The Moving Body in the Aural Skills Classroom-influenced by Dalcroze-eurhythmics-is a practical guide for college-level teachers and students interested in integrating the moving body into the traditional aural skills classroom. What distinguishes this book from other texts is its central concern with movement-to-music as a tool for developing musical perception and the kinesthetic aspects humans experience as performers. Moving to music and watching others move cultivates an active, multi-sensory learning experience, in which students learn by discovery and from each other. Improvisatory and expressive elements are built into exercises to encourage a dynamic link between musical training and artistic performance. Designed for a three- to four-semester undergraduate curriculum, the book contains a wealth of exercises that teach rhythmic, melodic, harmonic and formal concepts. Exercises not only develop the ear, but also awaken the muscular and nervous system, foster mind-body connections, strengthen the powers of concentration (being in the "musical now "), develop inner-hearing, short- and long-term memory, multi-tasking skills, limb autonomy, and expressive freedom. Exercises are presented in a graded, though flexible order allowing you to select individual exercises in any sequence. Activities involve movement through space (traveling movement) as well as movement in place (stationary movement) for those teaching in small classrooms. The text can be used as a teacher's manual, a supplementary aural-skills textbook, or as a stand-alone reference in a course dedicated to eurhythmics. Movement exercises are designed to enhance and work in conjunction with musical examples presented in other texts. Many exercises also provide an effective aural/sensory tool in the music theory classroom to complement verbal explanations. The approach integrates easily into any traditional college or conservatory classroom and is compatible with the following systems: fixed do, moveable do, and scale degrees. A companion website accompanies the text featuring undergraduate students performing select exercises.

Choreographing Discourses brings together essays originally published by Mark Franko between 1996 and the contemporary moment. Assembling these essays from international, sometimes untranslated sources and curating their relationship to a rapidly changing field, this Reader offers an important resource in the dynamic scholarly fields of Dance and Performance Studies. What makes this volume especially appropriate for undergraduate and graduate teaching is its critical focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century dance artists and choreographers - among these, Oskar Schlemmer, Merce Cunningham, Kazuo Ohno, William Forsythe, Bill T. Jones, and Pina Bausch, some of the most high-profile European, American, and Japanese artists of the past century. The volume's constellation of topics delves into controversies that are essential turning points in the field (notably, Still/Here and Paris is Burning), which illuminate the spine of the field while interlinking dance scholarship with performance theory, film, visual, and public art. The volume contains the first critical assessments of Franko's contribution to the field by Andre Lepecki and Gay Morris, and an interview incorporating a biographical dimension to the development of Franko's work and its relation to his dance and choreography. Ultimately, this Reader encourages a wide scope of conversation and engagement, opening up core questions in ethics, embodiment, and performativity.

This invaluable resource for teachers and therapists continues to explore the link between movement and emotions presented in the first edition of this innovative book. It provides 180 practical activities with a clear rationale for the use of creative dance and movement to enrich therapy or educational programmes. This book features session plans divided into warm-ups, introductions to themes, development of themes and warm-downs and explores many areas, including developmental movement processes, non-verbal communication, and expression communication. In addition to thoroughly updating the content of the original edition, this timely sourcebook includes new material on creative dance and dance movement psychotherapy, added references throughout and updated resources to reflect the most current knowledge. Creative Dance and Movement in Groupwork will be an invaluable asset for group leaders wishing to enhance their practice, as well as a starting point for those wishing to learn more about the field. It provides guidance and practical information that is suitable for working with clients of all ages and for those with a professional or practical interest in the educational, health, recreational or psychotherapeutic use of the arts, this book may act as one of many guiding lights on your journey.

A heart-warming nostalgia memoir from a member of the world famous dance troupe, The Tiller Girls. Based in London in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, Irene's story will transport readers back to a more innocent, simple way of life. This is the story of a little girl who loved to dance. Growing up in London in the 1930s, dancing was so much more to Irene than just a hobby. It was her escape and it took her off into another world away from the harsh realities of life. A fairytale world away from the horrors of WW2, from the grief of losing her father and missing her mother who she didn't see for three years while she was drafted to help with the war effort. And far away from her cold-hearted grandparents who treated her like an inconvenience. Finally it led to her winning a place as a Tiller Girl; the world's most famous dance troupe known for their 32-and-a-half high kicks a minute and precise, symmetrical routines. For four years she opened and closed the show at the prestigious London Palladium and performed on stage alongside huge stars such as Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Judy Garland. It was a strange mixture of glamour and bloody hard work but it was certainly never dull. And being a Tiller Girl also gave Irene the opportunity to see firsthand the devastating effects of WW2, both here and abroad. Heart-warming, enlightening and wonderfully uplifting, Irene's evocative story will transport readers back to a time when every town and holiday resort had several theatres and when dance troupes like The Tiller Girls were the epitome of glitz and glamour.

Dance has always been an important aspect of all human cultures, and the study of human movement and action has become a topic of increasing relevance over the last decade, bringing dance into the focus of the cognitive sciences. Since the first edition of The Neurocognition of Dance was published, research into the cognitive science of dance has expanded extensively, with the number of scientific studies focusing on dance and dance-related topics in cognitive psychology growing significantly. Featuring three new chapters addressing topics that have become highly relevant to the field in recent years - neuroaesthetics, entrainment, and choreographic cognition - as well as progress in teaching based on novel methods, this comprehensively revised and updated new edition of The Neurocognition of Dance is full of cutting-edge insights from scientists, researchers, and professionals from the world of dance. Also now including online material such as links to video clips, colour images and hands-on material for practical application, this book is an essential companion for students and professionals from fields including dance, cognitive psychology, sport psychology and sport science, movement science, and cognitive robotics.

Shakespeare's texts have a long and close relationship with many different types of dance, from dance forms referenced in the plays to adaptations across many genres today. With contributions from experienced and emerging scholars, this handbook provides a concise reference on dance as both an integral feature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture and as a means of translating Shakespearean text into movement - a process that raises questions of authorship and authority, cross-cultural communication, semantics, embodiment, and the relationship between word and image. Motivated by growing interest in movement, materiality, and the body, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance is the first collection to examine the relationship between William Shakespeare - his life, works, and afterlife - and dance. In the handbook's first section - Shakespeare and Dance - authors consider dance within the context of early modern life and culture and investigate Shakespeare's use of dance forms within his writing. The latter half of the handbook - Shakespeare as Dance - explores the ways that choreographers have adapted Shakespeare's work. Chapters address everything from narrative ballet adaptations to dance in musicals, physical theater adaptations, and interpretations using non-Western dance forms such as Cambodian traditional dance or igal, an indigenous dance form from the southern Philippines. With a truly interdisciplinary approach, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance provides an indispensable resource for considerations of dance and corporeality on Shakespeare's stage and the early modern era.

A book on how to teach dance and train dancers, by one of the US's leading dance teachers. Written for dance teachers in both professional settings and academic settings. A unique approach, following Bill's own six decades of dance teaching and not covered by any other book.

Divi Zheni identifies itself as a Bulgarian women's chorus and band, but it is located in Boston and none of its members come from Bulgaria. Zlatne Uste is one of the most popular purveyors of Balkan music in America, yet the name of the band is grammatically incorrect. The members of Sviraci hail from western Massachusetts, upstate New York, and southern Vermont, but play tamburica music on traditional instruments. Curiously, thousands of Americans not only participate in traditional music and dance from the Balkans, but in fact structure their social practices around it without having any other ties to the region. In Balkan Fascination, ethnomusicologist Mirjana Lausevic, a native of the Balkans, investigates this remarkable phenomenon to explore why so many Americans actively participate in specific Balkan cultural practices to which they have no familial or ethnic connection. Going beyond traditional interpretations, she challenges the notion that participation in Balkan culture in North America is merely a specialized offshoot of the 1960s American folk music scene. Instead, her exploration of the relationship between the stark sounds and lively dances of the Balkan region and the Americans who love them reveals that Balkan dance and music has much deeper roots in America's ideas about itself, its place in the world, and the place of the world's cultures in the American melting pot. Examining sources that span more than a century and come from both sides of the Atlantic, Lausevic shows that an affinity group's debt to historical movements and ideas, though largely unknown to its members, is vital in understanding how and why people make particular music and dance choices that substantially change their lives.

She is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body traces the history of the Cuban mulata and her association with hips, sensuality and popular dance. It examines how the mulata choreographs her racialised identity through her hips and enacts an embodied theory called hip(g)nosis. By focusing on her living and dancing body in order to flesh out the process of identity formation, this book makes a claim for how subaltern bodies negotiate a cultural identity that continues to mark their bodies on a daily basis. Combining literary and personal narratives with historical and theoretical accounts of Cuban popular dance history, religiosity and culture, this work investigates the power of embodied exchanges: bodies watching, looking, touching and dancing with one another. It sets up a genealogy of how the representations and venerations of the dancing mulata continue to circulate and participate in the volatile political and social economy of contemporary Cuba.

Examines the pivotal role of dance in the Italian operas of Handel, perhaps the greatest opera composer between Monteverdi and Mozart. George Frideric Handel set himself apart from his contemporaries by employing choreographed instrumental music to complement and reinforce the emotional impact of his operas. Of his fifty-three operas, no fewer than fourteen -- including ten written for the London stage -- feature dances. Dance in Handel's London Operas explores the relationship between music, drama, and dance in these London works, dispelling the notion that dance was a largely peripheral element in Italian-language operas prior to those of Gluck. Taking a chronological approach, Sarah McCleave examines operas written throughout various periods in Handel's life, beginning with his early London operas,including his time at the Royal Music Academy and the "Salle" operas of the 1730s, and concluding with his unstaged dramatic opera Alceste (1750). In considering the various influences on Handel (particularly the London stage), McCleave blends analysis of information from eighteenth-century treatises with that found in more modern studies, offering an informed and imaginative understanding of the role dance played in the work of this major figure --one who remained responsive throughout his career to the vital and innovative theatrical environment in which he worked. Sarah McCleave is a lecturer at The School of Creative Arts at Queen's University Belfast.

Choreographing Copyright provides a historical and cultural analysis of U.S.-based dance-makers' investment in intellectual property rights. Although federal copyright law in the U.S. did not recognize choreography as a protectable class prior to the 1976 Copyright Act, efforts to win copyright protection for dance began eight decades earlier. In a series of case studies stretching from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first, the book reconstructs those efforts and teases out their raced and gendered politics. Rather than chart a narrative of progress, the book shows how dancers working in a range of genres have embraced intellectual property rights as a means to both consolidate and contest racial and gendered power. A number of the artists featured in Choreographing Copyright are well-known white figures in the history of American dance, including modern dancers Loie Fuller, Hanya Holm, and Martha Graham, and ballet artists Agnes de Mille and George Balanchine. But the book also uncovers a host of marginalized figures - from the South Asian dancer Mohammed Ismail, to the African American pantomimist Johnny Hudgins, to the African American blues singer Alberta Hunter, to the white burlesque dancer Faith Dane - who were equally interested in positioning themselves as subjects rather than objects of property, as possessive individuals rather than exchangeable commodities. Choreographic copyright, the book argues, has been a site for the reinforcement of gendered white privilege as well as for challenges to it. Drawing on critical race and feminist theories and on cultural studies of copyright, Choreographing Copyright offers fresh insight into such issues as: the raced and gendered hierarchies that govern the theatrical marketplace, white women's historically contingent relationship to property rights, legacies of ownership of black bodies and appropriation of non-white labor, and the tension between dance's ephemerality and its reproducibility.

This book offers a set of eleven discipline-specific chapters from across the arts, humanities, psychology, and medicine. Each contributor considers the creative potential of error and/or ambiguity, defining these terms in the particular context of that discipline and exploring their values and applications. Themes include error in choreography, poetry, media art, healthcare, psychology, critical typography and mixed reality performance. The book emerges from a core question of how dance research and HCI can inform each other through consideration of error, ambiguity and 'messiness' as methodological tools. The digital age had heralded the possibility that error could be eradicated by the logic of computers but several chapters focus on glitch in arts practices that exploit errors in computer programmes, or even create programmes specifically to produce errors. Together, the chapters explore how error can take us somewhere different or somewhere new, to develop a new, more interesting way of working.

Tracing Tangueros offers an inside view of Argentine tango music in the context of the growth and development of the art form's instrumental and stylistic innovations. Rather than perpetuating the glamorous worldwide conceptions that often only reflect the tango that left Argentina nearly 100 years ago, authors Kacey Link and Kristin Wendland trace tango's historical and stylistic musical trajectory in Argentina, beginning with the guardia nueva's crystallization of the genre in the 1920s, moving through tango's Golden Age (1925-1955), and culminating with the "Music of Buenos Aires" today. Through the transmission, discussion, examination, and analysis of primary sources currently unavailable outside of Argentina, including scores, manuals of style, archival audio/video recordings, and live video footage of performances and demonstrations, Link and Wendland frame and define Argentine tango music as a distinct expression possessing its own musical legacy and characteristic musical elements. Beginning by establishing a broad framework of the tango art form, the book proceeds to move through twelve in-depth profiles of representative tangueros (tango musicians) within the genre's historical and stylistic trajectory. Through this focused examination of tangueros and their music, Link and Wendland show how the dynamic Argentine tango grows from one tanguero linked to another, and how the composition techniques and performance practices of each generation are informed by that of the past.

This book brings insights to begin a new examination of the human musical experience. The world of music is rich with artifacts that make us want to know the correlations of these artifacts and the human socio-cultural milieu. In this text, Dr. Akombo has defined and re-examined both music and dance from a global perspective. He has endeavored to portray music and dance as a composite whole by considering them inherent in every culture. While in some cultures music means sound and body movement, in others, dance means body movement and sound. This book surveys music and dance around the world and tries to put dance and music back to the context in which they were first created by humans: as a composite whole to coexist and compliment each other in an attempt to complete the human sphere. The book presents and shows the connection of the two units of music and dance as complimenting each other and also that the human experience of music and dance is timeless.

"Why do I dance? Dance is my medicine. It's the scream which eases for a while the terrible frustration common to all human beings who because of race, creed, or color, are 'invisible'. Dance is the fist with which I fight the sickening ignorance of prejudice."-Pearl Primus "A revelation of one woman's life, a celebration of Black beauty, and a pleasure to read, The Dance Claimed Me is required reading for anyone interested in one twentieth-century Black woman trailblazer's story."-Eisa Nefertari Ulen, The Crisis Pearl Primus (1919-1994) blazed onto the dance scene in 1943 with stunning works that incorporated social and racial protest into their dance aesthetic. In The Dance Claimed Me, Peggy and Murray Schwartz, friends and colleagues of Primus, offer an intimate perspective on her life and explore her influences on American culture, dance, and education. They trace Primus's path from her childhood in Trinidad, through her rise as an influential international dancer, an early member of the New Dance Group (whose motto was "Dance is a weapon"), and a pioneer in dance anthropology. Primus traveled extensively in the United States, Europe, Israel, the Caribbean, and Africa, and she played an important role in presenting authentic African dance to American audiences. She engendered controversy in both her private and professional lives, marrying a white Jewish man during a time of segregation and challenging black intellectuals who opposed the "primitive" in her choreography. Her political protests and mixed-race tours in the South triggered an FBI investigation, even as she was celebrated by dance critics and by contemporaries like Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson. For The Dance Claimed Me, the Schwartzes interviewed more than a hundred of Primus's family members, friends, and fellow artists-among them Maya Angelou, Geoffrey Holder, Judith Jamison, Donald McKayle, and Archbishop Granville Williams-to create a vivid portrayal of a life filled with passion, drama, determination, fearlessness, and brilliance.

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.

Dancers as Diplomats chronicles the role of dance and dancers in American cultural diplomacy. In the early decades of the Cold War and the twenty-first century, American dancers toured the globe on tours sponsored by the US State Department. Dancers as Diplomats tells the story of how these tours in shaped and some times re-imagined ideas of America in unexpected, often sensational circumstances-pirouetting in Moscow as the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded and dancing in Burma in the days just before the country held its first democratic elections. Based on more than seventy interviews with dancers who traveled on the tours, the book looks at a wide range of American dance companies, among them New York City Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the Martha Graham Dance Company, Urban Bush Women, ODC/Dance, Ronald K. Brown/Evidence, and the Trey McIntyre Project, among others. These companies traveled the world. During the Cold War, they dance everywhere from the Soviet Union during the Cold War to Vietnam just months before the US abandoned Saigon. In the post 9/11 era, they traveled to Asia and Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.

The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance provides a comprehensive introduction to and analysis of the global art form butoh. Originating in Japan in the 1960s, butoh was a major innovation in twentieth century dance and performance, and it continues to shape-shift around the world. Taking inspiration from the Japanese avant-garde, Surrealism, Happenings, and authors such as Genet and Artaud, its influence can be seen throughout contemporary performing arts, music, and visual art practices. This Companion places the form in historical context, documents its development in Japan and its spread around the world, and brings together the theory and the practice of this compelling dance. The interdisciplinarity evident in the volume reflects the depth and the breadth of butoh, and the editors bring specially commissioned essays by leading scholars and dancers together with translations of important early texts.

Watching Weimar Dance asks what audiences saw in the peculiarly turbulent and febrile moment of the Weimar Republic. It closely analyses the reception of various performances, from cabaret to concert dance and experimental theatre, in their own time and place - at home in interwar Germany, on tour, and later returning from exile after World War II. Spectator reports that performers died or became half-machine archived not only the physicality of past performance, but also the ways audiences used the temporary world of the stage to negotiate pressing social issues, from female visibility within commodity culture to the functioning of human-machine hybrids in an era of increasing technologization. These accounts offer offer limit cases for the body on stage and, in so doing, speak to the preoccupations of the day. Approaching a range of performance artists, including Oskar Schlemmer, Valeska Gert, Kurt Jooss, Mary Wigman, Bertolt Brecht, Anita Berber, and the Tiller Girl troupes, through archives of watching, the reception of these performances also revises and complicates understandings of Ausdruckstanz as the representative dance of this moment in Germany. They further reveal how such practices came to be reconfigured and imbued with new significance in the post-war era. By bringing insights from theatre, dance, and performance studies to German cultural studies, and vice versa, Watching Weimar Dance develops a culturally-situated model of watching that not only offers a revisionist narrative, but also demonstrates new methods for dance scholarship to shape cultural history.

Argentinean tango is a global phenomenon. Since its origin among immigrants from the slums of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, it has crossed and re-crossed many borders.Yet, never before has tango been danced by so many people and in so many different places as today. Argentinean tango is more than a specific music and style of dancing. It is also a cultural imaginary which embodies intense passion, hyper-heterosexuality, and dangerous exoticism. In the wake of its latest revival, tango has become both a cultural symbol of Argentinean national identity and a transnational cultural space in which a modest, yet growing number of dancers from different parts of the globe meet on the dance floor. Through interviews and ethnographical research in Amsterdam and Buenos Aires, Kathy Davis shows why a dance from another era and another place appeals to men and women from different parts of the world and what happens to them as they become caught up in the tango salon culture. She shows how they negotiate the ambivalences, contradictions, and hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and global relations of power between North and South in which Argentinean tango is - and has always been - embroiled. Davis also explores her uneasiness about her own passion for a dance which - when seen through the lens of contemporary critical feminist and postcolonial theories - seems, at best, odd, and, at worst, disreputable and even a bit shameful. She uses the disjuncture between the incorrect pleasures and complicated politics of dancing tango as a resource for exploring the workings of passion as experience, as performance, and as cultural discourse. She concludes that dancing tango should be viewed less as a love/hate embrace with colonial overtones than a passionate encounter across many different borders between dancers who share a desire for difference and a taste of the 'elsewhere.'Dancing Tango is a vivid, intriguing account of an important global cultural phenomenon.

Winner of the de la Torre Bueno prize, Society of Dance History Scholars The ancient world served as an unconventional source of inspiration for a generation of modernists. Drawing on examples from literature, dance, photography, and film, Modernism's Mythic Pose argues that a strain of antimodern-classicism permeates modernist celebrations of novelty, shock, and technology. The touchstone of Preston's study is Delsartism-the popular transnational movement which promoted mythic statue-posing, poetic recitation, and other hybrid solo performances for health and spiritual development. Derived from nineteenth-century acting theorist Francois Delsarte and largely organized by women, Delsartism shaped modernist performances, genres, and ideas of gender. Even Ezra Pound, a famous promoter of the "new," made ancient figures speak in the "old" genre of the dramatic monologue and performed public recitations. Recovering precedents in nineteenth-century popular entertainments and Delsartism's hybrid performances, this book considers the canonical modernists Pound and T. S. Eliot, lesser-known poets like Charlotte Mew, the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, Isadora Duncan the international dance star, and H.D. as poet and film actor. Preston's interdisciplinary engagement with performance, poetics, modern dance, and silent film demonstrates that studies of modernism often overemphasize breaks with the past. Modernism also posed myth in an ambivalent relationship to modernity, a halt in the march of progress that could function as escapism, skeptical critique, or a figure for the death of gods and civilizations.

Focusing on Egypt during the period 1760 to 1870, this book fills in the historical blanks for a dance form known today in the Middle East as raqs sharki or raqs baladi, and in Western countries as "belly dance." Eyewitness accounts written by European travelers, the major primary source for modern scholars, provide most of the research material. The author shapes these numerous accounts into a coherent whole, providing a meaningful picture of Egyptian female entertainers of the period as professionals in the arts, rather than as a group of unnamed "ethnic" dancers and singers including one or two identified women of dubious reputation. Analysis is given of the contexts of this dance - which was a legitimate performing art form in Egyptian society appreciated by a wide variety of audiences - with a focus on actual performances - and a re-creation their choreography.

Musical Intimacies and Indigenous Imaginaries explores several styles performed in the vital aboriginal musical scene in the western Canadian province of Manitoba, focusing on fiddling, country music, Christian hymnody, and step dancing. In considering these genres and the contexts in which they are performed, author Byron Dueck outlines a compelling theory of musical publics, examines the complex, overlapping social orientations of contemporary musicians, and shows how music and dance play a central role in a distinctive indigenous public culture.
Dueck considers a wide range of contemporary aboriginal performances and venues--urban and rural, secular and sacred, large and small. Such gatherings create opportunities for the expression of distinctive modes of northern Algonquian sociability and for the creative extension of indigenous publicness. In examining these interstitial sites--at once places of intimate interaction and spaces oriented to imagined audiences--this volume considers how Manitoban aboriginal musicians engage with audiences both immediate and unknown; how they negotiate the possibilities mass mediation affords; and how, in doing so, they extend and elaborate indigenous sociability.
Musical Intimacies brings theories of public culture from anthropology and literary criticism into musicological and ethnomusicological discussions while introducing productive new ways of understanding North American indigenous engagement with mass mediation. It is a unique work that will appeal to students and scholars of popular music, musicology, music theory, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. It will be necessary reading for students of American ethnomusicology, First Nations and Native American studies, and Canadian music studies.

Throughout her history, the ballerina has been perceived as the embodiment of beauty and perfection -- she is the feminine ideal. But the reality is another story. Beginning with the earliest ballerinas, who often led double lives as concubines, Deirdre Kelly goes on to review the troubled lives of 19th-century ballerinas, who lived in poverty and worked under torturous and even life-threatening conditions. In the 20th century, George Balanchine created a contradictory ballet culture that simultaneously idealized and oppressed ballerinas, and many of his dancers suffered from anorexia and bulimia or underwent cosmetic surgery to achieve the ideal ethereal form. At the beginning of the 21st century, ballerinas are still underpaid, vulnerable to arbitrary discrimination and dismissal, and expected to bear pain stoically -- but much of this is beginning to change. As Kelly examines the lives of some of the world's best ballerinas, she argues for a rethinking of the world's most graceful dance form -- a rethinking that would position the ballerina at its heart, where she belongs. Highlighting the work of such great ballerinas such as Anna Pavlova, Isadora Duncan, Suzanne Farrell, Gelsey Kirkland, and Evelyn Hart Kelly illustrates how the world of ballet is slowly evolving.

In the early twentieth century, female performers regularly appeared on the stages and screens of American cities. Though advertised as dancers, mimics, singers, or actresses, they often exceeded these categories. Instead, their performances adopted an aesthetic of intermediality, weaving together techniques and elements drawn from a wide variety of genres and media, including ballet, art music, photography, early modern dance, vaudeville traditions, film, and more. Onstage and onscreen, performers borrowed from existing musical scores and narratives, referred to contemporary shows, films, and events, and mimicked fellow performers, skating neatly across various media, art forms, and traditions. Behind the scenes, they experimented with cross-promotion, new advertising techniques, and various technologies to broadcast images and tales of their performances and lives well beyond the walls of American theaters, cabarets, and halls. The performances and conceptions of art that emerged were innovative, compelling, and deeply meaningful.
Body Knowledge: Performance, Intermediality, and American Entertainment at the Turn of the Twentieth Century examines these performances and the performers behind them, highlighting the Ziegfeld Follies and The Passing Show revues, Salome dancers, Isadora Duncan's Wagner dances, Adeline Genee and Bessie Clayton's photographic danced histories, Hazel Mackaye and Ruth St. Denis's pageants, and Anna Pavlova's opera and film projects. By destabilizing the boundaries between various media, genres, and performance spaces, each of these women was able to create performances that negotiated turn-of-the-century American social and cultural issues: contemporary technological developments and the rise of mass reproduction, new modes of perception, the commodification of art and entertainment, the evolution of fan culture and stardom, changing understandings of the body and the self, and above all, shifting conceptions of gender, race, and sexual identity. Tracing the various modes of intermediality at work on- and offstage, Body Knowledge re-imagines early twentieth-century art and entertainment as both fluid and convergent.