Independent choreographer and filmmaker Robin Bisio is inspired both by poetry and by her native southern California landscapes, ranging from rolling fields to the rollicking sea shore. She collaborates with many talented artists and performers to create wild and stunning dances in challenging plein air environments. "'Your Flesh Shall Be a Poem' is a very attractive, wind-blown and provocative book." -Allegra Fuller Snyder, Professor Emerita of Dance, and former Director of the Graduate Program in Dance Ethnology, at UCLA

Robert Cohan is part of the pantheon of American contemporary choreographers which includes Alvin Ailey and Paul Taylor. Like them he follows in the tradition of their teacher Martha Graham whose works were grounded in finding through dance a way to express the human condition, in all its forms. This he has done in over fifty works, from early solos and duets to large group works which have been performed by contemporary and ballet companies around the world. A distinguished teacher, choreographer and advocate for dance, he has shaped the lives of generations of dance artists. Robert Cohan joined the Martha Graham Dance Company in 1946 and left it 23 years later when he was invited by Robin Howard to become the first Artistic Director of the Contemporary Dance Trust in London and as such was the founder Artistic Director of The Place, London Contemporary Dance School and London Contemporary Dance Theatre, which he directed for over 20 years. As director of LCDT he created many works for the Company in collaboration with leading composers and designers, including the classics, Cell, Stabat Mater, Forest and Nymphaeas. No one has had a greater influence on the development of dance in Britain than Cohan. Having pioneered the teaching of contemporary dance technique in Britain, he was instrumental in the development of a vast following, not only for the repertory of LCDT but through his pioneering residencies held throughout the country, for the many other British companies which followed. Without him there would be no Robert North, Richard Alston, Siobhan Davies, Lloyd Newson, Rosemary Butcher, Dharshan Singh-Bhuller, Anthony van Laast: the list could go on and include choreographers and dancers in every part of the world. From 1980 to 1990 he acted as the Artistic Advisor to the Batsheva Dance Company and choreographed several works for them and the Bat Dor Company in Israel. He has been continually in demand as a director of choreographic courses, notably the International Course for Professional Choreographers and Composers which he directed six times. Since 1989 he has been working freelance and has choreographed ballets for Scottish Ballet as well as companies in Germany and Italy. This book is based on extensive interviews with Cohan, his family, friends and colleagues. Drawing together his life in dance around the world, it provides the first in depth study of this seminal figure in the dance world. The author: Paul Jackson trained in both music and dance and has worked in both subjects internationally. He is a past Chair of the Standing Conference for Dance in Higher Education, the umbrella organisation for British university dance departments. From 1997-2002 he was head of music at Northumbria University where he also founded both dance degrees. He worked previously at the Arts Educational Schools, Islington Arts Factory, Central School of Ballet and at Walter Nicks' school the CFPD in Poitiers, France.

Does a dance communicate ? What ? How ? Are all dances meaningful ? Do spectators see what a choreographer sees ? "The strands of the dance medium like locks of hair plait into one meaningful whole. The interlock is all." The interlock is what this book explores from the choreographer and performers' perspective with every genre in contemporary dance theatre in mind. Written for practical people in dance, the text is organised in 32 short chapters each addressing a question on the way in which choreographers might or might not engage with their audiences in dance theatre works. The topics include an introduction to communication theory and the way in which the interlocking network between performers, movement material, sound, and performance can carry meaning. The book is written from choreographers' and performers' perspectives, with 46 dance works cited from a wide range of genres. The text is unusually presented - as closely as possible to how we speak to each other - with key words in bold type for ease of reference. Valerie Preston-Dunlop is an internationally recognised lecturer, teacher, and author on dance. She is currently Adviser for Postgraduate Studies and Research at the Trinity Laban Centre in London.

DESTINED TO DANCE They called her a genius. They called her a goddess. They called her a monster. Which title best fits Martha Graham, iconic Mother of Modern Dance? Find out - in the first historical novel about this great American diva. DESTINED TO DANCE is a creative portrait of the legendary dancer and choreographer. Written by award-winning author Marcy Heidish, Martha Graham's story holds the spotlight - and the reader. Skillfully weaving fact and fiction, Heidish (A Woman Called Moses, etc.) offers another remarkable account of an American heroine: her successes, her sorrows, and her struggles. Here is a masterful portrait of Graham, onstage, back-stage, offstage. With literary grace and lively prose, the woman behind the icon is revealed. We see Graham's break-through brilliance, often compared to Picasso's or Sravinsky. We also witness Graham's triumph over alcoholism, despair, and a failed marriage. Set against the intriguing world of dance, Martha Graham's story offers us a close-up on a complex and compelling overcomer. Martha Graham (1894-1991) invented a new "language of movement," still taught around the world and exemplified in such classic works as Appalachian Spring, among 180 others. The Martha Graham Center for Contemporary Dance tours widely and its current artistic director, a former Graham dancer, has contributed unique input to this novel. As always, Heidish's research is thorough and her sense of her subject is magical. For all who love the arts, all who seek inspiration, and all who like to read between history's lines, DESTINED TO DANCE is a must-read book.

"When I learned about improvisation from Anna, it was like receiving the other half of the hemisphere. Without improvisation I would not have developed the work that I'm doing."--Trisha Brown
"Anna Halprin--who, with her husband, the architect Lawrence Halprin, is considered to be the wellspring of what we call postmodern dance--has spent most of her long life shattering rules, conventions, expectations, and long-cherished ideals like so many porcelain teacups. . . . In this new cultural history and intellectual biography, Janice Ross has unscrolled a story--with her subject's full collaboration--that continuously reveals and surprises. It is a groundbreaking achievement in dance scholarship, commensurate with the work of Sally Banes, the scholar of postmodern dance to whom this book is affectionately dedicated."--Mindy Aloff, author of "Dance Anecdotes"
"This book is an eye-opener. It is fascinating to learn about the different creative periods in Anna Halprin's life, from her involvement with Jewish identity and culture, dance education, and Bauhaus emigres in the thirties and forties to her relationship with the Beat poets in San Francisco, her influential summer workshops, and her exploration of ritual and performance from the fifties to the present."--Mark Franko, author of "Excursion for Miracles: Paul Sanasardo, Donya Feuer and Studio for Dance (1955-1964)"
"Janice Ross has done a masterful job of capturing the life, work, and impact of the little midwestern woman whose influence shaped the dance revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, and whose greatest accomplishment may have been 'finding dance culture where no one else had looked.' Ross illuminates the West Coastroots of postmodernism, and outlines Halprin's accomplishments as a healer, which are still accruing after more than sixty years."--Elizabeth Zimmer, dance critic and editor

Have you ever sat in the audience but wished you were on the stage? Or maybe you are a naturally creative person but sometimes you feel blocked or find it hard to keep going? If you ever breathed in with joy when you saw a particular colour, like the colour of the gorse or the sea, and would like to recapture that feeling and build on it, this book is for you. It will help you to become fitter in body and soul, to slow down your thinking and worrying and inhabit your body with more passion and ease. Lani O'Hanlon brings the creative and healing arts together in Dancing the Rainbow. It includes the story of how movement and dance transformed her life when she started to use dance to heal the trauma in her own body, and her book sets out to also transform the reader's life through dance. With easy to follow illustrations throughout, it uses tried and tested methods to unlock creative potential in a way that is in balance with the body's rhythm and with the rhythm of the Earth.

Ann Daly ranks among the most insightful, articulate dance critics and scholars writing today. Spanning the divide between journalism and scholarship, this collection offers a double-sighted view of dance in America from 1986 to the present, documenting the shift in experimental dance from formal to social concerns, and recording the expansion of dance studies in the academy from historical documentation to cultural criticism.
Daly examines performance art and visual art as they relate to and influence dance, with a look at the intersection of dance and history. Gender is the subject of the final section of the book. More than 80 reviews, features, essays, interviews and scholarly articles -- including extended considerations of Pina Bausch, Deborah Hay, Bill T. Jones and Ralph Lemon -- were originally published in venues ranging from High Performance to The New York Times to TDR: A Journal of Performance Studies.

Alvin Ailey (1931-1989) was a choreographic giant in the modern dance world and a champion of African-American talent and culture. His interracial Alvin Ailey American Dance theatre provided opportunities to black dancers and choreographers when no one else would. His acclaimed Revelations" remains one of the most performed modern dance pieces in the twentieth century. But he led a tortured life, filled with insecurity and self-loathing. Raised in poverty in rural Texas by his single mother, he managed to find success early in his career, but by the 1970s his creativity had waned. He turned to drugs, alcohol, and gay bars and suffered a nervous breakdown in 1980. He was secretive about his private life, including his homosexuality, and, unbeknownst to most at the time, died from AIDS-related complications at age 58.Now, for the first time, the complete story of Ailey's life and work is revealed in this biography. Based on his personal journals and hundreds of interviews with those who knew him, including Mikhail Baryshnikov, Judith Jamison, Lena Horne, Katherine Dunham, Sidney Poitier, and Dustin Hoffman, Alvin Ailey is a moving story of a man who wove his life and culture into his dance.

There are many skills one needs to produce a piece of dance. Bruce describes the basic foundation or ingredients of his version of Dance Theatre as: Movement, Drama, Sound and Vision. A choreographer has to study all of them to the best of their ability and learn how to combine them. _x000D_ There is no definitive method of choreography. Any choreographer who has a voice has learnt and executed it in their way. Choreographers pick up things here and there from what they see, who they work with, and assemble a craft themselves. So much of what they do as artists is intuition and instinct. Creativity cannot be tamed and fully understood or concluded. Artists are dealing with imagination.

Bob Fosse (1927-1987) is recognized as one of the most significant figures in post-World War II American musical theater. With his first Broadway musical, The Pajama Game in 1954, the "Fosse style" was already fully developed, with its trademark hunched shoulders, turned-in stance, and stuttering, staccato jazz movements. Fosse moved decisively into the role of director with Redhead in 1959 and was a key figure in the rise of the director-choreographer in the Broadway musical. He also became the only star director of musicals of his era-a group that included Jerome Robbins, Gower Champion, Michael Kidd, and Harold Prince-to equal his Broadway success in films. Following his unprecedented triple crown of show business awards in 1973 (an Oscar for Cabaret, Emmy for Liza with a Z, and Tony for Pippin), Fosse assumed complete control of virtually every element of his projects. But when at last he had achieved complete autonomy, his final efforts, the film Star 80 and the musical Big Deal, written and directed by Fosse, were rejected by audiences and critics. A fascinating look at the evolution of Fosse as choreographer and director, Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical considers Fosse's career in the context of changes in the Broadway musical theater over four decades. It traces his early dance years and the importance of mentors George Abbott and Jerome Robbins on his work. It examines how each of the important women in his adult life-all dancers-impacted his career and influenced his dance aesthetic. Finally, the book investigates how his evolution as both artist and individual mirrored the social and political climate of his era and allowed him to comfortably ride a wave of cultural changes.

Published in Valiz's new "Antennae" series devoted to new research in art, photography, architecture and design, "Moving Together" examines contemporary dance from both a practical and theoretical perspective. The author, Professor Rudi Laermans, analyzes three tendencies: pure dance, dance theater and (self-) reflexive dance. He proposes a theoretical framework for understanding how artistic cooperation figures into the creation of dance. Boasting a great design by the maverick Dutch studio Metahaven, "Moving Together" includes dialogues with some of the most influential names in contemporary dance spanning several generations: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, founder of the cutting-edge dance company Rosas; Jerome Bel, the controversial and experimental French choreographer; William Forsythe, known internationally for his work with Ballett Frankfurt (1984-2004) and The Forsythe Company (2005-present); as well as many others dance innovators.

An illustrated and in-depth exploration of four of Rosas's early works, Fase, Rosas danst Rosas, Elena's Aria, and Bartok, through sketches, notes, and photographs Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is one of the most prominent choreographers in contemporary dance. Her 1982 debut with Fase immediately attracted the attention of the international dance scene; since then, De Keersmaeker and her company, Rosas, have created an impressive series of choreographic works that have been described as "pure writing with movement in time and space." This book explores four of Rosas' early works, Fase, Rosas danst Rosas, Elena' s Aria, and Bartok, through sketches, notes in reviews, and photographs. Distributed for Mercatorfonds

Theorizing the experiences of black and brown bodies in hip hop dance Baring Unbearable Sensualities brings together a bold methodology, an interdisciplinary perspective and a rich array of primary sources to deepen and complicate mainstream understandings of Hip Hop Dance, an Afro-diasporic dance form, which have generally reduced the style to a set of techniques divorced from social contexts. Drawing on close observation and interviews with Hip Hop pioneers and their students, Rosemarie A. Roberts proposes that Hip Hop Dance is a collective and sentient process of resisting oppressive manifestations of race and power. Roberts argues that the experiences of marginalized black and brown bodies materialize in and through Hip Hop Dance from the streets of urban centers to contemporary worldwide expressions. A companion web site contains over 30 video clips referenced in the text.

One of the most important dance artists of the twentieth century, dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham (1909-2006) created works that thrilled audiences the world over. As an African American woman, she broke barriers of race and gender, most notably as the founder of an important dance company that toured the United States, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Australia for several decades. Through both her company and her schools, she influenced generations of performers for years to come, from Alvin Ailey to Marlon Brando to Eartha Kitt. Dunham was also one of the first choreographers to conduct anthropological research about dance and translate her findings for the theatrical stage. Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora makes the argument that Dunham was more than a dancer-she was an intellectual and activist committed to using dance to fight for racial justice. Dunham saw dance as a tool of liberation, as a way for people of African descent to reclaim their history and forge a new future. She put her theories into motion not only through performance, but also through education, scholarship, travel, and choices about her own life. Author Joanna Dee Das examines how Dunham struggled to balance artistic dreams, personal desires, economic needs, and political commitments in the face of racism and sexism. The book analyzes Dunham's multiple spheres of engagement, assessing her dance performances as a form of black feminist protest while also presenting new material about her schools in New York and East St. Louis, her work in Haiti, and her network of interlocutors that included figures as diverse as ballet choreographer George Balanchine and Senegalese president Leopold Sedar Senghor. It traces Dunham's influence over the course of several decades from the New Negro Movement of the 1920s to the Black Power Movement of the late 1960s and beyond. By drawing on a vast, never-utilized trove of archival materials along with oral histories, choreographic analysis, and embodied research, Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora offers new insight about how this remarkable woman built political solidarity through the arts.