Yoga Biomechanics: Stretching Redefined provides a unique evidence-based exploration into the complexities of human movement and what a safe, effective yoga practice entails. The emphasis is taken off flexibility and centered around a narrative of body tissue adaptation. Conventional approaches to modern yoga are examined through a biomechanist's lens, highlighting emerging perspectives in both the rehabilitation and sport science literature. Artfully woven throughout the book is a sub-text that improves the reader's research literacy while making an impassioned plea for the role of research in the evolution of how teachers teach, and how practitioners practice. Yoga teachers and yoga practitioners alike will discern yoga asana for its role in one's musculoskeletal health. Yoga therapists and other allied healthcare providers can apply principles discussed to their respective professions. All readers will understand pose modifications in the context of load management, reducing fears of injury and discovering the robustness and resilience of the human body. Coverage includes - Biomechanics Basics; Force, Applied/Modified Loads, and Stress; Progressive Overload and Specificity; Conventional Stretching; Stretching and Performance; Eccentrics; Mechanical Properties of Connective Tissue; Tissue Behavior, Structure, and Composition; Tissue Adaptation, Capacity, and Tension; Exploration into Soft Tissue Injuries; Alignment and Posture Features include - Highlights meaningful, evidence-based applications and examples of yoga and/or stretching. Provides guidelines for non-researcher's critical interpretation of research, helping them to avoid making poor choices based in well-worn beliefs and hackneyed assumption. Pushes teachers to a deeper understanding of biomechanics, beyond simply memorizing anatomy, empowering them to make smart choices for instructing a variety of populations in both private and group class settings. Encourages variety in popular modern-day asana, using props and a keen eye, given our understanding of how the body's tissues adapt to applied loads. Educates yoga teachers to think beyond the scripted yoga education they received, stretching their minds to further understand and redefine stretching of the human body.

This volume collects academic as well as artistic explorations highlighting historical and contemporary approaches to the "energetic" in its aesthetic and political potential. Energetic processes cross dance, performance art and installations. In contemporary dance and performance art, energetic processes are no longer mere conditions of form but appear as distinct aesthetic interventions. They transform the body, evoke specific states and push towards intensities.International contributors (i.e. Gerald Siegmund, Susan Leigh Foster, Lucia Ruprecht) unfold thorough investigations, elucidating maneuvers of mobilization, activation, initiation, regulation, navigation and containment of forces as well as different potentials and promises associated with the "energetic".

Over the last 40 years, while the musical film has faded from its historical high-point to a more isolated and quirky phenomenon, the dance film has displayed refulgent growth and surprising resilience. A phenomena of modern movie-making, the dance film has spawned profitable global enterprises (Billy Elliot), has fashioned youthful angst as sociological voice (Saturday Night Fever, Footloose and Dirty Dancing) and acted as a marker of post-modern ironic camp (Strictly Ballroom). This modern genre has influenced cinema as a whole in the ways bodies are made dimensional, in the way rhythm and energy are communicated, and in the filmic capacity to create narrative worlds without words. Emerging as a distinct (sub)genre in the 1970s, dance film has been crafting its own meta-narrative and aesthetic paradigms that, nonetheless, display extraordinary variety. Ranging from the experimental, 'you are there' sonic explorations of Robert Altman's The Company and the brutal energy of David La Chappelle's Rize to the lighter 'backstage musical' form displayed in Centre Stage and Save the Last Dance, this genre has garnered both commercial and artistic success.Meanwhile, Bollywood has become a juggernaut, creating transportable memory for diasporic Indian communities across the world. This is an entire industry based on the 'dance number', where films are pitched around the choreography, where the actors are not expected to sing, but they must dance. This series of essays investigates the relationship between movement and sound as it is revealed, manipulated and crafted in the dance film genre. It considers the role of all aspects of sound in the dance film, including the dancer generated sounds inherent in Tap, Flamenco, Irish Dance and Krumping. Drawing on significant post-War dance films from around world, Movies, Moves and Music comprehensively surveys this mainstream genre, where image and sound meet in a crucial symbiosis.

Discusses the development of dance from 1949 to 1984 and examines the work of dancers and choreographers.

A fascinating exploration of our reality through the eyes of a physicist and a dancer-and an engaging introduction to both disciplines From stepping out of our beds each morning to admiring the stars at night, we live in a world of motion, energy, space, and time. How do we understand the phenomena that shape our experience? How do we make sense of our physical realities? Two guides-a former member of New York City Ballet, Emily Coates, and a CERN particle physicist, Sarah Demers-show us how their respective disciplines can help us to understand both the quotidian and the deepest questions about the universe. Requiring no previous knowledge of dance or physics, this introduction covers the fundamentals while revealing how a dialogue between art and science can enrich our appreciation of both. Readers will come away with a broad cultural knowledge of Newtonian to quantum mechanics and classical to contemporary dance. Including problem sets and choreographic exercises to solidify understanding, this book will be of interest to anyone curious about physics or dance.

Josephine Baker (1906-1975) was a dancer, singer, actress, author, politician, militant, and philanthropist, whose images and cultural legacy have survived beyond the hundredth anniversary of her birth. Neither an exercise in postmodern deconstruction nor simple biography, Josephine Baker in Art and Life presents a critical cultural study of the life and art of the Franco-American performer whose appearances as the savage dancer Fatou shocked the world. Although the study remains firmly anchored in Josephine Baker's life and times, presenting and challenging carefully researched biographical facts, it also offers in-depth analyses of the images that she constructed and advanced. Bennetta Jules-Rosette explores Baker's far-ranging and dynamic career from a sociological and cultural perspective, using the tools of sociosemiotics to excavate the narratives, images, and representations that trace the story of her life and fit together as a cultural production.