Riverdance exploded across the stage at Dublin's Point Theatre one spring evening in 1994 during a seven-minute interval of the Eurovision Song Contest hosted by Ireland. It was a watershed moment in the cultural history of a country embracing the future, a confident leap into world music grounded in the footfall of the choreographed kick-line. It was a moment forty-five years in the making for its composer. In this tenderly unfurled memoir Bill Whelan rehearses a lifetime of unconscious preparation as step by step he revisits his past, from with his Barrington Street home in 1950s Limerick, to the forcing ground of University College Dublin and the Law Library during the 1960s, to his attic studio in Ranelagh. Along the way the reader is introduced to people and places in the immersive world of fellow musicians, artists and producers, friends and collaborators, embracing the spectrum of Irish music as it broke boundaries, entering the global slipstream of the 1980s and 1990s. As art and commerce fused, dramas and contending personalities come to view behind the arras of stage, screen and recording desk. Whelan pays tribute to a parade of those who formed his world. He describes the warmth and sustenance of his Limerick childhood, his parents and Denise Quinn, won through assiduous courtship; the McCourts and Jesuit fathers of his early days, the breakthrough with a tempestuous Richard Harris who summoned him to London; Danny Doyle, Shay Healy, Dickie Rock, Planxty, The Dubliners and Stockton's Wing, Noel Pearson, Sean O Riada; working with Jimmy Webb, Leon Uris, The Corrs, Paul McGuinness, Moya Doherty, John McColgan, Jean Butler and Michael Flatley. Written with wry, inimitable Irish humour and insight, Bill Whelan's self deprecation allows us to to see the players in all their glory, vulnerability and idiosyncracy. This fascinating work reveals the nuts, bolts, sheer effort and serendipities that formed the road to Riverdance in his reinvention of the Irish tradition for a modern age. As the show went on to perform to millions worldwide, Whelan was honoured with a 1997 Grammy Award when Riverdance was named the 'Best Musical Show Album.' Richly detailed and illustrated, The Road to Riverdance forms an enduring repository of memory for all concerned with the performing arts.

Chinese Theatre: An Illustrated History Through Nuoxi and Mulianxi is the first book in any language entirely devoted to a historical inquiry into Chinese theatre through Nuoxi and Mulianxi, the two most representative and predominant forms of Chinese temple theatre. This is an interdisciplinary book project that is aimed to help researchers and students of theatre history understand the ritual origins of Chinese theatre and the dynamic relationships among myth, ritual, religion, and theatre.

The Complete Guide to Dance Nutrition is the first complete textbook written by an experienced dietitian specialising in the field of dance nutrition and provideS both dancers-in-training and instructors with practical advice on dance nutrition for health and performance. It is also highly relevant for dance professionals. With an in-depth and extensive coverage on all nutrition topics relevant to dancers, this textbook covers nutrition for the scenarios dancers face, including day to day training and rehearsals, peak performance, injuries, immunonutrition, nutrition and stress management. Information is included on topics applicable to individual dancers including advice for dancers with type 1 diabetes and clinical conditions relating to gut health. This book guides the reader through the macronutrients making up the diet, their chemical structure and their role in health and optimal performance. Readers will be shown how to estimate energy and nutrient needs based on their schedule, type of dance undertaken, and personal goals before considering the practical aspects of dance nutrition; from nutrition planning to dietary supplements, strategies for assessing the need to alter body composition and guidance on undertaking health focused changes is presented. The Complete Guide to Dance Nutrition combines and condenses the author's knowledge and many years of experience working in the dance industry to translate nutrition science into a practical guide. Bringing together the latest research in dance science and nutrition, this book aims to be a trusted reference and practical textbook for students of Dance, Dance Nutrition, Dance Performance, Sport Nutrition and Sport Science more generally as well as for those training in the dance industry, dance teachers and professionals.

Riverdance exploded across the stage at Dublin's Point Theatre one spring evening in 1994 during a seven-minute interval of the Eurovision Song Contest hosted by Ireland. It was a watershed moment in the cultural history of a country embracing the future, a confident leap into world music grounded in the footfall of the choreographed kick-line. It was a moment forty-five years in the making for its composer. In this tenderly unfurled memoir Bill Whelan rehearses a lifetime of unconscious preparation as step by step he revisits his past, from with his Barrington Street home in 1950s Limerick, to the forcing ground of University College Dublin and the Law Library during the 1960s, to his attic studio in Ranelagh. Along the way the reader is introduced to people and places in the immersive world of fellow musicians, artists and producers, friends and collaborators, embracing the spectrum of Irish music as it broke boundaries, entering the global slipstream of the 1980s and 1990s. As art and commerce fused, dramas and contending personalities come to view behind the arras of stage, screen and recording desk. Whelan pays tribute to a parade of those who formed his world. He describes the warmth and sustenance of his Limerick childhood, his parents and Denise Quinn, won through assiduous courtship; the McCourts and Jesuit fathers of his early days, the breakthrough with a tempestuous Richard Harris who summoned him to London; Danny Doyle, Shay Healy, Dickie Rock, Planxty, The Dubliners and Stockton's Wing, Noel Pearson, Sean O Riada; working with Jimmy Webb, Leon Uris, The Corrs, Paul McGuinness, Moya Doherty, John McColgan, Jean Butler and Michael Flatley. Written with wry, inimitable Irish humour and insight, Bill Whelan's self deprecation allows us to to see the players in all their glory, vulnerability and idiosyncracy. This fascinating work reveals the nuts, bolts, sheer effort and serendipities that formed the road to Riverdance in his reinvention of the Irish tradition for a modern age. As the show went on to perform to millions worldwide, Whelan was honoured with a 1997 Grammy Award when Riverdance was named the 'Best Musical Show Album.' Richly detailed and illustrated, The Road to Riverdance forms an enduring repository of memory for all concerned with the performing arts.

Includes an international and multidisciplinary list of contributors.

First Published in 1993.A complete autobiography of Evalina Palmer-Sikelianos (1874-1952), a woman of immense spiritual strength who fought for the arts against the background of war. She contributed impressively throughout her life to the revival of interest in classical Greece, the theatre and choral dance, and advocated an adherence to mythical authenticity rather than a romanticised view of Greek tragic drama.

This volume investigates performance cultures as rich and dynamic environments of knowledge practice through which distinctive epistemologies are continuously (re)generated, cultivated, and celebrated. Epistemologies are dynamic formations of rules, tools, and procedures not only for understanding but also for doing knowledges. This volume deals in particular with epistemological challenges posed by practices and processes of interweaving performance cultures. These challenges arise in artistic and academic contexts because of hierarchies between epistemologies. European colonialism worked determinedly, violently, and often with devastating effects on instituting and sustaining a hegemony of modern Euro-American rules of knowing in many parts of the world. Therefore, Interweaving Epistemologies critically interrogates the (im)possibilities of interweaving epistemologies in artistic and academic contexts today. Writing from diverse geographical locations and knowledge cultures, the book's contributors-philosophers, political scientists as well as practitioners and scholars of theater, performance, and dance-investigate prevailing forms of epistemic ignorance and violence. They introduce key concepts and theories that enable critique of unequal power relations between epistemologies. Moreover, contributions explore historical cases of interweaving epistemologies and examine innovative present-day methods of working across and through epistemological divides in non-hegemonic, sustainable, creative, and critical ways. Ideal for practitioners, students and researchers of theater, performance, and dance as well as of philosophy and history (of science), Interweaving Epistemologies emphasizes the urgent need to acknowledge, study and promote epistemological plurality and diversity in practices of performance making as well as in scholarship on theater and performance around the globe today.

- A comprehensive and accessible introduction to the essential elements of choreography - practice, theory and contexts - Invaluable for any undergraduate students on Dance Studies or Dance BfA courses across the UK, US and Europe - Gives a much more current and contemporary take on the discipline than most books in this area, aimed at a younger, student audience

* Interdisciplinary book that weaves together ideas from psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and dance. * Considers how movement is central to our sense of reality, our sense of self, and our relationships with others and the surrounding world. * Accessibly written book that foregrounds the author's voice and experiences

Movements of Interweaving is a rich collection of essays exploring the concept of interweaving performance cultures in the realms of movement, dance, and corporeality. Focusing on dance performances as well as on scenarios of cultural movements on a global scale, it not only challenges the concept of intercultural dance performances, but through its innovative approach also calls attention to the specific qualities of "interweaving" as a form of movement itself. Divided into four sections, this volume features an international team of scholars together developing a new critical perspective on the cultural practices of movement, travel and migration in and beyond dance.

Creating a sensation with her risque nightclub act and strolls down the Champs Elysees, pet cheetah in tow, Josephine Baker lives on in popular memory as the banana-skirted siren of Jazz Age Paris. In Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe, Matthew Pratt Guterl brings out a little known side of the celebrated personality, showing how her ambitions of later years were even more daring and subversive than the youthful exploits that made her the first African American superstar. Her performing days numbered, Baker settled down in a sixteenth-century chateau she named Les Milandes, in the south of France. Then, in 1953, she did something completely unexpected and, in the context of racially sensitive times, outrageous. Adopting twelve children from around the globe, she transformed her estate into a theme park, complete with rides, hotels, a collective farm, and singing and dancing. The main attraction was her Rainbow Tribe, the family of the future, which showcased children of all skin colors, nations, and religions living together in harmony. Les Milandes attracted an adoring public eager to spend money on a utopian vision, and to worship at the feet of Josephine, mother of the world. Alerting readers to some of the contradictions at the heart of the Rainbow Tribe project--its undertow of child exploitation and megalomania in particular--Guterl concludes that Baker was a serious and determined activist who believed she could make a positive difference by creating a family out of the troublesome material of race.

Politics as Public Art presents a keystone collection that pursues new frameworks for a critical understanding of the relationship between public art and protest movements through the utilization of socially engaged and choreopolitical approaches. This anthology draws from a unique combination of interdisciplinary scholarship and activism where it integrates geographically rich perspectives from political and grassroots community contexts spanning the United States, Europe, Australia, and Southeastern Africa. The volume questions, and reimagines, not only how public art practice can be integral to politics, including forms of surveillance and control of bodily movement. It also probes into how political participation itself can be construed as a form of public artmaking for radical social change and just worlds. This collection advocates for scholar-activist inquiry into how socially engaged public art practices can pave the way for thinking through-and working toward-championing more inclusive futures and, as such, choreographing greater intersectional justice. This book provides a wide appeal to audiences across humanities and social science scholarship, arts practice, and activism seeking conceptual and empirically informed tools for moving from public art and choreopolitical theory into modes of praxis: critical reflection and action.

aesthetic objects, performance, art, Aesthetic, theatre, live art, sociology cultural studies and cultural geography.

The writings of six choreographers are assembled in this book and the leap they have taken to go from the medium of choreography into written text constitutes a form of translation. Some of the texts investigate the possibilities of written language as invention, others use it as a means to illustrate specific tenets or describe choreographic projects. All yield insight into the process of coaxing language from the body.

Music-Dance explores the identity of choreomusical work, its complex authorship and its modes of reception as well as the cognitive processes involved in the reception of dance performance. Scholars of dance and music analyse the ways in which a musical score changes its prescriptive status when it becomes part of a choreographic project, the encounter between sound and motion on stage, and the intersection of listening and seeing. As well as being of interest to musicologists and choreologists considering issues such as notation, multimedia and the analysis of performance, this volume will appeal to scholars interested in applied research in the fields of cognition and neuroscience. The line-up of authors comprises representative figures of today's choreomusicology, dance historians, scholars of twentieth-century composition and specialists in cognitive science and performance studies. Among the topics covered are multimedia and the analysis of performance; the notational practice of choreographers and the parallel attempts of composers to find a graphic representation for musical gestures; and the experience of dance as a paradigm for a multimodal perception, which is investigated in terms of how the association of sound and movement triggers emotions and specific forms of cognition.

The collective volume seeks to respond to these questions by exploring crip time in disability performance as both a concept and a phenomenon. Out of time has many different meanings, amongst them outmoded, out of step, under time pressure, no time left, or simply delayed. In the disability context it may also refer to resistant attitudes of living in "crip time" that contradict time as a linear process with a more or less predictable future. According to Alison Kafer, "crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds." What does this mean in the disability arts? What new concepts of accessibility, crip futures, and crip resistance can be staged or created by disability performance? And how does the notion of "out of time" connect crip time with pandemic time in disability performance? The book tackles the topic from two angles: on the one hand from a theoretical point of view that connects performance analysis with crip and performance theory, on the other hand from a practice-based perspective of disability artists who develop new concepts and dramaturgies of crip time based on their own lived experiences and observations in the field of the performing and disability arts. The book gathers different types of text genres, forms and styles that mirror the diversity of their authors. Besides theoretical and academic chapters on disability performance the book also includes essays, poems, dramatic texts, and choreographic concepts that reflect upon the alternative knowledge in the disability arts.

The need to 'rethink' and question the nature of dance history has not diminished since the first edition of Rethinking Dance History. This revised second edition addresses the needs of an ever-evolving field, with new contributions considering the role of digital media in dance practice; the expansion of performance philosophy; and the increasing importance of practice-as-research. A two-part structure divides the book's contributions into: * Why Dance History? - the ideas, issues and key conversations that underpin any study of the history of theatrical dance. * Researching and Writing - discussions of the methodologies and approaches behind any successful research in this area. Everyone involved with dance creates and carries with them a history, and this volume explores the ways in which these histories might be used in performance-making - from memories which establish identity to re-invention or preservation through shared and personal heritages. Considering the potential significance of studying dance history for scholars, philosophers, choreographers, dancers and students alike, Rethinking Dance History is an essential starting point for anyone intrigued by the rich history and many directions of dance.

What does it mean to be able to move? The Aging Body in Dance brings together leading scholars and artists from a range of backgrounds to investigate cultural ideas of movement and beauty, expressiveness and agility. Contributors focus on Euro-American and Japanese attitudes towards aging and performance, including studies of choreographers, dancers and directors from Yvonne Rainer, Martha Graham, Anna Halprin and Roemeo Castellucci to Kazuo Ohno and Kikuo Tomoeda. They draw a fascinating comparison between youth-oriented Western cultures and dance cultures like Japan's, where aging performers are celebrated as part of the country's living heritage. The first cross-cultural study of its kind, The Aging Body in Dance offers a vital resource for scholars and practitioners interested in global dance cultures and their differing responses to the world's aging population.

Gender and Dance in Modern Iran: Biopolitics on Stage investigates the ways dancing bodies have been providing evidence for competing representations of modernity, urbanism, and religiosity across the twentieth century. Focusing on the transformation of the staged dancing body, its space of performance, and spectatorial cultural ideology, this book traces the dancing body in multiple milieus of performance, including the Pahlavi era's national artistic scene and the popular cafe and cabaret stages, as well as the commercial cinematic screen and the post-revolutionary Islamized theatrical stage. It links the socio-political discourses on performance with the staged public dancer, in order to interrogate the formation of dominant categories of "modern," "high," and "artistic," and the subsequent "othering" of cultural realms that were discursively peripheralized from the "national" stage. Through the study of archival and ethnographic research as well as a diverse literature pertaining to music, theater, cinema, and popular culture, it combines a close reading of primary sources such as official documents, press materials, and program notes with visual analysis of filmic materials and imageries, as well as interviews with practitioners. It offers an original and informed exploration into the ways performing bodies and their public have been associated with binary notions of vice and virtue, morality and immorality, commitment and degeneration, chastity and eroticism, and veiled-ness and nakedness. Engaging with a range of methodological and historiographical methods, including postcolonial, performance, and feminist studies, this book is a valuable resource for students and scholars of Middle East history and Iranian studies, as well as gender studies and dance and performance studies.

This is the first comprehensive textbook on lighting design for dance productions. Illuminates the aesthetic considerations of lighting design (the "poetry") along with the tools and technology (the "nitty-gritty") to execute effective designs. Contains reflections from renowned lighting designers, including Jennifer Tipton, Beverly Emmons, Mark Stanley, Richard Dunham, and James E. Streeter.

This book provides a fascinating and concise history of devised theatre practice. As both a founding member of Philadelphia's Pig Iron Theater Company and a Professor, Telory Arendell begins this journey with a brief history of Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop and Living Newspapers through Brecht's Berliner Ensemble and Joe Chaikin's Open Theatre to the racially inflected commentary of Luis Valdez's Teatro Campesino and Ariane Mnouchkine's collaboration with Theatre de Soleil. This book explores the impact of devised theatre on social practice and analyzes Goat Island's use of Pina Bausch's gestural movement, Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed in Giving Voice, Anna Deavere Smith's devised envelope for Verbatim Theatre, The Tectonic Theatre Project's moment work, Teya Sepinuck's Theatre of Witness, Pig Iron's use of Lecoq mime to build complex physical theatre scripts, and The Riot Group's musical arrangement of collaborative devised text. Included are a foreword by Allen J. Kuharski and three devised plays by Theatre of Witness, Pig Iron, and The Riot Group. Replete with interviews from the initial Pig Iron collaborators on subjects of writing, directing, choreographing, teaching, and developing a pedagogical platform that supports devised theatre.

Dance on the American Musical Theatre Stage: A History chronicles the development of dance, with an emphasis on musicals and the Broadway stage, in the United States from its colonial beginnings to performances of the present day. This book explores the fascinating tug-and-pull between the European classical, folk and social dance imports and America's indigenous dance forms as they met and collided on the popular musical theatre stage. The historical background influenced a specific musical theatre movement vocabulary and a unique choreographic approach that is recognizable today as Broadway style dancing. Throughout the book, a cultural context is woven into the history to reveal how the competing values within American culture, and its attempts as a nation to define and redefine itself, played out through developments in dance on the musical theatre stage. This book is central to the conversation on how dance influences and reflects society, and will be of interest to students and scholars of Musical Theatre, Theatre Studies, Dance and Cultural History.

African dance is discussed here in its global as well as local contexts as a powerful vehicle of aesthetic and cultural exchange and influence. To date, scholars have tended, with a few exceptions, to write about African dance in primarily ethnographic terms. This collection seeks to challenge this pattern and expand dance research by engaging with the aesthetics and socio-political impact of dance for communities in and out of Africa in an increasingly global context. Contributors to this issue look at the impact that specifically situated indigenous dance forms have had on the development of newforms locally, and the reciprocal impact of local and international infrastructures, including funding bodies, tourism and festivals. African Theatre 17 examines how dance is contributing to a particularly African interculturalism, while analysing the issues of representation of Africa in a postcolonial context. Articles address the efficacy of dance to engage audiences with disavowed issues regarding gender, sexuality and dis/ability both within and beyond Africa. Highlights include a dance photo essay on F.O.D. Gang's 2017 site-specific street performance "Untitled" in Lagos, a new non-themed section, and the playscript Lunatic! by Zimbabwean playwright Thoko Zulu. Volume Editors: YVETTE HUTCHISON & CHUKWUMA OKOYE Series Editors: Yvette Hutchison, Reader, Department of Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Warwick; Chukwuma Okoye, Reader in African Theatre & Performance University of Ibadan; Jane Plastow, Professor of African Theatre, University of Leeds.