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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Dance
Dancers create 'civic culture' as performances for public consumption, but also as vernaculars connecting individuals who may have little in common. Examining performance and the construction of culturally diverse communities the book suggests that amateur and concert dance can teach us how to live and work productively together.
The book fills a niche in early modern scholarship, no such comprehensive treatment of hobby-horse allusions was published before. Relevant dictionaries and glossaries in critical editions will be much helped by the book, because it contextualizes and often corrects traditional explanations for the word 'hobby-horse.' The comprehensive treatment of hobby-horse allusions, ranging from cultural history to theatrical, print productions and images allows for a fuller understanding of how popular culture worked in early modern England. Comparative close readings of little known and canonical plays highlight differences between types of dramaturgical composition, and such conclusions may be useful for theatre practitioners even today. The book caters for the interests of people coming from various fields: theatre, cultural history, literature, art history, folklore studies. The book is written in an accessible language, guiding the reader informatively through a lot of early modern texts and concepts.
The Essential Guide to Contemporary Dance Techniques explores the multifaceted learning processes and underlying principles behind the technical skills and abilities of a contemporary dancer. The depth and complexity of this challenging sensorial, intellectual, reflective and creative process is presented with clarity, to support every training dancer in achieving the most from their learning experiences. Insights into three major technical forms: Graham technique, Cunningham technique and Release-based technique, reveal the distinct approaches, processes and experiences possible in contemporary dance training. Essential technical and performance considerations are covered, including: breath; alignment; core activation; connectivity; dynamic qualities of motion; use of the body; use of space; action and finally, relationships to the audience. With personal contributions from respected teachers at top dance institutions, this practical guide offers a unique insight into the expectations and processes of professional training classes as well as the success you can achieve with them. With images from real-life technique classes and dynamic performances, this is an essential companion for all contemporary dance students.
A famous nineteenth century guide to Civil War dance that includes illustrations and step-by-step instructions. Contents Include: The Toilet The Ball Room Quadrille Le Pantalon-L'Ete La Poule Trenise-La Pastorale Finale Coulon's Double Quadrille Plain Cotillions The Polka Manner of Dancing it Rules and Steps of the Polka As Taught by R. Coulon As Taught by Cellarius Rules to be Observed in Waltzing and Gallopading The Valse Valse a Trois Temps The Schottische Coulon's Explanation of the Schottische Steps The Polka Mazourka The Redowa The Gorletza Valse a Deux Temps Valse a Cinq Temps The Cellarius Valse Gallopade-Le Galop Waltz Quadrille The Waltz Cotillion Circular Circle Highland Reel Spanish Dance Coulon's Quadrille Polka Quadrilles Lancers-1 La Rose 2 La Lodoiska 3 La Dorset 4 Nina 5 Finale Les Lanciers The Original Schottische Quadrilles Junior Schottische Quadrille Mazourka Quadrilles Philadelphia Mazourka Quadrilles Russian Mazourka Quadrilles German or Parlor Cotillions The Pyramid The Two flowers The Round and Grand Chain The Star Supplemental new Dances Espagnole L'Anglicane Varsities Hungroise L'Imperiale The Tango Hungarian Rigadoon or Menuet Quadrills of Five Figures The Triplet Valse a Deux Temps Polka Minuet de la Cour Serious Family Polka European Mazourka Quadrilles Military Quadrilles The Cellarius Waltz Mazourka Scotch Reel Ball Dress for Gentlemen Etiquette of the Ball-Room
Dramaturgies of Interweaving explores present-day dramaturgies that interweave performance cultures in the fields of theater, performance, dance, and other arts. Merging strategies of audience engagement originating in different cultures, dramaturgies of interweaving are creative methods of theater and art-making that seek to address audiences across cultures, making them uniquely suitable for shaping people's experiences of our entangled world. Presenting in-depth case studies from across the globe, spanning Australia, China, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, the US, and the UK, this book investigates how dramaturgies of interweaving are conceived, applied, and received today. Featuring critical analyses by scholars-as well as workshop reports and artworks by renowned artists-this book examines dramaturgies of interweaving from multiple locations and perspectives, thus revealing their distinct complexities and immense potential. Ideal for scholars, students, and practitioners of theater, performance, dramaturgy, and devising, Dramaturgies of Interweaving opens up an innovative perspective on today's breathtaking plurality of dramaturgical practices of interweaving in theater, performance, dance, and other arts, such as curation and landscape design.
Several famous playwrights of the Elizabethan and Stuart periods, including Shakespeare, wrote for open-air public theatres and also for the private, indoor theatres at the palaces at which the court resided. This book is a full account of such court theatre, and examines the theatrical entertainments for Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I. By contrast with the now vanished playhouses of the time, four of the royal chambers used as theatres survive, and the author attempts to draw as full a picture as he can of such places, the physical and aesthetic conditions under which actors worked in them, and the composition and conduct of court audiences. The book includes plans and illustrations of the theatres and an appendix which lists all known court performances of plays and masques between 1558 and 1652.
When World War II was over, a young bomber pilot with an itch for movement and action hung up his cap and learned another way to fly. Onstage with Martha Graham is the story of Stuart Hodes, a versatile and influential dancer who got his start with Martha Graham, an icon of modern dance. His memoir is a rare firsthand view of the dance world in the 1940s and through the end of the twentieth century.One of the few male dancers in Graham's company-and in the New York dance scene at the time-Hodes offers a unique perspective and a one-of-a-kind narrative. He describes how he fell into the art by chance, happening to walk into Graham's studio one day. He was soon hooked. He documents his experiences, travels, passions, and loves while learning from and performing with Graham, during which time he saw most of the United States, much of Europe, and some of Asia. Advancing quickly, he eventually danced as Graham's partner in Appalachian Spring, Deaths and Entrances, Every Soul Is a Circus, and Errand into the Maze.In his portrait of Martha Graham, who was the center of his dancing world, Hodes recounts conversations, revelations, bouts of temper and creativity, the daily ritual of deeply physical dancing, and the never-ending search for artistic validity. Direct, often humorous, and always authentic, Hodes shares his delight in dance as both hard work and a fantastic adventure.
This book argues that today's professoriate has become increasingly theatrical, largely as a result of neoliberal policies in higher education, but also in response to an anti-intellectual scrutiny that has become pervasive throughout the Western world. The Theatrical Professoriate: Contemporary Higher Education and Its Academic Dramas examines how the Western professoriate increasingly finds itself enacting command performances that utilize scripting, characterization, surrogation, and spectacle-the hallmarks of theatricality-toward neoliberal ends. Roxworthy explores how the theatrical nature of today's professoriate and the resultant glut of performances about academia on stage and screen have contributed to a highly ambivalent public fascination with academia. She further documents the "theatrical turn" witnessed in American higher education, as academic institutions use performance to intervene in the diversity issues and disciplinary disparities fueled by neoliberalism. By analyzing academic dramas and their audience reception alongside theoretical approaches, the author reveals how contemporary academia drives the professoriate to perform in what seem like increasingly artificial ways. Ideal for practitioners and students of education, ethnic, and science studies, The Theatrical Professoriate deftly intervenes in Performance Studies' still-unsettled debates over the differential impact of live versus mediated performances.
Moving through Conflict: Dance and Politics in Israel is a pioneering project in examining the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through dance. It proposes a research framework for study of the social, cultural, aesthetic and political dynamics between Jews and Arabs as reflected in dance from late 19th-century Palestine to present-day Israel. Drawing on multiple disciplines, this book examines a variety of social and theatrical venues (communities, dance groups, evening classes and staged performances), dance genres (folk dancing, social dancing and theatrical dancing) and different cultural identities (Israeli, Palestinian and American). Underlying this work is a fundamental question: can the body and dance operate as nonverbal autonomous agents to mediate change in conflicting settings, transforming the "foreign" into the "familiar"? Or are they bound to their culturally dependent significance - and thus nothing more than additional sites of an embodied politics? This anthology expounds on various studies on dance, historical periods, points of view and points of contact that help promote thinking about this fundamental issue. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of dance studies, sociology, anthropology, art history, education and cultural studies, as well as conflict and resolution studies.
Pina Bausch's Aggressive Tenderness: Repurposing Theater through Dance maps Bausch's pieces alongside methodologies of key theater and film practitioners. This book includes discussion of a variety of Bausch pieces, including Sacre du Printemps (Rite of Spring 1975), Kontakthof (Meeting Place 1978), Cafe Muller (Cafe Mueller 1978), Nelken (Carnations 1982), Arien (Arias 1985), and Vollmond (Full Moon 2006). Beginning with her approach as one avenue of dance dramaturgy, the author connects the content expressed in these pieces with theoretical conversations, works from other artists inspired by Bausch, and her own experiences, providing an examination that is both academic and personally insightful. Arendell reads all of these theatrical and film approaches into Bausch's work to highlight how the time frame involves a cross-pollination between Bausch and the other artists that looks both backward and forward in its influences. Ideal for students of dance and theater, Pina Bausch's Aggressive Tenderness shows how Bausch's Tanztheater speaks a kinaesthetic language, one that Arendell translates into a somaesthetic exploration to pair a repurposed body ethic with movements that present new forms of embodiment.
The Dancing God: Staging Hindu Dance in Australia charts the sensational and historic journey of de-provincialising and popularising Hindu dance in Australia. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, colonialism, orientalism and nationalism came together in various combinations to make traditional Hindu temple dance into a global art form. The intricately symbolic Hindu dance in its vital form was virtually unseen and unknown in Australia until an Australian impresario, Louise Lightfoot, brought it onto the stage. Her experimental changes, which modernised Kathakali dance through her pioneering collaboration with Indian dancer Ananda Shivaram, moved the Hindu dance from the sphere of ritualistic practice to formalised stage art. Amit Sarwal argues that this movement enabled both the authentic Hindu dance and dancer to gain recognition worldwide and created in his persona a cultural guru and ambassador on the global stage. Ideal for anyone with an interest in global dance, The Dancing God is an in-depth study of how a unique dance form evolved in the meeting of travellers and cultures.
Moving Relation explores the notion of touch in the realm of contemporary dance. By closely analyzing performances by well-known European and American choreographers such as Meg Stuart, William Forsythe, Xavier Le Roy, Jared Gradinger and Angela Schubot, this book investigates their usage of touch on the level of movement, experience and affect. Building on the proposition that touch is more than the moment of bodily contact, the author demonstrates the concept of touch as an interplay of movements and multiple relations of proximity. Egert employs both depth, using close descriptions and analyses of dance performances with theoretical investigations of touch, with breadth, working across the fields of performance and dance studies, philosophy and cultural theory. Suitable for scholars and practitioners in the fields of dance and performance studies, Moving Relation uses a process-oriented notion of touch to reevaluate key concepts such as the body, rhythm, emotional expression, subjectivity and audience perception.
This volume brings together philosophical and interdisciplinary perspectives on improvisation. The contributions connect the theoretical dimensions of improvisation with different viewpoints on its practice in the arts and the classroom. The chapters address the phenomenon of improvisation in two related ways. On the one hand, they attend to the lived practices of improvisation both within and without the arts in order to explain the phenomenon. They also extend the scope of improvisational practices to include the role of improvisation in habit and in planned action, at both individual and collective levels. Drawing on recent work done in the philosophy of mind, they address questions such as whether improvisation is a single unified phenomenon or whether it entails different senses that can be discerned theoretically and practically. Finally, they ask after the special kind of improvisational expertise which characterizes musicians, dancers, and other practitioners, an expertise marked by the artist's ability to participate competently in complex situations while deliberately relinquishing control. Philosophy of Improvisation will appeal to anyone with a strong interest in improvisation, to researchers working in philosophy, aesthetics, and pedagogy as well as practitioners involved in different kinds of music, dance, and theater performances.
The book is a wide-ranging collection of essays on Indian classical dance, which include writings on dance appreciation, the criticism, theory and philosophy of dance, as well as some historical and light controversial articles. Also included is a seminal and unique monograph on the contribution of Sanjukta Panigrahi to the development of Odissi. The book approaches the subject from an internationalist point of view and opens up new possibilities for the appreciation of Indian dance in the context of a global intercultural critique. In addition, it is beautifully illustrated with a number of photographs captured by Arun Kumar. It will enrich and provide new ways of understanding for classical Indian dance, both for the dance community and for the general reader.
Composer and cultural official Nicolas Nabokov (1903-78) led an unusual life even for a composer who was also a high-level diplomat. Nabokov was for nearly three decades an outstanding and far-sighted player in international cultural exchanges during the Cold War, much admired by some of the most distinguished minds of his century for the range of his interests and the breadth of his vision. Nicolas Nabokov: A Life in Freedom and Music follows Nabokov's life through its fascinating details: a privileged Russian childhood before the Revolution; exile, first to Germany, then to France; the beginnings of a promising musical career, launched under the aegis of Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes with Ode in 1928; his twelve-year "American exile" during which he occupied several academic positions; his return to Europe after the war to participate in the denazification of Germany; his involvement in anti-Stalinist causes in the first years of the Cold War; his participation in the Congress for Cultural Freedom; his role as cultural adviser to the Mayor of Berlin and director of the Berlin Festival in the early 1960s; the resumption of his American academic and musical career in the late 1960s and 1970s. Nabokov is unique not only in that he was involved on a high level in international cultural politics, but also in that his life intersected at all times with a vast array of people within, and also well beyond, the confines of classical music. Drawing on a vast array of primary sources, Vincent Giroud's first-ever biography of Nabokov will be of interest readers interested in twentieth-century music, Russian music, Russian emigration, and the Cold War, particularly in its cultural aspects. Musicians and musicologists interested in Nabokov as a composer, or in twentieth century Russian composers in general, will find in the book information not available anywhere else.
The Moving Body and the English Romantic Imaginary explores ways in which England in the Romantic period conceptualized its relation both to its constituent parts within the United Kingdom and to the larger world through discussions of dance, dancing, and dancers, and through theories of dance and performance. As a referent that both engaged and constructed the body-through physical training, anatomization, spectacle and spectatorship, pathology, parody, and sentiment-dance worked to produce an English exceptional body. Discussions of dance in fiction and periodical essays, as well as its visual representation in print culture, were important ways to theorize points of contact as England was investing itself in the world as an economic and imperial power during and after the Revolutionary period. These formulations offer dance as an engine for the reconfiguration of gender, class, and national identity in the print culture of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England.
This book provides a thorough analysis of terpsichorean lexis in Renaissance drama. Besides considering not only the Shakespearean canon but also the Bard's contemporaries (e.g., dramatists as John Marston and Ben Jonson among the most refined Renaissance dance aficionados), the originality of this volume is highlighted in both its methodology and structure. As far as methods of analysis are concerned, corpora such as the VEP Early Modern Drama collection and EEBO, and corpus analysis tools such as #LancsBox are used in order to offer the widest range of examples possible from early modern plays and provide co-textual references for each dance. Examples from Renaissance playwrights are fundamental for the analysis of connotative meanings of the dances listed and their performative, poetic and metaphoric role in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama. This study will be of great interest to Renaissance researchers, lexicographers and dance historians.
This book provides a practical introduction to researching and performing early Anglo-American secular music and dance with attention to their place in society. Supporting growing interest among scholars and performers spanning numerous disciplines, this book contributes quality new scholarship to spur further research on this overshadowed period of American music and dance. Organized in three parts, the chapters offer methodological and interpretative guidance and model varied approaches to contemporary scholarship. The first part introduces important bibliographic tools and models their use in focused examinations of individual objects of material musical culture. The second part illustrates methods of situating dance and its music in early American society as relevant to scholars working in multiple disciplines. The third part examines contemporary performance of early American music and dance from three distinct perspectives ranging from ethnomusicological fieldwork and phenomenology to the theatrical stage. Dedicated to scholar Kate Van Winkle Keller, this volume builds on her legacy of foundational contributions to the study of early American secular music, dance, and society. It provides an essential resource for all those researching and performing music and dance from the revolutionary era through the early nineteenth century.
This was the first manual to be published in France,here in the version translated into English by the English dancer, dancing master and writer John Essex. The manual describes, using Feuillet's own dance notation system, motions for the feet and arms, how the dance corresponds to the music, and rules for performance. Additionally, floor plans and music for ten dances are given. Feuillet also suggests appropriate steps. Performed as a series of figures by a column of men facing a column of women, the English country dance was a popular ballroom dance during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
This is a story of a young girl from a small town with a big dream that took her to Juilliard, Broadway, summer stock, the stage of the Metropolitan Opera and the Santa Fe Opera, and introduced her to her husband William Zeckendorf Jr. Her memoir overflows with the glamour of a life lived among the famous figures of mid-century New York society and the grit necessary to succeed in the professional world of dance. Fascinated by art and architecture, the vivacious ballerina Nancy Zeckendorf became a formidable development partner with her husband and a philanthropic leader in the performing arts - her fundraising ability is an art form unto itself. "I love hardware stores and tools," she said of her common-sense approach to construction projects. Indeed, Nancy was a guiding force in the expansion of the Santa Fe Opera, the Lensic Performing Arts Center, and the premier community of Los Miradores where she lives now in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Curating Dramaturgies investigates the transformation of art and performance and its impact on dramaturgy and curatorship. Addressing contexts and processes of the performing arts as interconnecting with visual arts, this book features interviews with leading curators, dramaturgs and programmers who are at the forefront of working in, with, and negotiating the daily practice of interdisciplinary live arts. The book offers a view of praxis that combines perspectives on theory and practice and looks at the way that various arts institutions, practitioners and cultural agents have been working to change the way that art and performance have developed and experienced by spectators in the last decade. Curating Dramaturgies argues that cultural producers and scholars are becoming more cognizant of this overlapping and transforming field. The introductory essay by the editors explores the rise of interdisciplinary live arts and its ramifications in cultural and political terms. This is further elaborated in the interviews with 15 diversely placed arts professionals who are at the forefront of rethinking and consolidatingthe ever-evolving field of the visual arts and performance.
"Tell the truth," her friend the director Lindsay Anderson urged Eleanor Fazan. "It's seldom heard." Nor is it easy to tell. But that's what "Fiz" has done: delivering frank and intimate accounts of her not-always-peaceful collaborations with the brilliant figures she has worked with over the decades - on stage in London's West End, on screen, and in opera. It's an amazing line-up: among performers, from Jack Hulbert, Cicely Courtneidge and George Formby to Barry Humphries, Alec Guinness, Laurence Olivier; among directors, Tony Richardson, John Schlesinger, and Stephen Frears; among writers, John Osborne and the legendary Beyond the Fringe team - Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley Moore. Along the way we get musicians too: her husband Stanley Myers, composer of "Cavatina," the haunting theme from The Deerhunter, and the god-like maestro Herbert von Karajan. Fiz's memoir offers a modest, frank, and often startlingly perceptive account of the delights and difficulties of working with some of the most brilliant - and utterly impossible - writers, directors, and performers of the last sixty years. Her true stories of professional relationships are funny, affectionate, sometimes searing; always enlightening about the agonies and ecstasies of what goes on behind the scenes.
This book uses the Afro-Brazilian art of capoeira to examine how security has been pursued from below and what significance this has for security analysis and policy. Illegal at the beginning of the twentieth century, capoeira is now a cultural institution and export that is protected by the Brazilian state and recognised by UNESCO, with capoeira players protecting and promoting their interests through the practice and development of their art. The book brings the musical and corporeal narrative from capoeira into conversation with debates on security; these have typically been dominated by northern, white, military voices, and as a result, the perspective of the weaker player is routinely overlooked in security literature and policy making. Bringing the perspective of the weaker party, Cultural Resistance and Security from Below examines the distribution of security from two angles. First, it presents the history of the interaction between capoeira players and the Brazilian society and state that resulted in political and legal acceptance of capoeira. Second, it explores how the practice of capoeira generates knowledge of identities, explanations and values, and how this knowledge empowers communities of players and is communicated to society more broadly. The book then turns to consider how capoeira resists within Brazil's contemporary context of insecurity, and what significance the knowledge and power, along with capoeira's core move of escape, have to security analysis and policy. The book concludes by taking the lessons from capoeira to inform understanding of other cultural activities and ways of life as potential sites and forms of resistance. Conceptually and methodologically original, this book will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of security studies, development studies, political science and international studies. It will also be of interest to those scholars interested in the changing interaction between politics and the arts.
Everyone who viewed the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games can understand the power of dance and mass movement in the service of politics. While examples of such public performances and huge festivals are familiar in Nazi Germany, the former Soviet Union and today's North Korea, this new book addresses the lesser known examples of Spain under Franco, the Dominican Republic, Iran, Croatia and Uzbekistan, all of which have been subjected to various political regimes. Dance and choreographed mass movement is the newest field of serious research in dance studies, particularly in the fields of politics and international relations and gender and sexuality. The author uses dance as a lens through which to study political, ethnic, and gendered phenomena so that the reader grasps that dance constitutes an important non-verbal lens for the study of human behaviour. This is the first study on dance and political science to focus specifically on authoritarian regimes. It is a significant and original contribution to scholarship in the field, with the key studies drawn from a variety of different geographical and historical backgrounds. In Spain under Franco, the Women's Section of the fascist Falange created a folk dance program that toured widely and through the performance of Spanish regional folk dances performed by virginal young Spanish women, embodying Catholic purity, permitted the regime to re-enter the world of polite diplomacy. The Dominican Republic dictator, Rafael Trujillo, himself a gifted dancer, raised the popular folk and vernacular dance, the merengue, to the level of the "national" dance, which became a symbol of his regime and Dominican identity, which merengue it still maintains. For over a thousand years, Croatia, has endured a series of authoritarian regimes - Hapsburg, Napoleon, the Yugoslav royal dictatorship, fascist, Josip Broz Tito's communist regime, Franjo Tudjaman - that ruled that small nation. For over 70 years, Lado, the National Folk Dance Ensemble of Croatia, has served as "the light of Croatian identity." Through its public performances of folk dances and music, Lado has become the face of a series of different regimes. In Iran, dance became banned under the Islamic Republic after serving the Pahlavi regime as a form of representation of its peasant population and its historic Persian identity. Uzbekistan currently has expanded the role of the invented tradition of Uzbek "classical" dance, created during the soviet period, as a representation of Uzbek identity, in national festivals. Thus, through these examples, the reader will see how dance and mass movement have become important as political means for a variety of authoritarian regimes to represent themselves. Primary readership will be dance scholars; particularly the growing number interested in ethno-identity dances of the second half of the twentieth-century Will be of interest to academic libraries and departments, with valuable information and interest also for scholars of ethnology, anthropology, cultural studies, history. |
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