La Nijinska is the first biography of twentieth-century ballet's premier female choreographer. Overshadowed in life and legend by her brother Vaslav Nijinsky, Bronislava Nijinska had a far longer and more productive career. An architect of twentieth-century neoclassicism, she experienced the transformative power of the Russian Revolution and created her greatest work - Les Noces - under the influence of its avant-garde. Many of her ballets rested on the probing of gender boundaries, a mistrust of conventional gender roles, and the heightening of the ballerina's technical and artistic prowess. A prominent member of Russia Abroad, she worked with leading figures of twentieth-century art, music, and ballet, including Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Poulenc, Alexandra Exter, Natalia Goncharova, Frederick Ashton, Alicia Markova, and Maria Tallchief. She was also a remarkable dancer in her own right with a bravura technique and powerful stage presence that enabled her to perform an unusually broad repertory. Finally, she was the author of an acclaimed volume of memoirs in addition to a major treatise on movement. Nijinska's career sheds new light on the modern history of ballet and of modernism more generally, recuperating the memory of lost works and forgotten artists, many of them women. But it also reveals the sexism pervasive in the upper echelons of the early and mid-twentieth-century ballet world, barriers that women choreographers still confront.

This is the moving story of the development of modern dance as told by the visionary artists who created it. The powerful words of Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Ruth St. Denis, and twenty nine other modern dance artists come to life in these original essays.

A charmingly illustrated exploration of The Nutcracker ballet, from the story to the characters to the music, for kids aged 8 - 12 to enjoy. The Nutcracker is one of the world's most beloved and recognizable ballets. A holiday perennial, it is frequently the first ballet young people experience and remember for a lifetime. This wonderfully engaging book introduces children, ages 8 to 12, to the story of the ballet, its history, the music and choreography, as well as all of the characters from Clara and the Prince to the Mouse King and the Snow Queen. Special sections introduce children to some of the most famous dancers and companies that have brought the performance and the magic of the ballet to life. Including a fold-out poster that young readers can remove and hang on their walls, A Child's Introduction to The Nutcracker is the perfect souvenir for the millions of young people who attend a holiday performance and have dreams of Sugarplum Fairies throughout the year.

Tarantella, a genre of Southern Italian folk music and dance, is an international phenomenon--seen and heard in popular festivals, performed across the Italian diaspora, even adapted for New Age spiritual practices. The boom in popularity has diversified tarantella in practice while setting it within a host of new, unexpected contexts. Incoronata Inserra ventures into the history, global circulation, and recontextualization of this fascinating genre. Examining tarantella's changing image and role among Italians and Italian Americans, Inserra illuminates how factors like tourism, translation, and world music venues have shifted the ethics of place embedded in the tarantella cultural tradition. Once rural, religious, and rooted, tarantella now thrives in settings urban, secular, migrant, and ethnic. Inserra reveals how the genre's changing dynamics contribute to reimagining Southern Italian identity. At the same time, they translate tarantella into a different kind of performance that serves new social and cultural groups and purposes. Indeed, as Inserra shows, tarantella's global growth promotes a reassessment of gender relations in the Italian South and helps create space for Italian and Italian-American women to reclaim gendered aspects of the genre.

Ballet is a paradox: much loved but little studied. It is a beautiful fairy tale; detached from its origins and unrelated to the men and women who created it. Yet ballet has a history, little known and rarely presented. These great works have dark sides and moral ambiguities, not always nor immediately visible. The daring and challenging quality of ballet as well as its perceived ???safe??? nature is not only one of its fascinations but one of the intriguing questions to be explored in this Companion. The essays reveal the conception, intent and underlying meaning of ballets and recreate the historical reality in which they emerged. The reader will find new and unexpected aspects of ballet, its history and its aesthetics, the evolution of plot and narrative, new insights into the reality of training, the choice of costume and the transformation of an old art in a modern world.

From the vaudeville era, through the Astaire-Rogers movies, to the intricate artistry of bebop, tap has dominated American dance with its rhythm, originality, and humor. This book collects the voices and memories of thirty of America's best-loved tap-dance stars and two hundred rare theater, film, and publicity photographs. Here Shirley Temple recalls her magical duo with Bill "Bojangles" Robinson; Fayard Nicholas describes his days at Harlem's Cotton Club performing with Cab Calloway; Fred Kelly visits his and his brother Gene's Pittsburgh dance studio; Hermes Pan reminisces about his work with George Gershwin, Ginger Rogers, and Fred Astaire; and, in a chapter new to this edition, Toy and Wing tell about their days as the world's leading Asian tap duo. Appended with the most comprehensive listing of tap acts, recordings, and films ever compiled--newly updated for this paperback edition--"Tap!" brings to life the legends of one of America's most cherished and enduring art forms.

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.

Once dancers joined ballet, modern dance groups or chorus lines and did what they were directed to do. Today the art is more collaborative but still bound by old-fashioned structures impose by university dance studios. Today there are too many graduating students and little steady work, few auditions and decreasing opportunity for newcomers. The best dancers today are 'bodies for hire', those who are versatile, open-minded, independent and comfortable in every genre. Choreography has become a more democratic process in which dancers come to depend on each other.

This beautiful new book guides readers with intermediate to advanced level sewing skills toward the successful creation of costumes for theatrical or dance performances, and for re-enactments and interactive fiction. Nearly 250 beautiful color photographs and detailed line drawings of many types of costumes, along with solid design principles, provide a wealth of easy to understand information and how-to instructions. Practical tips concerning theatrical production teams, lines of authority, budgets, scheduling, and post-production storage of costumes are included. An annotated bibliography and a resource guide are both useful references.

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.

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.

This is an open access title. It is available to read and download as a free PDF on the Oxford Academic platform. It is made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. Dancing the World Smaller examines international dance performances in New York City in the 1940s as sites in which dance artists and audiences contested what it meant to practice globalism in mid-twentieth-century America. During and after the Second World War, modern dance and ballet thrived in New York City, a fertile cosmopolitan environment in which dance was celebrated as an emblem of American artistic and cultural dominance. In the ensuing Cold War years, American choreographers and companies were among those the U.S. government sent abroad to serve as ambassadors of American cultural values and to extend the nation's geo-political reach. Less-known is that international dance performance, or what was then-called "ethnic" or "ethnologic" dance, enjoyed strong support among audiences in the city and across the nation as well. Produced in non-traditional dance venues, such as the American Museum of Natural History, the Ethnologic Dance Center, and Carnegie Hall, these performances elevated dance as an intercultural bridge across human differences and dance artists as transcultural interlocutors. Dancing the World Smaller draws on extensive archival resources, as well as critical and historical studies of race and ethnicity in the U.S., to uncover a hidden history of globalism in American dance and to see artists such as La Meri, Ruth St. Denis, Asadata Dafora, Pearl Primus, Jose Limon, Ram Gopal, and Charles Weidman in new light. Debates about how to practice globalism in dance proxied larger cultural struggles over how to reconcile the nation's new role as a global superpower. In dance as in cultural politics, Americans labored over how to realize diversity while honoring difference and manage dueling impulses toward globalism, on the one hand, and isolationism, on the other.

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.

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 Spark will help create a legacy dance students will never forget! The Spark: The Legacy that Changed the Dance World is about the journey of creative artists and dancers-turned-teachers who are now struggling with the complexities of teaching. Choosing a ballet program that juggles all styles, techniques, and methodologies and that all levels of students will progressively love is a daunting task. In this book, dance teachers will discover what the greatest masters have always known: the true essence of dancing. Quite simply, they will learn how to teach pure, fluid movement with an age-appropriate curriculum proven for the past 60 years to effectively transcend any limiting beliefs about the basis for all dance. If you're looking for an empowered learning community with the perfect balance of discipline, integrity, and a curriculum that forms lifetime bonds with students, teachers, and parents, you've come to the right place. Celebrate your "sparkdom"!

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.

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 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.

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

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER One of the world's legendary artists and bestselling author of The Creative Habit shares her secrets-from insight to action-for harnessing vitality, finding purpose as you age, and expanding one's possibilities over the course of a lifetime in her newest New York Times bestseller Keep It Moving. At seventy-eight, Twyla Tharp is revered not only for the dances she makes-but for her astounding regime of exercise and nonstop engagement. She is famed for religiously hitting the gym each morning at daybreak, and utilizing that energy to propel her breakneck schedule as a teacher, writer, creator, and lecturer. This book grew out of the question she was asked most frequently: "How do you keep working?" Keep It Moving is a series of no-nonsense mediations on how to live with purpose as time passes. From the details of how she stays motivated to the stages of her evolving fitness routine, Tharp models how fulfillment depends not on fortune-but on attitude, possible for anyone willing to try and keep trying. Culling anecdotes from Twyla's life and the lives of other luminaries, each chapter is accompanied by a small exercise that will help anyone develop a more hopeful and energetic approach to the everyday. Twyla will tell you what the beauty-fitness-wellness industry won't: chasing youth is a losing proposition. Instead, Keep It Moving focuses you on what's here and where you're going-the book for anyone who wishes to maintain their prime for life.

"Peter has brilliantly put into words what I have felt my whole dancing life: that the power of dance can liberate and change all our lives." Darcey Bussell Humans are born to dance. And in today's sedentary world, we would all benefit from doing more of it. Science shows that just ten minutes of dancing provides a thorough work out for the body and brain, raising the heartbeat to cause a release of feel-good endorphins, connecting us to our emotions and reducing our stress levels. Dancing quite simply makes us feel more alive. Dr Peter Lovatt, a former professional dancer turned dance psychologist, has spent the past two decades studying why we dance and what it does for us, and is on a personal mission to make dancing as natural an activity in our daily lives as walking or drinking coffee. Filled with fascinating case studies from his research as well as great stories from dance history, The Dance Cure will inspire even those who think they "can't dance" to turn the music on, get up on the floor and dance themselves happy.

The Dancer's World 1920-1945 focuses on modern dancers as they saw themselves. Five chapters describe a narrative arc that encompasses Europe and the USA with a focus between 1920 and 1945. A final chapter considers contemporary relevance for dancers, dance artists, choreographers, dance students and scholars alike.

Arsenio Rodr\u00edguez was one of the most important Cuban musicians of the twentieth century. In this first scholarly study, ethnomusicologist David F. Garc\u00eda examines Rodr\u00edguez's life, including the conjunto musical combo he led and the highly influential son montuno style of music he created in the 1940s. Garc\u00eda recounts Rodr\u00edguez's battle for recognition at the height of \u0022mambo mania\u0022 in New York City and the significance of his music in the development of salsa. With firsthand accounts from relatives and fellow musicians, Arsenio Rodr\u00edguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin Popular Music follows Rodr\u00edguez's fortunes on several continents, speculating on why he never enjoyed wide commercial success despite the importance of his music. Garc\u00eda focuses on the roles that race, identity, and politics played in shaping Rodr\u00edguez's music and the trajectory of his musical career. His transnational perspective has important implications for Latin American and popular music studies.

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.

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.