This descriptive and analytic study examines how 1950s rock 'n' roll dancing illuminates the larger cultural context out of which the dancing arose. Rock 'n' Roll Dances of the 1950s provides a fresh, highly animated lens through which to observe and understand the cultural climate of 1950s America, examining, not only the steps and aesthetic qualities of rock 'n' roll dances, but also their emblematic meanings. Exploring dance as a reflection and expression of cultural trends, the book takes a sharply analytical look at rock 'n' roll dances from the birth of the genre in the mid-1950s to the decade's end. Readers will explore the emergence of teen culture in the '50s, rock 'n' roll's association with delinquency, and the controversy ignited by the physical movements of early rock 'n' roll artists. They will learn about the influence of black culture on 1950s dances and about the trendsetting TV show American Bandstand. Particularly telling for those wishing to grasp the underlying tensions of the decade is a discussion of the dance floor as a platform for racial integration. Period, archival photos A bibliography of books, articles, videos, films, and recordings documenting the history of 1950s rock 'n' roll music and dancing A detailed index allowing the book to be easily used as a reference source for research on social dance, rock 'n' roll, and American popular culture

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.

This volume looks forward and re-examines present day education and pedagogical practices in music and dance in the diverse cultural environments found in Oceania. The book also identifies a key issue of how teachers face the prospect of taking a reflexive view of their own cultural legacy in music and dance education as they work from and alongside different cultural worldviews. This key issue, amongst other debates that arise, positions Intersecting Cultures as an innovative text that fills a gap in the current market with highly appropriate and fresh ideas from primary sources. The book offers commentaries that underpin and inform current pedagogy and bigger picture policy for the performing arts in education in Oceania, and in parallel ways in other countries.

This book is a fictional tale about the actions of a group of boys who attended three years at Leeman Elementary School.

This book is a collection of essays that capture the artistic voices at play during a staging process. Situating familiar practices such as reimagining, reenactment and recreation alongside the related and often intersecting processes of transmission, translation and transformation, it features deep insights into selected dances from directors, performers, and close associates of choreographers. The breadth of practice on offer illustrates the capacity of dance as a medium to adapt successfully to diverse approaches and, further, that there is a growing appetite amongst audiences for seeing dances from the near and far past. This study spans a century, from Rudolf Laban's Dancing Drumstick (1913) to Robert Cohan's Sigh (2015), and examines works by Mary Wigman, Madge Atkinson (Natural Movement), Doris Humphrey, Martha Graham, Yvonne Rainer and Rosemary Butcher, an eclectic mix that crosses time and borders.

Every entertainer can be creative, and any entertainer can learn to be more creative. Using examples and thought provokers this book guides you through an exploration of the creative process so you can consciously use it more effectively. Writing your own material allows you to express your unique personality, take full advantage of your abilities, and connect more fully with your audience. This process will help you generate more ideas, and then turn them into reality. This book, the first of a trilogy, will help you come closer to achieving your potential as a variety artist.

Contemporary American dance scholars agree that the first venue for critically informed, aware, and diverse reflections on dance was Impulse. While Impulse was recognized as the platform for dance scholarship during the years of its publication, following its cessation in 1970, only a handful of libraries and collections retained a full complement of its issues. Over time and out of view Impulse began to fade from memory, and many upcoming dance scholars were unaware of its rich history and seminal contributions to the field. Fortunately, as Impulse collected dust on shelves, technologies evolved that offered hope for the preservation of print and media collections. In 2008 a project was initiated to preserve Impulse as a digital collection and bring together a cohort of dance scholars to analyze each issue from today's point of view. Their collected works are presented in Contemporary Dance History: Revisiting Impulse, 1950-1970. There is no comparable study or project designed to preserve and facilitate access to original source materials in dance at this time. Perspectives on Contemporary Dance History: Revisiting Impulse, 1950-1970 stands alone as a compendium of critical analyses of the full roster of a publication dedicated to dance. As eminent authors of the time were invited to contribute to issues of Impulse, contemporary dance scholars were invited to contribute to this book that examines Impulse from today's point of view. This volume revisits the journal's breadth of commentary, scope of authorship, and provocative yet engaging discourses. In these regards Perspectives on Contemporary Dance History: Revisiting Impulse, 1950-1970 is unlike any other contemporary volume of dance studies. Perspectives on Contemporary Dance History: Revisiting Impulse, 1950-1970 will be of interest to current and emerging dance scholars, dance historians, cultural theorists, education specialist, arts librarians, and those who seek a model for reclaiming the foundational literature of a discipline.

This study is the first monograph on the work of French choreographer Jerome Bel, following his artistic trajectory from the beginning of his career as a choreographer in 1994 to his most recent piece in 2016. It contains an overview and in-depth analysis of all of his choreographies, from Nom donne par l'auteur to Disabled Theatre, and provides a theoretical reflection on their theatrical nature. Bel has developed a singular discourse on dance that has often been labelled 'conceptual'. By reducing the stage elements in his performances to a minimum, his work explores the implications of dance as an art form that has, since the heyday of modernism, based its guiding principles on the laws of nature. Bel addresses the question of power relations in dance by working through the questions of authorship and various forms of subjectivity dance produces. Offering a unique opportunity to ground seemingly abstract academic theories in a specific embodied artistic practice, this study explores the intersection between artistic practice and theory.

In the 1920s and 30s, musicians from Latin America and the Caribbean were flocking to New York, lured by the burgeoning recording studios and lucrative entertainment venues. In the late 1940s and 50s, the big-band mambo dance scene at the famed Palladium Ballroom was the stuff of legend, while modern-day music history was being made as the masters of Afro-Cuban and jazz idiom conspired to create Cubop, the first incarnation of Latin jazz. Then, in the 1960s, as the Latino population came to exceed a million strong, a new generation of New York Latinos, mostly Puerto Ricans born and raised in the city, went on to create the music that came to be called salsa, which continues to enjoy avid popularity around the world. And now, the children of the mambo and salsa generation are contributing to the making of hip hop and reviving ancestral Afro-Caribbean forms like Cuban rumba, Puerto Rican bomba, and Dominican palo. Salsa Rising provides the first full-length historical account of Latin Music in this city guided by close critical attention to issues of tradition and experimentation, authenticity and dilution, and the often clashing roles of cultural communities and the commercial recording industry in the shaping of musical practices and tastes. It is a history not only of the music, the changing styles and practices, the innovators, venues and songs, but also of the music as part of the larger social history, ranging from immigration and urban history, to the formation of communities, to issues of colonialism, race and class as they bear on and are revealed by the trajectory of the music. Author Juan Flores brings a wide range of people in the New York Latin music field into his work, including musicians, producers, arrangers, collectors, journalists, and lay and academic scholars, enriching Salsa Rising with a unique level of engagement with and interest in Latin American communities and musicians themselves.

Playable Bodies investigates what happens when machines teach humans to dance. Dance video games work as engines of humor, shame, trust, and intimacy, urging players to dance like nobody's watching-while being tracked by motion-sensing interfaces in their living rooms. The chart-topping dance game franchises Just Dance and Dance Central transform players' experiences of popular music, invite experimentation with gendered and racialized movement styles, and present new possibilities for teaching, learning, and archiving choreography. Author Kiri Miller shows how these games teach players to regard their own bodies as both interfaces and avatars, and how a convergence of choreography and programming code is driving a new wave of full-body virtual-reality media experiences. Drawing on five years of ethnographic research with players, game designers, and choreographers, Playable Bodies situates dance games in a media ecology that includes the larger game industry, viral music videos, reality TV competitions, marketing campaigns, consumer reviews, social media discourse, and emerging surveillance technologies. Miller tracks the circulation of dance gameplay and related "body projects" across media platforms to reveal how dance games function as "intimate media," configuring new relationships among humans, interfaces, music and dance repertoires, and social media practices.

This collection of articles by Susan W. Stinson, organized thematically and chronologically by the author, reveals the evolution of the field of arts education in general and dance education in particular, through narrative and critical reflections by this unique scholar and a few co-authors. It also includes contextual insights not available elsewhere. The author's pioneering embodied research work in arts and dance education continues to be relevant to researchers today. The selected chapters and articles were predominantly previously published in a variety of journals, conference proceedings and books between 1985 and the present. Each section is preceded by an introduction and the author has written a post scriptum for each article to offer a commentary or response to the article from the current perspective.

In 1860, the great Danish choreographer and ballert-master August Bournonville wrote a series of eight public letters expressing his views on many aspects of ballet in his time, ranging from artistic and moral considerations to cultural comment and practical advice. Brimming with vision, opinion and wit, these provocative writings provide an important and fascinating insight into the world of nineteenth-century Romantic ballet, as viewed by one of its foremost exponents.

In this engaging memoir, Robert Rand tells the tale of how through dancing he helped free himself from the grip of panic disorder. Rand was a serious, shy, and intense scholar who had achieved national recognition in a career in writing and radio production. In the midst of his success, panic attacks overwhelmed him. For more than two years, he suffered their debilitating effects; the disease flattened his spirits and stripped him of self-confidence. Then he discovered social dancing, and in particular Cajun and zydeco dance and music. Dancing became a cathartic and liberating endeavor, helping him beat back his panic disorder to discover a world of passion and romance and to gain control of his life.

This book locates the philosophy of Ubuntu as the undergirding framework for indigenous dance pedagogies in local communities in Uganda. Through critical examination of the reflections and practices of selected local dance teachers, the volume reveals how issues of inclusion, belonging, and agency are negotiated through a creatively complex interplay between individuality and communality. The analysis frames pedagogies as sites where reflective thought and kinaesthetic practice converge to facilitate ever-evolving individual imagination and community innovations.

The effort to win federal copyright protection for dance choreography in the United States was a simultaneously racialized and gendered contest. Copyright and choreography, particularly as tied with whiteness, have a refractory history. This book examines the evolution of choreographic works from being federally non-copyrightable, unless they partook of dramatic or narrative structures, to becoming a category of works potentially copyrightable under the 1976 Copyright Act. Crucial to this evolution is the development of whiteness as status property, both as an aesthetic and cultural force and a legally accepted and protected form of property. The choreographic inheritances of Loie Fuller, George Balanchine, and Martha Graham are particularly important to map because these constitute crucial sites upon which negotiations on how to package bodies of both choreographers and dancers - as racialized, sexualized, nationalized, and classed - are staged, reflective of larger social, political, and cultural tensions.

Chinese Theatre: An Illustrated History Through Nuoxi and Mulianxi is the first book in any language entirely devoted to a historical inquiry into Chinese theatre through Nuoxi and Mulianxi, the two most representative and predominant forms of Chinese temple theatre. This is an interdisciplinary book project that is aimed to help researchers and students of theatre history understand the ritual origins of Chinese theatre and the dynamic relationships among myth, ritual, religion, and theatre.

This book explores the co-creative practice of contemporary dancers solely from the point of view of the dancer. It reveals multiple dancing perspectives, drawn from interviews, current writing and evocative accounts from inside the choreographic process, illuminating the myriad ways that dancers contribute to the production of dance culture.

Widely believed to be the oldest Indian dance tradition, odissi has transformed over the centuries from a sacred temple ritual to a transnational genre performed-and consumed-throughout the world. Building on ethnographic research in multiple locations, this book charts the evolution of odissi dance and reveals the richness, rigor, and complexity of the form as it is practiced today. As author and dancer-choreographer Nandini Sikand shows, the story of odissi is ultimately a story of postcolonial India, one in which identity, nationalism, tradition, and neoliberal politics dramatically come together.

This book focuses on Romeo Castellucci's theatrical project, exploring the ethical and aesthetic framework determined by his reflection on the nature of the image. But why does a director whose fundamental artistic tool is the image deny this key conceptual notion? Rooted in his conscious distancing from iconoclasm in the 1980s, Castellucci frequently replaces this notion with the words 'symbol', 'form' and 'idea'. As the first publication on the international market which presents Castellucci's work from both historical and theoretical perspectives, this book systematically confronts the director's discourse with other concepts related to his artistic project. Capturing the evolution of his theatre from icon to iconoclasm, word to image and symbol to allegory, the book explores experimental notions of staging alongside an 'emotional wave', which serves as an animating principle of Castellucci's revolutionary theatre.

Gregorio Lambranzi was an Italian dancing master, working in Venice in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. His New and Curious School of Theatrical Dancing, originally published in two parts in Nuremberg in 1716, gives details of more than one hundred theatrical dances of the time, with the emphasis on the comic and grotesque, many drawn from Commedia dell'arte characters. Also included are dances suggested by various professions and trades, and dances representing sports and pastimes. Each dance is illustrated by a full page engraving by Johann Georg Puschner and accompanied by a melody line of the music used and suggestions for steps. Lambranzi's work thus provides a unique record of theatrical dancing of his period. Unlike the Dover paperback edition this is a laminated hardback edition, reproducing the original cover design and with the plates printed one to a page.