"From Petipa to Balanchine" addresses an important, though vastly understudied aspect of Russian modernism--the importance of the art of the past. The work more specifically discusses the development of a classical revival in Russian ballet (1880 to the middle of the 20th century) and its relation to the early 20th-century re-evaluation of "classicism" in Russian art and letters. The work provides a cultural context for the developments and innovations in Russian dance in this period, and especially in the choreography of George Balanchine.
Soviet historians are largely unfamiliar with Balanchine's work while Western dance historians fail to understand its cultural context. Tim Scholl's book fills a void that has long existed in studies of both Russian modernism and Russian ballet. His work also marks the first attempt to discuss 19th and 20th-century Russian ballet traditions as one continuous tradition.
Scholl focuses on the major works of the period, the landmark ballets that influenced the course of Russian ballet history. The book also addresses contemporaneous movements in Russian poetry and visual arts (especially architecture) which are relevant to the development of ballet modernism.
This work offers a new and potentially controversial view of the history of the period as it questions the lasting value of the choreography created for the celebrated Ballets Russes. It suggests that a return to the classical dance academy provided the only viable solution to the many difficulties faced by 20th-century choreographers.
Scholl has studied in depth the area of Russian dance, specifically, the late 19th and 20th century. Drawing upon Russian language materials, Scholl places the works of Petipa and Balanchine--"Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Les Sylphides, Apollo" and "Jewels" among them--in their proper cultural and artistic contexts.

Grove chronicles not only his own fascinating Anglo-Argentinian background growing up in Buenos Aires but also the political history of the tango. He writes, 'In the troubled times of Juan and Evita Peron, the middle classes detested the music and dance so adored by portenos, the ordinary people of Buenos Aires. Too proletarian, sexy and subversive. These days the tango has enthusiasts worldwide, from Finland to Japan, but I didn't see anyone dance it until I was 18 and didn't attempt it myself until I was nearly 60.' He also details the terrifying moment his father was kidnapped by urban guerrillas and his anguish over the Falklands war.

How do teachers create a classroom environment that promotes collaborative and inquiry-based approaches to learning ballet? How do teachers impart the stylistic qualities of ballet while also supporting each dancer's artistic instincts and development of a personal style? How does ballet technique education develop the versatility and creativity needed in the contemporary dance environment? Creative Ballet Teaching draws on the fields of Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis (L/BMA), dance pedagogy, and somatic education to explore these questions. Sample lesson plans, class exercises, movement explorations, and journal writing activities specifically designed for teachers bring these ideas into the studio and classroom. A complementary online manual, Creative Ballet Learning, provides students with tools for technical and artistic development, self-assessment, and reflection. Offering a practical, exciting approach, Creative Ballet Teaching is a must-read for those teaching and learning ballet.

First Published in 1993.A complete autobiography of Evalina Palmer-Sikelianos (1874-1952), a woman of immense spiritual strength who fought for the arts against the background of war. She contributed impressively throughout her life to the revival of interest in classical Greece, the theatre and choral dance, and advocated an adherence to mythical authenticity rather than a romanticised view of Greek tragic drama.

The arts have a crucial role in empowering young people with special needs through diverse dance initiatives. Inclusive pedagogy that integrates all students in rich, equitable and just dance programmes within education frameworks is occurring alongside enabling projects by community groups and in the professional dance world where many high-profile choreographers actively seek opportunities to work across diversity to inspire creativity. Access and inclusion is increasingly the essence of projects for disenfranchised and traumatised youth who find creative expression, freedom and hope through dance. This volume foregrounds dance for young people with special needs and presents best practice scenarios in schools, communities and the professional sphere. International perspectives come from Australia, Brazil, Cambodia, Canada, Denmark, Fiji, Finland, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Norway, Papua New Guinea, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan, Timor Leste, the UK and the USA. Sections include: inclusive dance pedagogy equality, advocacy and policy changing practice for dance education community dance initiatives professional integrated collaborations

In the Central Himalayan region of Garhwal, the gods (devtas) enjoy dancing. Musicians - whether ritual specialists or musical specialists - are therefore an indispensable part of most entertainment and religious events. In shamanistic ceremonies, their incantations, songs and drumming 'make' the gods possess their mediums. In other contexts, such as dramatic theatrical renditions of stories of specific deities, actors 'dance' the role of their character having become possessed by the spirit of their character. Through the powerful sounds of their drumming, musicians cause the gods to dance. Music, and more particularly musical sound, is perceived in Garhwal as a powerful force. Andrew Alter examines music and musical practice in Garhwal from an analytical perspective that explores the nexus between musical sounds and performance events. He provides insight into performance practice, vocal techniques, notions of repertoire classification, instruments, ensembles, performance venues, and dance practice. However, music is not viewed simply as a system of organized sounds such as drum strokes, pitch iterations or repertoire items. Rather, in Garhwal, the music is viewed as a system of knowledge and as a system of beliefs in which meaning and spirituality become articulated through potent sound iterations. Alter makes a significant contribution to the discipline of ethnomusicology through a detailed documentation of musical practice in the context of ritual events. The book offers a traditionally thorough historical-ethnographic study of a region with the aim of integrating the local field-based case studies of musical practices within the broader Garhwali context. The work contains invaluable oral data, which has been carefully transliterated as well as translated. Alter blends a carefully detailed analysis of drumming in conjunction with the complex ritual and social contexts of this sophisticated and semantically rich musical practice.

The African dancer requires complete technical mastery and must respect the precise rules handed down by the society of the Masques de Sagesse. Alphonse Tirou is from the Ouenon people of the Ivory Coast. His major study is the first written record of this oral tradition and it explains the movements, codes and meanings of the traditional African dance. It is extremely valuable reading for all those studying or interested in Africa, as dance is such an essential part of this continent's cultural heritage.A former student of the National Institute of Arts at Abidjan, Alphonse Tirou has been a senior dignitary in the Kman of the Masques de Sagesse for over twenty years. He is currently teaching at the Bloa Nam (Movements) dance school in Nmes, which he founded in 1979 and which is still the only school worldwide to research African dance.

Essentials of Dance Movement Psychotherapy contributes to the global interest in embodiment approaches to psychotherapy and to the field of dance movement psychotherapy specifically. It includes recent research, innovative theories and case studies of practice providing an inclusive overview of this ever growing field. As well as original UK contributions, offerings from other nations are incorporated, making it more accessible to the dance movement psychotherapy community of practice worldwide. Helen Payne brings together well-known, experienced global experts along with rising stars from the field to offer the reader a valuable insight into the theory, research and practice of dance movement psychotherapy. The contributions reflect the breadth of developing approaches, covering subjects including: * combining dance movement psychotherapy with music therapy; * trauma and dance movement psychotherapy; * the neuroscience of dance movement psychotherapy; * the use of touch in dance movement psychotherapy; * dance movement psychotherapy and autism; * relational dance movement psychotherapy. Essentials of Dance Movement Psychotherapy will be a treasured source for anyone wishing to learn more about the psychotherapeutic use of creative movement and dance. It will be of great value to students and practitioners in the arts therapies, psychotherapy, counselling and other health and social care professions.

Indian Classical Dance and the Making of Postcolonial National Identities explores what happens when a national-cultural production is reproduced outside the immediate social, political and cultural context of its origin. Whereas most previous studies have analysed Indian classical dance in the context of Indian history and culture, this volume situates this dance practice in the longstanding trasnational linkages between India and the UK. What is the relation between the contemporary performance of Indian classical dance and the constitution of national, diasporic and multicultural identity? Where and how does Indian dance derive its productive power in the postcolonial moment? How do diasporic and nationalist representations of Indian culture intersect with depictions of British culture and politics? It is argued that classical Indian dance has become a key aspect of not only postcolonial South Asian diasporic identities, but also of British multicultural and transnational identity. Based on an extensive ethnographic study of performances of Indian classical dance in the UK, this book will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, sociology, South Asian studies, Postcolonial, Transnational and Cultural studies, and Theatre and Performance studies.

In this volume the author examines the place of dance in contemporary Britain. By doing so, he sets out to provide the historical, political and structural elements necessary to achieve a broad understanding of dance in society. He poses the question as to whether Britain has its own dance culture, examines the place of dance outside the theatrical environment (in schools, for example), and looks at the place of dance in the community.

An expert explains and analyzes the beloved art form An iconic symbol of Spain, flamenco has become a global phenomenon. Peter Manuel offers English-language readers a rare portrait of the music’s history, styles, and cultural impact. Beginning with flamenco’s Moorish and Roma influences, Manuel follows the music’s evolution through its consolidation in the mid-1800s and on to the vibrant contemporary scene. An investigation of flamenco’s major song-types looks at rhythm and compás, guitar technique, and many other aspects of the music while Manuel’s description and analysis of the repertoire range from soleares and bulerías to tangos. His overview of contemporary flamenco culture provides insight into issues that surround the music, including globalization, gender dynamics, notions of ownership, and the ongoing debates on purity versus innovation and the relative roles played by Gitanos and non-Gitanos. Multifaceted and entertaining, Flamenco Music is an in-depth study of the indelible art form that inspires enthusiasts and practitioners around the world.

Jasmin Vardimon's Dance Theatre offers an unusual, intimate insight into the devising and training processes of a choreographer in the midst of her practice. Libby Worth and Jasmin Vardimon take a collaborative approach to recording and exploring the working processes of Vardimon and her company, chronicling the development of specific productions rather than offering a single choreographic blueprint. Focusing on the techniques, strategies and creative activities necessitated by each project, Worth and Vardimon address: The initial 'triggers' which lead to research, expansion, and performance; The social, political and psychological content of Vardimon's work; The relationship between accessibility of content and complexity of ideas; Drawing on texts to enhance and shape a piece of dance work; The editing process, and its inherent messiness; The contribution of a company's different voices and viewpoints to the development of a production. Based on extended conversations and interviews, this highly illustrated, full -colour volume is a unique reflection on Jasmin Vardimon's vibrant, continually developing practice. It is a must-read for students and practitioners of dance and physical theatre.

Not everyone uses weapons in war. Ahmad survived against all odds by doing what he loved. He danced. Eight-year-old Ahmad lives with his family in the Yarmouk refugee camp on the outskirts of Damascus. During a school performance, he stumbles upon a troupe of ballerinas and is immediately spellbound by their beauty and grace. From that moment on, all Ahmad wants to do is dance. But Ahmad's family believe that dancing isn't for `real men'. Forced to practice in secret for years, his dreams are finally realised when he is asked to join Syria's most prestigious dance school. After the civil war breaks out and his own home is destroyed, Ahmad is determined to survive and to keep creating. He sets up a dance school for orphaned children and, despite threats from ISIS, continues to dance. Dance isn't just exercise or art for Ahmad: it is what keeps him alive amid the hunger, rubble and bombings in a city at breaking point. But Ahmad's life is set to change forever when he appears on a hit TV show and leaves war-torn Syria to become an international star at the Dutch National School of Ballet. From humble beginnings in Yarmouk to the illustrious stages of Amsterdam, dance is Ahmad's ticket for freedom. A beacon of hope, his extraordinary journey shows the salvation that dance can bring, even in the darkest times.

British Dance, Black Routes is an outstanding collection of writings which re-reads the achievements of Black British dance artists, and places them within a broad historical, cultural and artistic context. Until now discussion of choreography by Black dance practitioners has been dominated by the work of African-American artists, facilitated by the civil rights movement. But the work produced by Black British artists has in part been within the context of Britain's colonial legacy. Ramsay Burt and Christy Adair bring together an array of leading scholars and practitioners to review the singularity and distinctiveness of the work of British-based dancers who are Black and its relation to the specificity of Black British experiences. From sub-Saharan West African and Caribbean dance forms to jazz and hip-hop, British Dance, Black Routes looks afresh at over five decades of artistic production to provide an unparalleled resource for dance students and scholars.

"Surely you would like to be immortalised in art, fixed forever in perfection?" Sadler's Wells, 1933. I would kill to dance like her. Disciplined and dedicated, Olivia is the perfect ballerina. But no matter how hard she works, she can never match identical twin Clara's charm. I would kill to be with her. As rehearsals intensify for the ballet Coppelia, the girls feel increasingly like they are being watched. And, as infatuation turns to obsession, everything begins to unravel.

The "Language of Dance" series publishes key works that cover a range of dance styles and periods. Through selection of appropriate movement description, these pieces have been translated into labanotation, the highly developed method of analyzing and recording movement.;Whatever form of dance a pupil may choose, there are certain skills such as strength, co-ordination, elasticity and the ability to move rhythmically, that all must acquire. This book uses easily understood notated exercises as a means of teaching these skills within the language of dance. Exercises defining a range of dynamic qualities are linked into a series of sequences that allow students to develop the relationship between exercises and choreographed movement. The exercises are supplemented by photographs and a cassette composed and recorded by Jess Meeker, Shawn's original composer.

Bob Fosse (1927-87) is recognized as one of the most significant figures in the post-World War II American musical theater. With his first Broadway musical, The Pajama Game in 1954, the "Fosse style" was already fully developed, with the hunched shoulders, turned in stance, and stuttering, staccato jazz movements. Fosse moved decisively into the role of director with Redhead in 1959 and was a key figure in the rise of the director-choreographer in the Broadway musical. He also became the only star director of musicals of his era-a group that included Jerome Robbins, Gower Champion, Michael Kidd, and Harold Prince- to equal his Broadway success in films. Following his unprecedented triple crown of show business awards in 1973 (an Oscar for Cabaret, Emmy for Liza With a Z, and Tony for Pippin), Fosse assumed complete control of virtually every element of his projects. But when at last he had achieved complete autonomy, his final projects, the film Star 80 and the musical Big Deal, both written and directed by Fosse, were rejected by audiences and critics. A fascinating look at the evolution of Fosse as choreographer and director, Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical considers Fosse's career in the context of changes in the Broadway musical theater over four decades. It traces his early dance years and the importance of early mentors George Abbott and Jerome Robbins on his work. It examines how each of the important women in his adult life-all dancers-impacted his career and influenced his dance aesthetic. Finally, the book investigates how his evolution as both artist and individual mirrored the social and political climate of his era and allowed him to comfortably ride a wave of cultural changes.

Anna Halprin traces the life's work of this radical dance-maker, documenting her early career as a modern dancer in the 1940s through to the development of her groundbreaking approach to dance as an accessible and life-enhancing art form. Now revised and reissued, this book: sketches the evolution of the San Francisco Dancers' Workshop, exploring Halprin's connections with the avant-garde theatre, music, visual art and architecture of the 1950s and 60s offers a detailed analysis of Halprin's work from this period provides an important historical guide to a time when dance was first explored beyond the confines of the theatre and considered as a healing art for individuals and communities. As a first step towards critical understanding, and an initial exploration before going on to further, primary research, Routledge Performance Practitioners offer unbeatable value for today's student.

This book offers a set of eleven discipline-specific chapters from across the arts, humanities, psychology, and medicine. Each contributor considers the creative potential of error and/or ambiguity, defining these terms in the particular context of that discipline and exploring their values and applications. Themes include error in choreography, poetry, media art, healthcare, psychology, critical typography and mixed reality performance. The book emerges from a core question of how dance research and HCI can inform each other through consideration of error, ambiguity and 'messiness' as methodological tools. The digital age had heralded the possibility that error could be eradicated by the logic of computers but several chapters focus on glitch in arts practices that exploit errors in computer programmes, or even create programmes specifically to produce errors. Together, the chapters explore how error can take us somewhere different or somewhere new, to develop a new, more interesting way of working.

In dance, the choreographer creates, the dancer performs, and the viewer observes. This work is a handbook for the viewer. By presenting historical and artistic perspectives of dance, dance events are made more approachable and appreciation for the art form is heightened. The choreographic components of body language, content, structure, music, design, and interpretation are included. Also discussed is the development of critical reaction over time. Examples are drawn from Western theatrical dance and worldwide cultural variations. Terms are explained throughout the text, and an extensive bibliography gives sources in print and on tape for further study.

Focusing on visual approaches to performance in global cultural contexts, Perspectives in Motion explores the work of Adrienne L. Kaeppler, a pioneering researcher who has made a number of interdisciplinary contributions over five decades to dance and performance studies. Through a diverse range of case studies from Oceania, Asia, and Europe, and interdisciplinary approaches, this edited collection offers new critical and ethnographic frameworks for understanding and experiencing practices of music and dance across the globe.

Early hip hop film musicals have either been expunged from cinema history or excoriated in brief passages by critics and other writers. "Hip Hop on Film" reclaims and reexamines productions such as "Breakin'" (1984), " Beat Street" (1984), and "Krush Groove" (1985) in order to illuminate Hollywood's fascinating efforts to incorporate this nascent urban culture into conventional narrative forms. Such films presented musical conventions against the backdrop of graffiti-splattered trains and abandoned tenements in urban communities of color, setting the stage for radical social and political transformations. Hip hop musicals are also part of the broader history of teen cinema, and films such as Charlie Ahearn's "Wild Style" (1983) are here examined alongside other contemporary youth-oriented productions. As suburban teen films banished parents and children to the margins of narrative action, hip hop musicals, by contrast, presented inclusive and unconventional filial groupings that included all members of the neighborhood. These alternative social configurations directly referenced specific urban social problems, which affected the stability of inner city families following diminished governmental assistance in communities of color during the 1980s.

Breakdancing, a central element of hip hop musicals, is also reconsidered. It gained widespread acclaim at the same time that these films entered the theaters, but the nation's newly discovered dance form was embattled--caught between a multitude of institutional entities such as the ballet academy, advertising culture, and dance publications that vied to control its meaning, particularly in relation to delineations of gender. As street-trained breakers were enticed to join the world of professional ballet, this newly forged relationship was recast by dance promoters as a way to invigorate and "remasculinize" European dance, while young women simultaneously critiqued conventional masculinities through an appropriation of breakdance. These multiple and volatile histories influenced the first wave of hip hop films, and even structured the sleeper hit "Flashdance" (1983). This forgotten, ignored, and maligned cinema is not only an important aspect of hip hop history, but is also central to the histories of teen film, the postclassical musical, and even institutional dance. Kimberley Monteyne places these films within the wider context of their cultural antecedents and reconsiders the genre's influence.

The author takes a new approach to teaching notation through movement exercises, thus enlarging the scope of the book to teachers of movement and choreography as well as the traditional dance notation students. Updated and enlarged to reflect the most recent scholarship and through a series of exercises, this book guides students through: movement, stillness, timing, shaping, accents travelling direction, flexion and extension rotations, revolutions and turns supporting balance relationships. All of these movements are related to notation, so the student learns how to notate and describe the movements as they are performed.

"Your Move: A New Approach to the Study of Movement and Dance" establishes a fresh and original framework for looking at dance. In examining the basic elements of dance - the Alphabet of Movement - and using illustrations of movement technique and notation symbols it provides a new way to see, to teach and to choreograph dance. This book gives a list of primary actions upon which all physical activity is based, focusing on both the functional and expressive sides of movement.
It draws upon the author's broad experience in ballet, modern and ethnic dance to reinterpret movement and to shed new light on the role of movement in dance. "Your Move" is an important book not only for dancers but also for instructors in sport and physical therapy. Each copy of "Your Move" comes complete with exercise sheets, which can also be purchased separately. A teacher's guide has also been designed providing notes on each chapter, approaches to the exploration of movement, interpretation of the reading studies, additional information of motif description and answers to the exercise sheets. An optional audio cassette, with music written and recorded especially for use with the book, is also available.