"A book which has remained seminal in its field as one of the key texts in dance education. Jacqueline Smith-Autard delves into the creative arena of dance with a logic unmatched by any other creative author in this field" Speech and Drama "Jacqueline Smith-Autard has made significant contributions to the development of dance in education in the UK and abroad" National Dance Teachers Association Dance composition - the discipline that translates ideas into dances - is an important part of dance education. This book, a bestseller for over twenty years, is a practical guide to creative success in dance making and is a popular textbook for all those who are interested in dance composition, from secondary school to university. This new edition includes a DVD with video taken from Choreographic Outcomes, a groundbreaking advanced technology resource pack aimed at comprehensively improving students' choreography. The book has been revised, redesigned and expanded. Reference to the DVD examples are made throughout the book and new assignments based on the video material are included.

Malnig examines exhibition ballroom dance as both a theatrical genre and a cultural and social phenomenon, promoting new cultural standards, including the emancipation of women and a new casualness and spontaneity between the sexes. A lively and thorough account of a dance form that has found renewed popularity in recent years.

When not writing, journalist Josiah Howard ("Donna Summer: Her Life & Music," "Blaxploitation Cinema: the Essential Reference Guide") was also a waiter at one of New York City's most popular restaurant/bars. For sixteen years Mr. Howard worked at Restaurant Florent, a Meat Packing District institution that was a favorite hangout of actors, actresses, models, directors, singers and other celebrities of dubious distinction (the establishment also served food to mere mortals )

From Madonna and Mariah Carey to Tom Cruise and Keanu Reeves, from Calvin Klein and Barry Diller to the Olsen Twins and Jerry Seinfeld, "Famous People Eat Too A New York City Food Server's Encounters with the Rich, Famous, Semi-Famous and Infamous" offers a rare, behind-the-scenes look at some of the entertainment industry's biggest stars.

You can't tell a book by its cover-and you can't tell a celebrity by their cover either. Josiah Howard uncovers them all Was Diana Ross really the boss? Was Warren Beatty really "on top" of things? And, just who is that woman that looks like Bette Midler's mother? To find out: Put on your white shirt and waiters apron, get a pad and pencil, and make your way over to that table-NOW

New Revised Edition for 2012 Delving into five hundred years of political, social, and cultural mores, the author offers a chronology of the evolution of the Tango as intricate as the dance itself. Readers are invited into a world as remarkable as it is compelling. The Tango originated in the slums of Buenos Aires as a partnered dance between two men and evolved into the most sophisticated, elegant and physically demanding social dance. Originally relegated to the lower classes, it eventually earned its place as a respected art form, embraced by millions of dancers and spectators around the world. From Argentina's early colonial period of the 16th century through civil and world wars, the rise and fall of dictatorships and democracies, to its years of near-disappearance and then resurrection, the history and mystic of tango has been captured in this meticulously researched book.

A celebration of the human body and spirit in more than 100 photographs - all nude, all taken at night. These photographs illustrate the hard work and the dedication it takes to succeed in dancing, acting, photography - or really any creative endeavour that at first may be incredibly frightening or make you feel vulnerable, but once achieved offers an exhilaration previously unimagined. The photos were shot over 200 nights, with 300 different dancers, in more than 400 locations, in all kinds of weather. The photos are grouped by theme - Vulnerability, Ferocity, Stability, Ecstasy - and include shots from sunset to dawn, in spectacular black and white and glorious colour. Many will be accompanied by an inspiring quote. Additional text will include Jordan's introductory essay, describing how he came up with the book idea and how he is inspired by the dancers he photographs, as well as "Behind the Scenes" stories of how the shot was achieved and "In Their Shoes" - words from the dancers on what it was like to be photographed in nude in public.

The Matachines dance is a ritual drama performed on certain saint's days in Pueblo Indian and Mexicano/Hispano communities along the upper Rio Grande valley in New Mexico and elsewhere in the American Southwest. It derives from a genre of medieval European folk dramas symbolizing conflict between Christians and Moors. Spaniards brought it to the Americas as a vehicle for Christianizing the Indians. In this book, Rodriguez explores the colorful, complex, and often enigmatic Matachines dance as it is performed today. In the Upper Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, the Matachines is the only ritual dance performed in both Indian Pueblos and Hispano communities. There, the dance involves two lines of masked dancers, a young girl in white and her crowned, masked, male partner, a bull, and two clowns. Accompanied usually by violin and guitar, these characters enact a choreographic drama that symbolizes encounter, struggle, and transformation-resolution. In this classic, prize-winning ethnographic study, anthropologist and native New Mexican Sylvia Rodriguez compares Indian Pueblo and Hispano Matachines dance performance traditions to discover what they share, how they differ, what they reveal about specific communities, and what they mean to those who continue to perform them with devotion and skill. Sylvia Rodriguez, a professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico, studies interethnic relations in the US-Mexico Borderlands, with particular focus on Hispano/Mexicano-Pueblo-Anglo relations in the Upper Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico. She holds degrees from Barnard College and Stanford University, and has taught at Carleton College and the University of California, Los Angeles. Her publications deal with the impact of tourism on ethnic relations; the politics of identity, place, and representation; identity and ritual; and conflict over land and water. She continues to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in and around her home town of Taos.

Originally published in 1983 the first edition rapidly established itself as a core student text. Now fully revised and up-dated it remains the only book to address the rationale, process, techniques and methodologies specific to the study of dance history. For the main body of the text which covers historical studies of dance in its traditional and performance contexts, the editors have brought together a team of internationally known dance historians. Roger Copeland and Deborah Jowitt each take a controversial look at the modern American dance. Kenneth Archer and Millicent Hodson explain the processes they use when reconstructing 'lost' ballets, and Theresa Buckland and Georgina Gore write on traditional dance in England and West Africa respectively. With other contributions on social dance, ballet, early European modern dance and feminist perspectives on dance history this book offers a multitude of starting points for studying dance history as well as presenting examples of dance writing at its very best. Dance History will be an essential purchase for all students of dance.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203137361

The Anthology "Stories from Inside the Mirror" is filled with timeless true stories from Belly Dancers from around the world. Read the moving collection of true stories that contributes to human spirit, and celebrates courage and endurance.

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Matthew Bourne and His Adventures in Dance is an intimate and in-depth conversation between the prize-winning pioneer of ballet and contemporary dance Matthew Bourne and the New York Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay. In 1987, a small, aspirant dance group with a striking name made its debut on the London fringe. In 1996, Adventures in Motion Pictures made history as the first modern dance company to open a production in London's West End. From this achievement, AMP sailed triumphantly to Broadway - winning three Tony Awards - guided by Artistic Director Matthew Bourne. Even before the inception of AMP, Bourne was fascinated by theatre, by characterization, and by the history of dance. In his early works - Spitfire, Town & Country and Deadly Serious - Bourne brought a novel approach to dance. And in his reworkings of the classics of the ballet canon - Nutcracker, Swan Lake, Cinderella - Bourne created witty, vivid, poignant productions that received great acclaim. In the first decade of the new millennium, the company name was changed to New Adventures, and Bourne's 'classics', as well as Bourne's new works - The Car Man, Play Without Words, Edward Scissorhands and Dorian Gray - achieved levels of box-office popularity that have seldom, if ever, been matched in dance. In addition, his choreography for various musicals - My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins and Oliver! - have run for years in the West End and on Broadway. The detail in which Bourne discusses his work with Alastair Macaulay is unprecedented. The two explore Bourne's upbringing, his training and influences, and his distinctive creative methods. Bourne's notebooks, his sources and his collaboration with dancers all form part of the discussion in this book.

In Back to the Dance Itself, Sondra Fraleigh edits essays that illuminate how scholars apply a range of phenomenologies to explore questions of dance and the world; performing life and language; body and place; and self-knowing in performance. Some authors delve into theoretical perspectives, while others relate personal experiences and reflections that reveal fascinating insights arising from practice. Collectively, authors give particular consideration to the interactive lifeworld of making and doing that motivates performance. Their texts and photographs study body and the environing world through points of convergence, as correlates in elemental and constant interchange modeled vividly in dance. Selected essays on eco-phenomenology and feminism extend this view to the importance of connections with, and caring for, all life. Contributors: Karen Barbour, Christine Bellerose, Robert Bingham, Kara Bond, Hillel Braude, Sondra Fraleigh, Kimerer LaMothe, Joanna McNamara, Vida Midgelow, Ami Shulman, and Amanda Williamson.

Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham were the two most acclaimed and commercially successful African American dancers of their era and among the first black women to enjoy international screen careers. Both also produced fascinating memoirs that provided vital insights into their artistic philosophies and choices. However, difficulties in accessing and categorizing their works on the screen and on the page have obscured their contributions to film and literature. Hannah Durkin investigates Baker and Dunham's films and writings to shed new light on their legacies as transatlantic artists and civil rights figures. Their trailblazing dancing and choreography reflected a belief that they could use film to confront racist assumptions while also imagining-within significant confines-new aesthetic possibilities for black women. Their writings, meanwhile, revealed their creative process, engagement with criticism, and the ways each mediated cultural constructions of black women's identities. Durkin pays particular attention to the ways dancing bodies function as ever-changing signifiers and de-stabilizing transmitters of cultural identity. In addition, she offers an overdue appraisal of Baker and Dunham's places in cinematic and literary history.

Flexible Bodies honors the lives and labor of British South Asian dancers and celebrates their contributions to a distinct and dynamic sector of British dance. Drawing on expertise gained from over seven years dancing in Britain, author Anusha Kedhar presents a multifaceted picture of British South Asian dance as its own distinctive genre.Analyzing dance works, dance films, rehearsals, and touring - alongside immigration policy, arts funding initiatives, and global economic conditions - Flexible Bodies traces shifts in British South Asian dance from 1990s "Cool Britannia" multiculturalism to fallout from the 2008 global financial crisis and, more recently, the anti-immigration rhetoric leading up to the Brexit referendum in 2016. Kedhar draws on over a decade of interviews and conversations with dancers in Britain as well as in-depth choreographic analysis of major dance works to reveal the creative ways in which British South Asian dancers negotiate neoliberal, multicultural dance markets through an array of flexible bodily practices. Providing a new, critical dance studies lens through which to view the precarious economic, racial, national, and legal positions of South Asians in Britain,Flexible Bodies ultimately argues for centering dance labor in studies of neoliberalism.

Margot Fonteyn born plain Peggy Hookham was dreamed into existence by the architects of British ballet: Ninette de Valois, Frederick Ashton and Constant Lambert. Carried to fame on a wave of wartime patriotism, Margot's sense of duty rather than ambition propelled her forward. Yet her gifts were such that her pre-eminence would come to eclipse the careers of subsequent generations. Ballet is a fairytale world; if Margot, like the pure and poetic heroine of Swan Lake, was a natural Odette, she would also have to contend with virtue's raw shadow-side in the guise of Constant Lambert, Roberto Arias and Rudolph Nureyev the men who, like Von Rothbart, were to take possession of her heart.

A teacher's guide covering everything from the origins of Salsa; different styles of salsa dancing, a 20 week learning syllabus of moves from Cuba, New York, LA and Colombia, teaching methods, learning styles and how to start your own salsa dance practice. This book starts with my personal experience of salsa dance and explains the history of salsa from a worldwide historical view point. It traces England's influence on the roots of salsa dancing and the development of the UK salsa scene. This book is divided into practical guidance and theoretical exercises. The book will tell you about the different ways to teach salsa, the rules and regulations you must follow and how to set-up a salsa dance school. It shows you everything you need to set yourself up as a salsa dance teacher.

This definitive work on the contribution of the Gypsies to the development of flamenco traces their influences on music from their long migration from India, through Iran, Turkey, Greece, and Hungary, to their persecution in Spain. This new updated edition provides fuller explanations of some of the technical terms and an invaluable biographical dictionary of 200 of the foremost Gypsy flamenco artists from its origins to the present day, as well as a discography and videography.

Dancer, award-winning choreographer, show producer, stand-up comedienne, TV/Film actress and author, Norma Miller shares her touching historical memoir of Harlem's legendary Savoy Ballroom and the phenomenal music and dance craze that \u0022spread the power of swing across the world like Wildfire.\u0022 A dance contest winner by 14, Norma Miller became a member of Herbert White's Lindy Hoppers and a celebrated Savoy Ballroom Lindy Hop champion. Swingin' at the Savoy chronicles a significant period in American cultural history and race relations, as it glorifies the home of the Lindy Hop and he birthplace of memorable dance hall fads. Miller shares fascinating anecdotes about her youthful encounters with many of the greatest jazz legends in music history, including Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, Artie Shaw, Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters, and even boxer Joe Louis. Readers will experience the legend of the celebrated Harlem ballroom and the phenomenal Swing generation that changed music and dance history forever.

In "Agency and Embodiment," Carrie Noland examines the ways in which culture is both embodied and challenged through the corporeal performance of gestures. Arguing against the constructivist metaphor of bodily inscription dominant since Foucault, Noland maintains that kinesthetic experience, produced by acts of embodied gesturing, places pressure on the conditioning a body receives, encouraging variations in cultural practice that cannot otherwise be explained.

Drawing on work in disciplines as diverse as dance and movement theory, phenomenology, cognitive science, and literary criticism, Noland argues that kinesthesia feeling the body move encourages experiment, modification, and, at times, rejection of the routine. Noland privileges corporeal performance and the sensory experience it affords in order to find a way beyond constructivist theory s inability to produce a convincing account of agency. She observes that despite the impact of social conditioning, human beings continue to invent surprising new ways of altering the inscribed behaviors they are called on to perform. Through lucid close readings of Marcel Mauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Bill Viola, Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Henri Michaux, Judith Butler, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Derrida, and contemporary digital artist Camille Utterback, Noland illustrates her provocative thesis, addressing issues of concern to scholars in critical theory, performance studies, anthropology, and visual studies.

What are the arts? What functions do the arts serve in human life? There has been a surge of cognitive, biological, and evolutionary interest in the arts in recent years, most of it oriented towards individual artforms. However, there has been virtually no bridging work to integrate the arts under a single theoretical perspective. This book presents the first integrated cognitive account of the arts that unites visual art, theatre, literature, dance, and music into a single framework, with supporting discussions about creativity and aesthetics. Its comparative approach identifies both what is unique to each artform and what they share, shedding light on how the arts can combine with one another to form syntheses, such as choreographing dance movements to music, or setting lyrics to music to create a song. While studies in the psychology of the arts tend to focus on perceptual processes and aesthetic responses alone, this book offers a holistic sensorimotor account that examines the full gamut of processes from creation to perception. This allows for a broad discussion of the evolution of the arts, including the origins of rhythm, the co-evolution of music and language, the evolution of drawing, and cultural evolution of the arts. Finally, the book unifies a number of topics that have not previously been fully related to one another, including theatre and literature, music and language, creativity and aesthetics, dancing and acting, and visual art and music. A unique volume providing a bold new approach to the integration of the arts, for academics or general readers of the arts, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, anthropology, and evolutionary studies.

Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration explores global relationality within the realm of intercultural collaboration in contemporary dance. Author SanSan Kwan looks specifically at duets, focusing on "East" "West" pairings, and how dance artists from different cultural and movement backgrounds -Asia, the Asian diaspora, Europe, and the United States; trained in contemporary dance, hip hop, flamenco, Thai classical dance, kabuki, and butoh - find ways to collaborate. Kwan acknowledges the forces of dissension, prejudice, and violence present in any contact zone, but ultimately asserts that choreographic invention across difference can be an act of love in the face of loss and serve as a model for difficult, imaginative, compassionate global affiliation. Love Dances contends that the practice and performance of dance serves as a revelatory site for working across culture. Body-to-body interaction on the stage carries the potential to model everyday encounters across difference in the world.

This book is a compilation of essays by distinguished writers, critics and artists in the field of Dance and African American Studies who address several areas and disciplines of African dance both on the continent and in the diaspora. Sir Rex Nettleford, the distinguished Jamaican choreographer, professor and writer, stresses in the foreword to the book, the continuity between all dances that derive from Africa and the significance of this book. African dance, he argues, is a dominant, pervasive and empowering force in African communities.

The four themes covered are tradition, tradition and continuity, tradition transformed, and tradition contextualized. African, Brazilian, Caribbean and African American scholars each focus on some aspect of African dance that provide the connecting patterns. Besides Sir Rex Nettleford, other contributors to this book include Pearl Primus, Maware Opoku, Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, Myriam Evelyse Mariani, Cynthia S'thembile West and Omofolabo Soyinka Ajayi.

The third instalment in Craig Revel Horwood's frank and funny autobiography takes the reader through the highs and lows of the Strictly Come Dancing star's 'fab-u-lous' life. Join Craig and a host of Strictly stars - including Ore Oduba, Judy Murray and the unforgettable Ed Balls - on the show and live tours and get the real stories from behind the scenes.

The Aussie-born judge shares his famously forthright views on the changes in the show's line up, from Bruce Forsyth and Len Goodman's departures to the arrival of Claudia Winkleman and Shirley Ballas, as well as the dancers and stars.

Away from Strictly, Craig reveals fresh heartache over failed romances, his pain at losing his dad and how his work kept him from flying to Australia for the funeral. He marks the milestones in his life, including turning fifty and moving from London to live in a 'gorgeous' country pile, as well as going under the knife for a second hip operation plus a few nips and tucks.

The multi-talented dancer, director and choreographer also discusses his award-winning shows, including Sister Act and Son of a Preacher Man, and spending a year in drag as Miss Hannigan in Annie. Plus, he reveals all about his foray into movies, choreographing Hugh Grant for Paddington 2 and making his big screen debut in Nativity Rocks.

With his famous wit and a wealth of backstage gossip, In Strictest Confidence is the perfect read for all his fans as well as those of Strictly Come Dancing.