While Jews are commonly referred to as the "people of the book," American Jewish choreographers have consistently turned to dance as a means to articulate personal and collective identities; tangle with stereotypes; advance social and political agendas; and imagine new possibilities for themselves as individuals, artists, and Jews. Dancing Jewish delineates this rich history, demonstrating that Jewish choreographers have not only been vital contributors to American modern and postmodern dance, but that they have also played a critical and unacknowledged role in the history of Jews in the United States. By examining the role dance has played in the struggle between Jewish identification and integration into American life, the book moves across disciplinary boundaries to show how cultural identity, nationality, ethnicity, and gender are formed and performed through the body and its motions. A dancer and choreographer, as well as an historian, Rebecca Rossen offers evocative analyses of dances while asserting the importance of embodied methodologies to academic research. Featuring over fifty images, a companion website, and key works from 1930 to 2005 by a wide range of artists-including David Dorfman, Dan Froot, David Gordon, Hadassah, Margaret Jenkins, Pauline Koner, Dvora Lapson, Liz Lerman, Sophie Maslow, Anna Sokolow, and Benjamin Zemach-Dancing Jewish offers a comprehensive framework for interpreting performance and establishes dance as a crucial site in which American Jews have grappled with cultural belonging, personal and collective histories, and the values that bind and pull them apart.

Often called the Picasso, Stravinsky, or Frank Lloyd Wright of the dance world, Martha Graham revolutionized ballet stages across the globe. Using newly discovered archival sources, award-winning choreographer and dance historian Mark Franko reframes Graham's most famous creations, those from the World War II era, by restoring their rich historical and personal context. Graham matured as an artist during the global crisis of fascism, the conflict of World War II, and the post-war period that ushered in the Cold War. Franko focuses on four of her most powerful works, American Document (1938), Appalachian Spring (1944), Night Journey (1948), and Voyage (1953), tracing their connections to Graham's intense feelings of anti-fascism and her fascination with psychoanalysis. Moreover, Franko explores Graham's intense personal and professional bond with dancer and choreographer Erick Hawkins. The author traces the impact of their constantly changing feelings about each other and about their work, and how Graham wove together strands of love, passion, politics, and myth to create a unique and iconically American school of choreography and dance.

Since 1990, thousands of Hungarians have vacationed at summer camps devoted to Hungarian folk dance in the Transylvanian villages of neighboring Romania. This folk tourism and connected everyday practices of folk dance revival take place against the backdrop of an increasingly nationalist political environment in Hungary. In Movement of the People, Mary N. Taylor takes readers inside the folk revival movement known as dancehouse (tanchaz) that sustains myriad events where folk dance is central and championed by international enthusiasts and UNESCO. Contextualizing tanchaz in a deeper history of populism and nationalism, Taylor examines the movement's emergence in 1970s socialist institutions, its transformation through the postsocialist period, and its recent recognition by UNESCO as a best practice of heritage preservation. Approaching the populist and popular practices of folk revival as a form of national cultivation, Movement of the People interrogates the everyday practices, relationships, institutional contexts, and ideologies that contribute to the making of Hungary's future, as well as its past.

Martha Graham's Cold War frames the story of Martha Graham and her particular brand of dance modernism as pro-Western Cold War propaganda used by the United States government to promote American democracy. Representing every seated president from Dwight D. Eisenhower through Ronald Reagan, Graham performed politics in the global field for over thirty years. Why did the State Department consistently choose Martha Graham? As with other art forms such as jazz or avant-garde paintings, modern dance was seen to demonstrate American values of individualism and freedom; the choreographer used the freed body to make a new dance technique that could find the essence of human narratives. Graham targeted elites and its youth with modern dance to propound the 'universalism' of human rights under the banner of American democracy. In her choreography, argues author Victoria Phillips, Graham recast the stories of the Western canon through female protagonists whom she captured as timeless, seemingly beyond current politics, and in so doing implied superior political and cultural values of the Free World. Centering on powerful yet not demonstrably American female characters, the stories Graham danced seduced and captured the imaginations of elite audiences without seeming to force a determinedly American agenda. When her characters grew mythic on stage, they became the stories of all mankind, as Graham termed it. "My dances are ages old in meaning," she declared. But Graham took the pro-American argument one step further than her artistic compatriots. She added the trope of the frontier to her repertory. In the Cold War, Graham's particular modernism and the woman herself ossified, as did political aims of a cultural diplomacy based on an appeal to foreign elites. Phillips lays bare the side-by-side trajectories between the aging of Graham's choreography, her work as an ambassador, and the political dominance of the United States as a global power. With her tours and Cold War modernism, she demonstrated the power of the individual, immigrants, republicanism, and freedom from walls and metaphorical fences through cultural diplomacy with the unfettered language of movement and dance.

Religious life and public life are both passionately performed, but often understood to exclude one another. This book's array of voices investigates the publics hailed by religious performances and the challenges they offer to theories of the democratic public sphere.

Theatre and Performance in the Asia-Pacific is an innovative study of contemporary theatre and performance within the framework of modernity in the Asia-Pacific. It is an analysis of the theatrical imaginative as it manifests in theatre and performance in Australia, Indonesia, Japan and Singapore.

The effort to win federal protection for dance in the United States was a racialized and gendered contest. Picart traces the evolution of choreographic works from being federally non-copyrightable to becoming a category potentially copyrightable under the 1976 Copyright Act, specifically examining Loie Fuller, George Balanchine, and Martha Graham.

Street theatre invades a public space, shakes it up and disappears, but the memory of the disruption haunts the site for audiences who experience it. This book looks at how the dynamic interrelationship of performance, participant and place creates a politicized aesthetic of public space that enables the public to rehearse democratic practices.

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.

Migration makes a profound impression on identity (gender and sexuality, culture, class, status), its expressions, and performance. Research in this field has demonstrated that migrant communities often cast women as bearers of cultural reproduction. This is especially the case when women choose to become representatives of their community through cultural dance performances. Such performances are also a means to express the migrant life of movement and a way to maintain their sense of well-being. Dancing the Feminine is a compelling vision of expressions of gender and identity at the heart of the Asian womens experience. For the Indonesian female migrants, performing femininity is frequently negotiated in a cross-cultural context. The performances that author Monika Winarnita analyses are dramas of human interaction brought up through fissures and resolutions between the performers and their various audiences. The book provides analysis of these cultural performances as rituals of belonging, which demonstrate that in the diaspora meanings of the ritual are always open to being contested. A particular appeal of this book is the way in which cultural dance performance offers profound insight into migrants life experience as well as into how human beings tell their stories and interact with one another. Based on her experience of performing dance with Indonesian migrant women in Australia, the author provides a unique and novel set of research data that contributes to a diverse body of scholarly work in migration, performance, gender, sexuality and cultural studies, anthropology, and Asian studies.

Digital traces, whether digitized (programs, notebooks, drawings, etc.) or born digital (emails, websites, video recordings, etc.), constitute a major challenge for the memory of the ephemeral performing arts. Digital technology transforms traces into data and, in doing so, opens them up to manipulation. This paradigm shift calls for a renewal of methodologies for writing the history of theater today, analyzing works and their creative process, and preserving performances. At the crossroads of performing arts studies, the history, digital humanities, conservation and archiving, these methodologies allow us to take into account what is generally dismissed, namely, digital traces that are considered too complex, too numerous, too fragile, of dubious authenticity, etc. With the analysis of Merce Cunningham's digital traces as a guideline, and through many other examples, this book is intended for researchers and archivists, as well as artists and cultural institutions.

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.

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 volume of essays combines research from neuroscience, conscious studies, methods of training performers, modes of creating a staged narrative, Asian aesthetics, and post-modern theories of performance in an examination of the relationship between consciousness and performance.

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.

Dance theatre has become a site of transformation in the Irish performance landscape. This book conducts a socio-political and cultural reading of dance theatre practice in Ireland from Yeats' dance plays at the start of the 20th century to Celtic-Tiger-era works of Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre and CoisCeim Dance Theatre at the start of the 21st.

This book explores the nexus between gender, ageing and culture in dancers practicing a variety of genres. It challenges existing cultural norms which equate ageing with bodily decline and draws on an interdisciplinary theoretical framework to explore alternatives for developing a culturally valued mature subjectivity through the practice of dance.

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.

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.

Belle-epoque Paris witnessed the emergence of a vibrant and diverse dance scene, one that crystallized around the Ballets Russes, the Russian dance company formed by impresario Sergey Diaghilev. The company has long served as a convenient turning point in the history of dance, celebrated for its revolutionary choreography and innovative productions. This book presents a fresh slant on this much-told history. Focusing on the relation between music and dance, Davinia Caddy approaches the Ballets Russes with a wide-angled lens that embraces not just the choreographic, but also the cultural, political, theatrical and aesthetic contexts in which the company made its name. In addition, Caddy examines and interprets contemporary French dance practices, throwing new light on some of the most important debates and discourses of the day.

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.

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.

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

Rudolf Laban (1879 1958) was a pioneer in dance and movement, who found an extraordinary range of application for his ideas; from industry to drama, education and therapy. Laban believed that you can understand about human beings by observing how they move, and devised two complimentary methods of notating the shape and quality of movements.

The Laban Sourcebook offers a comprehensive account of Laban s writings. It includes extracts from his five books in English and from his four works in German, written in the 1920s and translated here for the first time.

This book draws on archival research in England and Germany to chart the development of Laban s groundbreaking ideas through a variety of documents, including letters, articles, transcripts of interviews, and his unpublished Effort and Recovery. It covers:

• The beginning of his career in Germany and Switzerland in the 1910s.
• His astonishing rise to fame in Germany in the 1920s as a dance teacher, choreographer and creator of public dance events.
• Following his move to England in 1938, the application of his ideas to drama, education, industry, and therapy.

Each extract has a short preface providing contextual background, and highlighting and explaining key terms. Passages have been selected and are introduced by many of the world s leading Laban scholars.