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 Of particular interest are the chapters written by senior Russian academics, who not only reveal previously unpublished documentation but also offer alternative insights into their subjects.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.

Training in somatic techniques-- holistic body-centered movement that promotes psycho-physical awareness and well-being--provides an effective means of improving dance students' efficiency and ease of movement. However, dance educators do not always have the resources to incorporate this knowledge into their classes. This volume explains the importance of somatics, introduces fundamental somatic principles that are central to the dance technique class, and offers tips on incorporating these principles into a dance curriculum. The authors demystify somatic thinking by explaining the processes in terms of current scientific research. By presenting both a philosophical approach to teaching as well as practical instruction tools, this work provides a valuable guide to somatics for dance teachers of any style or level.

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

The tango is easily the most iconic dance of the twentieth century and now of the twenty-first. This historical text peels back the propaganda that characterizes the dance, revealing both its true nature and that of the culture that created it. Topics covered include the tango's earliest origins, the sexualization of the dance, its place in Argentinian culture, and the mythological prohibition against it. This work explores the tango's unparalleled popularity, finding in it the irreducible universal: our common humanity and our creative solidarity.

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.

Dance played a fundamental role in French Baroque theatrical entertainments. Le Mariage de la Grosse Cathos, a comic mascarade composed by Andre Danican Philidor in 1688, is of major importance, because it is the only theatrical work from the court of Louis XIV to have survived complete in all its components - choreography, music, and text, both spoken and sung. It provides a concrete model not only of how dance was integrated into the musical theatre, but of how ballets - or even operaswere staged. Moreover, it uses a previously unknown dance notation system developed around the same time as Feuillet notation by choreographer Jean Favier l'aine. This book reproduces the entire manuscript of the mascarade and provides a comprehensive study of the work itself and of the circumstances in which it was created and performed. Chapters devoted to the music, the dance, and the performers provide a framework for understanding the performance context not only of this work, but of other court entertainments of the period. A study and evaluation of the notation system in which the dances are recorded, together with detailed analyses of the dances and of the movement indications for the musicians, complete the monograph.

While dance has always been as demanding as contact sports, intuitive boundaries distinguish the two forms of performance for men. Dance is often regarded as a feminine activity, and men who dance are frequently stereotyped as suspect, gay, or somehow unnatural. But what really happens when men dance?
When Men Dance offers a progressive vision that boldly articulates double-standards in gender construction within dance and brings hidden histories to light in a globalized debate. A first of its kind, this trenchant look at the stereotypes and realities of male dancing brings together contributions from leading and rising scholars of dance from around the world to explore what happens when men dance. The dancing male body emerges in its many contexts, from the ballet, modern, and popular dance worlds to stages in Georgian and Victorian England, Weimar Germany, India and the Middle East. The men who dance and those who analyze them tell stories that will be both familiar and surprising for insiders and outsiders alike.

B-boying is a form of Afro-diasporic competitive dance that developed in the Bronx, NY in the early 1970s. Widely - though incorrectly - known as "breakdancing," it is often dismissed as a form of urban acrobatics set to music. In reality, however, b-boying is a deeply traditional and profoundly expressive art form that has been passed down from teacher to student for almost four decades. Foundation: B-boys, B-girls and Hip-Hop Culture in New York offers the first serious study of b-boying as both unique dance form and a manifestation of the most fundamental principles of hip-hop culture. Drawing on anthropological and historical research, interviews and personal experience as a student of the dance, Joseph Schloss presents a nuanced picture of b-boying and its social context. From the dance's distinctive musical repertoire and traditional educational approaches to its complex stylistic principles and secret battle strategies, Foundation illuminates a previously unexamined thread in the complex tapestry that is contemporary hip-hop.

In the earliest years of the twentieth century, North American ballroom dancers favored the waltz or the polka. But in the 1910s, a new dance, the tango, broke onto the United States scene when Vernon and Irene Castle performed it in a Broadway musical. Rudolph Valentino, Arthur Murray, and Xavier Cugat popularized it even more in the 1920s and 1930s, and thousands of people were crowding dance floors around the country to hear the music and dance the tango. This work chronicles the history of the tango in the United States, from its antecedents in Argentina, Paris and London to the present day. It covers the dancers, musicians, and composers who were promoting it, and the tango's influence on American music. Chapters are dedicated to Vernon and Irene Castle, Rudolph Valentino, Arthur Murray, Xavier Cugat, the Big Band and jazz singers who incorporated tangos with English lyrics into their repertoires, Juan Carlos Cobian, Osvaldo Fresedo, Francisco Canaro, Carlos Gardel, Astor Piazzolla, the influence of World War II on the tango, portrayals of the tango in the movies and ballet, and the tango recordings of Gerry Mulligan, Gary Burton, Al Di Meola, Yo-Yo Ma, and Julio Iglesias, among many other topics.

What world has been constructed for dancing through the use of the term 'world dance'? What kinds of worlds do we as scholars create for a given dance when we undertake to describe and analyze it? This book endeavours to make new epistemological space for the analysis of the world's dance by offering a variety of new analytic approaches.

Choreographing Shakespeare presents a hitherto unexplored history of the choreographers and performers who have created dance adaptations of Shakespeare. This book investigates forty dance works in genres such as ballet, modern dance, and hip-hop, produced between 1940 and 2016 by choreographers in Britain, America, and Europe, all of which use Shakespeare's plays and Sonnets as their source material. By combining scholarly analysis of these productions with practice-based conversations from six contemporary choreographers, Klett offers both breadth of coverage and in-depth analysis of how Shakespeare's poetic language is translated into the usually wordless medium of dance, and shows exactly how these dance adaptations move beyond the Shakespearean texts to engage with musical and choreographic influences. Ideal for students of Shakespeare and Dance Studies, Choreographing Shakespeare explores how dance adaptations strive to design legible and intelligible stories, while ultimately celebrating the beauty of pure movement.

Popular social dances can reveal a lot about the lifestyle, culture, and social class of the people who perform them. The kicks, turns, twists, and other subtle nuances of each dance reflect and represent particular periods of a culture's history while they also profoundly influence that culture's fashion, music, and use of leisure time. This book investigates the historical development and importance of several popular dance crazes from the 19th and early 20th centuries, evaluating in particular how their very existence as 'taboo' cultural fads led to initial outrage while ultimately providing a catalyst for lasting social reform. The book opens with a brief overview of anti-dance sentiment from around the fourth century to the present day. It then focuses on couple dances of the 19th and early 20th centuries, revealing how these social dances in particular acted as an expression of this tumultuous period in history while revealing the shifting social attitudes of the day. The waltz, perhaps the most beloved and most maligned social dance to come out of this period, evoked indignant reaction from religious leaders and other self-appointed arbiters of social morality who sermonized against the corrupting influence of social dancing on decency and health. In addition to examining the impact of the waltz craze on fashion, music, leisure, and social reform, the text describes the violent opposition to the dance and the proliferation of both anti-dance and courtesy literature during the height of the waltz's popularity. It then explores these same issues as they relate to other dance crazes of the early 1900s, including the Charleston, the Tango, and Ragtime dances such as the Turkey Trot, Grizzly Bear, and Bunny Hug.

Dance and Light examines the interconnected relationship between movement and design, the fluid partnership that exists between the two disciplines, and the approaches that designers can take to enhance dance performances through lighting design. The book demystifies lighting for the dancer and helps designers understand how the dancer/choreographer thinks about their art form, providing insight into the choreographer's process and exploring how designers can make the most of their resources. The author shares anecdotes and ideas from an almost 50-year career as a lighting designer, along with practical examples and insights from colleagues, and stresses the importance of clear communication between designers, choreographers, and dancers. Attention is also given to the choreographer who wants to learn what light can do to help enhance their work on stage. Written in short, stand-alone chapters that allow readers to quickly navigate to areas of interest, Dance and Light is a valuable resource for lighting design classes wishing to add a section on dance lighting, as well as for choreography classes who want to better equip young artists for a significant collaborative partnership.

The Everyday Dancer is a new and honest account of the business of dancing from a writer with first hand experience of the profession. Structured around the daily schedule, The Everyday Dancer goes behind the velvet curtain, the gilt and the glamour to uncover the everyday realities of a career in dance. Starting out with the obligatory daily 'class', the book progresses through the repetition of rehearsals, the excitement of creating new work, the nervous tension of the half hour call, the pressures of performance and the anti-climax of curtain down. Through this vivid portrait of a dancer's every day, Deborah Bull reveals the arc of a dancer's life: from the seven-year-old's very first ballet class, through training, to company life, up through the ranks from corps de ballet to principal and then, not thirty years after it all began, to retirement and the inevitable sense of loss that comes with saying goodbye to your childhood dreams.

This analytical history traces representations of flamenco dance in Spain and abroad from the twentieth century through the present, using flamenco histories, film appearances of flamenco, accounts of live performances, and interviews with practitioners to map the emergence of a global dance practice. Focusing on the stereotype of the dancing body as the site of political and social tensions, it places that image in an international dialogue between tourists, flamenco purists, dictators, poets, filmmakers, and dancers. After laying the groundwork for an analysis of flamenco historiography, the text delves into such topics as images of the female flamenco dancer in films by Luis Bunuel, Carlos Saura, and Antonio Gades; the lasting stereotypes of flamenco bodies and Andalusian culture originated in Prosper Merimee's novella Carmen; and, the ways in which contemporary flamenco dancers such as Belen Maya, Pastora Galvan, and Rocio Molina negotiate the flamenco stereotype of Carmen as well as the return of an idealized Spanish feminine that pervades 'traditional' flamenco. Informed by political and cultural theory as well as works in feminist and gender studies, this ambitious study illuminates the conflicting stories that compose the history of flamenco.

'In the Wings' brings to life the exhilarating and physically-demanding life of the dancers in America's largest dance company. Froman gives a first-hand view of what it is like to dance at the highest level, from the rigors of daily training to the transcendent moments on stage.

One of the few studies covering both Broadway and Hollywood musicals, this book explores most of the most famous musicals of the past two centuries, along with many others. Presented as an introductory text for musical, dance and theater majors, as well as for musical lovers, the book includes references for nearly 1000 internet video examples of dance and song.

This study describes and analyzes the phenomenal popularity of exotic dance forms among mainstream Americans. Throughout the twentieth century and especially since 1950, millions of Americans have begun learning and performing various Balkan dances, the tango, and other Latin American dances, along with the classical dances of India, Japan, and Indonesia.While most previous studies in dance ethnography and anthropology have focused specifically on ""dancing in the field,"" or the dancing that native dancers do in their own environments, this study turns the tables to examine the ways in which ethnic dancing has allowed many Americans to create more exciting and romantic identities through dancing the dances of the ""exotic other,"" if only within the framed moment of a one-time dance lesson or performance. Throughout the work, the author describes the uniquely American enthusiasm for learning exotic dances, describing specific deficiencies in the American cultural identity that have led massive numbers of Americans to seek new or alternative identities through the various exotic dance genres.

In this memoir of a roller coaster career on the New York stage, former actor and dancer Bettijane Sills offers a highly personal look at the art and practice of George Balanchine, one of ballet's greatest choreographers, and the inner workings of his world-renowned company during its golden years. After getting her start on the stage as a child actor on Broadway, Bettijane Sills joined the New York City Ballet in 1961 as a member of the corps de ballet, working her way up to the level of soloist. As a company dancer who remained outside the spotlight that the principals enjoyed, Sills experienced a side of the company that prima ballerinas did not share in. She tells stories of taking class with Balanchine, dancing in the original casts of some of his most iconic productions, and working with some of the company's most famous dancers. Winningly honest and intimate, Sills lets readers in on the secrets of a world that most people have never seen firsthand. She reveals mistakes she made, the unglamorous parts of tour life, jealousy among company members, and Balanchine's complex relationships with women. She talks about Balanchine's insistence on thinness in his dancers and how her own struggles with weight ended her dancing career. Now a professor of dance who has educated thousands of students on Balanchine's style and legacy, Sills reflects on the highs and lows of a career indelibly influenced by the bright lights of theater and by the man who shaped American ballet.

This collection of new essays explores the many ways in which writing relates to corporeality and how the two work together to create, resist or mark the body of the "Other." Contributors draw on their varied backgrounds to examine different movement practices, with a focus on movement as a meaning-making process-including the choreographic act of writing. The challenges faced by marginalized bodies are discussed, along with ability of a body to question, contest and re-write historical narratives.

Dance is often considered an ephemeral art, one that disappears nearly as soon as it materializes, leaving no physical object behind. Yet some dance practice involves people trying to embody something that exists before - and survives beyond - their particular acts of dancing. What exactly is that thing? And (how) do dances continue to exist when not performed? Anna Pakes seeks to answer these and related questions in this book, drawing on analytic philosophy of art to explore the metaphysics of dance making, performance and disappearance. Focusing on Western theater dance,Pakes also traces the different ways dances have been conceptualized across time, and what those historical shifts imply for the ontology of dance works.

Flamenco, Regionalism and Musical Heritage in Southern Spain explores the relationship between regional identity politics and flamenco in Andalusia, the southernmost autonomous community of Spain. In recent years, the Andalusian Government has embarked on an ambitious project aimed at developing flamenco as a symbol of regional identity. In 2010, flamenco was recognised as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO, a declaration that has reinvigorated institutional support for the tradition. The book draws upon ethnomusicology, political geography and heritage studies to analyse the regionalisation of flamenco within the frame of Spanish politics, while considering responses among Andalusians to these institutional measures. Drawing upon ethnographic research conducted online and in Andalusia, the book examines critically the institutional development of flamenco, challenging a fixed reading of the relationship between flamenco and regionalism. The book offers alternative readings of regionalism, exploring the ways in which competing localisms and disputed identities contribute to a fresh understanding of the flamenco tradition. Matthew Machin-Autenrieth makes a significant contribution to flamenco scholarship in particular and to the study of music, regionalism and heritage in general.

This is the first comprehensive history of Russian theater in English since the fall of Communism. Written by an international team of experts, the book brings together the fruits of recent research into all areas of Russian theater history. Of particular interest will be the chapters written by senior Russian academics. The History covers the whole range of Russian dramatic experience, from puppet theater to ballet and grand opera. A key feature of the History is the collection of rare photographs, some published for the first time, chronicling the development of Russian theater.