Every year, countless young adults from affluent, Western nations travel to Brazil to train in capoeira, the dance/martial art form that is one of the most visible strands of the Afro-Brazilian cultural tradition. In Search of Legitimacy explores why "first world" men and women leave behind their jobs, families, and friends to pursue a strenuous training regimen in a historically disparaged and marginalized practice. Using the concept of apprenticeship pilgrimage-studying with a local master at a historical point of origin-the author examines how non-Brazilian capoeiristas learn their art and claim legitimacy while navigating the complexities of wealth disparity, racial discrimination, and cultural appropriation.

This book was born from a year of exchanges of movement ideas generated in cross-practice conversations and workshops with dancers, musicians, architects and engineers. Events took place at key cultural institutions such as the Royal Academy of Arts, London; and The Lowry, Salford, as well as on-site at architectural firms and on the streets of London. The author engages with dance's offer of perspectives on being in place: how the 'ordinary person' is facilitated in experiencing the dance of the city, while also looking at shared cross-practice understandings in and about the body, weight and rhythm. There is a prioritizing of how embodied knowledges across dance, architecture and engineering can contribute to decolonizing the production of place - in particular, how dance and city-making cultures engage with female bodies and non-white bodies in today's era of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. Akinleye concludes in response conversations about ideas raised in the book with John Bingham-Hall, Liz Lerman, Dianne McIntyer and Richard Sennett. The book is a fascinating resource for those drawn to spatial practices from dance to design to construction.

Through seven key case studies from Khan's oeuvre, this book demonstrates how Akram Khan's 'new interculturalism' is a challenge to the 1980s western 'intercultural theatre' project, as a more nuanced and embodied approach to representing Othernesses, from his own position of the Other.

Originally published in 1932, this is a wonderfully detailed guide to ballroom dancing by the then reigning world champion dancer. The book covers everything that is essential in connection with ballroom dancing, from a detailed description of the standardised figures down to the finer points which proclaim the expert dancer. It is a book that will make its appeal both to the novice and to the experienced or professional performer. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Hesperides Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork. Contents Include - A Complete Syllabus for a Ballroom Examination - General Knowledge Questions and Answers - The Slow Foxtrot - The Waltz - The Quick Step - The Tango - Charts Giving a Complete Description of Every Standing Figure

Across spatial, bodily, and ethical domains, music and dance both emerge from and give rise to intimate collaboration. This theoretically rich collection takes an ethnographic approach to understanding the collective dimension of sound and movement in everyday life, drawing on genres and practices in contexts as diverse as Japanese shakuhachi playing, Peruvian huayno, and the Greek goth scene. Highlighting the sheer physicality of the ethnographic encounter, as well as the forms of sociality that gradually emerge between self and other, each contribution demonstrates how dance and music open up pathways and give shape to life trajectories that are neither predetermined nor teleological, but generative.

What world has been constructed for dancing through the use of the term 'world dance'? What kinds of worlds do we as scholars create for a given dance when we undertake to describe and analyze it? This book endeavours to make new epistemological space for the analysis of the world's dance by offering a variety of new analytic approaches.

Choreographic Dwellings explores performance practices that extend the remit of the choreographic. Covering walking practices, site-specific and nomadic performance that explore the movement potentials of everyday environments, parkour and art installation, it offers a reframing of the topologically kinaesthetic experience of the choreographic.

This exciting new and original collection locates dance within the spectrum of urban life in late modernity, through a range of theoretical perspectives. It highlights a diversity of dance forms and styles that can be witnessed in and around contemporary urban spaces: from dance halls to raves and the club striptease; from set dancing to ballroom dancing, to hip hop and swing, and to ice dance shows; from the ballet class, to fitness aerobics; and 'art' dance which situates itself in a dynamic relation to the city.

Dance is more than an aesthetic of life - dance embodies life. This is evident from the social history of jive, the marketing of trans-national ballet, ritual healing dances in Italy or folk dances performed for tourists in Mexico, Panama and Canada. Dance often captures those essential dimensions of social life that cannot be easily put into words. What are the flows and movements of dance carried by migrants and tourists? How is dance used to shape nationalist ideology? What are the connections between dance and ethnicity, gender, health, globalization and nationalism, capitalism and post-colonialism? Through innovative and wide-ranging case studies, the contributors explore the central role dance plays in culture as leisure commodity, cultural heritage, cultural aesthetic or cathartic social movement.

Helene Neveu Kringelbach is an Oxford Diaspora Programme Researcher at the University of Oxford. Her current research interests include dance and musical theatre in West Africa and beyond, contemporary choreography in Africa and transnational families across Senegal and Europe.

Jonathan Skinner is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology in the School of History and Anthropology, Queen's University Belfast. He is the author of Before the Volcano: Reverberations of Identity on Montserrat (Arawak Publications 2004) and co-editor of Great Expectations: Imagination and Anticipation in Tourism (Berghahn Books 2011).

This book examines the globalization of belly dance and the distinct dancing communities that have evolved from it. The history of belly dance has taken place within the global flow of sojourners, immigrants, entrepreneurs, and tourists from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. In some cases, the dance is transferred to new communities within the gender normative structure of its original location in North Africa and the Middle East. Belly dance also has become part of popular culture's Orientalist infused discourse. The consequence of this discourse has been a global revision of the solo dances of North Africa and the Middle East into new genres that are still part of the larger belly dance community but are distinct in form and meaning from the dance as practiced within communities in North Africa and the Middle East.

Originally published in 1939.Contents Include Suggested Method of Approach By the Novice, the Compitition Dancer and Keen Amatueur, the Student The Hold The Poise, Balance and General Outline of the Walk Contrary Body Movement, Contrary Body Movement Position THE QUICK STEP The Walk Forward and Backward The Quarter Turns The Prgressive Chace' The Natural Turn The Natural Pivaot Turn etc THE WALTZ The Forward Change The Natural Turn The Reverse Turn The Hesitation Change The Natural Spin Turn etc THE FOXTROT The Walk, Forward and BackwardThe Three-Step The Feather Step etc THE TANGO The Walk Forward The Walk Backward The Progressive Side Step The Rock Turn From the Walk into Promenade etc POPULAR DANCES The Blues The Cuban Rumba Rythm Dancing The Quick Waltz BALLROOM NOVELTY DANCES AND GAMES THE PRACTICAL SIDE OF TEACHING

Dancing at the crossroads used to be young peoples opportunity to meet and enjoy themselves on mild summer evenings in the countryside in Ireland until this practice was banned by law, the Public Dance Halls Act in 1935. Now a key metaphor in Irish cultural and political life, dancing at the crossroads also crystallizes the argument of this book: Irish dance, from Riverdance (the commercial show) and competitive dancing to dance theatre, conveys that Ireland is to be found in a crossroads situation with a firm base in a distinctly Irish tradition which is also becoming a prominent part of European modernity. Helena Wulff is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. Publications include Twenty Girls (Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1988), Ballet across Borders (Berg, 1998), Youth Cultures (co-edited with Vered Amit-Talai, Routledge, 1995), New Technologies at Work (co-edited with Christina Garsten, Berg, 2003). Her research focusses on dance, visual culture, and Ireland."

This book renews thinking about the moving body by drawing on dance practice and performance from across the world. Eighteen internationally recognised scholars show how dance can challenge our thoughts and feelings about our own and other cultures, our emotions and prejudices, and our sense of public and private space. In so doing, they offer a multi-layered response to ideas of affect and emotion, culture and politics, and ultimately, the place of dance and art itself within society. The chapters in this collection arise from a number of different political and historical contexts. By teasing out their detail and situating dance within them, art is given a political charge. That charge is informed by the work of Michel Foucault, Stuart Hall, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Ranciere and Luce Irigaray as well as their forebears such as Spinoza, Plato and Freud. Taken together, Choreography and Corporeality: RELAY in Motion puts thought into motion, without forgetting its origins in the social world.

Some of the earliest dance treatises come from Italy and were written in the second half of the 15th century by dancing masters working at the Courts of the great ruling families of Northern Italy such as the d'Estes, Gonzagas and Medici. For the first time we have descriptions of the social dances performed at these courts, though the writers often assume a prior knowledge of technique and leave out much that we would like to know today. Although Antonio Cornazano was not a dancing master, he was an enthusiastic amateur, and his work gives us valuable insights into the interpretation of steps such as saltarelli and piva, as well as some poetically descriptive detail on style, presentation, and technique. Most of these early Italian sources are only available in manuscript form, and up to now none have been translated in full. This book will therefore be an invaluable addition to the library of all dance scholars and historians, as well as being of great interest to dance students wanting to know more about the origins of their art.

Originally published in 1899, this is a comprehensive study of the art of Dancing throughout history. It goes into great detail about dancing through the ages, including musical notation, right up to the start of the 1900s. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Hesperides Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork. Contents Include The Natural and Origin of Dancing Dancing in Ancient Egypt Dances of the Greeks Dancing in Ancient Rome Religious, Mysterious, and Fanatical Elements in Dancing Remarkable Dancing of Later Times The Minuet Modern Dancing

Examining performers from the ancient Mediterranean world to the modern Islamic Middle East, including India and Pakistan, Shay explores the careers, artistic performances, and legacies of these individuals who were forced to produce entertainment and art for, and have sex with, any and all patrons.

A historian's task is a voyage of discovery, and in these personal reminiscences Ivor Guest allows the reader to share the romance of recreating times past. Since his first published article appeared in the 1940s he has vastly expanded and enriched our knowledge of ballet in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through more than a score of books, many of them definitive works, that are a rare blend of scrupulous scholarship and readability. The story of his involvement in the world of ballet is a romance in itself. When he was drawn to the study of ballet history, comparatively little serious research had been done, and he found himself working in virtually virgin soil - the fulfillment of an historian's dream. The Paris Opera, with its library and archives, became his mecca, where he returned year after year to unearth the material on which were based his classic chronicles of the French ballet. In time his pre-eminence was to be recognised when he - an Englishman - was commissioned to write the official history of the Paris Opera Ballet. For him all this was a labour of love - almost in a literal sense, for as he reconstructed the lives of long-dead ballerinas through his patient research and deductive sleuthing, he fell under their spell like a man in love. His biographies are written with an easy style that conceals the toil that went into them, but in this book he tells of his quests for characters who were often maddeningly elusive, such as his 'first love', Fanny Cerrito. The account of his search for the date of her death is told with a touch of fine comedy, and culminates in the discovery of her descendants. These 'Adventures' are concerned mainly with Ivor Guest's work as a writer, but this is by no means the whole story. He played a crucial part in the creation of Frederick Ashton's 'La Fille mal gardee', discovering the early scores from which the music for this evergreen ballet was adapted, and his marriage to Ann Hutchinson led him up new paths as they combined their talents, hers as a specialist in dance notation, to recreate several choreographic gems from the past, including Fanny Elssler's famous Cachucha. And, to emphasise that his life is not all spent at his desk or in dusty archives, he tells the story of his involvement with the Royal Academy of Dance, as Chairman of its Executive Committee from 1969, when it was on the verge of bankruptcy, to the 1980s when it was riding high as the largest and most vital association of ballet teachers in the world. These reminiscences illuminate an aspect of the dance world that seldom comes into the limelight, yet is of great importance for its cultural significance. Scholars and writers who lift the curtain on the past work quietly in the background. This book tells the story of one of them, who in the field of dance scholarship is internationally recognised for his work.

How did Caribbean rituals helped form new currents in the performing and visual arts of the United States? This book answers this question through an examination of the Caribbean-inspired dance creations of dancer/choreographer Katherine Dunham and the experimental films of avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren.

A companion guide to one of the bestselling Limelight Edition titles, this book by Asaf Messerer, a founder of what has become known as the Bolshoi School, is one of the most celebrated manuals of classic dance instruction in the world. Messerer has gained an international reputation for his classes in classical technique-models of invention and well-rounded exercise, stressing both precision and fluid artistic control. Nearly 500 photographs of principal Bolshoi dancers illustrate the positions and steps indicated, and an introductory section by Messerer outlines his basic plan and philosophy of teaching.

'Swan Dive is to ballet what Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential was to restaurants, a chance to go behind the serene front of house to the sweaty, foul-mouthed, psychofrenzy backstage.' - Daisy Goodwin, Sunday Times In this love letter to the art of dance, Georgina Pazcoguin, New York City Ballet's first Asian American female soloist, lays bare the backstage world of elite ballet. With an unapologetic sense of humour about the cut-throat mentality required, Pazcoguin takes us from her small home town in Pennsylvania to training for one of the most revered ballet companies in the world - a company that was rocked by scandal in the wake of the #MeToo movement. Pazcoguin continues to be one of the few dancers openly speaking up against harassment, abuse and racism - all of which she has painfully experienced firsthand. Tying together Pazcoguin's fight for equality with an infectious passion for her craft, Swan Dive is a page-turning, one-of-a-kind memoir that guarantees you'll never view a ballerina or a ballet the same way again. 'Always arresting onstage, Georgina Pazcoguin gives us a take on the ballet world that is witty and from the heart. An eye-opening read.' - Mikhail Baryshnikov 'A funny, poignant and shocking read . . . [Pazcoguin] punctures, with enormous glee, the stereotype of the ballet dancer as an elegant, ethereal being.' - Fiona Sturges, Guardian