Making Video Dance: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Dance for the Screen is the first workbook to follow the entire process of video dance production: from having an idea, through to choreographing for the screen, filming and editing, and distribution. In doing so, it explores and analyses the creative, practical, technical, and aesthetic issues that arise when making screen dance. This rigorously revised edition brings the book fully up to date from a technical and aesthetic point of view, and includes: An extended exploration of improvisation in the video dance-making process New writing about filming in the landscape Additional writing on developing a practice and working with scores and manifestos Updated information about camera use, including filming with mobile phones A step-by-step guide to digital non-linear editing of screen dance Ideas for distribution in the 21st century Insights into Katrina's own screen dance practice, with reference to specific works that she has directed and which are available to view online New and revised practical exercises New illustrations specially drawn for this edition

The Art of Movement is an exquisitely designed, beautifully produced book that captures the movement, flow, energy, and grace of many of the most accomplished dancers in the world. These are the artists, from all walks of life, who are defining dance today. Here they are frozen in time in the most exquisite poses, and yet there's a feeling of movement in every photograph that makes the appear to be dancing across the pages. Accompanying the photographs are intimate and inspiring words from the dancers, as well as from choreographers and artistic directors, on what dance means to them. Dance is experiencing an unprecedented moment in popular culture. The Art of Movement is the perfect book for newly avid fans, as well as long-time lovers of dance.

This newly-updated second edition explores Pina Bausch's work and methods by combining interviews, first-hand accounts, and practical exercises from her developmental process for students of both dance and theatre. This comprehensive overview of her work offers new and exciting insight into the theatrical approach of a singular performance practitioner. This is an essential introduction to the life and work of one of the most significant choreographers/directors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As a first step towards critical understanding, and as an initial exploration before going on to further, primary research, Routledge Performance Practitioners offer unbeatable value for today's student.

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.

Why did the Greeks of the archaic and early Classical period join in choruses that sang and danced on public and private occasions? This book offers a wide-ranging exploration of representations of chorality in the poetry, art and material remains of early Greece in order to demonstrate the centrality of the activity in the social, religious and technological practices of individuals and communities. Moving from a consideration of choral archetypes, among them cauldrons, columns, Gorgons, ships and halcyons, the discussion then turns to an investigation of how participation in choral song and dance shaped communal experience and interacted with a variety of disparate spheres that include weaving, cataloguing, temple architecture and inscribing. The study ends with a treatment of the role of choral activity in generating epiphanies and allowing viewers and participants access to realms that typically lie beyond their perception.

Body and space refer to vital and interrelated dimensions in the experience of sounds and music. Sounds have an overwhelming impact on feelings of bodily presence and inform us about the space we experience. Even in situations where visual information is artificial or blurred, such as in virtual environments or certain genres of film and computer games, sounds may shape our perceptions and lead to surprising new experiences. This book discusses recent developments in a range of interdisciplinary fields, taking into account the rapidly changing ways of experiencing sounds and music, the consequences for how we engage with sonic events in daily life and the technological advancements that offer insights into state-of-the-art methods and future perspectives. Topics range from the pleasures of being locked into the beat of the music, perception-action coupling and bodily resonance, and affordances of musical instruments, to neural processing and cross-modal experiences of space and pitch. Applications of these findings are discussed for movement sonification, room acoustics, networked performance, and for the spatial coordination of movements in dance, computer gaming and interactive artistic installations.

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen sets the agenda for the study of dance in popular moving images - films, television shows, commercials, music videos, and YouTube - and offers new ways to understand the multi-layered meanings of the dancing body by engaging with methodologies from critical dance studies, performance studies, and film/media analysis. Through thorough engagement with these approaches, the chapters demonstrate how dance on the popular screen might be read and considered through bodies and choreographies in moving media. Questions the contributors consider include: How do dance and choreography function within the filmic apparatus? What types of bodies are associated with specific dances and how does this affect how dance(s) is/are perceived in the everyday? How do the dancing bodies on screen negotiate power, access, and agency? How are multiple choreographies of identity (e.g., race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation) set in motion through the narrative, dancing bodies, and/or dance style? What types of corporeal labors (dance training, choreographic skill, rehearsal, the constructed notion of "natural talent") are represented or ignored? What role does a specific film have in the genealogy of Hollywood dance film? How does the Hollywood dance film inform how dance operates in making cultural meanings? Whether looking at Bill "Bojangles" Robinson's tap steps in Stormy Weather, or Baby's leap into Johnny Castle's arms in Dirty Dancing, or even Neo's backwards bend in The Matrix, the book's arguments offer powerful new scholarship on dance in the popular screen.

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor and Francis, an informa company.

'What a multi-sensory pleasure in learning! I will be a better teacher and better clinician using what I am learning from this book.' Carol M Davis DPT, EdD, MS, FAPTA The emerging science of biotensegrity provides a fresh context for re-thinking our understanding of human movement, but its complexities can be formidable. Bodywork and movement professionals looking for an accessible and relevant guide to the concept and application of biotensegrity need look no further than Everything Moves: How biotensegrity informs human movement. In order to work with our own bodies and the bodies of our students, clients and teams most effectively, we need to understand the nature of our human structure. Everything Moves offers the enquiring bodyworker or movement professional, who wants to take their understanding of how to apply biotensegrity in their work to the next level, a practical and relatable guide to the biotensegral nature of our bodies, in which all of the parts are one, yet all are constantly changing. Throughout Everything Moves, concepts and ideas are presented with activities and exercises to make them tangible, accessible and applicable. The material presented is suitable for coaches and movement teachers new to biotensegrity, as well as those with more advanced levels of understanding. Whether your focus is performance, sports, Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais, yoga, Pilates, martial arts, or dance, any arena in which bodies move can be informed by Everything Moves!

Long treated as peripheral to music history, dance has become prominent within musicological research, as a prime and popular subject for an increasing number of books, articles, conference papers and special symposiums. Despite this growing interest, there remains no thorough-going critical examination of the ways in which musicologists might engage with dance, thinking not only about specific repertoires or genres, but about fundamental commonalities between the two, including embodiment, agency, subjectivity and consciousness. This volume begins to fill this gap. Ten chapters illustrate a range of conceptual, historical and interpretive approaches that advance the interdisciplinary study of music and dance. This methodological eclecticism is a defining feature of the volume, integrating insights from critical theory, film and cultural studies, the visual arts, phenomenology, cultural anthropology and literary criticism into the study of music and dance.

In recent decades, dance has become a vehicle for querying assumptions about what it means to be embodied, in turn illuminating intersections among the political, the social, the aesthetical, and the phenomenological. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics edited by internationally lauded scholars Rebekah Kowal, Gerald Siegmund, and the late Randy Martin presents a compendium of newly-commissioned chapters that address the interdisciplinary and global scope of dance theory - its political philosophy, social movements, and approaches to bodily difference such as disability, postcolonial, and critical race and queer studies. In six sections 30 of the most prestigious dance scholars in the US and Europe track the political economy of dance and analyze the political dimensions of choreography, of writing history, and of embodied phenomena in general. Employing years of intimate knowledge of dance and its cultural phenomenology, scholars urge readers to re-think dominant cultural codes, their usages, and the meaning they produce and theorize ways dance may help to re-signify and to re-negotiate established cultural practices and their inherent power relations. This handbook poses ever-present questions about dance politics-which aspects or effects of a dance can be considered political? What possibilities and understandings of politics are disclosed through dance? How does a particular dance articulate or undermine forces of authority? How might dance relate to emancipation or bondage of the body? Where and how can dance articulate social movements, represent or challenge political institutions, or offer insight into habits of labor and leisure? The handbook opens its critical terms in two directions. First, it offers an elaborated understanding of how dance achieves its politics. Second, it illustrates how notions of the political are themselves expanded when viewed from the perspective of dance, thus addressing both the relationship between the politics in dance and the politics of dance. Using the most sophisticated theoretical frameworks and engaging with the problematics that come from philosophy, social science, history, and the humanities, chapters explore the affinities, affiliations, concepts, and critiques that are inherent in the act of dance, and questions about matters political that dance makes legible.

Merce Cunningham reached the age of 75 in 1994, an age at which many creative artists are content to rest on their laurels, or at least to leave behind whatever controversies they may have caused during their careers. No so Cunningham. In the first place, his 70s have been a time of intense creativity in which he has choreographed as many as four new works a year. Cunningham is a strongly committed as ever to the discovery of new ways of moving and of making movement, refusing to be hampered by the physical limitations that have come with age. Since 1991 every new work has been made at least in part with the use of the computer program Life Forms, which enables him to devise choreographic phrases that he himself would be unable to perform - and which challenge and develop the virtuosity of the young dancers in his company. The essays collected in this special issue of Choreography and Dance were written over the last few years and discuss various aspects of the work of Cunningham as seen both from the outside and the inside.

Africans brought as slaves to North America arrived without possessions, but not without culture. The fascinating elements of African life manifested themselves richly in the New World, and among the most lasting and influential of these was the art of African dance. This generously illustrated exploration of African American dance history follows the dynamics of the dance forms throughout each generation. Chapter 1 provides introductory information about the African continent and the heritage that spawned African American dance. Following is a discussion of the discrimination and marginalization endured by African Americans, and the fortitude with which the dance survived and became increasingly important in American culture. Chapters 2 and 3 explore black dance in the slavery era and the variety of black festivals and gatherings that helped to preserve and showcase African-based dance throughout the nineteenth century. Remaining chapters outline ten major characteristics that have consistently marked African American dance, and describe the various styles of black vernacular dance that became popular in America--the Ring Shout, Buzzard Lope, Cakewalk, Shimmy, Charleston, Black Bottom, Big Apple, Lindy Hop, and more. Chapter 8 concludes with a discussion of African dance at the end of the twentieth century and its important role in the flowering of African American arts.

Arguably the world's most popular partnered social dance form, salsa's significance extends well beyond the Latino communities which gave birth to it. The growing international and cross-cultural appeal of this Latin dance form, which celebrates its mixed origins in the Caribbean and in Spanish Harlem, offers a rich site for examining issues of cultural hybridity and commodification in the context of global migration. Salsa consists of countless dance dialects enjoyed by varied communities in different locales. In short, there is not one dance called salsa, but many. Spinning Mambo into Salsa, a history of salsa dance, focuses on its evolution in three major hubs for international commercial export-New York, Los Angeles, and Miami. The book examines how commercialized salsa dance in the 1990s departed from earlier practices of Latin dance, especially 1950s mambo. Topics covered include generational differences between Palladium Era mambo and modern salsa; mid-century antecedents to modern salsa in Cuba and Puerto Rico; tension between salsa as commercial vs. cultural practice; regional differences in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami; the role of the Web in salsa commerce; and adaptations of social Latin dance for stage performance. Throughout the book, salsa dance history is linked to histories of salsa music, exposing how increased separation of the dance from its musical inspiration has precipitated major shifts in Latin dance practice. As a whole, the book dispels the belief that one version is more authentic than another by showing how competing styles came into existence and contention. Based on over 100 oral history interviews, archival research, ethnographic participant observation, and analysis of Web content and commerce, the book is rich with quotes from practitioners and detailed movement description.

A facsimile of Feuillet's 1704 dance manual, 'Recueil de Dances contenant un tres grand nombres des meillieures Entrees de Ballet de M. Pecour tant pour homme que pour femme dont la plus grande partie ont ete dancees a l'Opera.' Apart from a brief introduction in French, the book consists entirely of notation examples in Feuillet's own notation system.

Moving Sites explores site-specific dance practice through a combination of analytical essays and practitioner accounts of their working processes. In offering this joint effort of theory and practice, it aims to provide dance academics, students and practitioners with a series of discussions that shed light both on approaches to making this type of dance practice, and evaluating and reflecting on it. The edited volume combines critical thinking from a range of perspectives including commentary and observation from the fields of dance studies, human geography and spatial theory in order to present interdisciplinary discourse and a range of critical and practice-led lenses through which this type of work can be considered and explored. In so doing, this book addresses the following questions: * How do choreographers make site-specific dance performance? * What occurs when a moving body engages with site, place and environment? * How might we interpret, analyse and evaluate this type of dance practice through a range of theoretical lenses? * How can this type of practice inform wider discussions of embodiment, site, space, place and environment? This innovative and exciting book seeks to move beyond description and discussion of site-specific dance as a spectacle or novelty and considers site-dance as a valid and vital form of contemporary dance practice that explores, reflects, disrupts, contests and develops understandings and practices of inhabiting and engaging with a range of sites and environments. Dr Victoria Hunter is Senior Lecturer in Dance at the University of Chichester.

Improvisation is a performance practice that animates and activates diverse energies of inspiration, critique, and invention. In recent years it has coalesced into an exciting and innovative new field of interdisciplinary scholarly inquiry, becoming a cornerstone of both practical and theoretical approaches to performance."

The Improvisation Studies Reader" draws together the works of key artists and thinkers from a range of disciplines, including theatre, music, literature, film, and dance. Divided by keywords into eight sections, this book bridges the gaps between these fields. The book includes case studies, exercises, graphic scores and poems in order to produce a teaching and research resource that identifies central themes in improvisation studies. The sections include:

• Listening
• Trust/Risk
• Flow
• Dissonance
• Responsibility
• Liveness
• Surprise
• Hope

Each section of the Reader is introduced by a newly commissioned think piece by a key figure in the field, which opens up research questions reflecting on the keyword in question.

By placing key theoretical and classic texts in conversation with cutting-edge research and artists statements, this book answers the urgent questions facing improvising artists and theorists in the mediatized Twenty-First Century. "

Meke, a traditional rhythmic dance accompanied by singing, signifies an important piece of identity for Fijians. Despite its complicated history of colonialism, racism, censorship, and religious conflict, meke remained a vital part of artistic expression and culture. Evadne Kelly performs close readings of the dance in relation to an evolving landscape, following the postcolonial reclamation that provided dancers with political agency and a strong sense of community that connected and fractured Fijians worldwide. Through extensive archival and ethnographic fieldwork in both Fiji and Canada, Kelly offers key insights into an underrepresented dance form, region, and culture. Her perceptive analysis of meke will be of interest in dance studies, postcolonial and Indigenous studies, anthropology and performance ethnography, and Pacific Island studies.

A comprehensive overview of the dance culture of Singapore, this book embodies storytelling, personal reflections, memories, and histories of the artists. The extensive calendar of events encompassing companies and soloists from diverse dance practices, such as Indian, Malay and Chinese and a variety of Western contemporary dances, underline Singapore as a vibrant player in the evolution of Asian culture.

Group Motion reflects 50 years of co-creation between dancers, choreographers, teachers Brigitta Herrmann and Manfred Fischbeck, along with the participation of thousands of dancers, musicians, videographers and people around the world. Part memoire, part guidebook, part philosophy of art treatise, the book can be read for its stories, for its games, for inspiration. It may even be read for its photos. It does not offer a general history of dance movement improvisation; instead, it presents a very personal and original one. Informed by Mary Wigman's expressionist dance and other contemporary dance and theater traditions, Group Motion evolved and now represents a particular form of improvisational performance practice. Here you will find step-by-step guidance for dozens of improvisational structures or games. Group Motion's vision has brought dance game structures not only onto stages, but into prisons, airports, and public parks. The book offers guidance for dance professionals, theater artists, improvisational musicians and multi-disciplinary performers, and also those who use movement as an expressive tool for all.

Dance is the art least susceptible to preservation since its embodied, kinaesthetic nature has proven difficult to capture in notation and even in still or moving images. However, frameworks have been established and guidance made available for keeping dances, performances, and choreographers' legacies alive so that the dancers of today and tomorrow can experience and learn from the dances and dancers of the past. In this volume, a range of voices address the issue of dance preservation through memory, artistic choice, interpretation, imagery and notation, as well as looking at relevant archives, legal structures, documentation and artefacts. The intertwining of dance preservation and creativity is a core theme discussed throughout this text, pointing to the essential continuity of dance history and dance innovation. The demands of preservation stretch across time, geographies, institutions and interpersonal connections, and this book focuses on the fascinating web that supports the fragile yet urgent effort to sustain our dancing heritage. The articles in this book were originally published in the journal Dance Chronicle: Studies in Dance and the Related Arts.

Welcome to The Empire theatre 1922. When Jack Treadwell arrives at The Empire, in the middle of a rehearsal, he is instantly mesmerised. But amid the glitz and glamour, he soon learns that the true magic of the theatre lies in its cast of characters - both on stage and behind the scenes. There's stunning starlet Stella Stanmore and Hollywood heartthrob Lancelot Drake; and Ruby Rowntree, who keeps the music playing, while Lady Lillian Lassiter, theatre owner and former showgirl, is determined to take on a bigger role. And then there's cool, competent Grace Hawkins, without whom the show would never go on . . . could she be the leading lady Jack is looking for? When long-held rivalries threaten The Empire's future, tensions rise along with the curtain. There is treachery at the heart of the company and a shocking secret waiting in the wings. Can Jack discover the truth before it's too late, and the theatre he loves goes dark? Musical theatre legend Michael Ball brings his trademark warmth, wit and glamour to this, his debut novel. Enjoy the show! Real readers love The Empire 'A charming, captivating, majestic, electrifying, exciting and dazzling masterpiece' 'This book was perfect' 'The Empire is fantastic read, and one of my favourites of this year!' 'A real razzmatazz of a read' 'What a wonderful book, as full of warmth and wit as Michael himself . . . absolute magic!' The Empire was a Sunday Times No. 3 bestseller for w/c 24/10/2022'

In this sparkling, innovative, fully-illustrated work, world-renowned choreographer Annie-B Parson translates the components of dance-time, proximity, space, motion and tone- into text. As we follow Parson through her days-at home, reading, and on her walks down the street-and in and out of conversations on everything from Homer's Odyssey to feminist art to social protest, she helps us see how everyday movement creates the wider world. Dance, it turns out, is everything and everywhere. With the insight and verve of a soloist, Parson shows us how art-making is a part of our everyday lives and our political life as we move, together and apart, through space.

Since its inception, French opera has embraced dance, yet all too often operatic dancing is treated as mere decoration. Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera exposes the multiple and meaningful roles that dance has played, starting from Jean-Baptiste Lully's first opera in 1672. It counters prevailing notions in operatic historiography that dance was parenthetical and presents compelling evidence that the divertissement - present in every act of every opera - is essential to understanding the work. The book considers the operas of Lully - his lighter works as well as his tragedies - and the 46-year period between the death of Lully and the arrival of Rameau, when influences from the commedia dell'arte and other theatres began to inflect French operatic practices. It explores the intersections of musical, textual, choreographic and staging practices at a complex institution - the Academie Royale de Musique - which upheld as a fundamental aesthetic principle the integration of dance into opera.

A facsimile reproduction of Giambatista Dufort's manual, published in Naples in 1728, with text entirely in Italian. Part one of the book consists of thirty-four chapters devoted to instructions for steps required in Italian Baroque dance including pirola (pirouette), sfuggito (echappe), passo unite (assemble), and cadente (tombe). Each step is fully described and notated in Feuillet notation, the dance notation system first published by French choreographer Raoul-Auger Feuillet in 1700. The second part of the manual contains six chapters devoted to performance of the minuetto (minuet) and concludes with a section on the contradanza (contredanse) and riverenze (bows).