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.

"Finding Balance: Fitness, Health, and Training for a Lifetime in Dance "gives an overview of issues faced by all performing dancers: injury and treatment; technique and training; fitness; nutrition and diet; and career management. The text includes both easy-to-read overviews of each topic and "profiles" of well known dancers and how they have coped with these issues.
The new edition includes:
- Updated and new profiles
- Expanded injury and injury treatment information
- Updated dance science and physiology findings, and new references
- Updated diet guidelines
- Expanded and updated "Taking Control" section
It concludes with a list of selected dance/arts medicine clinics, a bibliography, glossary, and text notes.

Representing the first comprehensive analysis of Gaga and Ohad Naharin's aesthetic approach, this book follows the sensual and mental emphases of the movement research practiced by dancers of the Batsheva Dance Company. Considering the body as a means of expression, Embodied Philosophy in Dance deciphers forms of meaning in dance as a medium for perception and realization within the body. In doing so, the book addresses embodied philosophies of mind, hermeneutics, pragmatism, and social theories in order to illuminate the perceptual experience of dancing. It also reveals the interconnections between physical and mental processes of reasoning and explores the nature of physical intelligence.

Armed with an eighth-grade education, an inexhaustible imagination, and an innate talent for dancing, Hermes Pan (1909-1990) was a boy from Tennessee who became the most prolific, popular, and memorable choreographer of the glory days of the Hollywood musical. While he may be most well-known for the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals which he choreographed at RKO film studios, he also created dances at Twentieth Century-Fox, M-G-M, Paramount, and later for television, winning both the Oscar and the Emmy for best choreography.
In Hermes Pan: The Man Who Danced with Fred Astaire, Pan emerges as a man in full, an artist inseparable from his works. He was a choreographer deeply interested in his dancers' personalities, and his dances became his way of embracing and understanding the outside world. Though his time in a Trappist monastery proved to him that he was more suited to choreography than to life as a monk, Pan remained a deeply devout Roman Catholic throughout his creative life, a person firmly convinced of the powers of prayer. While he was rarely to be seen without several beautiful women at his side, it was no secret that Pan was homosexual and even had a life partner. As Pan worked at the nexus of the cinema industry's creative circles during the golden age of the film musical, this book traces not only Pan's personal life but also the history of the Hollywood musical itself. It is a study of Pan, who emerges here as a benevolent perfectionist, and equally of the stars, composers, and directors with whom he worked, from Astaire and Rogers to Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth, Elizabeth Taylor, Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, Bob Fosse, George Gershwin, Samuel Goldwyn, and countless other luminaries of American popular entertainment.
Author John Franceschina bases his telling of Pan's life on extensive first-hand research into Pan's unpublished correspondence and his own interviews. Pan enjoyed one of the most illustrious careers of any Hollywood dance director, and because his work also spanned across Broadway and television, this book will appeal to readers interested in musical theater history, dance history, and film.

Never before has a greater variety of careers been available in dance-and never before has such comprehensive, expert guidance on those burgeoning careers been accessible in one book. Careers in Dance is a master guide that will help students navigate the expanding opportunities in dance and familiarize current professionals with potential career choices that best align with their pursuits and strengths. This highly practical text offers a wealth of information on career options in a variety of settings and with a variety of focuses, including commercial ventures, scholarly pursuits, administrative avenues, medical and scientific settings, and interdisciplinary opportunities. Readers are guided in discovering their deepest interests and learning how to translate their unique strengths into rich and fulfilling careers. In keeping with recent trends in higher education dance programs, Careers in Dance spotlights entrepreneurship and leadership opportunities for dancers, delving into an array of options and offering much-needed advice. The book covers some of the social and cultural influences that affect success in the field, and it explores various career opportunities: K-12 and postsecondary dance education Dance studios Performance, choreography, and production Dance research, analytical writing, and journalism Dance administration and advocacy Dance science, therapy, and medical and somatic practices Private competition companies Technical theater and related areas The text also helps readers understand the connections between dance and other disciplines. For example, it details the interdisciplinary opportunities involving technology, technical theater, and media. It also notes the possibilities for continued education in graduate school programs and suggests approaches to acclimating to life as a working professional. Careers in Dance offers two recurring elements throughout the book: Profiles of, and interviews with, esteemed professional dancers, revealing their real-world experiences and affording insights into different dance careers Reflection prompts that encourage self-reflection and prepare readers to seek career development and career advancement opportunities This text explores the opportunities dance students and professionals can pursue, helps them pinpoint their areas of interest and strengths, and equips them to create their unique paths to a fulfilling career in dance. In doing so, Careers in Dance provides the advice and strategies dancers need to actualize their own destinies in dance.

This lively collection of articles on dancer and choreographer Jose Limón provides a valuable insight into the life and times of the important Mexican American choreographer.
Born in Mexico, Limon came to the United States at the age of seven. Caught between his native and adopted cultures, Limon used this cultural tension to shape his craft while working with his mentor Doris Humphrey. Incorporating bold choreography into performances that broke the mold of how male dancers had been perceived, Limon often depicted flawed men caught in complex dramas.
Limon's dance company was the first to be invited by the State Department to represent the U.S. on a tour of South America, and is the first modern dance company to survive the death of its founder.

This newly-updated second edition explores Pina Bausch's work and methods by combining interviews, first-hand accounts, and practical exercises from her developmental process for students of both dance and theatre. This comprehensive overview of her work offers new and exciting insight into the theatrical approach of a singular performance practitioner. This is an essential introduction to the life and work of one of the most significant choreographers/directors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As a first step towards critical understanding, and as an initial exploration before going on to further, primary research, Routledge Performance Practitioners offer unbeatable value for today's student.

The vital role of dance in enacting the embodied experiences of Indigenous peoples In Dancing Indigenous Worlds, Jacqueline Shea Murphy brings contemporary Indigenous dance makers into the spotlight, putting critical dance studies and Indigenous studies in conversation with one another in fresh and exciting new ways. Exploring Indigenous dance from North America and Aotearoa (New Zealand), she shows how dance artists communicate Indigenous ways of being, as well as generate a political force, engaging Indigenous understandings and histories. Following specific dance works over time, Shea Murphy interweaves analysis, personal narrative, and written contributions from multiple dance artists, demonstrating dance's crucial work in asserting and enacting Indigenous worldviews and the embodied experiences of Indigenous peoples. As Shea Murphy asserts, these dance-making practices can not only disrupt the structures that European colonization feeds upon and strives to maintain, but they can also recalibrate contemporary dance. Based on more than twenty years of relationship building and research, Shea Murphy's work contributes to growing, and largely underreported, discourses on decolonizing dance studies, and the geopolitical, gendered, racial, and relational meanings that dance theorizes and negotiates. She also includes discussions about the ethics of writing about Indigenous knowledge and peoples as a non-Indigenous scholar, and models approaches for doing so within structures of ongoing reciprocal, respectful, responsible action.

In 1933 choreographer George Balanchine and impresario Lincoln Kirstein embarked on an elusive quest to found a ballet company and school in the United States. Though their efforts would eventually result in the creation of the New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet, the first decade of their collaborative efforts was anything but assured. Tracing the tangled histories of two of the most important figures in twentieth-century dance, Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise offers a fresh perspective on a pivotal period in cultural history. Deeply researched using sources only made available in recent years, the book challenges the mythologies surrounding the early years of the Balanchine-Kirstein enterprise. It also reveals the full extent of Kirstein's essential role and offers reconstructive analysis of lost works, as well as new and surprising details regarding some of Balanchine's most iconic ballets, including Serenade, Apollo, and Concerto Barocco. This history involved artists including Richard Rodgers, Martha Graham, George Gershwin, Katherine Dunham, Vera Zorina, and Igor Stravinsky, as well as dozens of lesser known players whose contributions have yet to be fully acknowledged. Capturing the full sweep of Balanchine and Kirstein's collaborative work across multiple genres and institutions, this book reveals their partnership in all of its exciting and ungainly complexity, showing how the 1930s Balanchine was not the artist that he would eventually become, and how the same was true of the institutions that he and Kirstein jointly created.

Body and space refer to vital and interrelated dimensions in the experience of sounds and music. Sounds have an overwhelming impact on feelings of bodily presence and inform us about the space we experience. Even in situations where visual information is artificial or blurred, such as in virtual environments or certain genres of film and computer games, sounds may shape our perceptions and lead to surprising new experiences. This book discusses recent developments in a range of interdisciplinary fields, taking into account the rapidly changing ways of experiencing sounds and music, the consequences for how we engage with sonic events in daily life and the technological advancements that offer insights into state-of-the-art methods and future perspectives. Topics range from the pleasures of being locked into the beat of the music, perception-action coupling and bodily resonance, and affordances of musical instruments, to neural processing and cross-modal experiences of space and pitch. Applications of these findings are discussed for movement sonification, room acoustics, networked performance, and for the spatial coordination of movements in dance, computer gaming and interactive artistic installations.

Staging British South Asian Culture: Bollywood and Bhangra in British Theatre looks afresh at the popularity of forms and aesthetics from Bollywood films and bhangra music and dance on the British stage. From Andrew Lloyd Webber's Bombay Dreams to the finals of Britain's Got Talent, Jerri Daboo reconsiders the centrality of Bollywood and bhangra to theatre made for or about British South Asian communities. Addressing rarely discussed theatre companies such as Rifco, and phenomena such as the emergence of large- scale Bollywood revue performances, this volume goes some way towards remedying the lack of critical discourse around British South Asian theatre. A timely contribution to this growing field, Staging British South Asian Culture is essential reading for any scholar or student interested in exploring the highly contested questions of identity and representation for British South Asian communities.

'Eurythmy is that very thing which dancers with a true idealism have been unconsciously seeking - that inner harmony and balance that was a natural condition of the Greeks, visible in their statues and carved figures, so that, even in a standing pose, movement seems to flow through them.' Eurythmy is an expressive art of movement in which specific gestures relate to the sounds and rhythms of speech, to the tones and rhythms of music and to soul experiences, such as joy and sorrow. In this succinct and accessible booklet, the authors present a clear introduction to this contemporary art form in the context of the impulse of dance today. What is eurythmy, and how does it relate to other arts of movement and dance? What is eurythmy's purpose, and why did Rudolf Steiner create it in the early twentieth century? These and many more questions are answered in this extended essay, supplemented by 35 sketches of eurythmy figures by Rudolf Steiner that illustrate gestures of movement, feeling and character.

Anne Green Gilbert's Brain-Compatible Dance Education, Second Edition, strikes the perfect balance between hard science and practicality, making it an ideal resource for dance educators working with dancers of all ages and abilities. Gilbert presents the latest brain research and its implications for dance educators and dancers. She makes the research findings accessible and easy to digest, always connecting the science to the teaching and learning that takes place in classrooms and studios. This new edition of Brain-Compatible Dance Education features Gilbert's unique BrainDance warm-up, made up of eight developmental movement patterns for people of all ages, from birth to older adults. This BrainDance warm-up helps dancers improve focus and productivity as it invigorates their minds and bodies and gets their synapses firing. In addition, this edition offers the following new material: * 24 new lesson plans geared to all age groups, from birth on up * New tips and tools to strengthen your teaching skills and provide a foundation for advocating for dance in schools and communities * A new web resource that includes 11 video clips of BrainDance with variations for diverse audiences, as well as printable lesson plans, posters, charts, and assessment templates The video clips on the web resource are great teaching aids that show you real-world examples of how the movements are done. The clips show dancers from infants to seniors, from beginners to advanced students, and those with special needs. The text is organized into three parts. Part I presents the theory behind brain-compatible dance education, offering an overview of the latest brain research, outlining the 10 principles of brain-compatible dance education, and exploring how to plan engaging lessons and use tools to assess your dancers. Part II describes the lesson plan elements in depth, including warming up, exploring concepts, developing skills, creating, and cooling down. In part III, Gilbert offers her new sequential and holistic lesson plans for ages 0 through 4, 5 through 8, 9 through 18, and adults. Brain-Compatible Dance Education, Second Edition, will revitalize your dance classes by improving your students' focus as they perform the repetitions that are so necessary for skill development. It will help you understand the vital link between movement and cognition, develop holistic lesson plans for any age and population, and bring the joy of movement into students' lives.

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor and Francis, an informa company.

Best remembered for his role as the Scarecrow in the 1939 MGM musical The Wizard of Oz, Ray Bolger led a rich and extraordinary career in the decade before and more than four decades after the creation of the film. Ray Bolger: More Than a Scarecrow is the first biography of this classic American entertainer, covering the luminous and forgotten career of the eccentric dancer outside of his burlap mask. The product of a fragmented, working-class Boston Irish family, Bolger learned tap and eccentric dance steps as solace for a difficult life before running away to repertory theater and Vaudeville. From there, he would go on to become a Broadway star, a contract player at Hollywood's major studios, one of the first performers to tour the South Pacific for the USO, a Tony Award winner, an early sitcom star, and the opening headliner of the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas. Using unprecedented access to Bolger's papers and many never-before-published photographs, Ray Bolger: More Than a Scarecrow pieces together the lost story of an itinerant hoofer who survived and thrived during the major media changes of the twentieth century and established himself as a staple of American pop culture.

An exploration of the representational culture of Alzheimer's disease and how media technologies shape our ideas of cognition and aging With no known cause or cure despite a century of research, Alzheimer's disease is a true medical mystery. In Mediating Alzheimer's, Scott Selberg examines the nature of this enduring national health crisis by looking at the disease's relationship to media and representation. He shows how collective investments in different kinds of media have historically shaped how we understand, treat, and live with this disease. Selberg demonstrates how the cognitive abilities that Alzheimer's threatens-memory, for example-are integrated into the operations of representational technologies, from Polaroid photographs to Post-its to digital artificial intelligence. Focusing on a wide variety of media technologies, such as neuroimaging, art therapy, virtual reality, and social media, he shows how these cognitively oriented media ultimately help define personhood for people with Alzheimer's. Media have changed the practices of successful aging in the United States, and Selberg takes us deep into how technologies like digital brain-training and online care networks shape ideas of cognition and healthy aging. Packed with startlingly fresh insights, Mediating Alzheimer's contributes to debates around bioethics, the labor of caregiving, and a national economy increasingly invested in communication and digital media. Probing the very technologies that promise to save and understand our brains, it gives us new ways of understanding Alzheimer's disease and aging in America.

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen sets the agenda for the study of dance in popular moving images - films, television shows, commercials, music videos, and YouTube - and offers new ways to understand the multi-layered meanings of the dancing body by engaging with methodologies from critical dance studies, performance studies, and film/media analysis. Through thorough engagement with these approaches, the chapters demonstrate how dance on the popular screen might be read and considered through bodies and choreographies in moving media. Questions the contributors consider include: How do dance and choreography function within the filmic apparatus? What types of bodies are associated with specific dances and how does this affect how dance(s) is/are perceived in the everyday? How do the dancing bodies on screen negotiate power, access, and agency? How are multiple choreographies of identity (e.g., race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation) set in motion through the narrative, dancing bodies, and/or dance style? What types of corporeal labors (dance training, choreographic skill, rehearsal, the constructed notion of "natural talent") are represented or ignored? What role does a specific film have in the genealogy of Hollywood dance film? How does the Hollywood dance film inform how dance operates in making cultural meanings? Whether looking at Bill "Bojangles" Robinson's tap steps in Stormy Weather, or Baby's leap into Johnny Castle's arms in Dirty Dancing, or even Neo's backwards bend in The Matrix, the book's arguments offer powerful new scholarship on dance in the popular screen.

The writings of six choreographers are assembled in this book and the leap they have taken to go from the medium of choreography into written text constitutes a form of translation. Some of the texts investigate the possibilities of written language as invention, others use it as a means to illustrate specific tenets or describe choreographic projects. All yield insight into the process of coaxing language from the body.

This collection of new essays explores connections between dance, modernism, and modernity by examining the ways in which leading dancers have responded to modernity. Burt and Huxley examine dance examples from a period beginning just before the First World War and extending to the mid-1950s, ranging across not only mainland Europe and the United States but also Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific Asian region, and the UK. They consider a wide range of artists, including Akarova, Gertrude Colby, Isadora Duncan, Katherine Dunham, Margaret H'Doubler, Hanya Holm, Michio Ito, Kurt Jooss, Wassily Kandinsky, Margaret Morris, Berto Pasuka, Uday Shankar, Antony Tudor, and Mary Wigman. The authors explore dancers' responses to modernity in various ways, including within the contexts of natural dancing and transnationalism. This collection asks questions about how, in these places and times, dancing developed and responded to the experience of living in modern times, or even came out of an ambivalence about or as a reaction against it. Ideal for students and practitioners of dance and those interested in new modernist studies, Dance, Modernism, and Modernity considers the development of modernism in dance as an interdisciplinary and global phenomenon.

Shakespeare's texts have a long and close relationship with many different types of dance, from dance forms referenced in the plays to adaptations across many genres today. With contributions from experienced and emerging scholars, this handbook provides a concise reference on dance as both an integral feature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture and as a means of translating Shakespearean text into movement - a process that raises questions of authorship and authority, cross-cultural communication, semantics, embodiment, and the relationship between word and image. Motivated by growing interest in movement, materiality, and the body, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance is the first collection to examine the relationship between William Shakespeare - his life, works, and afterlife - and dance. In the handbook's first section - Shakespeare and Dance - authors consider dance within the context of early modern life and culture and investigate Shakespeare's use of dance forms within his writing. The latter half of the handbook - Shakespeare as Dance - explores the ways that choreographers have adapted Shakespeare's work. Chapters address everything from narrative ballet adaptations to dance in musicals, physical theater adaptations, and interpretations using non-Western dance forms such as Cambodian traditional dance or igal, an indigenous dance form from the southern Philippines. With a truly interdisciplinary approach, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance provides an indispensable resource for considerations of dance and corporeality on Shakespeare's stage and the early modern era.

From the graceful flutter of Princess Florine at Sleeping Beauty's wedding to the playful jetees in the first act of Giselle, the variation - or short solo work - is one of the key elements of classical ballet. Arguing that true artistry requires in-depth knowledge, former Kirov dancer and teacher Nina Danilova has worked with students for many years to focus on performing individual variations with the greatest extent of technical proficiency and artistic sensitivity. Eight Female Classical Ballet Variations lays out eight of the most important variations in the ballerina's repertoire. Each chapter is divided into five sections: a piano reduction of the score; a contextual note covering the history of the ballet, the plot, and memorable dancers who have performed the role; and instructions for dancing the variation itself, illustrated literally step by step. Accompanied by a comprehensive companion website, Eight Female Classical Ballet Variations pairs Danilova's impeccable technique with her decades of pedagogical experience. Teachers will welcome this classroom-ready guide, and student dancers will leap at the chance to develop their technique and artistry by tackling these variations.

This book draws on theories of aesthetics, post-colonialism, multiculturalism and transnationalism to explore salient aspects of perpetuating traditional dance customs in diaspora. It is the first book to present a broad-ranging analysis of cultural dance in Australia. Topics include adaptation of dance customs within a post-migration context, multicultural festivals, prominent performers, historiographies and archives, and the relative positionings of cultural and Western theatrical dance genres. The book offers a decolonized appraisal of dance in Australia, critiquing past and present praxes and offering suggestions for the future. Overall, it underscores the highly variegated nature of the Australian dance landscape and advocates for greater recognition of amateur community dance practices. Cultural Dance in Australia makes a substantial contribution to the catalogue of work about immigrants and cultural dance styles that continue to be preserved in Australia. This book will be of interest to scholars of dance, performance studies, migration studies and transnationalism.

Moving Otherwise examines how contemporary dance practices in Buenos Aires, Argentina enacted politics within climates of political and economic violence from the mid-1960s to the mid-2010s. From the repression of military dictatorships to the precarity of economic crises, contemporary dancers and audiences consistently responded to and reimagined the everyday choreographies that have accompanied Argentina's volatile political history. The titular concept, "moving otherwise" names how both concert dance and its off-stage practice and consumption offer alternatives to and modes to critique the patterns of movement and bodily comportment that shape everyday life in contexts marked by violence. Drawing on archival research based in institutional and private collections, over fifty interviews with dancers and choreographers, and the author's embodied experiences as a collaborator and performer with active groups, the book analyzes how a wide range of practices moved otherwise, including concert works, community dance initiatives, and the everyday labor that animates dance. It demonstrates how these diverse practices represent, resist, and remember violence and engender new forms of social mobilization on and off the theatrical stage. As the first book length critical study of Argentine contemporary dance, it introduces a breadth of choreographers to an English speaking audience, including Ana Kamien, Susana Zimmermann, Estela Maris, Alejandro Cervera, Renate Schottelius, Susana Tambutti, Silvia Hodgers, and Silvia Vladimivsky. It also considers previously undocumented aspects of Argentine dance history, including crossings between contemporary dancers and 1970s leftist political militancy, Argentine dance labor movements, political protest, and the prominence of tango themes in contemporary dance works that address the memory of political violence. Contemporary dance, the book demonstrates, has a rich and diverse history of political engagement in Argentina.