This volume collects academic as well as artistic explorations highlighting historical and contemporary approaches to the "energetic" in its aesthetic and political potential. Energetic processes cross dance, performance art and installations. In contemporary dance and performance art, energetic processes are no longer mere conditions of form but appear as distinct aesthetic interventions. They transform the body, evoke specific states and push towards intensities.International contributors (i.e. Gerald Siegmund, Susan Leigh Foster, Lucia Ruprecht) unfold thorough investigations, elucidating maneuvers of mobilization, activation, initiation, regulation, navigation and containment of forces as well as different potentials and promises associated with the "energetic".

One of the most important ballet choreographers of all time, Marius Petipa (1818 - 1910) created works that are now mainstays of the ballet repertoire. Every day, in cities around the world, performances of Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty draw large audiences to theatres and inspire new generations of dancers, as does The Nutcracker during the winter holidays. These are his best-known works, but others - Don Quixote, La Bayadere - have also become popular, even canonical components of the classical repertoire, and together they have shaped the defining style of twentieth-century ballet. The first biography in English of this monumental figure of ballet history, Marius Petipa: The Emperor's Ballet Master covers the choreographer's life and work in full within the context of remarkable historical and political surroundings. Over the course of ten well-researched chapters, Nadine Meisner explores Marius Petipa's life and legacy: the artist's arrival in Russia from his native France, the socio-political tensions and revolution he experienced, his popularity on the Russian imperial stage, his collaborations with other choreographers and composers (most famously Tchaikovsky), and the conditions under which he worked, in close proximity to the imperial court. Meisner presents a thrilling and exhaustive narrative not only of Petipa's life but of the cultural development of ballet across the 19th and early 20th centuries. The book also extends beyond Petipa's narrative with insightful analyses of the evolution of ballet technique, theatre genres, and the rise of male dancers. Richly illustrated with archival photographs, this book unearths original material from Petipa's 63 years in Russia, much of it never published in English before. As Meisner demonstrates, the choreographer laid the foundations for Soviet ballet and for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, the expatriate company which exercised such an enormous influence on ballet in the West, including the Royal Ballet and Balanchine's New York City Ballet. After Petipa, Western ballet would never be the same.

In Dance for Sports, author, choreographer, and dance instructor Margo Apostolos offers a new training approach for athletes and coaches that synthesizes common techniques between athletics and dance. By utilizing this approach, in- and off-season athletes can improve efficiency and relaxation. Throughout the book, Apostolos shows the potential exchange between sport and dance in exercises that focus on overlapping physical components of both practices including flexibility, strength, coordination, agility, balance, and timing. She also demonstrates how dance serves sport as a cross training activity with additional opportunities for athletes to explore creativity, improvisation, and mindfulness. Discussion with athletes from several sports interweaves each chapter to expand the learning process and offer useful anecdotes. Based upon the author's decades-long career and extensive experience with athletes and coaches in sports from basketball to swimming to track and field, Dance for Sports provides a fully integrative guide for students and instructors alike.

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.

This book explores the process of improvisation and outlines the ideal conditions for an inspirational creative state. Examining her own process as an artist and drawing on interviews with peers, the author considers how the forces of shaping (intellect-driven decisions) and letting-go (more intuitive moves) interact in improvisation. The book follows the journey of seven performing arts graduates and undergraduates, examining their experiences of improvisation and the interplay of shaping and letting-go. It reveals how the approach and methods of expressive arts can enrich an improviser's experience and spur the desire for discovery.

An important center of dancehall reggae performance, sound clashes are contests between rival sound systems: groups of emcees, tune selectors, and sound engineers. In World Clash 1999, held in Brooklyn, Mighty Crown, a Japanese sound system and the only non-Jamaican competitor, stunned the international dancehall community by winning the event. In 2002, the Japanese dancer Junko Kudo became the first non-Jamaican to win Jamaica's National Dancehall Queen Contest. High-profile victories such as these affirmed and invigorated Japan's enthusiasm for dancehall reggae. In "Babylon East," the anthropologist Marvin D. Sterling traces the history of the Japanese embrace of dancehall reggae and other elements of Jamaican culture, including Rastafari, roots reggae, and dub music.

Sterling provides a nuanced ethnographic analysis of the ways that many Japanese involved in reggae as musicians and dancers, and those deeply engaged with Rastafari as a spiritual practice, seek to reimagine their lives through Jamaican culture. He considers Japanese performances and representations of Jamaican culture in clubs, competitions, and festivals; on websites; and in song lyrics, music videos, reggae magazines, travel writing, and fiction. He illuminates issues of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class as he discusses topics ranging from the cultural capital that Japanese dancehall artists amass by immersing themselves in dancehall culture in Jamaica, New York, and England, to the use of Rastafari as a means of critiquing class difference, consumerism, and the colonial pasts of the West and Japan. Encompassing the reactions of Jamaica's artists to Japanese appropriations of Jamaican culture, as well as the relative positions of Jamaica and Japan in the world economy, "Babylon East" is a rare ethnographic account of Afro-Asian cultural exchange and global discourses of blackness beyond the African diaspora.

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.

Over the last 40 years, while the musical film has faded from its historical high-point to a more isolated and quirky phenomenon, the dance film has displayed refulgent growth and surprising resilience. A phenomena of modern movie-making, the dance film has spawned profitable global enterprises (Billy Elliot), has fashioned youthful angst as sociological voice (Saturday Night Fever, Footloose and Dirty Dancing) and acted as a marker of post-modern ironic camp (Strictly Ballroom). This modern genre has influenced cinema as a whole in the ways bodies are made dimensional, in the way rhythm and energy are communicated, and in the filmic capacity to create narrative worlds without words. Emerging as a distinct (sub)genre in the 1970s, dance film has been crafting its own meta-narrative and aesthetic paradigms that, nonetheless, display extraordinary variety. Ranging from the experimental, 'you are there' sonic explorations of Robert Altman's The Company and the brutal energy of David La Chappelle's Rize to the lighter 'backstage musical' form displayed in Centre Stage and Save the Last Dance, this genre has garnered both commercial and artistic success.Meanwhile, Bollywood has become a juggernaut, creating transportable memory for diasporic Indian communities across the world. This is an entire industry based on the 'dance number', where films are pitched around the choreography, where the actors are not expected to sing, but they must dance. This series of essays investigates the relationship between movement and sound as it is revealed, manipulated and crafted in the dance film genre. It considers the role of all aspects of sound in the dance film, including the dancer generated sounds inherent in Tap, Flamenco, Irish Dance and Krumping. Drawing on significant post-War dance films from around world, Movies, Moves and Music comprehensively surveys this mainstream genre, where image and sound meet in a crucial symbiosis.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)-a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries-and the generous support of Duke University. A portrait of the game of capoeira and its practice across borders. Originating in the Black Atlantic world as a fusion of dance and martial art, capoeira was a marginalized practice for much of its history. Today it is globally popular. This ethnographic memoir weaves together the history of capoeira, recent transformations in the practice, and personal insights from author Katya Wesolowski's thirty years of experience as a capoeirista.Capoeira Connections follows Wesolowski's journey from novice to instructor while drawing on her decades of research as an anthropologist in Brazil, Angola, Europe, and the United States. In a story of local practice and global flow, Wesolowski offers an intimate portrait of the game and what it means in people's lives. She reveals camaraderie and conviviality in the capoeira ring as well as tensions and ruptures involving race, gender, and competing claims over how this artful play should be practiced. Capoeira brings people together and yet is never free of histories of struggle, and these too play out in the game's encounters. In her at once clear-sighted and hopeful analysis, Wesolowski ultimately argues that capoeira offers opportunities for connection, dialogue, and collaboration in a world that is increasingly fractured. In doing so, capoeira can transform lives, create social spheres, and shape mobile futures. Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Discusses all basic principles of ballet, grouping movement by fundamental types. Diagrams show clearly the exact foot, leg, arm and body positions for the proper execution of many steps and movements. Offers dancers, teachers and ballet lovers information often difficult to locate in other books.