Dancing with Merce Cunningham is a buoyant, captivating memoir of a talented dancer's lifelong friendship with one of the choreographic geniuses of our time. Marianne Preger-Simon's story begins amid the explosion of artistic creativity that followed World War II. While immersed in the vibrant arts scene of postwar Paris during a college year abroad, Preger-Simon was so struck by the unconventional dance style of choreographer Merce Cunningham that she joined his classes in New York. She soon became an important member of his brand new dance troupe - and a constant friend. Through her experiences in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Preger-Simon offers a rare account of exactly how Cunningham taught and interacted with his students. She describes the puzzled reactions of audiences to the novel non-narrative choreography of the company's debut performances. She also portrays the relationships among the company's dancers, designers, and musicians, many of whom - including John Cage, David Tudor, and Carolyn Brown - would become integral to the avant-garde arts movement, telling tales of their adventures and conversations touring in a VW Microbus across the United States. Finally, reflecting on her connection with Cunningham throughout the latter part of his career, Preger-Simon recalls warm moments that continued to characterize their enduring friendship. Her memoir is an intimate look at the early years of one of the most influential companies in modern American dance and the brilliance of its visionary leader.

Dieses Buch deckt die Hauptgrunde fur die auffallende Prominenz des Chortanzes in Platons Nomoi auf und bietet eine innovative Deutung der komplexen Komposition des Dialogs. This book uncovers the principal reasons for the striking prominence of choral dance in Plato's Laws and offers a highly innovative account of the dialogue's complex composition.

David Hallberg, the first American to join the famed Bolshoi Ballet as a principal dancer and the dazzling artist The New Yorker described as "the most exciting male dancer in the western world," presents a look at his artistic life-up to the moment he returns to the stage after a devastating injury that almost cost him his career. Beginning with his real-life Billy Elliot childhood-an all-American story marred by intense bullying-and culminating in his hard-won comeback, Hallberg's "moving and intelligent" (Daniel Mendelsohn) memoir dives deep into life as an artist as he wrestles with ego, pushes the limits of his body, and searches for ecstatic perfection and fulfillment as one of the world's most acclaimed ballet dancers. Rich in detail ballet fans will adore, Hallberg presents an "unsparing...inside look" (The New York Times) and also reflects on universal and relatable themes like inspiration, self-doubt, and perfectionism as he takes you into daily classes, rigorous rehearsals, and triumphant performances, searching for new interpretations of ballet's greatest roles. He reveals the loneliness he felt as a teenager leaving America to join the Paris Opera Ballet School, the ambition he had to tame as a new member of American Ballet Theatre, and the reasons behind his headline-grabbing decision to be the first American to join the top rank of Bolshoi Ballet, tendered by the Artistic Director who would later be the victim of a vicious acid attack. Then, as Hallberg performed throughout the world at the peak of his abilities, he suffered a crippling ankle injury and botched surgery leading to an agonizing retreat from ballet and an honest reexamination of his entire life. Combining his powers of observation and memory with emotional honesty and artistic insight, Hallberg has written a great ballet memoir and an intimate portrait of an artist in all his vulnerability, passion, and wisdom. "Candid and engrossing" (The Washington Post), A Body of Work is a memoir "for everyone with a heart" (DC Metro Theater Arts).

Body and space refer to vital and interrelated dimensions in the experience of sounds and music. Sounds have an overwhelming impact on feelings of bodily presence and inform us about the space we experience. Even in situations where visual information is artificial or blurred, such as in virtual environments or certain genres of film and computer games, sounds may shape our perceptions and lead to surprising new experiences. This book discusses recent developments in a range of interdisciplinary fields, taking into account the rapidly changing ways of experiencing sounds and music, the consequences for how we engage with sonic events in daily life and the technological advancements that offer insights into state-of-the-art methods and future perspectives. Topics range from the pleasures of being locked into the beat of the music, perception-action coupling and bodily resonance, and affordances of musical instruments, to neural processing and cross-modal experiences of space and pitch. Applications of these findings are discussed for movement sonification, room acoustics, networked performance, and for the spatial coordination of movements in dance, computer gaming and interactive artistic installations.

Liz Aggiss and Billy Cowie, known collectively as Divas Dance Theatre, are renowned for their highly visual, interdisciplinary brand of dance performance that incorporates elements of theatre, film, opera, poetry and vaudevillian humor. They have created dance theatre, cabaret, live art, single and multiple screen dance installations, and live performance installations.
"Anarchic Dance "is a visual and textual record of the work of Divas Dance Theatre. The DVD-Rom included in the package features extracts from Aggiss and Cowie's work, including the highly-acclaimed dance film Motion Control (first premiered on BBC2 in 2002), rare video footage of their punk-comic live performances as The Wild Wigglers and reconstruction of Aggiss' solo performance in Grotesque Dancer.
These films are cross-referenced in the book, allowing readers to match performance and commentary as Aggiss and Cowie invite a broad range of writers to examine their live performance and dance screen practice through analysis, theory, discussion and personal response. As much as their practice is hybrid, maverick and hard to define, the various theories presented are equally challenging, lively and fresh.
Extensively illustrated with black and white and color photographs, this beautiful multi-media package is a celebration of Divas' boundary-shattering performance work. "Anarchic Dance" provides a comprehensive investigation into Cowie and Aggiss' collaborative partnership and demonstrates a range of exciting approaches through which dance performance can be engaged critically.

Spirit of Powwow has evolved as we have talked with dancers and drummers until we feel we now have a powwow book that goes beyond the usual mere description of regalia and dances. The photography and text cover every component of the powwow, not just the dance competition. The Nahanee family and their friends make this book a very personal experience for the reader as we have maintained the true voices of the dancers, drummers, officials and volunteers throughout as they speak of their experiences and beliefs. You will follow a powwow family and their friends into the dance arbour, learn of their experiences and meet the behind the scenes people who hold the event together. You will meet young dancers learning how to dance and how to make their very first regalia as they are being taught about their culture by Gloria. We have tried to create a book that will become a bridge between cultures. Come over the bridge with us. Come into the kitchens and taste Maizy's bannock, help set up the powwow ground, walk tall in the Grand Entry. Mix with the dancers and drummers and listen to them speak to you.

The 1909 arrival of Serge de Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris marked the beginning of some two decades of collaboration among litterateurs, painters, musicians, and choreographers, many not native to France. Charles Batson's original and nuanced exploration of several of these collaborations integral to the formation of modernism and avant-gardist aesthetics reinscribes performances of the celebrated Russians and the lesser-known but equally innovative Ballets Suedois into their varied artistic traditions as well as the French historical context, teasing out connections and implications that are usually overlooked in less decidedly interdisciplinary studies. Batson not only uncovers the multiple meanings set in motion through the interplay of dancers, musicians, librettists, and spectators, but also reinterprets literary texts that inform these meanings, such as Valery's 'L'Ame et la danse'. Identifying the performing body as a site where anxieties, drives, and desires of the French public were worked out, he shows how the messages carried by and ascribed to bodies in performance significantly influenced thought and informed the direction of much artistic expression in the twentieth century. His book will be a valuable resource for scholars working in the fields of literature, dance, music, and film, as well as French cultural studies.

Cuban music is recognized unanimously as a major historical force behind Latin American popular music, and as an important player in the development of US popular music and jazz. However, the music produced on the island after the Revolution in 1959 has been largely overlooked and overshadowed by the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon. The Revolution created the conditions for the birth of a type of highly sophisticated popular music, which has grown relatively free from market pressures. These conditions premised the new importance attained by Afro-Cuban dance music during the 1990s, when the island entered a period of deep economic and social crisis that has shaken Revolutionary institutions from their foundations. Vincenzo Perna investigates the role of black popular music in post-Revolutionary Cuba, and in the 1990s in particular. The emergence of timba is analysed as a distinctively new style of Afro-Cuban dance music. The controversial role of Afro-Cuban working class culture is highlighted, showing how this has resisted co-optation into a unified, pacified vision of national culture, and built musical bridges with the transnational black diaspora. Musically, timba represents an innovative fusion of previous popular and folkloric Afro-Cuban styles with elements of hip-hop and other African-American styles like jazz, funk and salsa. Timba articulates a black urban youth subculture with distinctive visual and choreographic codes. With its abrasive commentaries on issues such as race, consumer culture, tourism, prostitution and its connections to the underworld, timba demonstrates at the 'street level' many of the contradictions of contemporary Cuban society. After repeatedly colliding with official discourses, timba has eventually met with institutional repression. This book will appeal not only to ethnomusicologists and those working on popular music studies, but also to those working in the areas of cultural and Black studies, anthropology, Latin American studies, Cuban studies and Caribbean studies.

Pina Bausch s work has had tremendous impact across the spectrum of late twentieth-century performance practice, helping to redefine the possibilities of what both dance and theater can be. This edited collection presents a compendium of source material and contextual essays that examine Pina Bausch's history, practice and legacy, and the development of Tanztheater as a new form, with sections including:

• Dance and theatre roots and connections;
• Bausch s developmental process;
• The creation of Tanztheater;
• Bausch s reception;
• Critical perspectives.

Interviews, reviews and major essays chart the evolution of Bausch s pioneering approach and explore this evocative new mode of performance. Edited by noted Bausch scholar, Royd Climenhaga, "The Pina Bausch Sourcebook" aims to open up Bausch s performative world for students, scholars, dance and theatre artists and audiences everywhere.

Why did the Greeks of the archaic and early Classical period join in choruses that sang and danced on public and private occasions? This book offers a wide-ranging exploration of representations of chorality in the poetry, art and material remains of early Greece in order to demonstrate the centrality of the activity in the social, religious and technological practices of individuals and communities. Moving from a consideration of choral archetypes, among them cauldrons, columns, Gorgons, ships and halcyons, the discussion then turns to an investigation of how participation in choral song and dance shaped communal experience and interacted with a variety of disparate spheres that include weaving, cataloguing, temple architecture and inscribing. The study ends with a treatment of the role of choral activity in generating epiphanies and allowing viewers and participants access to realms that typically lie beyond their perception.

From the dance floor of a tango club to group therapy classes, from ballet to community theatre, improvised dance is everywhere. For some dance artists, improvisation is one of many approaches within the choreographic process. For others, it is a performance form in its own right. And while it has long been practiced, it is only within the last twenty years that dance improvisation has become a topic of critical inquiry. With The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation in Dance, dancer, teacher, and editor Vida L. Midgelow provides a cutting-edge volume on dance improvisation in all its facets. Expanding beyond conventional dance frameworks, this handbook looks at the ways that dance improvisation practices reflect our ability to adapt, communicate, and respond to our environment. Throughout the handbook, case studies from a variety of disciplines showcase the role of individual agency and collective relationships in improvisation, not just to dancers but to people of all backgrounds and abilities. In doing so, chapters celebrate all forms of improvisation, and unravel the ways that this kind of movement informs understandings of history, socio-cultural conditions, lived experience, cognition, and technologies.

This gorgeously designed retelling of The Nutcracker will make the perfect Christmas present for ballet fans everywhere! In snow white covered St. Petersburg, young dancer Stana's dreams have finally come true - she has been chosen to play the lead role in Tchaikovsky's new ballet, The Nutcracker. But with all eyes looking at her, can Stana overcome her nerves and dance like she's never danced before? From the author of the bestselling The Sinclair Mysteries, Katherine Woodfine, and Waterstone's Book Prize winner, Lizzy Stewart, this sumptuous and magical retelling of The Nutcracker will transport you on a journey fay beyond the page. Praise for Katherine Woodfine's The Sinclair's Mysteries series: 'A wonderful book, with a glorious heroine and a true spirit of adventure' Katherine Rundell, award-winning author of Rooftoppers 'Dastardliness on a big scale is uncovered in this well-plotted, evocative novel' The Sunday Times 'It's a dashing plot, an atmospheric setting and an extensive and imaginative cast. Katherine Woodfine handles it all with aplomb' The Guardian Praise for Lizzy Stewart's There's a Tiger in the Garden (Winner of the Waterstones Children's Book Prize 2017, Illustrated Books Category): 'A journey of discovery' The Guardian 'A stunning testament to the power of imagination' Metro

This complete scholarly edition of the collection of manuscript choreographies from c.1565-c.1675 associated with the Inns of Court is the first full-length study of these sources to be published. It offers practical reconstructions of the dances and provides a selection of musical settings simply but idiomatically arranged for four-part instrumental ensemble or keyboard. A Part One centres on the manuscript sources which transmit the Almain, and on the trends and influences that shaped its evolution in Britain from c. 1549 to c. 1675, taking account of both music and choreography.A In viewing the Almain within its broader historical context, Ian Payne throws new light on the dance, arguing that, together with the 'measures' which accompany it in the choreographies, it owes an even greater debt to the English country dance than has hitherto been acknowledged, a popular style that received its fullest expression in Playford's English Dancing Master of 1651. A The second part of the book focuses on the dances themselves. The steps are described in detail and reconstructions provided for the nine Almains and some of the other measures included in the manuscripts. Part Three comprises a complete critical edition of the manuscripts. A These easily performable versions of the dances will be an invaluable aid to those wishing to learn the dances, reconstruct them for stagings of Shakespeare's plays or Jacobean masques, and for dance historians.

The two volumes of Perspectives on American Dance are the first anthologies in over twenty-five years to focus exclusively on American dance practices across a wide span of American culture. They show how social experience, courtship, sexualities, and other aspects of life in America are translated through dancing into spatial patterns, gestures, and partner relationships. Essays in these collections address rarely-studied topics in American dance and offer unexpected perspectives on commonly studied dance forms. The second volume, The New Millennium, features essays by a young generation of writers who look at the kinds of social dancing that speak to new audiences through new media. Topics include ""dorky dancing"" on YouTube; same-sex competitors on the TV show So You Think You Can Dance; the racial politics of NFL touchdown dances; the commercialization of flash mobs; the connections between striptease and corporate branding; how 9/11 affected dance; the criminalization of New York City club dancing; and the joyous ironies of hipster dance. This volume emphasizes how dancing is becoming more social and interactive as technology opens up new ways to create and distribute dance.

Tap dancing legends Fayard (b. 1914) and Harold (1918-2000) Nicholas amazed crowds with their performances in musicals and films from the 30s to the 80s. They performed with Gene Kelly in The Pirate, with Cab Calloway in Stormy Weather, with Dorothy Dandridge (Harold's wife) in Sun Valley Serenade, and with a number of other stars on the stage and on the screen. Author Hill not only guides readers through the brothers' showstopping successes and the repressive times in which their dancing won them universal acclaim, she also offers extensive insight into the history and choreography of tap dancing, bringing readers up to speed on the art form in which the Nicholas Brothers excelled.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Through a revolutionary ethnographic approach that foregrounds storytelling and performance as alternative means of knowledge, Situated Narratives and Sacred Dance explores shared ritual traditions between the Anlo-Ewe people of West Africa and their descendants, the ArarA! of Cuba, who were brought to the island in the transatlantic slave trade. The volume draws on two decades of research in four communities: Dzodze, Ghana; Adjodogou, Togo; and Perico and Agramonte, Cuba. In the ceremonies, oral narratives, and daily lives of individuals at each field site, the authors not only identify shared attributes in religious expression across continents, but also reveal lasting emotional, spiritual, and personal impacts in the communities whose ancestors were ripped from their homeland and enslaved. The authors layer historiographic data, interviews, and fieldnotes with artistic modes such as true fiction, memoir, and choreographed narrative, challenging the conventional nature of scholarship with insights gained from sensorial experience. Including reflections on the making of an art installation based on this research project, this volume challenges readers to imagine the potential of approaching fieldwork as artists. The authors argue that creative methods can convey truths deeper than facts, pointing to new possibilities for collaboration between scientists and artists with relevance to any discipline.

The essential, easy-to-use classical ballet guide - spanning nearly two centuries of classical dance - with entries for more than eighty works from ballet companies around the world, from Giselle and Swan Lake to Cinderella and Steptext. This new edition has been revised to include new ballets by Wayne McGregor, Alexei Ratmansky and Christopher Wheeldon alongside classics by Tchaikovsky, Diaghilev and Balanchine. Features include: - plot summaries - an analysis of each ballet's principal themes - useful background and historical information - a unique, behind-the-scenes, performer's-eye view Dip in at random or trace the development of dance from cover to cover. Written by former Royal Ballet principal Deborah Bull and leading dance critic Luke Jennings, this ever popular Faber Pocket guide is a must for all ballet-goers - regulars and first-timers alike.

Dance Technique and Injury Prevention has established itself as the key reference for everyone involved in dance injury and treatment, physical therapy, and dance instruction. In this newly revised and expanded edition, Dr Howse reviews the subject's five main areas: Anatomy and Physiology, Injuries (general), Injuries (specific) - Their Cause and Treatment, Strengthening Exercises, and Technical Faults and Anatomical Variations. The new set of strengthening exercises is a special feature of this edition. Comprehensively illustrated with more than 320 diagrams and photographs, Dance Technique and Injury Prevention 3/e deserves a place in every professional's library and treatment room.

Collaborative practices are in the very nature of theatre. One of the most thriving, vibrant and exciting theatre cultures in the world is Brazil, offering plurality of various forms of theatrical expression. Brazilian Collaborative Theatre provides the collection of fifteen interviews with the leading contemporary theater directors, performers and choreographers and their respective groups, investigating their creative approaches and experiences of theatre making processes. We explore the cultural landscape that constitutes present day collaborative theatre in Brazil, in which practitioners are concerned with the very real questions; such as how theater is created and produced, for which audiences and through which models of cultural production? Within the Brazilian performing arts and cultural context, this book of interviews is unique as it brings voices of most established and prolific creators in present day Brazilian arts theatre scene. It also looks closely at autonomous performance and authorial staging and goes beyond text and playwright and examines the collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of theatre that predominated from the 1980s into the following decades. The main aim of the book is to offer new knowledge on present-day performing arts in Brazil, key artists and their companies that can have wildly influence on other cultures, creators and the audiences alike.

Long treated as peripheral to music history, dance has become prominent within musicological research, as a prime and popular subject for an increasing number of books, articles, conference papers and special symposiums. Despite this growing interest, there remains no thorough-going critical examination of the ways in which musicologists might engage with dance, thinking not only about specific repertoires or genres, but about fundamental commonalities between the two, including embodiment, agency, subjectivity and consciousness. This volume begins to fill this gap. Ten chapters illustrate a range of conceptual, historical and interpretive approaches that advance the interdisciplinary study of music and dance. This methodological eclecticism is a defining feature of the volume, integrating insights from critical theory, film and cultural studies, the visual arts, phenomenology, cultural anthropology and literary criticism into the study of music and dance.

London. Wham! Pop, glitz and glamour. And two girls with stars in their eyes. Our friendship began one windy day in 1982, outside Finsbury Park tube. It was an instant like at first sight. We were on our way to a Wham! rehearsal. Pepsi was the new girl in the band and over a car stereo, a cassette tape and that journey to Bushey we bonded. We had no idea that we were on the first of many journeys together and that soon we'd be travelling all over Europe, Australia, America, China and Japan. Or that no matter where we went, together, we'd find a way to make every exotic destination feel like home. We'd both been teenagers during the seventies - a dreary and difficult decade, especially if you were young in London and you didn't have much money. So, in 1982, anything was possible for us - a pair of twentysomethings who hadn't been to university, who didn't have any money, who dreamt of singing and dancing, but ultimately lived for fun. Everything felt new and life was a question mark. We had no idea what was lying ahead, but we wanted to say yes. What we didn't know was that we were saying yes to a lifetime of connection that has endured whatever we've done, wherever we've been. From the side of the stage to its centre - we have many stories to tell. And it's all here, it's all in black and white.

Music, Dance, and Drama in Early Modern English Schools is the first book to systematically analyze the role that the performing arts played in English schools after the Reformation. Although the material record is riddled with gaps, Amanda Eubanks Winkler sheds light on the subject through an innovative methodology that combines rigorous archival research with phenomenological and performance studies approaches. She organizes her study around a series of performance-based questions that demonstrate how the schoolroom intersected with the church, the court, the domicile, the concert room, and the professional theater, which allows her to provide fresh perspectives on well-known canonical operas performed by children, as well as lesser-known works. Eubanks Winkler also interrogates the notion that performance is ephemeral, as she considers how scores and playtexts serve as a conduit between past and present, and demonstrates the ways in which pedagogical performance is passed down through embodied praxis.