Ted Shawn (1891-1972), is the self-proclaimed "Father of American Dance" who helped to transform dance from a national pastime into theatrical art. In the process, he made dancing an acceptable profession for men and taught several generations of dancers, some of whom went on to become legendary choreographers and performers in their own right, most notably his protegees Martha Graham, Louise Brooks, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman. Shawn tried for many years and with great frustration to tell the story of his life's work in terms of its social and artistic value, but struggled, owing to the fact that he was homosexual, a fact known only within his inner circle of friends. Unwilling to disturb the meticulously narrated account of his paternal exceptionalism, he remained closeted, but scrupulously archived his journals, correspondence, programs, photographs, and motion pictures of his dances, anticipating that the full significance of his life, writing, and dances would reveal itself in time. Ted Shawn: His Life, Writings, and Dances is the first critical biography of the dance legend, offering an in-depth look into Shawn's pioneering role in the formation of the first American modern dance company and school, the first all-male dance company, and Jacob's Pillow, the internationally renowned dance festival and school located in the Berkshires. The book explores Shawn's writings and dances in relation to emerging discourses of modernism, eugenics and social evolution, revealing an untold story about the ways that Shawn's homosexuality informed his choreographic vision. The book also elucidates the influences of contemporary writers who were leading a radical movement to depathologize homosexuality, such as the British eugenicist Havelock Ellis and sexologist Alfred Kinsey, and conversely, how their revolutionary ideas about sexuality were shaped by Shawn's modernism.

An introduction to embodied movement through the work of a dance education pioneer In this introduction to the work of somatic dance education pioneer Nancy Topf (1942-1998), readers are ushered on a journey to explore the movement of the body through a close awareness of anatomical form and function. Making available the full text of Topf's The Anatomy of Center for the first time in print, this guide helps professionals, teachers, and students of all levels integrate embodied, somatic practices within contexts of dance, physical education and therapy, health, and mental well-being. Hetty King, a movement educator certified in the Topf Technique (R), explains how the ideas in this work grew out of Topf's involvement in developing Anatomical Release Technique-an important concept in contemporary dance-and the influence of earlier innovators Barbara Clark and Mabel Elsworth Todd, founder of the approach to movement known as "ideokinesis." Featuring lessons written as a dialogue between teacher, student, and elements of the body, Topf's material is accompanied by twenty-one activities that allow readers to use the book as a self-guided manual. A Guide to a Somatic Movement Practice is a widely applicable entry point into the tradition of experiential anatomy and its mindful centering of the living, breathing body.

A facsimile of Feuillet's 1704 dance manual, 'Recueil de Dances contenant un tres grand nombres des meillieures Entrees de Ballet de M. Pecour tant pour homme que pour femme dont la plus grande partie ont ete dancees a l'Opera.' Apart from a brief introduction in French, the book consists entirely of notation examples in Feuillet's own notation system.

Moving Sites explores site-specific dance practice through a combination of analytical essays and practitioner accounts of their working processes. In offering this joint effort of theory and practice, it aims to provide dance academics, students and practitioners with a series of discussions that shed light both on approaches to making this type of dance practice, and evaluating and reflecting on it. The edited volume combines critical thinking from a range of perspectives including commentary and observation from the fields of dance studies, human geography and spatial theory in order to present interdisciplinary discourse and a range of critical and practice-led lenses through which this type of work can be considered and explored. In so doing, this book addresses the following questions: * How do choreographers make site-specific dance performance? * What occurs when a moving body engages with site, place and environment? * How might we interpret, analyse and evaluate this type of dance practice through a range of theoretical lenses? * How can this type of practice inform wider discussions of embodiment, site, space, place and environment? This innovative and exciting book seeks to move beyond description and discussion of site-specific dance as a spectacle or novelty and considers site-dance as a valid and vital form of contemporary dance practice that explores, reflects, disrupts, contests and develops understandings and practices of inhabiting and engaging with a range of sites and environments. Dr Victoria Hunter is Senior Lecturer in Dance at the University of Chichester.

In this memoir of a roller coaster career on the New York stage, former actor and dancer Bettijane Sills offers a highly personal look at the art and practice of George Balanchine, one of ballet's greatest choreographers, and the inner workings of his world-renowned company during its golden years. After getting her start on the stage as a child actor on Broadway, Bettijane Sills joined the New York City Ballet in 1961 as a member of the corps de ballet, working her way up to the level of soloist. As a company dancer who remained outside the spotlight that the principals enjoyed, Sills experienced a side of the company that prima ballerinas did not share in. She tells stories of taking class with Balanchine, dancing in the original casts of some of his most iconic productions, and working with some of the company's most famous dancers. Winningly honest and intimate, Sills lets readers in on the secrets of a world that most people have never seen firsthand. She reveals mistakes she made, the unglamorous parts of tour life, jealousy among company members, and Balanchine's complex relationships with women. She talks about Balanchine's insistence on thinness in his dancers and how her own struggles with weight ended her dancing career. Now a professor of dance who has educated thousands of students on Balanchine's style and legacy, Sills reflects on the highs and lows of a career indelibly influenced by the bright lights of theater and by the man who shaped American ballet.

A comprehensive overview of the dance culture of Singapore, this book embodies storytelling, personal reflections, memories, and histories of the artists. The extensive calendar of events encompassing companies and soloists from diverse dance practices, such as Indian, Malay and Chinese and a variety of Western contemporary dances, underline Singapore as a vibrant player in the evolution of Asian culture.

Dance is the art least susceptible to preservation since its embodied, kinaesthetic nature has proven difficult to capture in notation and even in still or moving images. However, frameworks have been established and guidance made available for keeping dances, performances, and choreographers' legacies alive so that the dancers of today and tomorrow can experience and learn from the dances and dancers of the past. In this volume, a range of voices address the issue of dance preservation through memory, artistic choice, interpretation, imagery and notation, as well as looking at relevant archives, legal structures, documentation and artefacts. The intertwining of dance preservation and creativity is a core theme discussed throughout this text, pointing to the essential continuity of dance history and dance innovation. The demands of preservation stretch across time, geographies, institutions and interpersonal connections, and this book focuses on the fascinating web that supports the fragile yet urgent effort to sustain our dancing heritage. The articles in this book were originally published in the journal Dance Chronicle: Studies in Dance and the Related Arts.

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.

A facsimile reproduction of Giambatista Dufort's manual, published in Naples in 1728, with text entirely in Italian. Part one of the book consists of thirty-four chapters devoted to instructions for steps required in Italian Baroque dance including pirola (pirouette), sfuggito (echappe), passo unite (assemble), and cadente (tombe). Each step is fully described and notated in Feuillet notation, the dance notation system first published by French choreographer Raoul-Auger Feuillet in 1700. The second part of the manual contains six chapters devoted to performance of the minuetto (minuet) and concludes with a section on the contradanza (contredanse) and riverenze (bows).

An African American art form, jazz dance has an inaccurate historical narrative that often sets Euro-American aesthetics and values at the inception of the jazz dance genealogy. The roots were systemically erased and remain widely marginalized and untaught, and the devaluation of its Africanist origins and lineage has largely gone unchallenged. Decolonizing contemporary jazz dance practice, this book examines the state of jazz dance theory, pedagogy, and choreography in the twenty-first century, recovering and affirming the lifeblood of jazz in Africanist aesthetics and Black American culture.Rooted Jazz Dance brings together jazz dance scholars, practitioners, choreographers, and educators from across the United States and Canada with the goal of changing the course of practice in future generations. Contributors delve into the Africanist elements within jazz dance and discuss the role of Whiteness, including Eurocentric technique and ideology, in marginalizing African American vernacular dance, which has resulted in the prominence of Eurocentric jazz styles and the systemic erosion of the roots. These chapters offer strategies for teaching rooted jazz dance, examples for changing dance curriculums, and artist perspectives on choreographing and performing jazz. Above all, they emphasize the importance of centering Africanist and African American principles, aesthetics, and values. Arguing that the history of jazz dance is closely tied to the history of racism in the United States, these essays challenge a century of misappropriation and lean in to difficult conversations of reparations for jazz dance. This volume overcomes a major roadblock to racial justice in the dance field by amplifying the people and culture responsible for the jazz language.

What happens to the writing of dance history when issues of sexuality and sexual identity are made central? What happens to queer theory, and to other theoretical constructs of gender and sexuality, when a dancing body takes center stage? Dancing Desires asks these questions, exploring the relationship between dancing bodies and sexual identity on the concert stage, in nightclubs, in film, in the courts, and on the streets. From Nijinsky's balletic prowess to Charlie Chaplin's lightfooted "Little Tramp", from lesbian go-go dancers to the swans of Swan Lake, from the postmodern works of Bill T. Jones to the dangers of same-sex social dancing at Disneyland and the ecstatic Mardi Gras dance parties of Sydney, Australia, this book tracks the intersections of dance and human sexuality in the twentieth century as the definition of each has shifted and expanded.

The contributors come from a number of fields (literature, history, theater, dance, film studies, legal studies, critical race studies) and employ methodologies ranging from textual analysis and film theory to ethnography. By embracing dance, and bodily movement more generally, as a crucial focus for investigation, together they initiate a new agenda for tracking the historical kinesthetics of sexuality.

The training of elite dancers has not changed in the last 60 years; it is often only those that have survived the training that go on to have a career, not necessarily the most talented. It is time to challenge and change how we train tomorrow's professional dancers. This book brings you the reasons why and all tools to implement change. 10 years ago, Matthew Wyon and Gaby Allard introduced a new pedagogical approach to training vocational dancers: Periodization. This ground-breaking new methodology provides an adaptable framework to optimise training - it's goal-focused, fits to performance schedules, and is highly sustainable for the dancer. It is the future. For the first time, Wyon and Allard have put their discoveries to paper. Periodization provides clear context to why change is needed, and explores the theoretical underpinnings of this new approach and how it can be effectively applied to a dance environment.

The arts have a crucial role in empowering young people with special needs through diverse dance initiatives. Inclusive pedagogy that integrates all students in rich, equitable and just dance programmes within education frameworks is occurring alongside enabling projects by community groups and in the professional dance world where many high-profile choreographers actively seek opportunities to work across diversity to inspire creativity. Access and inclusion is increasingly the essence of projects for disenfranchised and traumatised youth who find creative expression, freedom and hope through dance. This volume foregrounds dance for young people with special needs and presents best practice scenarios in schools, communities and the professional sphere. International perspectives come from Australia, Brazil, Cambodia, Canada, Denmark, Fiji, Finland, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Norway, Papua New Guinea, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan, Timor Leste, the UK and the USA. Sections include: inclusive dance pedagogy equality, advocacy and policy changing practice for dance education community dance initiatives professional integrated collaborations

In the ancient world, dance was used to express important truths about the human condition, and this significance can still be seen today in representations of dancers in ancient art. Sculpture, relief carving, vase painting, and other visual media offer a glimpse of the function of dance in antiquity. In the modern era, the Ballets Russes, a Paris-based collective established by Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929), revolutionized dance and revived European and American interest in ballet, in part by drawing on notions of dance from the ancient world. Ballets Russes choreographers, designers, and collaborators looked to ancient culture for subjects and themes, and for a notion of dance as an expressive art form integrated with ritual. Hymn to Apollo explores the role of dance in ancient art and culture and how artists of the Ballets Russes returned to the past as a source for modern expression. Thematic essays and lavish illustrations present a fresh perspective on ancient artifacts, and watercolors, illustrations, sketchbooks, photographs, costumes, and other archival Ballets Russes material show how artists turned to the ancient world to create something new. Contributors include John Bowlt, Rachel Herschman, Kenneth Lapatin, and F. G. Naerebout. Distributed for the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University Exhibition Dates: March 6-June 2, 2019

Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion presents a wide-ranging compilation of essays, spanning more than 15 countries. Organized in four parts, the articles examine the regulation and exploitation of dancers and dance activity by government and authoritative groups, including abusive treatment of dancers within the dance profession; choreography involving human rights as a central theme; the engagement of dance as a means of healing victims of human rights abuses; and national and local social/political movements in which dance plays a powerful role in helping people fight oppression. These groundbreaking papers both detailed scholarship and riveting personal accounts encompass a broad spectrum of issues, from slavery and the Holocaust to the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; from First Amendment cases and the AIDS epidemic to discrimination resulting from age, gender, race, and disability. A range of academics, choreographers, dancers, and dance/movement therapists draw connections between refugee camp, courtroom, theater, rehearsal studio, and university classroom.

Popular social dances can reveal a lot about the lifestyle, culture, and social class of the people who perform them. The kicks, turns, twists, and other subtle nuances of each dance reflect and represent particular periods of a culture's history while they also profoundly influence that culture's fashion, music, and use of leisure time. This book investigates the historical development and importance of several popular dance crazes from the 19th and early 20th centuries, evaluating in particular how their very existence as 'taboo' cultural fads led to initial outrage while ultimately providing a catalyst for lasting social reform. The book opens with a brief overview of anti-dance sentiment from around the fourth century to the present day. It then focuses on couple dances of the 19th and early 20th centuries, revealing how these social dances in particular acted as an expression of this tumultuous period in history while revealing the shifting social attitudes of the day. The waltz, perhaps the most beloved and most maligned social dance to come out of this period, evoked indignant reaction from religious leaders and other self-appointed arbiters of social morality who sermonized against the corrupting influence of social dancing on decency and health. In addition to examining the impact of the waltz craze on fashion, music, leisure, and social reform, the text describes the violent opposition to the dance and the proliferation of both anti-dance and courtesy literature during the height of the waltz's popularity. It then explores these same issues as they relate to other dance crazes of the early 1900s, including the Charleston, the Tango, and Ragtime dances such as the Turkey Trot, Grizzly Bear, and Bunny Hug.

Kinaesthesia and Visual Self-reflection in Contemporary Dance features interviews with UK-based professional-level contemporary, ballet, hip hop, and breaking dancers and cross-disciplinary explication of kinaesthesia and visual self-reflection discourses. Expanding on the concept of a 'kinaesthetic mode of attention' leads to discussion of some of the key values and practices which nurture and develop this mode in contemporary dance. Zooming in on entanglements with video self-images in dance practice provides further insights regarding kinaesthesia's historicised polarisation with the visual. It thus provides opportunities to dwell on and reconsider reflections, opening up to a set of playful yet disruptive diffractions inherent in the process of becoming a contemporary dancer, particularly amongst an increasingly complex landscape of visual and theoretical technologies.

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.

Dezais' ''II Recueil de Nouvelles Contredances" was published in Paris in 1712. Apart from a brief introduction (in French) it consists entirely of Feuillet notations, with melody line music, of the following dances: La Folette, L'Alliance, La Petitte Ieanneton, La Badine, La Charpentier, La Marechal, La Conti, L'Argentine, Sont des Navets, La Villars, Madame Robine, La Samardique, La Gigue Espagnole, La Baptistine, Le Rigaudon d'Angleterre, ha-Voyes donc, Les Mariniers, La Cribelee, La Gentilly, La Victoire, Milord Biron, L'Empereur dans la Lune, Les Folies d'Isac, La Triomphante, Plaisirs sans crainte, Marche du Tekeli, and La Jeunesse.

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.

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 complement to other sibling arts in participating in China's successive revolutions, reforms, wars, and political movements.

In Choreographing Agonism, author Goran Petrovic Lotina offers new insight into the connections between politics and performance. Exploring the political and philosophical roots of a number of recent leftist civil movements, Petrovic Lotina forcefully argues for a re-imagining of artistic performance as an instrument of democracy capable of contesting a dominant politics. Inspired by post-Marxist theories of discourse theory, hegemony, conflict, and pluralism, and using tension as a guiding philosophical, political, and artistic force, the book expands the politico-philosophical debate on theories of performance. It offers both scholars and practitioners of performance a thought-provoking analysis of the ways in which artistic performance can be viewed politically as 'agonistic choreo-political practice,' a powerful strategy for mobilising alternative ways of living together and invigorating democracy. Choreographing Agonism makes a bold and innovative contribution to the discussion of political and philosophical thought in the field of Performance Studies.