Matthew Bourne and His Adventures in Dance is an intimate and in-depth conversation between the prize-winning pioneer of ballet and contemporary dance Matthew Bourne and the New York Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay. In 1987, a small, aspirant dance group with a striking name made its debut on the London fringe. In 1996, Adventures in Motion Pictures made history as the first modern dance company to open a production in London's West End. From this achievement, AMP sailed triumphantly to Broadway - winning three Tony Awards - guided by Artistic Director Matthew Bourne. Even before the inception of AMP, Bourne was fascinated by theatre, by characterization, and by the history of dance. In his early works - Spitfire, Town & Country and Deadly Serious - Bourne brought a novel approach to dance. And in his reworkings of the classics of the ballet canon - Nutcracker, Swan Lake, Cinderella - Bourne created witty, vivid, poignant productions that received great acclaim. In the first decade of the new millennium, the company name was changed to New Adventures, and Bourne's 'classics', as well as Bourne's new works - The Car Man, Play Without Words, Edward Scissorhands and Dorian Gray - achieved levels of box-office popularity that have seldom, if ever, been matched in dance. In addition, his choreography for various musicals - My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins and Oliver! - have run for years in the West End and on Broadway. The detail in which Bourne discusses his work with Alastair Macaulay is unprecedented. The two explore Bourne's upbringing, his training and influences, and his distinctive creative methods. Bourne's notebooks, his sources and his collaboration with dancers all form part of the discussion in this book.

In the early 1960s, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater was a small, multi-racial company of dancers that performed the works of its founding choreographer and other emerging artists. By the late 1960s, the company had become a well-known African American artistic group closely tied to the Civil Rights struggle. In Dancing Revelations, Thomas DeFrantz chronicles the troupe's journey from a small modern dance company to one of the premier institutions of African American culture. He not only charts this rise to national and international renown, but also contextualizes this progress within the civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights struggles of the late 20th century.
DeFrantz examines the most celebrated Ailey dances, including Revelations, drawing on video recordings of Ailey's dances, published interviews, oral histories, and his own interviews with former Ailey company dancers. Through vivid descriptions and beautiful illustrations, DeFrantz reveals the relationship between Ailey's works and African American culture as a whole. He illuminates the dual achievement of Ailey as an artist and as an arts activist committed to developing an African American presence in dance. He also addresses concerns about how dance performance is documented, including issues around spectatorship and the display of sexuality, the relationship of Ailey's dances to civil rights activism, and the establishment and maintenance of a successful, large-scale Black Arts institution.
Throughout Dancing Revelations, DeFrantz illustrates how Ailey combined elements of African dance with motifs adapted from blues, jazz, and Broadway to choreograph his dances. By re-interpreting these tropes of blackculture in his original and well-received dances, DeFrantz argues that Ailey played a significant role in defining the African American cultural canon in the twentieth century. As the first book to examine the cultural sources and cultural impact of Ailey's work, Dancing Revelations is an important contribution to modern dance history and criticism as well as African-American studies.

"A Queer History of the Ballet "is the first book-length study of ballet's queerness. It theorizes the queer potential of the ballet look, and provides historical analyses of queer artists and spectatorships. It demonstrates that ballet was a crucial means of coming to visibility, of evolving and articulating a queer consciousness in periods when it was dangerous and illegal to be homosexual. It also shows that ballet continues to be a key element of the dance cultures through which queerness is explored. The book moves from the 19th century through the post-modern era, bringing together an important array of creative figures and movements, including Romantic ballet; Tchaikovsky; Diaghilev; Genet; Fonteyn; New York City Ballet; Neumeier; Bourne; Bausch; and Morris. It discusses the making and performance history of key works, including "La Sylphide, Giselle, Sleeping Beauty," and "Swan Lake,"
"
A Queer History of the Ballet "will be especially useful to students and scholars involved in the growing number of courses on queer culture, theatre studies, dance history, gender studies, and cross-disciplinary approaches to literature. It is written in a lively, clear style that will make it accessible to the non-academic reader who has an interest in queer and/or dance history.

Throughout its history, the United States has become a new home for thousands of immigrants, all of whom have brought their own traditions and expressions of ethnicity. Not least among these customs are folk dances, which over time have become visual representations of cultural identity. Naturally, however, these dances have not existed in a vacuum. They have changed - in part as a response to ever-changing social identities, and in part as a reaction to deliberate manipulations by those within as well as outside of a particular culture. Compiled in great part from the author's own personal dance experience, this volume looks at how various cultures use dance as a visual representation of their identity, and how ""traditional"" dances change over time. It discusses several ""parallel layers"" of dance: dances performed at intra-cultural social occasions, dances used for representation or presentation, and folk dance performances. Individual chapters center on various immigrant cultures. Chiefly the work focuses on cultural representation and how it is sometimes manipulated. Key folk dance festivals in the United States and Canada are reviewed. Interviews with dancers, teachers, and others offer a first-hand perspective. An extensive bibliography encompasses concert programs and reviews as well as broader scholarly sources.

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.

In most forms of dancing, performers carry out their steps with a distance that keeps them from colliding with each other. Dancer, Steve Paxton in the 1970s considered this distance a territory for investigation. His study of intentional contact resulted in a public performance in 1972 in a Soho gallery, and the name ""contact improvisation"" was coined for the form of unrehearsed dance he introduced. Rather than copyrighting it, Paxton allowed it to evolve and spread. In this book, the author draws upon her own experience and research to explain the art of contact improvisation, in which dance partners propel movement by physical contact. They roll, fall, spiral, leap, and slip along the contours and momentum of moving bodies. The text begins with a history, then describes the elements that define this form of dance. Subsequent chapters explore how contact improvisation relates to self and identity; how class, race, gender, culture and physiology influence dance; how dance promotes connection in a culture of isolation; and how it relates to the concept of community. The final chapter is a collection of exercises explained in the words of teachers from across the United States and abroad. Appendix A describes how to set up and maintain a weekly jam; Appendix B details recommended reading, videos and Web sites.

This book is filled with dance games that the whole classroom or family can play and learn from. These noncompetitive games reward children for their involvement, encourage them to use their imagination, and show them how to express how they feel without using words. Black-and-white illustrations add to these simple games that release a childs spontaneity and self-expression.

The only scholarly book in English dedicated to recent European contemporary dance, "Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement" examines the work of key contemporary choreographers who have transformed the dance scene since the early 1990s in Europe and the US.
Through their vivid and explicit dialogue with performance art, visual arts and critical theory from the past thirty years, this new generation of choreographers challenge our understanding of dance by exhausting the concept of movement. Their work demands to be read as performed extensions of the radical politics implied in performance art, in post-structuralist and critical theory, in post-colonial theory, and in critical race studies.
In this far-ranging and exceptional study, Andre Lepecki brilliantly analyzes the work of the choreographers:
* Jerome Bel (France)
* Juan Dominguez (Spain)
* Trisha Brown (US)
* La Ribot (Spain)
* Xavier Le Roy (France-Germany)
* Vera Mantero (Portugal)
and visual and performance artists:
* Bruce Nauman (US)
* William Pope.L (US).
This book offers a significant and radical revision of the way we think about dance, arguing for the necessity of a renewed engagement between dance studies and experimental artistic and philosophical practices.

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.

The first part of this manual, first published in 1725, discusses the performance of various steps including demi coupe, bouree, chasse, and pirouette. Through the use of text and tables, Rameau also provides discussion on an improved and simplified version of Feuillet notation, the eighteenth-century system of recording dances. The second part of the text consists of notations for twelve duets choreographed by French dancer and choreographer, Guillaume-Louis Pecour. The text is entirely in French, with many examples in Feuillet notation.

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.

The Costumes of Burlesque: 1866-2018 is the first volume to inclusively document burlesque costume from its birth in the 1860's through the global burlesque movement in 2018. This lushly illustrated book presents the history and development of this American art form by documenting the origins, influencers, and genuine articles that created its aesthetic. Showcases of legendary performers, including Lydia Thompson, Gypsy Rose Lee, Sally Rand, Bettie Page, Kitten Natividad, and Dita Von Teese, demonstrate costume styles through the years. This guide gives readers a clear view of how burlesque costume looked and why. It teaches collectors, burlesque performers, and fans alike to recognize vintage pieces for what they are and to design their own costumes with inspiration from the originals. By including detailed costume documentation, over 400 images, and interviews with prominent costume designers such as Catherine D'Lish and Garo Sparo, The Costumes of Burlesque brings 150 years of burlesque costume history to life.

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.

Grand Hotel. My One and Only. Nine. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine. The Will Rogers Follies. For two decades, Tommy Tune was the maestro presiding over a string of glittering Broadway musicals that took the tradition of complete musical staging by a director-choreographer into a new era defined by spectacle and technology. He was last in a grand lineage led by Jerome Robbins, Gower Champion, Bob Fosse, and Michael Bennett, but also provided a link to a new generation of choreographers-turned-directors like Susan Stroman, Jerry Mitchell, and Casey Nicholaw. Unlike his fellow director-choreographers, Tune also maintained a successful performing career. His nine Tony Awards (plus a tenth, for Lifetime Achievement) were earned across four categories, not only for choreography and direction, but also as both featured and lead actor in a musical, for Seesaw and My One and Only-a distinction no one else can claim. Tune took the musical forward by looking backward, bringing satiric energy and contemporary style to a trove of show business antecedents-from clog dancing to showgirl formations, from precision kick lines to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers-style ballroom glides. He did the same with his concert and cabaret performances, drawing on classics from the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, and Cole Porter and performing them not as nostalgia but as vital, immediate statements of personal philosophy. Everything is Choreography: The Musical Theater of Tommy Tune is the first full scale book about the career of this prodigious artist. It celebrates and examines with a critical eye his major projects, and summons for readers a glorious period of dance, performance, and theatrical imagination.

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.

Honorable Mention, Latin American Studies Association Mexico Section Best Book in the HumanitiesA Revolution in Movement is the first book to illuminate how collaborations between dancers and painters shaped Mexico's postrevolutionary cultural identity. K. Mitchell Snow traces this relationship throughout nearly half a century of developments in Mexican dance-the emulation of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in the 1920s, the adoption of U.S.-style modern dance in the 1940s, and the creation of ballet-inspired folk dance in the 1960s. Snow describes the appearances in Mexico by Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova and Spanish concert dancer Tortola Valencia, who helped motivate Mexico to express its own national identity through dance. He discusses the work of muralists and other visual artists in tandem with Mexico's theatrical dance world, including Diego Rivera's collaborations with ballet composer Carlos Chavez; Carlos Merida's leadership of the National School of Dance; Jose Clemente Orozco's involvement in the creation of the Ballet de la Ciudad de Mexico; and Miguel Covarrubias, who led the "golden age" of Mexican modern dance. Snow draws from a rich trove of historical newspaper accounts and other contemporary documents to show how these collaborations produced an image of modern Mexico that would prove popular both locally and internationally and continues to endure today.

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.

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 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.

Tap dancing legends Fayard (b. 1914) and Harold (1918-2000) Nicholas amazed crowds with their performances in musicals and films from the 30s to the 80s. They performed with Gene Kelly in The Pirate, with Cab Calloway in Stormy Weather, with Dorothy Dandridge (Harold's wife) in Sun Valley Serenade, and with a number of other stars on the stage and on the screen. Author Hill not only guides readers through the brothers' showstopping successes and the repressive times in which their dancing won them universal acclaim, she also offers extensive insight into the history and choreography of tap dancing, bringing readers up to speed on the art form in which the Nicholas Brothers excelled.

Dance is an activity that everyone can enjoy, and Dance Appreciation will help students do just that. Dance Appreciation is written to encompass the needs of a broad range of dance students, from high school to university level, and is appropriate for students who are new to dance as well as those who are experienced in the art form. The text will help learners discover more about themselves, connect with dance, and make it a relevant and vital part of their lives, whether it is their primary course of study, eventual career path, or simply a way to express themselves and enrich their lives. This text is the only dance appreciation resource that offers ancillary materials for instructors: Instructor ancillaries consisting of an instructor guide, test package, and PowerPoint presentation package make the teaching experience both easier and more effective, whether teaching in face-to-face or online settings. Five video segments demonstrate elements of dance and offer associated learning and movement activities, bringing the content to life for students. Textbook elements such as learning objectives, key terms, Enduring Understanding statements, Spotlight special elements, and chapter discussion questions help students navigate the chapters and retain the essential content. In addition, related resources delivered through HKPropel supply students with learning activities, individual and group projects, handouts, time lines, suggestions for further reading, video recommendations, and more to facilitate the learning experience. Dance Appreciation helps students understand dance from the perspectives of dancers, choreographers, and professionals in other careers related to dance. Students are introduced to a broad range of dance genres, forms, and styles, and they learn to forge a relationship with dance as an art form, connecting it with other academic and artistic disciplines and with their own life experiences. The text is organized into three parts. Part I, Exploring Dance, provides a foundational understanding of who dances and why, and it introduces the elements of dance and movement principles. Part II, Selected Dance Genres and Styles, covers Western dance genres, examining classical concert dance forms, hip-hop, and aerial and site-specific dance, highlighting notable artists and events. In part III, Connecting With Dance, students delve into aspects of dance performance and production, learning approaches for viewing and responding to dance performances and exploring the role of global interactions, especially through online content and social media, in developing and transmitting new dance forms and styles. Throughout the text, readers will learn about dance-related career paths. Dance Appreciation offers instructors an up-to-date, comprehensive resource-complete with an array of ancillaries-that ensures that students have the opportunity to become informed, discerning, and responsive dance audience members and gain a broad appreciation of dance as an art form and a lifetime physical activity. Note: A code for accessing HKPropel is included with all new print books.

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.

Human movement influences an individual's perceptions and ability to interact with the world. Through exercises, illustrations, and detailed anatomical drawings, this remarkable book guides the reader toward total body integration. An experimental approach to movement fundamentals involving the patterning of connections in the body according to principles of efficient movement, the process of total body integration encourages personal expression and full psychological involvement.