African dance is discussed here in its global as well as local contexts as a powerful vehicle of aesthetic and cultural exchange and influence. To date, scholars have tended, with a few exceptions, to write about African dance in primarily ethnographic terms. This collection seeks to challenge this pattern and expand dance research by engaging with the aesthetics and socio-political impact of dance for communities in and out of Africa in an increasingly global context. Contributors to this issue look at the impact that specifically situated indigenous dance forms have had on the development of newforms locally, and the reciprocal impact of local and international infrastructures, including funding bodies, tourism and festivals. African Theatre 17 examines how dance is contributing to a particularly African interculturalism, while analysing the issues of representation of Africa in a postcolonial context. Articles address the efficacy of dance to engage audiences with disavowed issues regarding gender, sexuality and dis/ability both within and beyond Africa. Highlights include a dance photo essay on F.O.D. Gang's 2017 site-specific street performance "Untitled" in Lagos, a new non-themed section, and the playscript Lunatic! by Zimbabwean playwright Thoko Zulu. Volume Editors: YVETTE HUTCHISON & CHUKWUMA OKOYE Series Editors: Yvette Hutchison, Reader, Department of Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Warwick; Chukwuma Okoye, Reader in African Theatre & Performance University of Ibadan; Jane Plastow, Professor of African Theatre, University of Leeds.

Dance on the American Musical Theatre Stage: A History chronicles the development of dance, with an emphasis on musicals and the Broadway stage, in the United States from its colonial beginnings to performances of the present day. This book explores the fascinating tug-and-pull between the European classical, folk and social dance imports and America's indigenous dance forms as they met and collided on the popular musical theatre stage. The historical background influenced a specific musical theatre movement vocabulary and a unique choreographic approach that is recognizable today as Broadway style dancing. Throughout the book, a cultural context is woven into the history to reveal how the competing values within American culture, and its attempts as a nation to define and redefine itself, played out through developments in dance on the musical theatre stage. This book is central to the conversation on how dance influences and reflects society, and will be of interest to students and scholars of Musical Theatre, Theatre Studies, Dance and Cultural History.

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.

Commemorating the centenary of Tchaikovsky's death, these essays reassess the life and work of the composer from a variety of perspectives, ranging from the musicological and biographical to broader ones addressing his place in the development of the arts in Europe and America. As they make clear, there is much about Tchaikovsky's achievement that has been taken for granted, and the essays included in this collection represent as much acts of reevaluation as of celebration.

After a broad synthesis of Tchaikovsky's relation to the literature, music, and theater of the 18th and 19th centuries, there are sections devoted to Tchaikovsky and his musical contemporaries; Tchaikovsky's lost opera, "The Oprichnik"; Tchaikovsky's mature operatic work; his place in Russian Orthodoxy and nationalism; and contemporary perspectives on his life and works. The volume concludes with discussions on Tchaikovsky scholarship, the place of the composer in American and Russian musical education, and the interpretation and performance of his ballets. It is an important collection for scholars and other researchers involved in Russian music and ballet.

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.

In recent years, a growth in dance and wellbeing scholarship has resulted in new ways of thinking that place the body, movement, and dance in a central place with renewed significance for wellbeing. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Wellbeing examines dance and related movement practices from the perspectives of neuroscience and health, community and education, and psychology and sociology to contribute towards an understanding of wellbeing, offer new insights into existing practices, and create a space where sufficient exchange is enabled. The handbook's research components include quantitative, qualitative, and arts-based research, covering diverse discourses, methodologies, and perspectives that add to the development of a complete picture of the topic. Throughout the handbook's wide-ranging chapters, the objective observations, felt experiences, and artistic explorations of practitioners interact with and are printed alongside academic chapters to establish an egalitarian and impactful exchange of ideas.

Further Steps brings together New York's foremost choreographers - among them MacArthur 'Genius' award winners Meredith Monk and Bill T. Jones - to discuss the past, present and future of dance in the US. In a series of exclusive and enlightening interviews, this diverse selection of artists discuss the changing roles of race, gender, politics, and the social environment on their work.

Bringing her own experience of the New York dance scene to her study, Constance Kreemer traces the lives and works of the following choreographers:

Lucinda Childs, Douglas Dunn, Molissa Fenley, Rennie Harris, Bill T. Jones, Kenneth King, Nancy Meehan, Meredith Monk, Rosalind Newman, Gus Solomons jr, Doug Varone, Dan Wagoner, Mel Wong and Jawole Zollar.

Telling a riveting true story of the emergence and development of an American icon, this book traces swing dancing from its origins to its status as a modern-day art form. From its unlikely origins in the African slave trade, one of the saddest chapters of American history, swing dance emerged as a celebration of the soul. Swing is now recognized around the globe as a joyous partnered dance, uniquely Afro-American in origin and an American treasure. This book examines how the original swing style of the 1920s, the Lindy Hop, branched out and evolved with the changing dynamics of popular culture, paralleling the development of the nation. Swing Dancing covers the dance through the years of minstrelsy, the jazz age, the big band era, bebop, and the decline of partnered dancing in the 1960s. Swing experts and instructors Tamara and Erin Stevens have combined a compelling historic examination of swing dance with an assortment of riveting personal interviews and photographic documentation to create a comprehensive reference book on this important art form. Contains insights from personal interviews with a variety of prominent dancers, scholars, and historians Presents a chronology of the emergence of vernacular American dancing and the development of swing, from colonial times to the present day Includes numerous illustrations and photographs depicting the diverse influences on the genre, from legendary musicians to iconic swing dancers and more Contains a select bibliography of diverse source material, such as books, films, and magazine and newspaper articles Provides a helpful index offering access to names, places, people, and all important subjects

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. It 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. 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 volume 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 is the first comprehensive textbook on lighting design for dance productions. Illuminates the aesthetic considerations of lighting design (the "poetry") along with the tools and technology (the "nitty-gritty") to execute effective designs. Contains reflections from renowned lighting designers, including Jennifer Tipton, Beverly Emmons, Mark Stanley, Richard Dunham, and James E. Streeter.

Soviet ballet immediately following the Russian Revolution of 1917 until the advent of Stalin in the thirties is one of the most important, yet least documented, periods in ballet history. In this new study Elizabeth Souritz, former head of the Dance Section of the Moscow Institute of the History of the Arts, draws on Russian archival material, theatre literature, and reminiscences of performers, designers and choreographers to paint a powerful and colourful picture of this influential time.

Lucia Ruprecht's study is the first monograph in English to analyse the relationship between nineteenth-century German literature and theatrical dance. Combining cultural history with close readings of major texts by Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Heinrich Heine, the author brings to light little-known German resources on dance to address the theoretical implications of examining the interdiscursive and intermedial relations between the three authors' literary works, aesthetic reflections on dance, and dance of the period. In doing so, she not only shows how dancing and writing relate to one another but reveals the characteristics that make each mode of expression distinct unto itself. Readings engage with literary modes of understanding physical movement that are neglected under the regime of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, and of classical ballet, setting the human, frail and expressive body against the smoothly idealised neoclassicist ideal. Particularly important is the way juxtaposing texts and performance practice allows for the emergence of meta-discourses about trauma and repetition and their impact on aesthetics and formulations of the self and the human body. Related to this is the author's concept of performative exercises or dances of the self which constitute a decisive force within the formation of subjectivity that is enacted in the literary texts. Joining performance studies with psychoanalytical theory, this book opens up new pathways for understanding Western theatrical dance's theoretical, historical and literary continuum.

Hope in a Ballet Shoe tells the story of Michaela DePrince. Growing up in war-torn Sierra Leone, she witnessed atrocities that no child ever should. Her father was killed by rebels and her mother died of famine. Sent to an orphanage, Michaela was mistreated and saw the brutal murder of her favourite teacher. Then Michaela and her best friend are adopted by an American couple, and Michaela begins to take dance lessons. But life in the States isn't without difficulties. Unfortunately, tragedy can find its way to Michaela in America, too, and her past can feel like it's haunting her. The world of ballet is a racist one, and Michaela has to fight for a place amongst the ballet elite, hearing the words 'America's not ready for a black girl ballerina.' And yet . . . Today, Michaela DePrince is an international ballet star, dancing for The Dutch National Ballet at the age of nineteen. This is a heart-breaking, inspiring autobiography by a teenager who shows us that, beyond everything, there is always hope for a better future.

A complete introduction to traditional Japanese dance, this text will delight readers with its lively descriptions and beautiful illustrations. This book discusses Kabuki dance, modern dance movements based on Kabuki dance and the influence of Western dance.

Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema, an ambitious study of two of South Asia's most popular cultural forms - cinema and dance - historicizes and theorizes the material and cultural production of film dance, a staple attraction of popular Hindi cinema. It explores how the dynamic figurations of the body wrought by cinematic dance forms from the 1930s to the 1990s produce unique constructions of gender, sexuality, stardom, and spectacle. By charting discursive shifts through figurations of dancer-actresses, their publicly performed movements, private training, and the cinematic and extra-diegetic narratives woven around their dancing bodies, the book considers the "women's question" via new mobilities corpo-realized by dancing women. Some of the central figures animating this corporeal history are Azurie, Sadhona Bose, Vyjayanthimala, Helen, Waheeda Rehman, Madhuri Dixit, and Saroj Khan, whose performance histories fold and intersect with those of other dancing women, including devadasis and tawaifs, Eurasian actresses, oriental dancers, vamps, choreographers, and backup dancers. Through a material history of the labor of producing on-screen dance, theoretical frameworks that emphasize collaboration, such as the "choreomusicking body" and "dance musicalization," aesthetic approaches to embodiment drawing on treatises like the Natya Sastra and the Abhinaya Darpana, and formal analyses of cine-choreographic "techno-spectacles," Dancing Women offers a variegated, textured history of cinema, dance, and music. Tracing the gestural genealogies of film dance produces a very different narrative of Bombay cinema, and indeed of South Asian cultural modernities, by way of a corporeal history co-choreographed by a network of remarkable dancing women.

This book examines modern dance as a form of embodied resistance to political and cultural nationalism in India through the works of five selected modern dance makers: Rabindranath Tagore, Uday Shankar, Shanti Bardhan, Manjusri Chaki Sircar and Ranjabati Sircar.

Professional dance is an exciting but demanding career to choose, and the dancer of today needs to be physically prepared for the stress on the body that a performing life entails. Pilates and Conditioning for Dancers is a practical guide to exercises designed specifically for dance students and professionals alike. The focus on how to choose exercises that suit the individual offers dancers the freedom to optimize their performance potential in a flexible environment. Key topics covered are Core Control; Turnout; The Healthy Spine; Footwork; Jumping and Landing. This new book covers each area of the body, relating the exercises closely to dance technique and providing movement solutions for dancers of al styles and at all stages of their performing career.

- A comprehensive and accessible introduction to the essential elements of choreography - practice, theory and contexts - Invaluable for any undergraduate students on Dance Studies or Dance BfA courses across the UK, US and Europe - Gives a much more current and contemporary take on the discipline than most books in this area, aimed at a younger, student audience

When the American modern dancers Isadora Duncan (1877-1928) and Martha Graham (1894-1991) read Nietzsche, they were inspired by the way in which he uses images of dance to figure an alternative to Christian values. They each came to describe their visions for dance in Nietzschean terms. This book investigates the role Nietzsche's dance images play in his project of 'revaluing all values' and does so alongside the religious rhetoric and subject matter evident in the dancing, teaching, and writing of Duncan and Graham. It concludes that these modern dancers found justification and guidance in Nietzsche's texts for developing dance as a medium of religious experience and expression.

Paris at the turn of the century - Art Nouveau, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and the Folies Bergere. This was the atmosphere which nurtured the artistic development of the remarkable dancer and choreographer Ida Rubinstein.
This long-awaited biography gives us a unique insight into the life of a remarkable woman, responsible for a fascinating chapter of our artistic heritage. She was a chameleon, a diva, who lived many lives, overcoming the anti-Semitism of her times to enchant and captivate the highest of societies.
Untrained as a dancer, Ida Rubinstein's charisma attracted collaborators such as Debussy, Stravinsky, Ravel, Cocteau, Bakst, and Benois. She scandalized high society from Paris to St. Petersburg and attracted the attention of everyone from Marc Chagall to Sarah Bernhardt.
Vicki Woolf has appeared in several films and countless plays. Her training as a dancer led to the development of her own method of exercises and related publications, prior to undertaking the research for Danc