First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"An excellent introduction to the many complexities and facets of powwows. It entices the reader to recognize the importance of bodies in motion--in particular, dance--in forging social worlds and mediating power relations."--Zoila Mendoza, author of Creating Our Own: Folklore, Performance, and Identity in Cuzco, Peru "An outstanding interpretation of Native American powwow dancing that reveals its significance in the context of colonial and postcolonial history and across cultures and borders. As dancer and dance scholar, Axtmann brings a keen eye and her own kinesthetic knowledge of dance to her groundbreaking interpretation of the movement styles of powwow dances. "--Elizabeth Fine, author of Soulstepping: African American Step Shows "In her meticulously researched book, Ann Axtmann has added a new dimension to our understanding of Native performance. This rich ethnographic and cultural analysis will be of tremendous interest to scholars, students, and the general public. Axtmann makes a strong and moving case for the power of the dancing body."--Julie Malnig, editor of Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader Thousands of intertribal powwows occur every year throughout the United States and Canada. Sometimes lasting up to a week, these sacred and traditional events are central to Native American spirituality. Attendees dance, drum, sing, eat, reestablish family ties, and make new friends. In this compelling interdisciplinary work, Ann Axtmann examines powwows as practiced primarily along the northeast Atlantic coastline from New Jersey into New England. Focusing on the centrality of bodies in motion, she introduces us to the complexities of powwow history, describes how space and time are performed along the powwow trail, identifies the specific dance styles employed, and considers the issue of race in relation to Native American dancers and the phenomenon of "playing Indian" by non-Natives. Ultimately, Axtmann seeks to understand how powwow dancers express and embody power and what these dances signify for the communities in which they are performed.

Armed with an eighth-grade education, an inexhaustible imagination, and an innate talent for dancing, Hermes Pan (1909-1990) was a boy from Tennessee who became the most prolific, popular, and memorable choreographer of the glory days of the Hollywood musical. While he may be most well-known for the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals which he choreographed at RKO film studios, he also created dances at Twentieth Century-Fox, M-G-M, Paramount, and later for television, winning both the Oscar and the Emmy for best choreography.
In Hermes Pan: The Man Who Danced with Fred Astaire, Pan emerges as a man in full, an artist inseparable from his works. He was a choreographer deeply interested in his dancers' personalities, and his dances became his way of embracing and understanding the outside world. Though his time in a Trappist monastery proved to him that he was more suited to choreography than to life as a monk, Pan remained a deeply devout Roman Catholic throughout his creative life, a person firmly convinced of the powers of prayer. While he was rarely to be seen without several beautiful women at his side, it was no secret that Pan was homosexual and even had a life partner. As Pan worked at the nexus of the cinema industry's creative circles during the golden age of the film musical, this book traces not only Pan's personal life but also the history of the Hollywood musical itself. It is a study of Pan, who emerges here as a benevolent perfectionist, and equally of the stars, composers, and directors with whom he worked, from Astaire and Rogers to Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth, Elizabeth Taylor, Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, Bob Fosse, George Gershwin, Samuel Goldwyn, and countless other luminaries of American popular entertainment.
Author John Franceschina bases his telling of Pan's life on extensive first-hand research into Pan's unpublished correspondence and his own interviews. Pan enjoyed one of the most illustrious careers of any Hollywood dance director, and because his work also spanned across Broadway and television, this book will appeal to readers interested in musical theater history, dance history, and film.

This text is intended to provide a concise history of dance for both undergraduate and graduate students in the History of Dance.

The Dancing God: Staging Hindu Dance in Australia charts the sensational and historic journey of de-provincialising and popularising Hindu dance in Australia. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, colonialism, orientalism and nationalism came together in various combinations to make traditional Hindu temple dance into a global art form. The intricately symbolic Hindu dance in its vital form was virtually unseen and unknown in Australia until an Australian impresario, Louise Lightfoot, brought it onto the stage. Her experimental changes, which modernised Kathakali dance through her pioneering collaboration with Indian dancer Ananda Shivaram, moved the Hindu dance from the sphere of ritualistic practice to formalised stage art. Amit Sarwal argues that this movement enabled both the authentic Hindu dance and dancer to gain recognition worldwide and created in his persona a cultural guru and ambassador on the global stage. Ideal for anyone with an interest in global dance, The Dancing God is an in-depth study of how a unique dance form evolved in the meeting of travellers and cultures.

A book on how to teach dance and train dancers, by one of the US's leading dance teachers. Written for dance teachers in both professional settings and academic settings. A unique approach, following Bill's own six decades of dance teaching and not covered by any other book.

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.

The Routledge Dance Studies Reader has been expanded and updated, giving readers access to thirty-seven essential texts that address the social, political, cultural, and economic impact of globalization on embodiment and choreography. These interdisciplinary essays in dance scholarship consider a broad range of dance forms in relation to historical, ethnographic, and interdisciplinary research methods including cultural studies, reconstruction, media studies, and popular culture. This new third edition expands both its geographic and cultural focus to include recent research on dance from Southeast Asia, the People's Republic of China, indigenous dance, and new sections on market forces and mediatization. Sections cover: Methods and approaches Practice and performance Dance as embodied ideology Dance on the market and in the media Formations of the field. The Routledge Dance Studies Reader includes essays on concert dance (ballet, modern and postmodern dance, tap, kathak, and classical khmer dance), popular dance (salsa and hip-hop), site-specific performance, digital choreography, and lecture-performances. It is a vital resource for anyone interested in understanding dance from a global and contemporary perspective.

This dynamic collection documents the rich and varied history of social dance and the multiple styles it has generated, while drawing on some of the most current forms of critical and theoretical inquiry. The essays cover different historical periods and styles; encompass regional influences from North and South America, Britain, Europe, and Africa; and emphasize a variety of methodological approaches, including ethnography, anthropology, gender studies, and critical race theory. While social dance is defined primarily as dance performed by the public in ballrooms, clubs, dance halls, and other meeting spots, contributors also examine social dance's symbiotic relationship with popular, theatrical stage dance forms.
Contributors are Elizabeth Aldrich, Barbara Cohen-Stratyner, Yvonne Daniel, Sherril Dodds, Lisa Doolittle, David F. Garcia, Nadine George-Graves, Jurretta Jordan Heckscher, Constance Valis Hill, Karen W. Hubbard, Tim Lawrence, Julie Malnig, Carol Martin, Juliet McMains, Terry Monaghan, Halifu Osumare, Sally R. Sommer, May Gwin Waggoner, Tim Wall, and Christina Zanfagna.

Beginning in the late 1970s as an offshoot of disco and punk, dance-punk is difficult to define. Also sometimes referred to as disco-punk and funk-punk, it skirts, overlaps, and blurs into other genres including post-punk, post-disco, new wave, mutant disco, and synthpop. This book explores the historical and cultural conditions of the genre as it appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s and then again in the early 2000s, and illuminates what is at stake in delineating dance-punk as a genre. Looking at bands such as Gang of Four, ESG, Public Image Ltd., LCD Soundsystem, The Rapture, and Le Tigre, this book examines the tensions between and blurring of the rhetoric and emotion in dance music and the cynical and ironic intellectualizing associated with post-punk.

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.

This book traces the history of engagements between dance and the visual arts in the mid-twentieth century and provides a backdrop for the emerging field of contemporary, intermedial art practice. Exploring the disciplinary identity of dance in dialogue with the visual arts, this book unpacks how compositional methods that were dance-based informed visual art contexts. The book provokes fresh consideration of the entangled relationship between, and historiographic significance of, visual arts and dance by exploring movements in history that dance has been traditionally mapped to (Neo-Avant Garde, Neo-Dada, Conceptual art, Postmodernism, and Performance Art) and the specific practices and innovations from key people in the field (like John Cage, Anna Halprin, and Robert Rauschenberg). This book also employs a series of historical and critical case studies which show how compositional approaches from dance-breath, weight, tone, energy-informed the emergence of the intermedial. Ultimately this book shows how dance and choreography have played an important role in shaping visual arts culture and enables the re-imagination of current art practices through the use of choreographic tools. This unique and timely offering is important reading for those studying and researching in visual and fine arts, performance history and theory, dance practice and dance studies, as well as those working within the fields of dance and visual art. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com

Children love to observe, explore, learn, and create. Elementary Dance Education helps them do all four. And it does so in a unique way, shaping its movement activities around nature themes. In fact, all of the learning experiences are based on different aspects of nature, as the text intertwines children's innate curiosity and observation skills with the processes of scientific inquiry and artistic creation. Elementary Dance Education helps teachers develop the instructional skills they need to incorporate dance into their curricula, providing over 70 movement activities and exercises for students in grades K-6. The activities, which stimulate children's minds and bodies through the process of collaborative dance creation, include variations for younger and older students. Ideas are offered for partner or small-group explorations, making the activities more inclusive and appropriate for each age group. Another unique feature of this book is the original music accompanying it. Teachers have access to 90 minutes of dynamic sounds, rhythmic percussion, captivating electro-acoustic compositions, and gentle atmospheric selections, delivered through HKPropel, to accompany the learning experiences. The compositions support students' movement explorations, conveying a range of images and emotions and inspiring a variety of responses. In addition, Elementary Dance Education offers the following: Discussion questions for each exercise, prompting in-class discussion and student exploration; the questions come with sample answers or ideas to encourage student responses and spur a fruitful discussion 75 photos and several diagrams to illustrate positions and poses and stimulate ideas for the movement exercises Journal prompts, tailored for older and younger children, to give students the opportunity to respond and reflect on the learning experiences Video links (provided in HKPropel) to help illustrate concepts and exercises, offer examples, or encourage students to watch for something specific in an activity The book's first chapter introduces the basic elements of dance; the remaining seven chapters offer movement exercises in various areas of nature: plants, animals, water, earth, sky, people, and other wonders. This book is a rich and easy-to-implement resource not only for elementary dance educators and physical educators but for classroom teachers as well. The exercises in this book use a template for movement discovery in which students will observe, explore, create, and share. This template "can be applied to all areas of the curriculum," says author Janice Pomer. "It's an invaluable tool for student engagement, satisfying children's capacity to watch, wonder, move, interact, discover, and share." Elementary Dance Education will promote children's creativity and curiosity, engage and challenge their minds and bodies, and help them learn to appreciate and support each other as they work together exploring, creating, and sharing their ideas and insights about the natural world through dance. Note: A code for accessing HKPropel is included with all new print books.

This collaboration between artists, choreographers, researchers, experimental psychologists and cognitive scientists investigates ways in which choreographers and performers make innovative, expressive movement, and audiences interpret what may well be a previously unmapped experience. ""Thinking in Four Dimensions"" is the first book to address the cognitive processes that underpin the creation of new works of contemporary dance. With case studies including data gathered from dance audiences as well as psychological analysis of new dance works, plus interviews with artists and video of performance pieces, ""Thinking in Four Dimensions"" is a unique package. ""Thinking in Four Dimensions"" is available in two formats. The e-book version incorporates text, full-colour images and video, which gives access to unique footage of choreographers and performers creating important new Australian dance works. The d-book is a print-on-demand version of the text with black and white images. This exciting collection of essays suggests that dance-making can be a form of imaginative enquiry - a thinking in time and space - both for those who perform it, and for those who watch.

Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and Cultural Theory in the Early Twentieth Century offers a new interpretation of European modernist dance by addressing it as guiding medium in a vibrant field of gestural culture that ranged across art and philosophy. Taking further Cornelius Castoriadis's concept of the social imaginary, it explores this imaginary's embodied forms. Close readings of dances, photographs, and literary texts are juxtaposed with discussions of gestural theory by thinkers including Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, and Aby Warburg. Choreographic gesture is defined as a force of intermittency that creates a new theoretical status of dance. Author Lucia Ruprecht shows how this also bears on contemporary theory. She shifts emphasis from Giorgio Agamben's preoccupation with gestural mediality to Jacques Ranciere's multiplicity of proliferating, singular gestures, arguing for their ethical and political relevance. Mobilizing dance history and movement analysis, Ruprecht highlights the critical impact of works by choreographers such as Vaslav Nijinsky, Jo Mihaly, and Alexander and Clotilde Sakharoff. She also offers choreographic readings of Franz Kafka and Alfred Doeblin. Gestural Imaginaries proposes that modernist dance conducts a gestural revolution which enacts but also exceeds the insights of past and present cultural theory. It makes a case for archive-based, cross-medial, and critically informed dance studies, transnational German studies, and the theoretical potential of performance itself.

Dancing in the Muddy Temple traces ingredients for an embodied spirituality based in movement and embedded in the land. Drawing from nature immersion, dance, anthropology, and shamanism, Eline Kieft explores improvised movement as a pathway to insight, healing, transformation, and direct interaction with source. This inspiring book offers an intricate road map to explore and strengthen the interwovenness of various layers of self, surroundings, and the sacred. Kieft seamlessly moves between her personal, professional, and academic background, creating an unusual scholarship in which bodily and autobiographical narrative are neatly interwoven with interdisciplinary literature. The work crosses boundaries between cognition and intuition; matter and spirit. Its uniqueness lies in a radical integration of theory and practice, which brings an aliveness to the material that stirs an inquisitive desire to move. Its language inspires confidence and creates a safe space for personal inquiry into a rich and complex territory. This book provides a much-needed medicine for scholars and seekers, dreamers and dancers, philosophers, and artists at a time when the earth and its human and other-than-human-people are hurting. It skillfully distills tools for a practical spirituality of the everyday that explores what it means to be an embodied human on this planet.

Moving Otherwise examines how contemporary dance practices in Buenos Aires, Argentina enacted politics within climates of political and economic violence from the mid-1960s to the mid-2010s. From the repression of military dictatorships to the precarity of economic crises, contemporary dancers and audiences consistently responded to and reimagined the everyday choreographies that have accompanied Argentina's volatile political history. The titular concept, "moving otherwise" names how both concert dance and its off-stage practice and consumption offer alternatives to and modes to critique the patterns of movement and bodily comportment that shape everyday life in contexts marked by violence. Drawing on archival research based in institutional and private collections, over fifty interviews with dancers and choreographers, and the author's embodied experiences as a collaborator and performer with active groups, the book analyzes how a wide range of practices moved otherwise, including concert works, community dance initiatives, and the everyday labor that animates dance. It demonstrates how these diverse practices represent, resist, and remember violence and engender new forms of social mobilization on and off the theatrical stage. As the first book length critical study of Argentine contemporary dance, it introduces a breadth of choreographers to an English speaking audience, including Ana Kamien, Susana Zimmermann, Estela Maris, Alejandro Cervera, Renate Schottelius, Susana Tambutti, Silvia Hodgers, and Silvia Vladimivsky. It also considers previously undocumented aspects of Argentine dance history, including crossings between contemporary dancers and 1970s leftist political militancy, Argentine dance labor movements, political protest, and the prominence of tango themes in contemporary dance works that address the memory of political violence. Contemporary dance, the book demonstrates, has a rich and diverse history of political engagement in Argentina.

Watching Weimar Dance asks what audiences saw in the peculiarly turbulent and febrile moment of the Weimar Republic. It closely analyses the reception of various performances, from cabaret to concert dance and experimental theatre, in their own time and place - at home in interwar Germany, on tour, and later returning from exile after World War II. Spectator reports that performers died or became half-machine archived not only the physicality of past performance, but also the ways audiences used the temporary world of the stage to negotiate pressing social issues, from female visibility within commodity culture to the functioning of human-machine hybrids in an era of increasing technologization. These accounts offer offer limit cases for the body on stage and, in so doing, speak to the preoccupations of the day. Approaching a range of performance artists, including Oskar Schlemmer, Valeska Gert, Kurt Jooss, Mary Wigman, Bertolt Brecht, Anita Berber, and the Tiller Girl troupes, through archives of watching, the reception of these performances also revises and complicates understandings of Ausdruckstanz as the representative dance of this moment in Germany. They further reveal how such practices came to be reconfigured and imbued with new significance in the post-war era. By bringing insights from theatre, dance, and performance studies to German cultural studies, and vice versa, Watching Weimar Dance develops a culturally-situated model of watching that not only offers a revisionist narrative, but also demonstrates new methods for dance scholarship to shape cultural history.

"The first time I saw Sharmila practicing yoga, I was amazed. Her ability to control her body with awe-inspiring precision was mysterious. Her quiet and powerful concentration makes her slowly evolving, rock solid shapes appear like sculpture. By uniting the rich heritage of dance, martial arts and yoga in an unforeseen way, Sharmila is guiding performance into new territory."--Karole Armitage.

Representing dancers, scholars, admirers, and critics, I See America Dancing is a diverse collection of primary documents and articles about the place and shape of dance in the United States from colonial times to the present. This volume offers a lively counterpoint between observers of the dance and dancers' views of what they do when they dance. Dance traditions represented include the Native American pow-wow; tribal music and dance activities on Sunday afternoons in New Orlean's Congo Square; the colonial Playford Balls and their modern offspring, country line dancing; and the Buddhist-inspired Japanese Bon dances in Hawaii. Anti-dance perspectives include government injunctions against Native American dancing and essays from a range of speakers who have declared the waltz, the twist, or the senior prom to be a careless quick-step away from hell or the brothel. I See America Dancing examines the styles that have marked theatrical dance in America, from French ballet to minstrel shows, and presents the views of influential dancers, choreographers, and the pioneers of early modern dance in America. Specific pieces examined include George Ballanchine's ballet Stars and Stripes, Yvonne Rainer's protest piece "Flag Dance, 1970," and Sonje Mayo's "Naked in America." Covering historical social attitudes toward the dance as well as the performers and their works, I See America Dancing is a comprehensive, scholarly sourcebook that captures the energy and passion of this vital artform.

Based on new archival research, this book uniquely presents a fresh interrogation of how, among London's fashionable society, dancing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was variously a means of social modelling, change, conformity and creative individual expression.

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 Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment brings together a cross-section of artists and scholars engaged with the phenomenon of reenactment in dance from a practical and theoretical standpoint. Synthesizing myriad views on danced reenactment and the manner in which this branch of choreographic performance intersects with important cultural concerns around appropriation this Handbook addresses originality, plagiarism, historicity, and spatiality as it relates to cultural geography. Others topics treated include transmission as a heuristic device, the notion of the archive as it relates to dance and as it is frequently contrasted with embodied cultural memory, pedagogy, theory of history, reconstruction as a methodology, testimony and witnessing, theories of history as narrative and the impact of dance on modernist literature, and relations of reenactment to historical knowledge and new media.