Founder of the Philadelphia Dance Company (PHILADANCO) and the Philadelphia School of Dance Arts, Joan Myers Brown's personal and professional histories reflect both the hardships and the accomplishments of African Americans in the artistic and social developments through the twentieth century and into the new millennium. Dixon Gottschild deftly 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 has had no previous voice to tell its story from the inside out. Augmented by interviews with a score of dance professionals, including Billy Wilson, Gene Hill Sagan, Rennie Harris, Milton Myers, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, and Ronald K. Brown, Joan Myers Brown's background and richly contoured biography are object lessons in survival-a true American narrative.

This book provides philosophical grounds for an emerging area of scholarship: the study of religion and dance. In the first part, LaMothe investigates why scholars in religious studies have tended to overlook dance, or rhythmic bodily movement, in favor of textual expressions of religious life. In close readings of Descartes, Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Kierkegaard, LaMothe traces this attitude to formative moments of the field in which philosophers relied upon the practice of writing to mediate between the study of "religion," on the one hand, and "theology," on the other. In the second part, LaMothe revives the work of theologian, phenomenologist, and historian of religion Gerardus van der Leeuw for help in interpreting how dancing can serve as a medium of religious experience and expression. In so doing, LaMothe opens new perspectives on the role of bodily being in religious life, and on the place of theology in the study of religion.

Dance Appreciation is an exciting exploration of how to understand and think about dance in all of its various contexts. This book unfolds a brief history of dance with engaging insight into the social, cultural, aesthetic, and kinetic aspects of various forms of dance. Dedicated chapters cover ballet, modern, tap, jazz, and hip-hop dance, complete with summaries, charts, timelines, discussion questions, movement prompts, and an online companion website all designed to foster awareness of and appreciation for dance in a variety of contexts. This wealth of resources helps to uncover the fascinating history that makes this art form so diverse and entertaining, and to answer the questions of why we dance and how we dance. Written for the novice dancer as well as the more experienced dance student, Dance Appreciation enables readers to learn and think critically about dance as a form of entertainment and art.

Zwischen den oesterreichischen Literaten Elfriede Jelinek und Werner Schwab liegen auf den ersten Blick Welten. Trotz diverser Dichotomien weisen ihre Theatertexte spurbare Affinitaten zueinander auf, die sich zudem in die Tendenzen der seit einigen Dekaden vorherrschenden Theaterasthetik einschreiben. Eklatant ist in dieser Hinsicht die Omniprasenz des Sujets Koerper. Im Mittelpunkt dieser Untersuchung steht die konfrontative Analyse und Interpretation des Koerperdiskurses bei Jelinek und Schwab. Ausgehend von hierfur relevanten Koerperkonzepten vor allem des 20. Jahrhunderts werden ausgewahlte Theaterstucke in verschiedene Themenkomplexe gefasst. Diese unterschiedlichen Versionen des Koerpers werden mit einem interdisziplinaren Rekurs auf Aspekte wie Sexualitat, Geschlecht, Macht und Religion hin befragt. In ihrer groteskenhaften Performativitat erweisen sich die theatralisierten Koerper letztlich als politisches Medium, durch das sich die vorgefuhrten Koerperversionen als Koerpersubversionen aufdecken lassen.

The average length of a professional dancer's career is 10 to 15 years. Similar to professional athletes, once the prime years of physical prowess have passed, retirement is inevitable. After retirement, there are still many years of adult life ahead for dancers. Making the transition to a new career is challenging to many. Motivated by her own career transition, author Nancy Upper interviewed former ballet dancers who have made successful transitions into new careers after they stopped performing. Part 1 of the book features interviews with individuals who remained in ballet-related careers. Part 2 discusses the experiences of four dancers who moved on to careers outside the field of dance. Part 3 focuses on former dancers who have used their non-dance careers to help dancers and to promote ballet awareness. Appendices provide information about marketable qualities dancers develop as a result of their training, career transition tips, transition resources and a graph mapping the transition process.

Fully revised and updated, this second edition of Contemporary Choreography presents a range of articles covering choreographic enquiry, investigation into the creative process, and innovative challenges to traditional understandings of dance making. Contributions from a global range of practitioners and researchers address a spectrum of concerns in the field, organized into seven broad domains: Conceptual and philosophical concerns Processes of making Dance dramaturgy: structures, relationships, contexts Choreographic environments Cultural and intercultural contexts Challenging aesthetics Choreographic relationships with technology. Including 23 new chapters and 10 updated ones, Contemporary Choreography captures the essence and progress of choreography in the twenty-first century, supporting and encouraging rigorous thinking and research for future generations of dance practitioners and scholars.

Pasha's talent and determination has taken him to some amazing places all around the world including Moscow, New York, LA and London. However, it was the grey, stark landscape of his Siberian hometown, still reeling from the Communist regime, which provided the unlikely inspiration for his early love of ballroom dancing, a passion that he has embraced and nurtured ever since. With a desire to succeed, Pasha fought off tough competition to win a place on So You Think You Can Dance in the US, and then became one of the best-loved professionals on Strictly Come Dancing in the UK. It's no surprise that Pasha has twice danced his way into the Strictly final, and waltzed straight into the hearts of the nation. Yet, despite his fame, Pasha remains something of an enigma and, unlike some of is dancing co-stars, has eschewed the limelight, preferring to express himself through movement. Now, in his own words, Pasha reveals all in his heart-warming autobiography. From romance to body image, Pasha speaks candidly about the impact his extensive world travel and showbiz life have had on his mindset, and the illness that nearly killed him.He'll separate fact from fiction, the man from the myth and reveal how it really felt to almost lift the Glitter-ball trophy with Chelsee Healey and Kimberley Walsh. Most of all, he'll give readers a glimpse behind the scenes of the flashy world of ballroom, and what really goes on beneath the veneer of sparkles and glamour.

Dance on Screen is a comprehensive introduction to the rich diversity of screen dance genres. It provides a contextual overview of dance in the screen media and analyzes a selection of case studies from the popular dance imagery of music video and Hollywood, through to experimental art dance. The focus then turns to video dance, dance originally choreographed for the camera. Video dance can be seen as a hybrid in which the theoretical and aesthetic boundaries of dance and television are traversed and disrupted. This new paperback edition includes a new Preface by the author covering key developments since the hardcover edition was published in 2001.

This unique study focuses on the social, racial, and artistic climate for African American performers working during the swing era—roughly the late 1920s through the 1940s. The career of Norton and Margot, a ballroom dance team whose work was thwarted by the racial tenets of the era, serves as a tour guide and barometer of the times on this excursion through the worlds of African American vaudeville, separate black and white Americas, the European touring circuit, and pre-Civil Rights era racial etiquette.

From early accounts of dance customs in medieval Ireland to the present, Helen Brennan offers an authoritative look at the evolution of Irish dance. Every type of dance from social to traditional to clergy is included. Brennan takes care to explain the different styles and traditions that evolved from different parts of Ireland; which results in some lively discussions as people reminisce over old favorites. She also discusses how dance evolved to become such an important part of Ireland's culture and history. An appendix is offered to help explain the various steps involved in each style of dance including the Munster or Southern style, Single Shuffle, Double Shuffle, Treble Shuffle, the Heel Plant, the Cut, the Rock or Puzzle, the Drum, the Sean Nos Dance Style of Connemara, and the Northern Style.

This book contains readings of American, British and European postmodern dances informed by feminist, postcolonialist, queer and poststructuralist theories. It explores the roles dance and space play in constructing subjectivity. By focusing on site-specific dance, the mutual construction of bodies and spaces, body-space interfaces and 'in-between spaces, ' the dances and dance films are read 'against the grain' to reveal their potential for troubling conventional notions of subjectivity associated with a white, Western, heterosexual able-bodied, male norm.

Tracing the development of tap dancing from ancient India to the Broadway stage in 1903, when the word "Tap" was first used in publicity to describe this new American style of dance, this text separately addresses the cultural, societal and historical events that influenced the development of Tap dancing.

Section One covers primary influences such as Irish step dancing, English clog dancing and African dancing. Section Two covers theatrical influences (early theatrical developments, "Daddy" Rice, the Virginia Minstrels) and Section Three covers various other influences (Native American, German, Shaker). Also included are accounts of the people present at tap's inception and how various styles of dance were mixed to create a new art form.

Contributions by Darrell Gerohn Baksh, Jan de Cosmo, Frances Henry, Jeff Henry, A. D. Jones, Samantha Noel, Dwaine Plaza, Philip W. Scher, and Asha St. Bernard.Women are performing an ever-growing role in Caribbean Carnival. Through a feminist perspective, this volume examines the presence of women in contemporary Carnival by demonstrating not only their strength in numbers, but also the ways in which women participate in the event. While decried by traditionalists, the bikinis, beads, and feathers of "pretty mas" convey both a newly found empowerment as a gendered resistance to oppression from men. Although research on Carnivals is substantial, especially in the Americas, the Subject of women in Carnival as a topic of inquiry remains fairly new. These essays address anthropological and historical facets of women and their practices in the Trinidad Carnival, including an analysis of how women's costuming and performance have changed over time. The modern costumes, which are well within the financial means of most mas players, demonstrate the new power of women who can now afford these outfits. In discussing the commodification and erotization of Carnival, the book emphasizes the unveiling of the female body and the hip-rolling sexual movements called winin or it. Through display of their bodies, contemporary women in Carnival express a form of female resistance. Intent on enjoying and expressing themselves, they seem invigorated by their place in the economy, as well as their sexuality, defying the moral controls imposed on them. Through an array of methods in qualitative research, including interviews, participant observation, and ethnography, this volume explains the new power of women in the evolution of Carnival mas in Trinidad amid the wider Caribbean diaspora.

From its beginnings as an alternative and dissident form of dance training in the 1960s, Somatics emerged at the end of the twentieth century as one of the most popular and widespread regimens used to educate dancers. It is now found in dance curricula worldwide, helping to shape the look and sensibilities of both dancers and choreographers and thereby influencing much of the dance we see onstage worldwide. One of the first books to examine Somatics in detail and to analyse how and what it teaches in the dance studio, The Natural Body in Somatics Dance Training considers how dancers discover and assimilate new ways of moving and also larger cultural values associated with those movements. The book traces the history of Somatics, and it also details how Somatics developed in different locales, engaging with local politics and dance histories so as to develop a distinctive pedagogy that nonetheless shared fundamental concepts with other national and regional contexts. In so doing it shows how dance training can inculcate an embodied politics by guiding and shaping the experience of bodily sensation, constructing forms of reflexive evaluation of bodily action, and summoning bodies into relationship with one another. Throughout, the author focuses on the concept of the natural body and the importance of a natural way of moving as central to the claims that Somatics makes concerning its efficacy and legitimacy.

Several famous playwrights of the Elizabethan and Stuart periods, including Shakespeare, wrote for open-air public theaters and also for the private, indoor theaters at the palaces at which the Court resided. The author draws as full a picture as he can of the royal theaters used at courts, the physical and aesthetic conditions under which actors worked in them, and the composition and conduct of court audiences. The book includes an appendix that lists all known court performances of plays and masques between 1558 and 1642.

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

A history of dance's pathologization may startle readers who find in dance performance grace, discipline, geometry, poetry, and the body's transcendence of itself. Exploring dance's historical links to the medical and scientific connotations of a "pathology," this book asks what has subtended the idealization of dance in the West. It investigates the nineteenth-century response, in the intersections of dance, literature, and medicine, to the complex and long-standing connections between illness, madness, poetry, and performance.
In the nineteenth century, medicine becomes a major cultural index to measure the body's meanings. As a particularly performative form of madness, nineteenth-century hysteria preserved the traditional connection to dance in medical descriptions of "choreas." In its withholding of speech and its use of body code, dance, like hysteria, functions as a form of symptomatic expression.
Yet by working like a symptom, dance performance can also be read as a commentary on symptomatology and as a condition of possibility for such alternative approaches to mental illness as psychoanalysis. By redeeming as art what is "lost" in hysteria, dance expresses non-hysterically what only hysteria had been able to express: the somatic translation of idea, the physicalization of meaning.
Medicine's discovery of "idea" manifesting itself in the body in mental illness strikingly parallels a literary fascination with the ability of nineteenth-century dance to manifest "idea," suggesting that the evolution of medical thinking about mind-body relations as they malfunction in madness, as well as changes in the cultural reception of danced representations of these relations, might be paradigmatic shifts caused by the same cultural factors: concern about the body as a site of meaning and about vision as a theater of knowledge.

This book explores the Broadway legacy of choreographer Agnes de Mille, from the 1940s through the 1960s. Six musicals are discussed in depth - Oklahoma!, One Touch of Venus, Bloomer Girl, Carousel, Brigadoon, and Allegro. Oklahoma!, Carousel, and Brigadoon were de Mille's most influential and lucrative Broadway works. The other three shows exemplify aspects of her legacy that have not been fully examined, including the impact of her ideas on some of the composers with whom she worked; her ability to incorporate a previously conceived work into the context of a Broadway show; and her trailblazing foray into the role of choreographer/director. Each chapter emphasizes de Mille's unique contributions to the original productions. Several themes emerge in looking closely at de Mille's Broadway repertoire. Character development remained at the heart of her theatrical work work. She often took minor characters, represented with minimal or no dialogue, and fleshed out their stories. These stories added a layer of meaning that resulted in more complex productions. Sometimes, de Mille's stories were different from the stories her collaborators wanted to tell, which caused many conflicts. Because her unique ideas often got woven into the fabric of her musicals, de Mille saw her choreography as an authorship. She felt she should be given the same rights as the librettist and the composer. De Mille's work as an activist is an aspect of her legacy that has largely been overlooked. She contributed to revisions in dance copyright law and was a founding member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, a theatrical union that protects the rights of directors and choreographers. Her contention that choreographers are authors who have their own stories to tell offers a new way of understanding the Broadway musical.

"The Queer Afterlife of Vaslav Nijinsky" is three books in one: an impressionistic account of the dancer's homoerotic career, an analysis of his gay male reception, and an exploration of the limitations of that analysis. The impressionistic account, based on the aestheticism of Walter Pater, focuses on significant gestures made by Nijinsky in key roles, including the Golden Slave, the Specter of the Rose, Narcissus, Petrouchka, and the Faun. The analysis of his reception, based on the semiotics of Roland Barthes, is deconstructive. And the exploration of the the analytical limitations sets the stage for cultural studies that move beyond Barthesian semiotics--beyond, that is, the author's last two books.
Why, given that most of his followers were not gay, describe Nijinsky's queer afterlife? The author's answer is that Nijinsky was the Lord Alfred Douglas of the Ballet Russes. The dancer, however, had even more "lilac-hued notoriety" than Douglas--notoriety based upon common knowledge of his sexual relationship with Serge Diaghilev, upon his having been one of the first sensuous young men to dominate a Western stage recently riven by the homosexual/heterosexual division we are still contending with today, and upon his mastery of leading roles and body languages that had very little to do with conventional masculinity.

This comprehensive book will serve as a step-by-step guide to Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis, updating and expanding concepts and practices. Following extensive research on the method developed by Rudolf von Laban and his disciples, this book explains movement principles, exercises, and motif symbols in detail. Organized according to the four categories of Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis (Body-Effort-Shape-Space), additional chapters present the different developments of the theory in relation to performing arts and movement therapy. The author draws on Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis as a dynamic and connective approach, traveling from classroom and studio to everyday life, stage performance, and film acting. The Laban perspective serves as a multimedia artistic viewpoint, intertwining theory, learning, and imagery. This unique approach to this internationally used method is essential reading for educators and students of dance and other performing arts and movement-related professions.

Psychology for Dancers: Theory and Practice to Fulfil Your Potential examines how psychological theory can be related to dance practice. Aimed at the dancer who wants to maximize their potential but has no grounding in psychology, the book begins with an examination of basic psychological concepts, approaches and methods, before applying theory to dance. The book explores why dance is so important in many people's lives: as a form of fitness, a profession, or visual entertainment. Each chapter then examines a different aspect of psychology related to dance in an applied context. Self-perception is examined as dancers are under great scrutiny; a grounded sense of self will ensure a positive perception of self-worth and body image, and suggestions are made as to how a healthy and motivational climate can be created. The book also places an emphasis on how cognitive skills are as important as technical skills, including the ability to learn and recall steps and choreography as efficiently as possible. Social factors are related to the dance context, with a discussion of effective leadership and communication skills and the importance of group cohesion. Finally, there is a review of the impact of emotions on dance practice and how best to manage these emotions. Each chapter reviews important psychological theories, offering practical suggestions on how they can be applied to dance practice. Psychology for Dancers is an invaluable resource for students, professionals, and teachers of dance.

This absorbing book is ballet's 'biography' -- a revealing examination of a closed world, its competition and camaraderie, sexual politics, intimacies, pressures and, not least of all, its magic. Ballet companies have endeavoured to hide what is going on backstage lest the reality of highly strung nerves, constant fatigue and pain from injuries tarnish the illusion of ethereal figures and seemingly weightless steps in polished performances. But the audience's perceptions of fairy-tale worlds onstage are far removed from the experiences of the dancers themselves. The author, who trained to be a dancer, has been given an entree to this private world that few outsiders ever see.Books on ballet tend to focus on performance. In contrast, this book, which draws on extensive fieldwork with major companies such as London's Royal Ballet, the American Ballet Theatre in New York, the Royal Swedish Ballet and the Ballett Frankfurt, is about dancers - how their careers are made and unmade and what happens in dance companies offstage. Anyone interested in the culture of ballet or the theatre, as well as students of anthropology, dance, performance and cultural studies, will want to read what really goes on when the curtain comes down.