Dance has proliferated in movies, television, Internet, and retail spaces while the spiritual power of dance has also been linked with mass consumption. Walter marries the cultural studies of dance and the religious aspects of dance in an exploration of consumption rituals, including rituals of being persuaded to buy products that include dance.

"Bringing the study of Chinese theatre into the 21st-century, Lei discusses ways in which traditional art can survive and thrive in the age of modernization and globalization. Building on her previous work, this new book focuses on various forms of Chinese "opera" in locations around the Pacific Rim, including Hong Kong, Taiwan and California"--

As war is declared can The Variety Girls keep smiling through...Cleethorpes - September 1939 Struggling to keep their spirits up as the reality of war hits home and theatres are closed, friends Jessie Delaney and Frances O'Leary search for work to see them through until they can sing and dance again. Frances, once upon a time followed her dreams of becoming a dancer but soon found herself with a broken heart and a precious secret when her lover abandoned her. Keeping her secret from her friends grows more difficult as time passes and their friendship grows.. But with her lover returning to England from a successful tour of America, how long will it be before the truth comes to light? Secrets aren't good for anyone and Frances isn't the only one hiding things from her friends. Ginny Thomspon, another Variety Girl is hoping for the best. But is hope enough? Can the Variety Girls pull together to help each other through the tough times or will their secrets tear them apart? A gritty and heart-warming saga perfect for readers of Elaine Everest, Nancy Revell and Pam Howes. Praise for Tracy Baines: 'A charming, heart-warming saga about ambition, hard work and courage in the cut and thrust of a world often driven by jealousy and spite'. Rosie Clarke 'Immerse yourself in the exciting, evocative world of Wartime musical theatre. I highly recommend this book.' Fenella Miller 'An emotional, entertaining read that had me gripped!' Sheila Riley 'An absorbing and poignant saga. I loved it from the very beginning and would highly recommend it...' Elaine Roberts 'Terrific - beautifully written. The book twinkles. A well-crafted and satisfying story' Maisie Thomas 'A pleasure from start to finish.' Glenda Young '...you will have to read this well-researched song and dance of a novel in great gulps as I did' Annie Clark 'I just loved this book! Molly Walton The Variety Girls is terrific - beautifully written & with an unusual background. The stage costumes twinkle with sequins and the book twinkles with tiny details of theatre life that add depth and atmosphere to this well-crafted and satisfying story. Maisie Thomas, The Railway Girls 'A pleasure from start to finish.' Glenda Young, Belle of the Backstreets '...you will have to read this well-researched song and dance of a novel in great gulps as I did' Milly Adams 'an evocative, busy, entertaining read, which has well balanced touches of humour, vying with angst, and of course, more than a dollop of tension.' Margaret Graham, Frost Magazine 'Characterisation is one of the book's strong points - the individual characters stay in your mind long after you finish the story.' Barbara Dynes, The Voice

The biography of a fascinating cultural hero, Rene Blum and the Ballets Russes uncovers the events in the life of the enigmatic and brilliant writer and producer who perished in the Holocaust. Brother of Leon Blum, the first socialist prime minister of France, Rene Blum was a passionate and prominent litterateur. He was the editor of the chic literary journal Gil Blas where he met such celebrated figures as Claude Debussy, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Andre Gide, and Paul Valery. As author Judith Chazin-Bennahum's research illustrates, Blum actually arranged for the publication of Proust's Swann's Way. But Blum's accomplishments and legacy do not end there: after enlisting in World War I, he won the Croix de Guerre and became a national hero. And Blum resurrected the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo after Diaghilev's death. Tragically, he was arrested in 1941 during a roundup of Jewish intellectuals and ultimately sent to Auschwitz.
Based on a treasure trove of previously undiscovered letters and documents, this thoroughly researched narrative not only tells the poignant story of Blum's life but also illustrates Blum's central role in the development of dance in the United States. Indeed, Blum's efforts to save his ballet company eventually helped to bring many of the world's greatest dancers and choreographers--among them Fokine, Balanchine, and Nijinska--to American ballet stages, shaping the path of dance in the United States for years to come."

Dancing Bodies of Devotion: Fluid Gestures in Bharata Natyam examines how Bharata Natyam, a traditionally Hindu storytelling dance form, moves across religious boundaries through both incorporating choreography on Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, and Jain themes and the pluralistic identities of participants. Dancers traverse religious boundaries by reformulating an aesthetic foundation based on performative rather than solely textual understandings of rasa, conventionally defined as a formula for how to physically craft emotion on stage. Through the ethnographic case studies of this volume, dancers of Bharata Natyam innovatively demonstrate how the rasa of devotion (bhakti rasa), surprisingly absent from classic dance-related texts, serves as the pivotal framework for expanding on their own interreligious thematic and interpretive possibilities. In contemporary Bharata Natyam, bhakti rasa is not just about enhancing religious experience; instead, these dancers choreographically adapt various religious identities and ideas in order to emphasize pluralistic cultural and ethical dimensions in their work. Through the dancing body, multiple religious and secular interpretations fluidly co-exist.

A far-reaching examination of exoticism, cultural internationalism and modernism's encounters with Indonesian tradition, "Performing Otherness "examines how Indonesia entered world stages through imperialism as an antimodern phantasm and through nationalism became a means of intercultural communication and cultural diplomacy.

"Interrogating America" looks at American culture and politics from the lens of American theatre and drama, drawing from specialists in the field of theatre to reflect upon the role of theatre in the creation of the American cultural and political milieu. The essays confront such iconic concepts as the American Dream and the American Melting Pot, addressing issues such as American enfranchisement and historical limitations placed on the idea of inclusion based on class, race, and gender. Together, the essays create a portrait of the dynamic give-and-take that is central to the idea of Americanness and America itself.

Considering the concept of power in capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian ritual art form, Varela describes ethnographically the importance that capoeira leaders (mestres) have in the social configuration of a style called Angola in Bahia, Brazil. He analyzes how individual power is essential for an understanding of the modern history of capoeira, and for the themes of embodiment, play, cosmology, and ritual action. The book also emphasizes the great significance that creativity and aesthetic expression have for capoeira's practice and performance.

This book asks important questions about making performance through the means of collaboration and co-created practice. It argues that we can align ethics and aesthetics with collaborative performance to realise the importance of being in association with one another, and being engaged through our shared imaginations. Evident in the examples of practice visited in this study is the attention given by a number of practitioners to the development of shared, co-operative modes of creation. Here, we can appreciate ethical work as being relational, forged in association with the others as we cultivate ideas that matter. In looking at a range of work from practitioners including Meg Stuart, Rosemary Lee, Deufert&Philschke and Fevered Sleep, Considering Ethics in Dance, Theatre and Performance explores ways that we rehearse by attending to ethics, aesthetics and co-creation. In learning to listen, to observe, to co-operate and to negotiate, these practitioners reveal the ways that they bring their work into existence through the transmission of shared meaning.

The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance provides a comprehensive introduction to and analysis of the global art form butoh. Originating in Japan in the 1960s, butoh was a major innovation in twentieth century dance and performance, and it continues to shape-shift around the world. Taking inspiration from the Japanese avant-garde, Surrealism, Happenings, and authors such as Genet and Artaud, its influence can be seen throughout contemporary performing arts, music, and visual art practices. This Companion places the form in historical context, documents its development in Japan and its spread around the world, and brings together the theory and the practice of this compelling dance. The interdisciplinarity evident in the volume reflects the depth and the breadth of butoh, and the editors bring specially commissioned essays by leading scholars and dancers together with translations of important early texts.

This book sheds light on the purpose of Hindu dance as devotional. Dr. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall explains the history of Hindu dance and how colonization caused the dance form to move from sacred to a Westernized system that emphasizes culture. Postcolonialism is a main theme throughout this text, as religion and culture do not remain static. MisirHiralall points to a postcolonial return to Hindu dance as a religious and sacred dance form while positioning Hindu dance in the Western culture in which she lives.

With a political agenda foregrounding collaborative practice to promote ethical relations, these individually and joint written essays and interviews discuss dances often with visual art, theatre, film and music, drawing on continental philosophy to explore notions of space, time, identity, sensation, memory and ethics.

In the land of samba there is another vibrant culture capturing the attention of urban youth. This compelling account argues that hip hop, while certainly a product of globalized flows of information and technology, is by no means homogenous. Using more than five years of anthropological fieldwork in Sao Paulo, Brazil's largest city, Pardue represents "culture" as generative and thus meaningful as a set of practices. When interpreted in this manner, local hip hoppers become closer to what they claim to be--subjects rather than objects of history and everyday life. In his ethnography, the first in English to look at Brazilian hip hop, Pardue highlights the analytical categories of race, class, gender, and territory.

Through discussion of a dazzling array of artists in India and the diaspora, this book delineates a new language of dance on the global stage. Myriad movement vocabularies intersect the dancers' creative landscape, while cutting-edge creative choreography parodies gender and cultural stereotypes, and represents social issues.

Movements of Interweaving is a rich collection of essays exploring the concept of interweaving performance cultures in the realms of movement, dance, and corporeality. Focusing on dance performances as well as on scenarios of cultural movements on a global scale, it not only challenges the concept of intercultural dance performances, but through its innovative approach also calls attention to the specific qualities of "interweaving" as a form of movement itself. Divided into four sections, this volume features an international team of scholars together developing a new critical perspective on the cultural practices of movement, travel and migration in and beyond dance.

Senegal has played a central role in contemporary dance due to its rich performing traditions, as well as strong state patronage of the arts, first under French colonialism and later in the postcolonial era. In the 1980s, when the Senegalese economy was in decline and state fundingwithdrawn, European agencies used the performing arts as a tool in diplomacy. This had a profound impact on choreographic production and arts markets throughout Africa. In Senegal, choreographic performers have taken to contemporary dance, while continuing to engage with neo-traditional performance, regional genres like the sabar, and the popular dances they grew up with. A historically informed ethnography of creativity, agency, and the fashioning of selves through the different life stages in urban Senegal, this book explores the significance of this multiple engagement with dance in a context of economic uncertainty and rising concerns over morality in the public space.

The Beatles were one of the most important musical phenomena of the twentieth century, and together with their manager, Brian Epstein, it can truly be stated that they changed the world. But there were dark aspects to the Beatles story to go along with the million-sellers, and the record-breaking tours. Lost opportunities, millions of pounds lost or squandered or stolen, and the involvement of some very unpleasant characters. "For No One" is the story of the Beatles rise to super-stardom and their descent into a petty squabbling break-up, and a decline highlighted by tragic death and squalid murder and a host of unanswered questions.

Theatre and Performance in the Asia-Pacific is an analysis of the theatrical imaginative as it manifests in theatre and performance in Australia, Indonesia, Japan and Singapore. The sites encompass marked differences in language, performance, history and politics, and variations in the solidity and volatility of their imagined worlds. Recognizing these differences, the book explores contrasts in each nation as it identifies with the region and the cultural interconnections that support a regional identity. While the four nations demonstrate degrees of ambivalence and connection to the Asia-Pacific as a region, the project argues that relations to modernity and globalization are less nation-specific. The project articulates a regional configuration of modernity which is multiple, contradictory but nonetheless regional. Each nation has in common the imperative to reconcile with and adapt to European modernity in a way that renders global modernity multiple rather than singular.

David G. Pier offers an ethnographic study of the Senator Extravaganza traditional dance competition in Uganda, and the performers, marketers, and other actors who were involved in it. Pier illustrates the event as part of a broader moment in Ugandan and African public culture - one in which marketing is playing an increasingly dominant role.

The year is 1932. Frederick Ashton is living in Earls Court and Anton Dolin ('will ere long be proclaimed the rival and successor of Nijinsky') in bohemian Chelsea. Ninette de Valois is hobnobbing with the Bloomsbury Group, while little Alicia Markova is exiled to North Kensington. Less illustrious figures are running dancing schools everywhere from Glasgow to Truro. Across the channel Serge Lifar ('who possesses an important collection of pictures by well-known artists connected with the ballet') is lording it at the Paris Opera, while Danilova and Balanchine are cohabiting in the 17th arrondissement. Harald Kreutzberg can be found in Hamburg, Rudolf Laban in Berlin, and Serge Grigorieff in Monte-Carlo. Back in Great Britain, The Casani School of Dancing will guarantee you a career as a Dancer or Hostess, earning 5 to 10 a week, after a series of 150 private lessons at a most reasonable cost, and D. Walter and Co will sell you an automatic revolving spotlight ('the most wonderful lighting effect ever produced') for a mere 5 15s 6d. You can ensure youthful natural contours when dancing with the aid of a Kestos Brassiere, and at 102 Charing Cross Road Princess Yvonne will furnish you with a set of rather risque photographs to further your career. As well as a long biographical section, the directory includes a list of dance associations round the world, details of stage dancing competitions and lists of the Dancing Times Cup winners and Ballroom Competition winners. It provides a fascinating glimpse of the dance world in days gone by.