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.

The ritual bedhaya dances of the Central Javanese courts form a highly valued expression of Javanese culture. These stately dance forms, comprising complex choreographies executed to the accompaniment of archaic songs and gamelan music, are part of the cultural tradition of the Mataram dynasty. They have been preserved in the two main court centres of Central Java: Surakarta and Yogyakarta.
The contents of the book range from a relatively general introduction to a detailed analysis of structural, formal features of the dances. Included are theories on the origin, social context and esoteric meaning, as well as 19th and 20th century scores of performances.
The two main components of the art form, choral singing and group dancing, have each been discussed in a separate chapter. A number of song texts and choreographies, transcribed from palace manuscripts, are published for the first time. These songs represent an archaic singing style, which holds important information on the development of Javanese vocal and instrumental music.
An analysis of bedhaya choreographies which are seldom performed nowadays may serve to prevent the impending disappearance of this beautiful and stylized art form. The choreographic discussion has been visualized on a 60 minute video-tape, produced from research material which was filmed between 1983-1985. This video-tape may be ordered from the author.

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.

- 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

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

Kathakali Dance-Drama provides a comprehensive introduction to the distinctive and colourful dance-drama of Kerala in South-West India for the first time. This landmark volume:
* explores Kathakali's reception as it reaches new audiences both in India and the west
* includes two cases of controversial of Kathakali experiments
* explores the implications for Kathakali of Keralan politics
During these performances heroes, heroines, gods and demons tell their stories of traditional Indian epics. The four Kathakali plays included in this anthology, translated from actual performances into English are:
* The Flower of Good Fortune
* The Killing of Kirmmira
* The Progeny of Krishna
* King Rugmamgada's Law
Each play has an introduction and detailed commentary and is illustrated by stunning photographs taken during performances. An introduction to Kathakali stage conventions, make-up, music, acting, and training is also provided, making this an ideal volume for both the specialist and non-specialist reader.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203197666

Kathakali Dance-Drama provides a comprehensive introduction to the distinctive and colourful dance-drama of Kerala in South-West India for the first time. This landmark volume:
* explores Kathakali's reception as it reaches new audiences both in India and the west
* includes two cases of controversial of Kathakali experiments
* explores the implications for Kathakali of Keralan politics.
During these performances heroes, heroines, gods and demons tell their stories of traditional Indian epics. The four Kathakali plays included in this anthology, translated from actual performances into English are:
* The Flower of Good Fortune
* The Killing of Kirmmira
* The Progeny of Krishna
* King Rugmamgada's Law.
Each play has an introduction and detailed commentary and is illustrated by stunning photographs taken during performances. An introduction to Kathakali stage conventions, make-up, music, acting, and training is also provided, making this an ideal volume for both the specialist and non-specialist reader.

In this funny, vulnerable, and all-too-real memoir, award-winning content creator and actress Avani Gregg takes you behind the scenes of her incredible life, sharing how a girl from small-town Indiana went on to become TikToker of the Year. With more than 55 million followers on social media; invitations to glamorous events around the world; awards, magazine covers, and even her own makeup line - Avani Gregg never imagined this wild ride for herself. After all, she was just from a small town, spending her time hanging with friends and family and combing thrift-store racks for finds. It only took one video - her famous 'Clown Girl Check' - and she suddenly found herself vibing as one of the original Hype House creators. 'People think I exploded overnight,' the eighteen-year-old TikTok sensation says. 'But they don't know the half of it. They don't know what came before or after. They don't know my Backstory.' In this eye-opening memoir, Avani shares the ups and down of her remarkable life, including the devastating back injury that forced her to retire from gymnastics and abandon her dreams of Olympic gold. In the aftermath, struggling to make sense of it all, she found her calling: creating jaw-droppingly dramatic make-up looks on social media that leave her 'Bebs' begging for more. Diving deep into topics like mental health, relationships, bullying and more, Avani shares her private sketchbook and most intimate thoughts: 'There's a lot we all think and feel but are afraid to say out loud. Well, I'm saying it...and it's gonna get deep.' This is the unfiltered, revealing and deeply inspiring Backstory of someone with big dreams and how she worked to achieve them. And Avani is not holding back.

The writings of six choreographers are assembled in this book and the leap they have taken to go from the medium of choreography into written text constitutes a form of translation. Some of the texts investigate the possibilities of written language as invention, others use it as a means to illustrate specific tenets or describe choreographic projects. All yield insight into the process of coaxing language from the body.

It was indeed an adventure for those pioneers in France who struggled for the recognition of the new-born dance of the twentieth century - from the free dance of Isadora Duncan, through the absolute dance of Mary Wigman, to the modern dance of Martha Graham.
Jacqueline Robinson has lived at the heart of this adventure, sharing the aspirations of a whole generation who often suffered from the lack of understanding of an establishment more inclined towards classical ballet.
From the breaking of the soil in the twenties, to the flowering in the sixties, here is a chronicle of the changing landscape of French dance. Here is the story of those men and women, ploughmen and poets, rebels and visionaries - the recollection of those events that made it possible for dance as an art form in Western countries to rise again as a fundamental expression of the human spirit.

A pioneer choreographer in modern American dance, Anna Sokolow has led a bewildering, active international life. Her meticulous biographer Larry Warren once looked up Anna Sokolow in a few reference books and found that she was born in three different years and that her parents were from Poland except when they were in Russia, and found many other inaccuracies.
Drawing on material from nearly 100 interviews, Larry Warren has created a fascinating account and assessment of the life and work of Anna Sokolow, whose nomadic career was divided between New York, Mexico, and Israel.
Setting her work on more than 70 dance companies, Anna Sokolow not only pioneered the development of a personal approach to movement, which has become part of the language of contemporary dance, but also created such masterpieces as "Rooms," dealing with loneliness and alienation, and "Dreams," which concerns the inner torment of victims of the Nazi Holocaust. Her unflinching look at the darker sides of experien

Why do women choreographers chose to create the dances they do in the manner they do? How do women in dance work independently and organizationally? How do women set up institutions? How has higher education helped or hindered women in the world of dance? These are the questions this work seeks to address.;In dealing with some of the tensions, joys, frustrations and fears women experience at various points of their creative lives, the contributors strike a balance between a theoretical sense of feminism and its practice in reality. This book aims to present answers to questions about women, power and action.

"East Meets West in Dance" chronicles this development in the words of many of its best known and most active exponents. This collection of articles provides a theoretical discussion of the promises and pitfalls inherent in transplanting art forms from one culture to another; it offers practical guidance for those who might want to participate in this enterprise and explains the general history of the dance exchange to date. It also identifies the differences that are unique to specific cultures, such as the development of theatrical forms, arts education, and the status of artists. This is a first examination of a phenomenon that has already touched most people in the arts community worldwide, and that none can afford to ignore.
A lively dialogue has evolved over the last few decades between dance professionals -- performers, teachers and administrators -- in the United States and Europe and their counterparts in Asia and the Pacific rim.

"East Meets West in Dance" chronicles this development in the words of many of its best known and most active exponents. This collection of articles provides a theoretical discussion of the promises and pitfalls inherent in transplanting art forms from one culture to another; it offers practical guidance for those who might want to participate in this enterprise and explains the general history of the dance exchange to date. It also identifies the differences that are unique to specific cultures, such as the development of theatrical forms, arts education, and the status of artists. This is a first examination of a phenomenon that has already touched most people in the arts community worldwide, and that none can afford to ignore.
A lively dialogue has evolved over the last few decades between dance professionals -- performers, teachers and administrators -- in the United States and Europe and their counterparts in Asia and the Pacific rim.

Martha Ullman West illustrates how American ballet developed over the course of the twentieth century from an aesthetic originating in the courts of Europe into a stylistically diverse expression of a democratic culture. West places at center stage two artists who were instrumental to this story: Todd Bolender and Janet Reed.Lifelong friends, Bolender (1914-2006) and Reed (1916-2000) were part of a generation of dancers who navigated the Great Depression, World War II, and the vibrant cultural scene of postwar New York City. They danced in the works of choreographers Lew and Willam Christensen, Eugene Loring, Agnes de Mille, Catherine Littlefield, Ruthanna Boris, and others who West argues were just as responsible for the direction of American ballet as the legendary George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. The stories of Bolender, Reed, and their contemporaries also demonstrate that the flowering of American ballet was not simply a New York phenomenon. West includes little-known details about how Bolender and Reed laid the foundations for Seattle's Pacific Northwest Ballet in the 1970s and how Bolender transformed the Kansas City Ballet into a highly respected professional company soon after. Passionate in their desire to dance and create dances, Bolender and Reed committed their lives to passing along their hard-won knowledge, training, and work. This book celebrates two unsung trailblazers who were pivotal to the establishment of ballet in America from one coast to the other.

This book explores the therapeutic use of touch, focusing on an in-depth case study of work in an NHS setting with a client with learning disabilities, and situating this within a wide theoretical context. This is a unique and influential study illustrating the impact of touch in dance movement psychotherapy and laying the ground for a theory on the use of touch in Dance Movement Psychotherapy (DMP). The case study illustrates the impact of touch upon the therapeutic relationship with the use of video transcription and descriptive reflexive accounts of the session content. The case analysis sections establish the ground for a paradigm shift, and for emergent theory and methods in support of the use of touch in Dance Movement Psychotherapy and other contexts. The role touch takes is beyond its affect, which expands our understanding of its potency as an intervention. The writing is embedded in many years of practice-led-research in the field of dance and somatic practices, in particular Body-Mind Centering (R) and Contact Improvisation, in which touching and being touched is met with curiosity as a place of insight and revelation, beyond the bounds of taboo and social diktat. The study considers the philosophical landscape of both touch and non-touch. This book explores and reflects upon the use of touch, considering the wider context and socially imposed perceptions that would prevent touch from taking place - including philosophical and social discourses. Through telling the story of a client case, the book offers a wealth of thought-provoking content to inspire continued dialogue. Key strengths of this book are the depth, warmth and perceptiveness of the case history, and the way in which this is successfully linked with theory. Particular attention is paid to embodied cognition and exosystemic theory, the two leading developments of current thinking. With the ethical, practical and philosophical content, the book will be of interest to psychotherapists, health and social care practitioners, as well as arts in health practitioners and beneficiaries in educational programs and settings. Primary readership will be among DMP psychotherapists, body psychotherapists, drama therapists, Body Mind Centering (R) practitioners, arts in health practitioners, people working with clients with learning disabilities and any practitioner and researcher interested in understanding the role touch may play in the psychotherapeutic encounter.

"Elements of Performance" is based on Pauline Koner's course of the same name taught at the Juilliard School in New York. It discusses her theories of the primary and secondary elements of the art of performing. The primary elements are Emotion, Motivation, Focus and Dynamics and the secondary are those of the craft: stage props, hand props, cloth of different length and weight, Chinese ribbons, costumes and stage deportment.
Pauline Koner is a dancer, choreogrpaher, teacher and writer. she was artist in residence at the North Carolina School of Arts form 1965-1976 and performed at the White House in 1967. Having taught in major dance schools and universities throughout the world, she is currently at the Juilliard School of Dance in New York.

Tamara Tchinarova was born in Romania in 1919 and began her dance training in Paris with emigre ballerinas from the Imperial Russian Ballet. She danced professionally in Europe with the touring Ballet Russes companies that emerged in the 1930s after the death of the entrepreneur Serge Diaghilev, and she went to Australia in 1936 with the Monte Carlo Russian Ballet, returning in 1938 with the Covent Garden Russian Ballet. In Australia during those first two tours by the Russian Ballet, she made a strong impression as Action in Leonide Massine's first symphonic ballet "Les Presages". She was also admired for her portrayal of Thamar the Georgian Queen in Michel Fokine's dramatic ballet "Thamar", and was also praised for her dancing in demi-character roles in ballets such as "Le Beau Danube". In 1939 at the conclusion of the Covent Garden Russian Ballet tour, along with a number of her colleagues, Tchinarova elected to stay in Australia where she met and married the actor Peter Finch and worked with him on a number of films before leaving Australia to make her home in London. But Finch had caught the eye of the glamorous actress Vivien Leigh, wife of Sir Laurence Olivier, and the love triangle that developed was to have devastating consequences. This fascinating autobiography highlights Tamara's incredible life in Romania and her worldwide dancing career, the tempestuous marriage to Peter Finch and her involvement in his notorious affair with Leigh, through to her subsequent career as adviser and interpreter for many Russian ballet companies.

Understanding Dance is a comprehensive introduction to the aestethetics of dance, and will be an essential text for all those interested in dance as an object of study.
Focusing on the work of a number of major choreographers, companies and critics Graham McFee explores the nature of our understanding of Dance by considering the practice of understanding dance-works themselves. He concludes with a validation of the place of dance in society and in education. Troughout he provides detailed insights into the nature and appreciation of art as well as a general grouding in philosophy.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203393309

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment brings together a cross-section of artists and scholars engaged with the phenomenon of reenactment in dance from a practical and theoretical standpoint. Synthesizing myriad views on danced reenactment and the manner in which this branch of choreographic performance intersects with important cultural concerns around appropriation this Handbook addresses originality, plagiarism, historicity, and spatiality as it relates to cultural geography. Others topics treated include transmission as a heuristic device, the notion of the archive as it relates to dance and as it is frequently contrasted with embodied cultural memory, pedagogy, theory of history, reconstruction as a methodology, testimony and witnessing, theories of history as narrative and the impact of dance on modernist literature, and relations of reenactment to historical knowledge and new media.

'He achieves the miraculous,' the sculptor Auguste Rodin wrote of dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. 'He embodies all the beauty of classical frescoes and statues'. Like so many since, Rodin recognised that in Nijinsky classical ballet had one of the greatest and most original artists of the twentieth century, in any genre. Immersed in the world of dance from his childhood, he found his natural home in the Imperial Theatre and the Ballets Russes, he had a powerful sponsor in Sergei Diaghilev - until a dramatic and public failure ended his career and set him on a route to madness. As a dancer, he was acclaimed as godlike for his extraordinary grace and elevation, but the opening of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring saw furious brawls between admirers of his radically unballetic choreography and horrified traditionalists. Nijinsky's story has lost none of its power to shock, fascinate and move. Adored and reviled in his lifetime, his phenomenal talent was shadowed by schizophrenia and an intense but destructive relationship with his lover, Diaghilev. 'I am alive' he wrote in his diary, 'and so I suffer'. In the first biography for forty years, Lucy Moore examines a career defined by two forces - inspired performance and an equally headline-grabbing talent for controversy, which tells us much about both genius and madness. This is the full story of one of the greatest figures of the twentieth century, comparable to the work of Rosamund Bartlett or Sjeng Scheijen.