Focusing on Egypt during the period 1760 to 1870, this book fills in the historical blanks for a dance form known today in the Middle East as raqs sharki or raqs baladi, and in Western countries as "belly dance." Eyewitness accounts written by European travelers, the major primary source for modern scholars, provide most of the research material. The author shapes these numerous accounts into a coherent whole, providing a meaningful picture of Egyptian female entertainers of the period as professionals in the arts, rather than as a group of unnamed "ethnic" dancers and singers including one or two identified women of dubious reputation. Analysis is given of the contexts of this dance - which was a legitimate performing art form in Egyptian society appreciated by a wide variety of audiences - with a focus on actual performances - and a re-creation their choreography.

Musical Intimacies and Indigenous Imaginaries explores several styles performed in the vital aboriginal musical scene in the western Canadian province of Manitoba, focusing on fiddling, country music, Christian hymnody, and step dancing. In considering these genres and the contexts in which they are performed, author Byron Dueck outlines a compelling theory of musical publics, examines the complex, overlapping social orientations of contemporary musicians, and shows how music and dance play a central role in a distinctive indigenous public culture.
Dueck considers a wide range of contemporary aboriginal performances and venues--urban and rural, secular and sacred, large and small. Such gatherings create opportunities for the expression of distinctive modes of northern Algonquian sociability and for the creative extension of indigenous publicness. In examining these interstitial sites--at once places of intimate interaction and spaces oriented to imagined audiences--this volume considers how Manitoban aboriginal musicians engage with audiences both immediate and unknown; how they negotiate the possibilities mass mediation affords; and how, in doing so, they extend and elaborate indigenous sociability.
Musical Intimacies brings theories of public culture from anthropology and literary criticism into musicological and ethnomusicological discussions while introducing productive new ways of understanding North American indigenous engagement with mass mediation. It is a unique work that will appeal to students and scholars of popular music, musicology, music theory, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. It will be necessary reading for students of American ethnomusicology, First Nations and Native American studies, and Canadian music studies.

Throughout her history, the ballerina has been perceived as the embodiment of beauty and perfection -- she is the feminine ideal. But the reality is another story. Beginning with the earliest ballerinas, who often led double lives as concubines, Deirdre Kelly goes on to review the troubled lives of 19th-century ballerinas, who lived in poverty and worked under torturous and even life-threatening conditions. In the 20th century, George Balanchine created a contradictory ballet culture that simultaneously idealized and oppressed ballerinas, and many of his dancers suffered from anorexia and bulimia or underwent cosmetic surgery to achieve the ideal ethereal form. At the beginning of the 21st century, ballerinas are still underpaid, vulnerable to arbitrary discrimination and dismissal, and expected to bear pain stoically -- but much of this is beginning to change. As Kelly examines the lives of some of the world's best ballerinas, she argues for a rethinking of the world's most graceful dance form -- a rethinking that would position the ballerina at its heart, where she belongs. Highlighting the work of such great ballerinas such as Anna Pavlova, Isadora Duncan, Suzanne Farrell, Gelsey Kirkland, and Evelyn Hart Kelly illustrates how the world of ballet is slowly evolving.

In the early twentieth century, female performers regularly appeared on the stages and screens of American cities. Though advertised as dancers, mimics, singers, or actresses, they often exceeded these categories. Instead, their performances adopted an aesthetic of intermediality, weaving together techniques and elements drawn from a wide variety of genres and media, including ballet, art music, photography, early modern dance, vaudeville traditions, film, and more. Onstage and onscreen, performers borrowed from existing musical scores and narratives, referred to contemporary shows, films, and events, and mimicked fellow performers, skating neatly across various media, art forms, and traditions. Behind the scenes, they experimented with cross-promotion, new advertising techniques, and various technologies to broadcast images and tales of their performances and lives well beyond the walls of American theaters, cabarets, and halls. The performances and conceptions of art that emerged were innovative, compelling, and deeply meaningful.
Body Knowledge: Performance, Intermediality, and American Entertainment at the Turn of the Twentieth Century examines these performances and the performers behind them, highlighting the Ziegfeld Follies and The Passing Show revues, Salome dancers, Isadora Duncan's Wagner dances, Adeline Genee and Bessie Clayton's photographic danced histories, Hazel Mackaye and Ruth St. Denis's pageants, and Anna Pavlova's opera and film projects. By destabilizing the boundaries between various media, genres, and performance spaces, each of these women was able to create performances that negotiated turn-of-the-century American social and cultural issues: contemporary technological developments and the rise of mass reproduction, new modes of perception, the commodification of art and entertainment, the evolution of fan culture and stardom, changing understandings of the body and the self, and above all, shifting conceptions of gender, race, and sexual identity. Tracing the various modes of intermediality at work on- and offstage, Body Knowledge re-imagines early twentieth-century art and entertainment as both fluid and convergent.

For more than two decades, le hip hop has shown France's "other" face: danced by minorities associated with immigration and the suburbs, it has channeled rage against racism and unequal opportunity and offered a movement vocabulary for the expression of the multicultural difference that challenges the universalist discourse of the Republic. French hip-hoppers subscribe to black U.S. culture to articulate their own difference but their mouv' developed differently, championed by a Socialist cultural policy as part of the patrimoine culturel, instituted as a pedagogy and supported as an art of the banlieue. In the multicultural mix of "Arabic" North African, African and Asian forms circulating with classical and contemporary dance performance in France, if hip hop is positioned as a civic discourse, and hip hop dancer as legitimate employment, it is because beyond this political recuperation, it is a figural language in which dancers express themselves differently, figure themselves as something or someone else. French hip hop develops into concert dance not through the familiar model of a culture industry, but within a Republic of Culture; it nuances an "Anglo-Saxon" model of identity politics with a "francophone" post-colonial identity poetics and grants its dancers the statut civil of artists, technicians who develop and transmit body-based knowledge. This book- the first in English to introduce readers to the French mouv' -analyzes the choreographic development of hip hop into la danse urbaine, touring on national and international stages, as hip hoppeurs move beyond the banlieue, figuring new forms within the mobility brought by new media and global migration.

Mixed methods research techniques, combining both quantitative and qualitative elements, have become well established throughout the social, behavioural and natural sciences. This is the first book to focus on the application of mixed methods research in the movement sciences, specifically in sport, physical education and dance. Researchers and practitioners in each of these fields are concerned with the study of habitual behaviour in naturalistic contexts, and of the concurrent and sequential nature of events and states, precisely the kind of work that multi-method research design can help illuminate. The book is arranged into four sections. The first provides a thorough overview of mixed methods procedures and research design, and summarizes their applicability to the movement sciences. The remaining sections then offer detailed case studies of mixed methods research in team and individual sports (analyzing hidden patterns of play and optimising technique); kinesics and dance (analyzing motor skills behaviour in childhood, and the complexity of motor responses in dance); and physical education (detecting interaction patterns in group situations, and optimizing non-verbal communication by teachers and sports coaches). Mixed Methods Research in the Movement Sciences offers an important new tool for researchers and helps to close the gap between the analysis of expert performance and our understanding of the general principles of movement science. It is important reading for any student, researcher or professional with an interest in motor control, sport and dance pedagogy, coaching, performance analysis or decision-making in sport.

This is the story of English Country Dance, from its 18th century roots in the English cities and countryside, to its transatlantic leap to the U.S. in the 20th century, told by not only a renowned historian but also a folk dancer, who has both immersed himself in the rich history of the folk tradition and rehearsed its steps. In City Folk, Daniel J. Walkowitz argues that the history of country and folk dancing in America is deeply intermeshed with that of political liberalism and the 'old left.' He situates folk dancing within surprisingly diverse contexts, from progressive era reform, and playground and school movements, to the changes in consumer culture, and the project of a modernizing, cosmopolitan middle class society. Tracing the spread of folk dancing, with particular emphases on English Country Dance, International Folk Dance, and Contra, Walkowitz connects the history of folk dance to social and international political influences in America. Through archival research, oral histories, and ethnography of dance communities, City Folk allows dancers and dancing bodies to speak. From the norms of the first half of the century, marked strongly by Anglo-Saxon traditions, to the Cold War nationalism of the post-war era, and finally on to the counterculture movements of the 1970s, City Folk injects the riveting history of folk dance in the middle of the story of modern America.

Choreographer Alex Romero created ""Jailhouse Rock"", the iconic Elvis Presley production number, but never received screen credit for his contribution. This book tells his story. The son of a Mexican general, Romero escaped the early 20th century revolution, joined his family's vaudeville dance act and became a dancer in Hollywood. Part of Jack Cole's exclusive Columbia dance troupe, he was eventually hired as a staff assistant at MGM, where he worked on Take Me Out to the Ballgame, American in Paris, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and On the Town, among many others. When Romero transitioned into a full-time choreography, he created the dances for numerous films, including Love Me or Leave Me, I'll Cry Tomorrow, tom thumb, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, and three additional movies for Elvis. Known for his inventive style and creative use of props, Romero was instrumental in bringing rock and roll to the screen. This biography includes first-person accounts of his collaborations with Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, and others.

In her heyday, Martha Graham's name was internationally recognized within the modern dance world, and though trends in choreography continue to change, her status in dance still inspires regard. In this, the first extended feminist look at this modern dance pioneer, Victoria Thoms explores the cult of Graham and her dancing through a feminist lens that exposes the gendered meaning behind much of her work. Thoms synthesizes a diverse archive of material on Graham from films, photographs, memoir, and critique in order to uniquely highlight her contribution to the dance world and arts culture in general.

The story of this groundbreaking summer dance programme is told through the voices of staff, faculty, and students. Administrative director Mary Josephine Shelly's previously unpublished writings form a key summary of eight of the nine summer sessions. The Bennington School of the Dance was held from 1934 to 1942 at Bennington College in Vermont with one summer spent at Mills College in California. Its effects were far-reaching in the development and dissemination of modern dance as an original American art form. The school produced unique choreographic works by teachers in residence: Martha Graham, Hanya Holm, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman. Leading choreographers of the later 20th century such as Merce Cunningham, Anna Halprin, Jose Limon, Alwin Nikolais and Anna Sokolow participated at the school. The largest portion of students were high school and college level teachers who would spread modern dance across the country and abroad.

Rudolf Laban was one of the leading dance theorists of the twentieth century. His work on dance analysis and notation raised the status of dance as both an art form and a scholarly discipline. This is the first book to combine: an overview of Laban's life, work and influences an exploration of his key ideas, including the revolutionary "Laban Movement Analysis" system analysis of his works Die Grunen Clowns and The Mastery of Movement and their relevance to dance theater from the 1920s onwards a detailed exercise-based breakdown of Laban's key teachings. As a first step towards critical understanding, and as an initial exploration before going on to further, primary research, Routledge Performance Practitioners are unbeatable value for today's student.

Dancer/scholars from around the world have contributed essays on belly dance to this book. They all carefully consider the transformation of an improvised folk form from North Africa and the Middle East into a popular global dance practice. The essays explore the differences between the solo improvisational forms of North Africa and the Middle East, often referred to as raqs sharki, which are part of family celebrations, and the numerous globalised versions of this dance form, belly dance, derived from the movement vocabulary of North Africa and the Middle East but with a variety of performance styles distinct from its site of origin. Local versions of belly dance have grown and changed along with the role that dance plays in the community. The global evolution of belly dance is an inspiring example of the interplay of imagination, the internet and the social forces of local communities.

This book has systematic directions for those who are creating a dance company for young audiences how to handle bookings, write effective grants, handle crowds of children in a theater environment, and keep children's interest high--and how to maintain the support and the appreciation of presenters, teachers, and principals for whom they perform. Profiles of ten successful dance companies who perform for children are provided. The book also supplies practical tools or building a career in dance. The book's touring and production information can be applied to almost any performing group that uses the medium of dance to deliver its message--from professional dance companies and organizations to university, high school, studio dance performers.

This book is an ode to the mythological heritage of Bharatanatyam. The visual narrative captures the rich heritage of this temple dance and its original exponents, the Devadasis or 'handmaidens of the deity'. Its repertoire of movements and moods bring alive the fascinating stories of Hindu gods and goddesses and their kaleidoscopic lives. In the following pages, the authors have traced the myths and legends that are cherished in our performing arts, to delight the culture-curious reader. And what is interesting is that in these stories, the reader will discover the inter-connectedness of ancient mythologies around the world. Perhaps such discoveries go a long way in validating the role that art plays in connecting civilisations. The book is designed to engage the reader without pedagogy or scholastic strictures, but with a lightness of touch, that entertains while it informs. Because the vision here is to weave information, anecdotes and trivia, together in the spirit of a popular cultural ranconteur. Replete with rare photographs curated from the Sohinimoksha World Dance and Communications archives, complemented by a lucid narrative that wraps facts in the language of romance and adventure, this book promises to be a collector's item for those who value the legacy of India's most celebrated dance form. For glimpses of some live performances by Sohini Roychowdhury, and her Sohinimoksha World Dance troupe, celebrating the music, dance, mythology of India and the World, go on-line to 'Dancing With The God.... with Sohinimoksha World Dance' at https://youtu.be/naR7p6SKiko

Modernism on Stage restores Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes to its central role in the Parisian art world of the 1910s and 1920s. During those years, the Ballets Russes' stage served as a dynamic forum for the interaction of artistic genres - dance, music and painting - in a mixed-media form inspired by Richard Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art). This interdisciplinary study combines a broad history of Diaghilev's troupe with close readings of four ballets designed by canonical modernist artists: Pablo Picasso, Sonia Delaunay, Henri Matisse, and Giorgio de Chirico. Experimental both in concept and form, these productions redefine our understanding of the interconnected worlds of the visual and performing arts, elite culture and mass entertainment in Paris between the two world wars. This volume traces the ways in which artists working with the Ballets Russes adapted painterly styles to the temporal, three-dimensional and corporeal medium of ballet. Analyzing interactions among sets, costumes, choreography, and musical accompaniment, the book establishes what the Ballets Russes' productions looked like and how audiences reacted to them. Juliet Bellow brings dance to bear upon modernist art history as more than a source of imagery or ornament: she spotlights a complex dialogue among art forms that did not preclude but rather enhanced artists' interrogation of the limits of medium.

The visionary choreographer and dancer Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) not only revolutionized dance in the twentieth century but blazed a path for other visionaries who would follow in her wake. While many biographies have explored Duncan's crucial role as one of the founders of modern dance, no other book has proved as critical-as both historical record and vivid evocation of a riveting life-as her autobiography. From her early enchantment with classical music and poetry to her great successes abroad, to her sensational love affairs and headline-grabbing personal tragedies, Duncan's story is a dramatic one. My Life still stands alone as "a great document, revealing the truth of her life as she understood it, without reticence or apology or compromise" (New York Herald Tribune). Now, in this fully restored edition, with its risque recollections and fervent idealism, My Life can be appreciated by a new generation.

Dancing in Blackness is a professional dancer's personal journey over four decades, across three continents and 23 countries, and through defining moments in the story of black dance in America. In this memoir, Halifu Osumare reflects on what blackness and dance have meant to her life and international career. Osumare's story begins in 1960s San Francisco amid the Black Arts Movement, black militancy, and hippie counterculture. It was there, she says, that she chose dance as her own revolutionary statement. Osumare describes her experiences as a young black dancer in Europe teaching ""jazz ballet"" and establishing her own dance company in Copenhagen. Moving to New York City, she danced with the Rod Rodgers Dance Company and took part in integrating the programs at the Lincoln Center. After doing dance fieldwork in Ghana, Osumare returned to California and helped develop Oakland's black dance scene. Osumare introduces readers to some of the major artistic movers and shakers she collaborated with throughout her career, including Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Jean-Leon Destine, Alvin Ailey, and Donald McKayle. Now a black studies scholar, Osumare uses her extraordinary experiences to reveal the overlooked ways that dance has been a vital tool in the black struggle for recognition, justice, and self-empowerment. Her memoir is the inspiring story of an accomplished dance artist who has boldly developed and proclaimed her identity as a black woman.

Driven by facts and hard data, this volume reveals how gender dynamics affect the lives of dancers, choreographers, directors, students, educators, and others who are involved in the world of dance. It unpacks real issues that matter-not just to dance communities but also to broader societal trends in the West. In these studies, dancers and dance scholars take readers into classrooms, rehearsals, performances, festivals, competitions, college dance departments, and company administrations. They ask incisive questions and analyze data to learn about the role of gender in attitudes, stereotypes, pedagogy, funding inequities, representation, casting, and body image. Dance is an important part of our larger cultural fabric, and this volume adds powerful findings to today's discussions about living in a gendered society.

Making Music for Modern Dance traces the collaborative approaches, working procedures, and aesthetic views of the artists who forged a new and distinctly American art form during the first half of the 20th century. The book offers riveting first-hand accounts from innovative artists in the throes of their creative careers and provides a cross-section of the challenges faced by modern choreographers and composers in America. These articles are complemented by excerpts from astute observers of the music and dance scene as well as by retrospective evaluations of past collaborative practices.
Beginning with the careers of pioneers Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn, and continuing through the avant-garde work of John Cage for Merce Cunningham, the book offers insights into the development of modern dance in relation to its music. Editor Katherine Teck's introductions and afterword offer historical context and tie the artists' essays in with collaborative practices in our own time. The substantive notes suggest further materials of interest to students, practicing dance artists and musicians, dance and music history scholars, and to all who appreciate dance.

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.

Founder of the Philadelphia Dance Company (Philadanco) and the Philadelphia School of Dance Arts, Joan Myers Brown's personal and professional histories reflect the hardships as well as the advances of African Americans in the artistic and social developments of the twentieth century and into the new millennium. Dixon Gottschild uses Brown's career as the fulcrum to leverage an exploration of the connection between performance, society, and race, beginning with Brown's predecessors in the 1920s and a concert dance tradition that had no previous voice to tell its story from the inside out. Brown's background and richly contoured biography are object lessons in survival--a true American narrative.

Mixed methods research techniques, combining both quantitative and qualitative elements, have become well established throughout the social, behavioural and natural sciences. This is the first book to focus on the application of mixed methods research in the movement sciences, specifically in sport, physical education and dance. Researchers and practitioners in each of these fields are concerned with the study of habitual behaviour in naturalistic contexts, and of the concurrent and sequential nature of events and states, precisely the kind of work that multi-method research design can help illuminate. The book is arranged into four sections. The first provides a thorough overview of mixed methods procedures and research design, and summarizes their applicability to the movement sciences. The remaining sections then offer detailed case studies of mixed methods research in team and individual sports (analyzing hidden patterns of play and optimising technique); kinesics and dance (analyzing motor skills behaviour in childhood, and the complexity of motor responses in dance); and physical education (detecting interaction patterns in group situations, and optimizing non-verbal communication by teachers and sports coaches). Mixed Methods Research in the Movement Sciences offers an important new tool for researchers and helps to close the gap between the analysis of expert performance and our understanding of the general principles of movement science. It is important reading for any student, researcher or professional with an interest in motor control, sport and dance pedagogy, coaching, performance analysis or decision-making in sport.

The language of tap dancing is as rich and varied as that of any art, and different choreographers, teachers and performers often use totally different terms for exactly the same step. The various names of all steps and clear descriptions of them are collected for the first time in this reference work. The emphasis is on all variations of a name, from universally recognized terms to simple ""pet"" names that individual performers and choreographers have created, with extensive cross-references provided. Each of the steps is fully described, with appropriate counts, explanations and history. Many antique and unusual steps such as the Patting Juba, the Quack and the Swanee Shuffle are included.

With its dynamic choreographies and booming drumbeats, taiko has gained worldwide popularity since its emergence in 1950s Japan. Harnessed by Japanese Americans in the late 1960s, taiko's sonic largesse and buoyant energy challenged stereotypical images of Asians in America as either model minorities or sinister foreigners. While the majority of North American taiko players are Asian American, over 400 groups now exist across the US and Canada, and players come from a range of backgrounds. Using ethnographic and historical approaches, combined with in-depth performance description and analysis, this book explores the connections between taiko and Asian American cultural politics. Based on original and archival interviews, as well as the author's extensive experience as a taiko player, this book highlights the Midwest as a site for Asian American cultural production and makes embodied experience central to inquiries about identity, including race, gender, and sexuality. The book builds on insights from the fields of dance studies, ethnomusicology, performance studies, queer and feminist theory, and Asian American studies to argue that taiko players from a variety of identity positions perform Asian America on stage, as well as in rehearsals, festivals, schools, and through interactions with audiences. While many taiko players play simply for the love of its dynamism and physicality, this book demonstrates that politics are built into even the most mundane aspects of rehearsing and performing.

Written by an international team of experts, this book brings together the fruits of recent research into all areas of Russian theatre history. Of particular interest are the chapters written by senior Russian academics, who not only reveal previously unpublished documentation but also offer alternative insights into their subjects. The History covers the whole range of Russian dramatic experience, from puppet theatre to ballet and grand opera, but its emphasis is on the practice of theatre, especially acting, and the final chapter puts Russian theatre into the wider context of Western performance and the stage. The History begins with the earliest endeavours, with rituals and entertainments, and moves through to the emergence of established drama in the eighteenth century. The history of twentieth-century Russian theatre is a special feature of the volume, with chapters following the progress of drama and performance from the revolution, through communism, up until recent years.