Hollywood's conversion to sound in the 1920s created an early peak in the film musical following the immense success of The Jazz Singer. The opportunity to synchronize moving pictures with a soundtrack suited the musical in particular, since the heightened experience of song and dance drew attention to the novelty of the technological development. Until the near-collapse of the genre in the 1960s, the film musical enjoyed around thirty years of development, as landmarks such as The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis, Singin' in the Rain, and Gigi showed the exciting possibilities of putting musicals on the silver screen. The first of three volumes, The Politics of the Musical Theatre Screen Adaptation: An Oxford Handbook traces how the genre of the stage-to-screen musical has evolved, starting with early screen adaptations such as the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie Roberta and working through to Into the Woods (2014). Many chapters examine specific screen adaptations in depth, while others deal with broad issues such as realism or the politics of the adaptation in works such as Li'l Abner and Finian's Rainbow. Together, the chapters incite lively debates about the process of adapting Broadway for the big screen and provide models for future studies. Volume I: The Politics of the Musical Theatre Screen Adaptation Volume II: Race, Sexuality, and Gender and the Musical Screen Adaptation Volume III: Stars, Studios, and the Musical Theatre Screen Adaptation

When World War II was over, a young bomber pilot with an itch for movement and action hung up his cap and learned another way to fly. Onstage with Martha Graham is the story of Stuart Hodes, a versatile and influential dancer who got his start with Martha Graham, an icon of modern dance. His memoir is a rare firsthand view of the dance world in the 1940s and through the end of the twentieth century.One of the few male dancers in Graham's company-and in the New York dance scene at the time-Hodes offers a unique perspective and a one-of-a-kind narrative. He describes how he fell into the art by chance, happening to walk into Graham's studio one day. He was soon hooked. He documents his experiences, travels, passions, and loves while learning from and performing with Graham, during which time he saw most of the United States, much of Europe, and some of Asia. Advancing quickly, he eventually danced as Graham's partner in Appalachian Spring, Deaths and Entrances, Every Soul Is a Circus, and Errand into the Maze.In his portrait of Martha Graham, who was the center of his dancing world, Hodes recounts conversations, revelations, bouts of temper and creativity, the daily ritual of deeply physical dancing, and the never-ending search for artistic validity. Direct, often humorous, and always authentic, Hodes shares his delight in dance as both hard work and a fantastic adventure.

On Site: Methods for Site-Specific Performance Creation is a practical book for artists and students at all levels who create or are learning to create making sited dance works. Author Stephan Koplowitz covers specific, hands-on strategies for an array of issues to consider before, during, and after embarking upon a project, including site selection, procuring permits, designing the audience experience, researching and exploring a site for inspiration and content, differences in urban and natural environments, definitions of key production roles, building effective collaborations with artists, and techniques to generate site-inspired production elements such as sound/music, costumes, lighting, and media. He also offers helpful chapters on project budgeting, contract negotiation, fundraising, marketing, documentation, and assessment. Based on the author's career spanning over 30 years of site-specific creation, the book also includes the voices of over 24 other artists, producers, and writers who share their perspectives and experiences on the many topics covered. A guide designed to make site work practical, intentional, and attainable, On Site will become a well-worn reference for anyone interested in the creative process and discovering the power of site-specific works.

The untold story of how breaking – one of the most widely practiced dance forms in the world today – began as a distinctly African American expression in the Bronx, New York, during the 1970s. Breaking is the first and most widely practiced hip-hop dance in the world, with around one million participants in this dynamic, multifaceted artform – and, as of 2024, Olympic sport. Yet, despite its global reach and nearly 50-year history, stories of breaking’s origins have largely neglected the African Americans who founded it. Dancer and scholar Serouj "Midus" Aprahamian offers, for the first time, a detailed look into the African American beginnings of breaking in the Bronx, New York. The Birth of Breaking challenges numerous myths and misconceptions that have permeated studies of hip-hop’s evolution, considering the influence breaking has had on hip-hop culture. Including previously unseen archival material, interviews, and detailed depictions of the dance at its outset, this book brings to life this buried history, with a particular focus on the early development of the dance, the institutional settings where hip-hop was conceived, and the movement’s impact on sociocultural conditions in New York City throughout the 1970s. By featuring the overlooked first-hand accounts of over 50 founding b-boys and b-girls alongside movement analysis informed by his embodied knowledge of the dance, Aprahamian reveals how indebted breaking is to African American culture, as well as the disturbing factors behind its historical erasure.

This cornerstone of the World of Art series is a succinct, vivid and authoritative guide to the rich history of western dance in all its incarnations from 16th-century court ballet to the genre-shattering contortions of 21st-century theatrical dance. Updated for the new millennium to feature the latest styles, performers and technology, this third edition reaffirms its status as the essential introduction to the subject.

This book illuminates the relationship between philosophy and experimental choreographic practice today in the works of leading European choreographers. A discussion of key issues in contemporary performance from the viewpoint of Deleuze, Spinoza and Bergson is accompanied by intricate analyses of seven groundbreaking dance performances.

Ten international dramaturg-scholars advance proposals that reset notions of agency in contemporary dance creation. Dramaturgy becomes driven by artistic inquiry, distributed among collaborating artists, embedded in improvisation tasks, or weaved through audience engagement, and the dramaturg becomes a facilitator of dramaturgical awareness.

Here is the vibrant, colorful, high-stepping story of tap - the first comprehensive, fully documented history of a uniquely American art form, exploring all aspects of the intricate musical and social exchange that evolved from Afro-Irish percussive step dances like the jig, gioube, buck-and-wing, and juba to the work of such contemporary tap luminaries as Gregory Hines, Brenda Bufalino, Dianne Walker, and Savion Glover. In Tap Dancing America, Constance Valis Hill, herself an accomplished jazz tap dancer, choreographer, and performance scholar, begins with a dramatic account of a buck dance challenge between Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and Harry Swinton at Brooklyn's Bijou Theatre, on March 30, 1900, and proceeds decade by decade through the 20th century to the present day. She vividly describes tap's musical styles and steps - from buck-and-wing and ragtime stepping at the turn of the century; jazz tapping to the rhythms of hot jazz, swing, and bebop in the '20s, '30s and '40s; to hip-hop-inflected hitting and hoofing in heels (high and low) from the 1990s right up to today. Tap was long considered "a man's game," and Hill's is the first history to highlight such outstanding female dancers as Ada Overton Walker, Kitty O'Neill, and Alice Whitman, at the turn of the 20th century, as well as the pioneering women composers of the tap renaissance, in the 70s and 80s, and the hard-hitting rhythm-tapping women of the millennium such as Chloe Arnold, Ayodele Casel, Michelle Dorrance, and Dormeshia Sumbry Edwards. Written with uncanny foresight, the book features dancers who have become international touring artists and have performed on Broadway, won Emmy and Tony Awards, and received the prestigious Dance Magazine, Adele and Fred Astaire, and Jacob's Pillow Dance awards. Presented with all the verve and grace of tap itself and drawing on eyewitness accounts of early performances as well as interviews with today's greatest tappers, Tap Dancing America fills a major gap in American dance history and places tap firmly center stage.

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.

Rudolf Steiner initiated a new art of movement, which can be characterised as speech and music made visible. This concise but informative guide to eurythmy includes a brief survey of dance, from its origin in the ancient mysteries to its contemporary forms, placing Steiner's ideas in their historical context. It then goes on to explore the three main strands of eurythmy: as stage performance, in education, and in therapy, giving insightful examples of each. The book has been revised and updated, and includes black and white photographs of performance and educational eurythmy.

Through discussion of a dazzling array of artists in India and the diaspora, this book delineates a new language of dance on the global stage. Myriad movement vocabularies intersect the dancers' creative landscape, while cutting-edge creative choreography parodies gender and cultural stereotypes, and represents social issues.

Hijikata Tatsumi's explosive 1959 debut Forbidden Colors sparked a new genre of performance in Japan - butoh: an art form of contrasts, by turns shocking and serene. Since then, though interest has grown exponentially, and people all over the world are drawn to butoh's ability to enact paradox and contradiction, audiences are less knowledgeable about the contributions and innovations of the founder of butoh. Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh traces the rollicking history of the creation and initial maturation of butoh, and locates Hijikata's performances within the intellectual, cultural, and economic ferment of Japan from the sixties to the eighties.

Employing a cultural theory approach, this book explores the relationship between popular dance and value. It traces the shifting value systems that underpin popular dance scholarship and considers how different dancing communities articulate complex expressions of judgment, significance and worth through their embodied practice.

"Vandekeybus brought into focus a whole new genre of modern dance...Combat rolls, breakneck sprints and savagely wrestled duets became the defining vocabulary of a new generation." The Guardian. In 2016, Wim Vandekeybus' company Ultima Vez celebrates its 30th birthday. Never before has his oeuvre been recorded in a book. Until now. This extraordinary book is a visual trip through the most powerful images from his repertoire, a quest for the ideas and themes that inspire him. It aso contains unpublished texts, notes and scripts from his shows and films. A number of compagnons de route, such as David Byrne, Mauro Pawlowski, and Peter Verhelst, offer a personal textual contribution. Choreographer, filmmaker and photographer Wim Vandekeybus and his company Ultima Vez are at the top of the dance industry in Belgium - and around the world. After a cooperation with Jan Fabre, Vandekeybus founded his very own company Ultima Vez in 1986. His first performance, What the Body Does Not Remember (1987), was an international success and was awarded a Bessie Award (New York Dance and Performance Award), a prize awarded for pioneering work.

George Balanchine's arrival in the United States in 1933, it is widely thought, changed the course of ballet history by creating a bold neoclassical style that is celebrated as the first American manifestation of the art form. In Making Ballet American, author Andrea Harris challenges this narrative by revealing the complex social, cultural, and political forces that actually shaped the construction of American neoclassical ballet. Situating American ballet within a larger context of modernisms, the book examines critical efforts to craft new, modernist ideas about the relevance of classical dancing for American society and democracy. Through cultural and choreographic analysis, it illustrates the evolution of modernist ballet during a turbulent historical period. Ultimately, the book argues that the Americanization of Balanchine's neoclassicism was not the inevitable outcome of his immigration or his creative genius, but rather a far more complicated story that pivots on the question of modern arts relationship to America and the larger world.

Engaging with a broad range of research and performance genres, The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance Studies offers the most comprehensive research on Hip Hop dance to date. Filling a lacuna in both Hip Hop and dance studies, the Handbook places practitioners' voices at the forefront and in dialogue with theoretical insights, rooted in critical race theory, anticolonialism, intersectional feminism, and more. Volume editors Mary Fogarty and Imani Kai Johnson have included influential dancers and scholars from around the world: from B-Boys Ken Swift, YNOT, and Storm, to practitioners of locking, waacking and House dance styles such as E. Moncell Durden, Terry Bright Kweku Ofosu, Fly Lady Di, and Leah McFly, and innovative academic work on Hip Hop dance by the most prominent researchers in the field. Throughout the Handbook contributors address individual and social histories of dance, Afrodiasporic and global lineages, the contribution of B-Girls from Honey Rockwell to Rokafella, the "studio-fication" of Hip Hop styles, and moves into theatre, TV, and the digital/social media space.

Whether as performers or spectators, more people enjoy dance today than ever before. Its extraordinary range extends from classical ballet and baroque court spectacles to avant-garde modern dance, tap and world dance. Everyone with an interest in dance will have felt the need for a guide to the art's rich history and complex present state. Susan Au's lucid text covers the whole subject, vividly describing the great performers and performances of the past as well as exploring in detail the dance world of today. A generous selection of illustrations completes the picture, taking the reader from the palaces of the Medici to the lofts of Manhattan, from the dancing of Louis XIV to the experimental choreography of Twyla Tharp and Pina Bausch. A new final chapter documents the work of the chief dancers and choreographers from the 1980s to the present, covering offshoots of modern dance such as Tanztheater and Butoh, and recent developments in performance art and sitespecific choreography. The author discusses the upsurge in the popularity of dances of the past, among them ballroom dancing and the Argentine tango, and notes the revival of tap dancing as well as the successful transition of Irish step dancing to the theatre. In addition, she records the uses dance and dancers have made of recent technological advances, including cinedance and videodance, CD-ROMs, and the Internet.

In early twentieth-century Europe, the watershed developments of pictorial abstraction, modern dance, and cinema coincided to shift the artistic landscape and the future of modern art. In Moving Modernism, Nell Andrew challenges assumptions about modernist abstraction and its appearance in the field of painting. By recovering performances, methods, and circles of aesthetic influence for avant-garde dance pioneers and filmmakers from the turn of the century to the interwar period - including dancer Loie Fuller, who presented to symbolist artists the possibility of prolonged or suspended vision; Valentine de Saint-Point, whose radical dance paralleled the abstractions of cubo-futurist painting; Sophie Taeuber and her Dada dance; the Belgian "pure plastics" choreographer known as Akarova; and the dance-like cinema of Germaine Dulac - Andrew demonstrates that abstraction was deployed not only as modernist form but as an apparatus of creation, perception, and reception across artistic media.

When Words are Inadequate is a transnational history of modern dance written from and beyond the perspective of China. Author Nan Ma extends the horizon of China studies by rewriting the cultural history of modern China from a bodily movement-based perspective through the lens of dance modernism. The book examines the careers and choreographies of four Chinese modern dance pioneers-Yu Rongling, Wu Xiaobang, Dai Ailian, and Guo Mingda-and their connections to canonical Western counterparts, including Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, Rudolf von Laban, and Alwin Nikolais. Tracing these Chinese pioneers' varied experiences in Paris, Tokyo, Trinidad, London, New York, and China's metropolises and borderlands, the book shows how their contributions adapted and reimagined the legacies of early Euro-American modern dance. In doing so, When Words are Inadequate reinserts China into the multi-centered, transnational network of artistic exchange that fostered the global rise of modern dance, further complicating the binary conceptions of center and periphery and East and West. By exploring the relationships between performance and representation, choreography and politics, and nation-building and global modernism, it situates modern dance within an intermedial circuit of literary and artistic forms, demonstrating how modern dance provided a kinesthetic alternative and complements to other sibling arts in participating in China's successive revolutions, reforms, wars, and political movements.

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.

This choreographed book is dedicated to the phenomenon of the bare body in contemporary performance. This work of artistic research draws on philosophical, biopolitical, and ethical discourses relevant to the appearance of bare bodies in choreography, setting a framework for a reflexive movement between affect and ethics, sensuous address and response. Acts of exposure and concealment are culturally situated and anchored, and are examined for their methodological and nanopolitical significance. The concepts of anarchic responsibility and choreo-ethics lead to a reevaluation of contact, relationship, and solidarity. Choreography is thus understood as a complex field of revelatory experiences based on ecologies of aesthetic perception and ethico-political agency.

Honest Bodies: Revolutionary Modernism in the Dances of Anna Sokolow illustrates the ways in which Sokolow's choreography circulated American modernism among Jewish and communist channels of the international Left from the 1930s-1960s in the United States, Mexico, and Israel. Drawing upon extensive archival materials, interviews, and theories from dance, Jewish, and gender studies, this book illuminates Sokolow's statements for workers' rights, anti-racism, and the human condition through her choreography for social change alongside her dancing and teaching for Martha Graham. Tracing a catalog of dances with her companies Dance Unit, La Paloma Azul, Lyric Theatre, and Anna Sokolow Dance Company, along with presenters and companies the Negro Cultural Committee, New York State Committee for the Communist Party, Federal Theatre Project, Nuevo Grupo Mexicano de Clasicas y Modernas, and Inbal Dance Theater, this book highlights Sokolow's work in conjunction with developments in ethnic definitions, diaspora, and nationalism in the US, Mexico, and Israel.