How does the moving, dancing body engage with the materials, textures, atmospheres, and affects of the sites through which we move and in which we live, work and play? How might embodied movement practice explore some of these relations and bring us closer to the complexities of sites and lived environments? This book brings together perspectives from site dance, phenomenology, and new materialism to explore and develop how 'site-based body practice' can be employed to explore synergies between material bodies and material sites. Employing practice-as-research strategies, scores, tasks and exercises the book presents a number of suggestions for engaging with sites through the moving body and offers critical reflection on the potential enmeshments and entanglements that emerge as a result. The theoretical discussions and practical explorations presented will appeal to researchers, movement practitioners, artists, academics and individuals interested in exploring their lived environments through the moving body and the entangled human-nonhuman relations that emerge as a result.

Global Movements: Dance, Place, and Hybridity provides a theoretical and practical examination of the relationships between the global mobility of ideas and people, and its impact on dance and space. Using seven case studies, the contributors illustrate the mixture of dance styles that result from the global diffusion of cultural traditions and practices. The collection portrays a multitude of ways in which public and private spaces-stages, buildings, town squares as well as natural environments-are transformed and made meaningful by culturally diverse dances. Global Movements will be of interest to scholars of geography, dance, and global issues.

If you're looking for a fun, effective, low-impact workout that will build stamina, enhance flexibility, and improve your cardiovascular well-being, look no more. This gentle and effective dance is not only exciting to learn; it's also a great workout. Bellydance strengthens your core muscles gracefully, giving you new confidence in your body's natural sway and movement. These popular dance steps have been embraced by women of all ages everywhere.

Here, Evyenia Karmi, an experienced dancer, teacher, and member of the International Dance Council, introduces students to the basic terminology and movements of bellydance. Through careful, easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions, you can quickly begin learning the vocabulary of this ancient and beautiful dance.

Once you master the basic steps, the addition of sultry veil work can add a whole new dimension and excitement to your experience and performance. This compact and easy-to-use guide is an excellent teaching tool, featuring a gentle warm-up routine, to prepare your body for this energetic workout experience.

Create your own choreography or just have fun dancing You'll learn basic arm movements, technique for both the upper and lower body, directional and travelling steps, the basics of veil work-and much more.

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen sets the agenda for the study of dance in popular moving images - films, television shows, commercials, music videos, and YouTube - and offers new ways to understand the multi-layered meanings of the dancing body by engaging with methodologies from critical dance studies, performance studies, and film/media analysis. Through these arguments, the chapters demonstrate how dance on the popular screen might be read and considered through the different bodies and choreographies being shown. Questions the contributors consider include: How do dance and choreography function within the filmic apparatus? What types of bodies are associated with specific dances and how does this affect how dance(s) is/are perceived in the everyday? How do the dancing bodies on screen negotiate power, access, and agency? How are multiple choreographies of identity (e.g., race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation) set in motion through the narrative, dancing bodies, and/or dance style? What types of corporeal labors (dance training, choreographic skill, rehearsal, the constructed notion of "natural talent") are represented or ignored? What role does a specific film have in the genealogy of Hollywood dance film? How does the Hollywood dance film inform how dance operates in cultural meaning making? Whether looking at Bill "Bojangles" Robinson's tap steps in Stormy Weather, or Baby's leap into Johnny Castle's arms in Dirty Dancing, or even Neo's backwards bend in The Matrix, the book's arguments offer a powerful corrective to the lack of accessible scholarship on dance in the popular screen.

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.

Alla Osipenko is the gripping story of one of history's greatest ballerinas, a courageous rebel who paid the price for speaking truth to the Soviet state. The daughter of a distinguished Russian aristocratic and artistic family, Osipenko was born in 1932, but raised almost in a cocoon of pre-Revolutionary decorum and protocol. In Leningrad she studied directly under Agrippina Vaganova, the most revered and influential of all Russian ballet instructors. In 1950, she joined the Mariinsky (then-Kirov) Ballet, where her lines, shapes, movement both exemplified the venerable traditions of Russian ballet and projected those traditions into uncharted and experimental realms. She was the first of her generation of Kirov stars to enchant the West when she danced in Paris in 1956. Five years later, she was a key figure in the sensational success of the Kirov in its European debut. But Osipenko's sharp tongue and candid independence, as well as her almost-reckless flouting of Soviet rules for personal and political conduct, soon found her all but quarantined in Russia. An internationally acclaimed ballerina at the height of her career, she found that she would now have to prevail in the face of every attempt by the Soviet state and the Kirov administration to humble her. Throughout the book, Osipenko talks frankly and freely in a way that few Russians of her generation have allowed themselves to. She discusses her traumatic relationship to the Soviet state, her close but often-fraught relationship with her family, her four husbands, her lovers, her colleagues, her son's arrest for selling dollars in Leningrad and subsequent death. This biography features a cast of characters drawn from all sectors of Soviet and post-Perestroika society.

This overview of folk dancing in the United States showcases an important historical movement and explains how folk dance communities evolved to fulfill the needs of specific groups of people over time. While the general term "folk dance" encompasses a surprising variety of specific dances, there are three major recreational communities or forms: international folk dance, modern western square dance, and contra dance. Throughout the last century, millions of people have enjoyed folk dancing as an educational and recreational activity, regardless of the particular style. Folk Dancing explains the reasons for the folk dance movement that exploded in Europe and North America in the late 19th century. It describes the clubs, camps, festivals, and communities that sprang up, and examines the culture of the movement-the music, key individuals and events, types of clothing, and influences of technologies and popular culture. The book contains authoritative, original information gleaned from the author's own research conducted with hundreds of folk dance enthusiasts across America. Presents information based upon hundreds of candid interviews and informal conversations with folk dancers across the country Provides a timeline of dance trends in North America as related to the folk dance movement Features diagrams of dance formations such as square dance, quadrilles, and contra dance as well as illustrations showing dance positions and community dance events from pre-20th century sources Presents original photographs and images collected from interviewees to illustrate different facets of recreational dance communities Contains a bibliography of resources that covers a broad scope of folk dance history as well as specific recreational communities Includes a glossary of commonly used folk dance terms

This interdisciplinary book brings together essays that consider how the body enacts social and cultural rituals in relation to objects, spaces, and the everyday, and how these are questioned, explored, and problematised through, and translated into dance, art, and performance. The chapters are written by significant artists and scholars and consider practices from various locations, including Central and Western Europe, Mexico, and the United States. The authors build on dialogues between, for example, philosophy and museum studies, and memory studies and post-humanism, and engage with a wide range of theory from phenomenology to relational aesthetics to New Materialism. Thus this book represents a unique collection that together considers the continuum between everyday and cultural life, and how rituals and memories are inscribed onto our being. It will be of interest to scholars and practitioners, students and teachers, and particularly those who are curious about the intersections between arts disciplines.

This introduction to acting helps students develop confidence and the ability to express themselves in a clear and distinctive way. They formulate a goal and plan a course of action for achieving that goal creatively and individualistically. This textbook is basic to a career in theater or any career requiring public speaking. It leads students through the steps to refine Del-Sign a fusion acting techniques using all of the elements in a typical college program with the style of Deaf culture to enhance the acting students' physicality.

Reading Writing is a complete manual on entertaining with handwriting analysis, written specifically for mentalists and magicians. It contains a course in handwriting analysis and readings, and includes a dozen mentalism experiments presented with a handwriting analysis theme, and half a dozen close-up magic tricks in which handwriting is part of the presentation.

Bringing together scholars and researchers in one volume, this study investigates how the thinking of the Ukrainian-Israeli somatic educationalist Moshe Feldenkrais (1904-84) can benefit and reflect upon the creative practices of dance, music and theatre. Since its inception, the Feldenkrais Method has been associated with artistic practice, growing contiguously with performance, cognitive and embodied practices in dance, music, and theatre studies. It promotes awareness of fine motor action for improved levels of action and skill, as well as healing for those who are injured. For creative artists, the Feldenkrais Method enables them to refine and improve their work. This book offers historical, scientific and practical perspectives that develop thinking at the heart of the Method and is divided into three sections: Historical Perspectives on Creative Practice, From Science into Creative Practice and Studies in Creative Practice. All the essays provide insights into self-improvement, training, avoiding injury, history and philosophy of artistic practice, links between scientific and artistic thinking and practical thinking, as well as offering some exercises for students and artistic practitioners looking to improve their understanding of their practice. Ultimately, this book offers a rich development of the legacy and the ongoing relevance of the Feldenkrais Method. We are shown how it is not just a way of thinking about somatic health, embodiment and awareness, but a vital enactivist epistemology for contemporary artistic thought and practice.