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.

Group Motion reflects 50 years of co-creation between dancers, choreographers, teachers Brigitta Herrmann and Manfred Fischbeck, along with the participation of thousands of dancers, musicians, videographers and people around the world. Part memoire, part guidebook, part philosophy of art treatise, the book can be read for its stories, for its games, for inspiration. It may even be read for its photos. It does not offer a general history of dance movement improvisation; instead, it presents a very personal and original one. Informed by Mary Wigman's expressionist dance and other contemporary dance and theater traditions, Group Motion evolved and now represents a particular form of improvisational performance practice. Here you will find step-by-step guidance for dozens of improvisational structures or games. Group Motion's vision has brought dance game structures not only onto stages, but into prisons, airports, and public parks. The book offers guidance for dance professionals, theater artists, improvisational musicians and multi-disciplinary performers, and also those who use movement as an expressive tool for all.

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.

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.

Since its inception, French opera has embraced dance, yet all too often operatic dancing is treated as mere decoration. Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera exposes the multiple and meaningful roles that dance has played, starting from Jean-Baptiste Lully's first opera in 1672. It counters prevailing notions in operatic historiography that dance was parenthetical and presents compelling evidence that the divertissement - present in every act of every opera - is essential to understanding the work. The book considers the operas of Lully - his lighter works as well as his tragedies - and the 46-year period between the death of Lully and the arrival of Rameau, when influences from the commedia dell'arte and other theatres began to inflect French operatic practices. It explores the intersections of musical, textual, choreographic and staging practices at a complex institution - the Academie Royale de Musique - which upheld as a fundamental aesthetic principle the integration of dance into opera.

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).

This book explores the complex relationship between literature and dance in the era of modernism. During this period an unprecedented dialogue between the two art forms took place, based on a common aesthetics initiated by contemporary discussions of the body and gender, language, formal experimentation, primitivism, anthropology, and modern technologies such as photography, film, and mechanisation. The book traces the origins of this relationship to the philosophical antecedents of modernism in the nineteenth century and examines experimentation in both art forms. The book investigates dance's impact on the modernists' critique of language and shows the importance to writers of choreographic innovations by dancers of the fin de siecle, of the Ballets Russes, and of European and American experimentalists in non-balletic forms of modern dance. A reciprocal relationship occurs with choreographic use of literary text. Dance and literature meet at this time at the site of formal experiments in narrative, drama, and poetics, and their relationship contributes to common aesthetic modes such as symbolism, primitivism, expressionism, and constructivism. Focussing on the first half of the twentieth century, the book locates these transactions in a transatlantic field, giving weight to both European and American contexts and illustrating the importance of dance as a conduit of modernist preoccupations in Europe and the US through patterns of influence and exchange. Chapters explore the close interrelationships of writers and choreographers of this period including Mallarme, Nietzsche, Yeats, Conrad, Woolf, Lawrence, Pound, Eliot, and Beckett, Fuller, Duncan, Fokine, Nijinsky, Massine, Nijinska, Balanchine, Tudor, Laban, Wigman, Graham, and Humphrey, and recover radical experiments by neglected writers and choreographers from David Garnett and Esther Forbes to Andree Howard and Oskar Schlemmer.

The story of the splendidly unpredictable Russian dancer who ruffled the feathers of the Bloomsbury set and became the wife of John Maynard Keynes Born in 1891 in St Petersburg, Lydia Lopokova lived a long and remarkable life. Her vivacious personality and the sheer force of her charm propelled her to the top of Diaghilev's Ballet Russes. Through a combination of luck, determination and talent, Lydia became a star in Paris, a vaudeville favourite in America, the toast of Britain and then married the world-renowned economist, and formerly homosexual, John Maynard Keynes. Lydia's story links ballet and the Bloomsbury group, war, revolution and the economic policies of the super-powers. She was an immensely captivating, eccentric and irreverent personality: a bolter, a true bohemian and, eventually, an utterly devoted wife.

In Kinesthetic City, author SanSan Kwan explores the contentious nature of Chineseness in diaspora through the lens of moving bodies as they relate to place, time, and identity. She locates her study in five Chinese urban sites--Shanghai, Taipei, Hong Kong, New York's Chinatown, and the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles--at momentous historical turning points to parse out key similarities and differences in the construction of Chineseness. The moving bodies she considers are not only those in performances by some of the most well-known Chinese dance companies in these cities, but also her own as she navigates urban Chinese spaces.
By focusing primarily on kinesthesia--the body's awareness of motion--to gather information rather than more traditional modes of sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste, she highlights the importance of motion in the determination of space. In examining in these specific places at these precise historical moments, Kwan illuminates how moving bodies contribute to the production of those places and those moments. For Kwan, Chinese communities in diaspora provide particularly salient examples of how when and where our bodies are help to determine who we are. Whether engaged in otherwise unremarkable walking or in highly choreographed acts of political protest, human movement exists in dialogue with the kinesthetic of these city spaces, helping Chinese communities make meaning of themselves away from mainland China.
As a whole, Kinesthetic City offers dance studies ways to extend movement analysis to study not only concert, folk or social dance, but also quotidian movement and urban flow.

Eurythmy is an art form that makes sounds visible. By incorporating zodiac gestures into their art, as indicated by Rudolf Steiner, eurythmists can draw on a deep connection between the earth and the cosmos. The zodiac, as representative of the whole cosmos, is a vital part of human spirituality, acting as the backdrop to human life. But it can be hard to fathom the zodiac's secrets, even through meditation. Barfod draws a parallel between meditative exercises and eurythmy practice, and shows how zodiac gestures in eurythmy can reveal cosmic insights. This is a book for eurythmy teachers and practitioners who want to deepen their art and spiritual work.

Modernist Mysteries: Persephone is a landmark study that will move the field of musicology in important new directions. The book presents a microhistorical analysis of the premiere of the melodrama Persephone at the Paris Opera on April 30th, 1934, engaging with the collaborative, transnational nature of the production. Author Tamara Levitz demonstrates how these collaborators-- Igor Stravinsky, Andre Gide, Jacques Copeau, and Ida Rubinstein, among others-used the myth of Persephone to perform and articulate their most deeply held beliefs about four topics significant to modernism: religion, sexuality, death, and historical memory in art. In investigating the aesthetic and political consequences of the artists' diverging perspectives, and the fall-out of their titanic clash on the theater stage, Levitz dismantles myths about neoclassicism as a musical style. The result is a revisionary account of modernism in music in the 1930s.
As a result of its focus on the collaborative performance, this book differs from traditional accounts of musical modernism and neoclassicism in several ways. First and foremost, it centers on the performance of modernism, highlighting the theatrical, performative, and sensual. Levitz places Christianity in the center of the discussion, and questions the national distinctions common in modernist research by involving a transnational team of collaborators. She further breaks new ground in shifting the focus from "history" to "memory" by emphasizing the commemorative nature of neoclassic listening rituals over the historicist stylization of its scores, and contends that modernists captured on stage and in philosophical argument their simultaneous need and inability to mourn the past. The book as a whole counters the common criticism that neoclassicism was a "reactionary" musical style by suggesting a more pluralistic, ambivalent, and sometimes even progressive politics, and reconnects musical neoclassicism with a queer classicist tradition extending from Winckelmann through Walter Pater to Gide. Modernist Mysteries concludes that 1930s modernists understood neoclassicism not as formalist compositional approaches but rather as a vitalist art haunted by ghosts of the past and promissory visions of the future."

Unique in its focus on history rather than technique, Jazz Dance offers the only overview of trends and developments since 1960. Editors Lindsay Guarino and Wendy Oliver have assembled an array of seasoned practitioners and scholars who trace the numerous histories of jazz dance and examine various aspects of the field, including trends, influences, training, race, aesthetics, international appeal, and its relationship to tap, rock, indie, black concert dance, and Latin dance. Featuring discussions of such dancers and choreographers as Bob Fosse and Katherine Dunham, as well as analyses of how the form's vocabularly differs from ballet, this complex and compelling history captures the very essence of jazz dance.

The concept of "worldmaking" is based on the idea that "the world" is not given, but rather produced through language, actions, ideas and perception. This collection of essays takes a closer look at various hybrid and disparate worlds related to dance and choreography. Coming from a broad range of different backgrounds and disciplines, the authors inquire into the ways of producing "dance worlds": through artistic practice, discourse and media, choreographic form and dance material.The essays in this volume critically reflect the predominant topos of dance as something fleeting and ephemeral - an embodiment of the Other in modernity. Moreover, they demonstrate that there is more than just one universal "world of dance", but rather a multitude of interrelated dance worlds with more emerging every day.

Dancing the World Smaller examines international dance performances in New York City in the 1940s as sites in which dance artists and audiences contested what it meant to practice globalism in mid-twentieth-century America. During and after the Second World War, modern dance and ballet thrived in New York City, a fertile cosmopolitan environment in which dance was celebrated as an emblem of American artistic and cultural dominance. In the ensuing Cold War years, American choreographers and companies were among those the U.S. government sent abroad to serve as ambassadors of American cultural values and to extend the nation's geo-political reach. Less-known is that international dance performance, or what was then-called "ethnic" or "ethnologic" dance, enjoyed strong support among audiences in the city and across the nation as well. Produced in non-traditional dance venues, such as the American Museum of Natural History, the Ethnologic Dance Center, and Carnegie Hall, these performances elevated dance as an intercultural bridge across human differences and dance artists as transcultural interlocutors. Dancing the World Smaller draws on extensive archival resources, as well as critical and historical studies of race and ethnicity in the U.S., to uncover a hidden history of globalism in American dance and to see artists such as La Meri, Ruth St. Denis, Asadata Dafora, Pearl Primus, Jose Limon, Ram Gopal, and Charles Weidman in new light. Debates about how to practice globalism in dance proxied larger cultural struggles over how to reconcile the nation's new role as a global superpower. In dance as in cultural politics, Americans labored over how to realize diversity while honoring difference and manage dueling impulses toward globalism, on the one hand, and isolationism, on the other.

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 Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music studies the complex impact of movements, costumes, words, scenes, music, and special effects in English illusionistic theatre of the Renaissance. Drawing on a massive amount of documentary evidence relating to English productions as well as spectacle in France, Italy, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire, the book elucidates professional ballet, theatre management, and dramatic performance at the early Stuart court. Individual studies take a fresh look at works by Ben Jonson, Samuel Daniel, Thomas Carew, John Milton, William Davenant, and others, showing how court poets collaborated with tailors, designers, technicians, choreographers, and aristocratic as well as professional performers to create a dazzling event. Based on extensive archival research on the households of Queen Anne and Queen Henrietta Maria, special chapters highlight the artistic and financial control of Stuart queens over their masques and pastorals. Many plates and figures from German, Austrian, French, and English archives illustrate accessibly-written introductions to costume conventions, early dance styles, male and female performers, the dramatic symbolism of colors, and stage design in performance. With splendid costumes and choreographies, masques once appealed to the five senses. A tribute to their colorful brilliance, this book seeks to recover a lost dimension of performance culture in early modern England.

Whether you're an absolute beginner or a Strictly Come Dancing wannabe, it's time to get up and dance Craig Revel Horwood's Ballroom Dancing gives you the confidence you need to take your first steps on the dancefloor. It even includes style tips from the style guru, Len Goodman, to give you that professional look. Discover the history, foot positions, turns, and more, to all your favourite Strictly dances: * Waltz * Social foxtrot * Quickstep * Tango * Rumba * Samba * Cha cha cha * Jive Ballroom dancing is totally cool, funky, and fantastically rewarding. What better way to get fit than tangoing your tension away, and foxtrotting the fat off your thighs? Happy dancing.

Artists like Bill Robinson, King Rastus Brown, John Bubbles, Honi Coles and others who speak to us in this book, are our Nijinskys, Daighilevs, Balanchines, and Grahams. There are so many books on ballet and modern dance. There are still a few on tap dance and they are so cavalierly allowed to go out of print even though the interest in them is so deep and sustaining.

This intriguing biography details the life and work of world dance pioneer La Meri (1899-1988). An American dancer, choreographer, teacher, and writer, La Meri was ahead of her time in championing cross-cultural dance performances and education, yet she is almost totally forgotten today. In La Meri and Her Life in Dance, Nancy Ruyter introduces readers to a visionary artist who played a pivotal role in dance history.Born in Texas as Russell Meriwether Hughes, La Meri toured throughout Latin America, Europe, Asia, the Pacific, and the United States in the 1920s and '30s, immersing herself in different dance traditions at a time when few American dancers explored styles outside their own. She learned about Indian dance culture from the celebrated Uday Shankar, studied belly dancing with the Moroccan sultan's top dancer, and took flamenco lessons in Spain. La Meri spread awareness and enjoyment of the world's myriad forms of expression before it was common for performing artists from these countries to tour internationally. Ruyter describes how La Meri founded the Ethnologic Dance Center in New York City, choreographed innovative works based on various dance cultures for Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival and other venues, and wrote widely on the styles and techniques of international dance genres. This long-overdue book illustrates that the popularity of world dance today owes much to the trailblazing efforts of La Meri.

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.

This second edition of this well-known text book now offers downloadable resources to accompany the dance studies throughout the chapters. The authors take a new approach to teaching, learning and creating with notation through movement exploration, exercises and short dances, thus enlarging the scope of the book to teachers of movement, movement analysis and choreography as well as the traditional dance notation students. Updated and enlarged to reflect the most recent scholarship and through a series of exercises, this book guides students through: movement, stillness, timing, shaping, accents travelling direction, flexion and extension, rotations, revolutions and turns supporting, change of support springing balance relationships. All of these movements are explored sequentially and are represented symbolically in notation so the student learns how to physically articulate, notate and describe the movements as they are performed.

Dancer Robert Barnett trained under legendary choreographer Bronislava Nijinska. His professional ballet career was launched when he joined the Colonel de Basil Original Ballet Russe company. In the late 1940s, when George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein formed the New York City Ballet, Barnett was among of the first generation of dancers. Under Balanchine's direction, he rose from corps de ballet to soloist. In 1958 he became principal dancer and associate artistic director of the Atlanta Ballet-the oldest continuously operating company in America-and served as artistic director for more than thirty years. He was head coach of the American delegation to the International Ballet Competitions in Varna, Bulgaria, in 1980, and in Moscow in 1981. Today he serves as a guest teacher and coach at schools and companies throughout the U.S., and remains remains active with Atlanta Ballet. Barnett's autobiography recounts the life of a dancer and director, offers insight on what is involved in pursuing a professional career in dance and provides a history of ballet in America from the early 1920s through 2018.