What does it mean to be a performing arts leader? Leadership in the Performing Arts addresses and analyzes this question by presenting the wisdom and expertise of eleven men and women with experience leading nonprofit performing arts institutions in the United States. These successful leaders provide many real-world examples of business practices that may be generally applied by practitioners in our field, and throughout the nonprofit sector. The book examines: The leader's career path and professional growth The leader's vision Leadership styles and the importance of interpersonal skills Setting and executing organizational priorities Leading decision-making and communication processes Creating change and innovation Challenges faced in leading an institution Interviewees include: Kathy Brown, executive director of the New York City Ballet; Peter Gelb, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera; Heather Hitchens, president of the American Theatre Wing; Karen Brooks Hopkins, president and chief executive officer of the Brooklyn Academy of Music; Timothy J. McClimon, president of the American Express Foundation; Laura Penn, executive director of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society; Arlene Shuler, president and chief executive officer of New York City Center; Paul Tetreault, director of Ford's Theatre; Nancy Umanoff, executive director of the Mark Morris Dance Group; Patrick Willingham, executive director of The Public Theater; and Harold Wolpert, managing director of the Roundabout Theatre Company. Allworth Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, publishes a broad range of books on the visual and performing arts, with emphasis on the business of art. Our titles cover subjects such as graphic design, theater, branding, fine art, photography, interior design, writing, acting, film, how to start careers, business and legal forms, business practices, and more. While we don't aspire to publish a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are deeply committed to quality books that help creative professionals succeed and thrive. We often publish in areas overlooked by other publishers and welcome the author whose expertise can help our audience of readers.

Serge Diaghilev was the Russian impresario who is often said to have invented the modern art form of ballet. Commissioning such legendary names as Nijinsky, Fokine, Stravinsky, and Picasso, this intriguingly complex genius produced a series of radically original art works that had a revolutionary impact throughout the western world.Off stage and in its wake came scandal and sensation, as the great artists and mercurial performers involved variously collaborated, clashed, competed while falling in and out of love with each other on a wild carousel of sexual intrigue and temperamental mayhem. The Ballets Russes not only left a matchless artistic legacy - they changed style and glamour, they changed taste, and they changed social behaviour. The Ballets Russes came to an official end after many vicissitudes with Diaghilev's abrupt death in 1929. But the achievements of its heroic prime had established a paradigm that would continue to define the terms and set the standards for the next. Published to mark the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Diaghilev's birth, Rupert Christiansen - leading critic and self-confessed 'incurable balletomane' - presents this freshly researched and challenging reassessment of a unique phenomenon, exploring passionate conflicts and outsize personalities in a story embracing triumph and disaster.

"New York Times" bestselling author Allen St. John started off looking for the world's greatest guitar, but what he found instead was the world's greatest guitar builder. Living and working in Rugby, Virginia (population 7), retired rural mail carrier Wayne Henderson is a true American original, making America's finest instruments using little more than a pile of good wood and a sharp whittling knife. There's a 10-year waiting list for Henderson's heirloom acoustic guitars -- and even a musical legend like Eric Clapton must wait his turn. Partly out of self-interest, St. John prods Henderson into finally building Clapton's guitar, and soon we get to pull up a dusty stool and watch this Stradivari in glue-stained blue jeans work his magic. The story that ensues will captivate you with its portrait of a world where craftsmanship counts more than commerce, and time is measured by old jokes, old-time music, and homemade lemon pies shared by good friends.

Narrated in a voice that at times may be construed as the author's own, Guide is the story of the conflict between a novelist's fantasy life and his inability to represent it in language. Remembering the clarity and omnipotence he felt during an LSD trip in his teens, "Dennis" drops acid and attempts to write a novel that will make sense of his life, his desires, his friends, and his art, and distinguish what is real from the distortions created by his overactive imagination. Dennis's sexual relationship with Chris - an addict who fantasizes about being killed - pushes him to the very edge of emotions he has only imagined. His platonic love for Luke, an imaginative, but far more innocent, friend, offers possible salvation from his otherwise crazy life. In episodic chapters that criss-cross through time, Guide weaves together Dennis's story with these and other characters, including Goof, a young and amazingly innocent porn star, Sniffles, a teenage runaway whose need for love outweighs his attachment to life, and Mason, whose lurid desires are rivaled only by Dennis's own.

This book teaches readers how to put a working system together by showing them the equipment available to them, and what it can do. Readers will learn how to create video products using the computer as an editing tool, and how to refine sound and combine graphics with video. Information on web distribution is included.

With the advent of the new digital camcorders developed by Panasonic and Sony in the new DV format, professional quality video is available in consumer-level equipment. At the same time, digital editing is now available for the PC using video capture cards in the $500-$1,000 price range, and digital editing software in the $800-$1,200 range, such as Adobe Premiere. This combination enables users such as the sophisticated amateur video maker, the wedding or business presentation video maker, and people working in multimedia for educational, training, or other presentation purposes, to edit their own work and turn out competent professional-quality video.
Provides amateur and professional videographers information on the newest digital editing software available
Examines a wide range of presentation issues such as sound, and combining graphics with video
Covers web distribution

This finely illustrated book offers a simple yet comprehensive 'grammar' of a new discipline. Performance Art first became popular in the fifties when artists began creating 'happenings'. Since then the artist as a performer has challenged many of the accepted rules of the theatre and radically altered our notion of what constitutes visual art. This is the first publication to outline the essential characteristics of the field and to put forward a method for teaching the subject as a discipline distinct from dance, drama, painting or sculpture.
Taking the theory of primary and secondary colours as his model, Anthony Howell posits three primaries of action and shows how these may be mixed to obtain a secondary range of actions. Based on a taught course, the system is designed for practical use in the studio and is also entertaining to explore. Examples are cited from leading performance groups and practitioners such as Bobbie Baker, Orlan, Stelarc, Annie Sprinkle, Robert Wilson, Goat Island, and Station House Opera.
This volume, however, is not just an illustrated grammar of action - it also shows how the syntax of that grammar has psychoanalytic repercussions. This enables the performer to relate the system to lived experience, ensuring a realisation that meaning is being dealt with through these actions and that the stystem set forth is more than a dry structuring of the characteristics of movement.
Freud's notion of 'transference' and Lacan's understanding of 'repetition' are compared to a performer's usage of the same terms. Thus the book provides a psychoanalytic critique of performance at the same time as it outlines an efficient method for creating live work on both fine art and theatre courses.

"The classic drama of a daughter's revenge of her father's murder, in a brilliant new translation for modern audiences. Plays for Performance Series."

The first volume to focus exclusively on lesbian performance work, Acts of Passion: Sexuality, Gender, and Performance draws on the experiences and expertise of a wide range of lesbian practitioners and theorists to explore the impact and influences of sexuality and gender on performance. It examines essays, dialogues, and performance texts from theater directors, performers, theorists, playwrights, and performance writers against social and cultural constructs and performance theories to produce a diverse and challenging portrait of lesbian live performance art. The book's penetrating scope covers drag queens, lesbian vampires, representations of lesbian sex, solo artists, the art of collaboration, lesbian aesthetics, and lesbian playwrights writing straight and illustrates why live performance is one of the most dynamic forums in which women can create, control, and produce their work without artistic constraint.Acts of Passion explodes binary definitions of gender and sexuality by destabilizing familiar notions of the 'real'and creating new production values and aesthetics in the process. The relationships between experience and expression, sexuality and cultural placing, context and artistic control, representation and self-representation become clearer as the book discusses: the manner in which women are represented as absent in the signifying system of patriarchal society how questions of purity, 'authenticity,'and self-definition complicate the field of representation the power of lesbian dance performance to make the lesbian body culturally visible several 'new wave'performers--creating work, getting seen, showing flesh, doing politics, and making money the projections, preconceptions, expectations, and general baggage attached to the performing lesbian body what the term 'lesbian playwright'means within contemporary culture 'It's Queer Up North'--a British National Arts Organization the arguments for and against mainstreaming lesbian performanceAnyone interested in theater and performance, cultural studies, gender issues, and the politics of 'positive representation'--whether playwright, performer, director, writer, academic, student, or theatre goer--will find Acts of Passion a powerful step in wrenching the power of representation away from the dominant culture. Defiant, saucy, sexy, and smart, the contributors appropriate their own spaces, identities, crafts, and languages, both within this book and without.

Communication Research on Expressive Arts and Narrative as Forms of Healing: More than Words examines a number of widely used expressive arts therapies from a communication perspective, providing case studies and other qualitative investigations focused specifically on communication aspects of expressive therapies including drama, music, and dance/movement therapies. This collection, edited by Kamran Afary and Alice Marianne Fritz and authored by contributors with experience as educators, artists, and licensed therapists, integrates communication, therapy, and pedagogy to explore the role and efficacy of expressive arts therapies. Scholars of communication, performing arts, and mental health will find this book particularly useful, along with mental health practitioners and scholars conducting fieldwork.

Bursting with beautiful illustrations to color, Harry Potter: Ravenclaw: The Official Coloring Book is a must-have coloring book for members of this house and fans of the magical film series. Grab your colored pencils--it's time for coloring wizardry! Show your house pride with intricate all-new artwork of characters, iconic objects, and magical places from the Harry Potter films, all themed to house Ravenclaw. Featuring important house moments from the Sorting Ceremony, Yule Ball, feasts, and so much more, this coloring book is jam-packed with special designs and scenes every wise Ravenclaw will love. GORGEOUSLY INTRICATE: 64 pages of intricate designs, perfect for hours of coloring relaxation and creativity BELOVED CHARACTERS: Includes all-new artwork of beloved Ravenclaws, including Luna Lovegood, Cho Chang, Filius Flitwick, and more COLLECT ALL HOGWARTS HOUSES: Collect all four official Harry Potter Coloring Books: Gryffindor, Slytherin, Ravenclaw, and Hufflepuff OFFICIAL WIZARDING WORLD COLORING BOOK: Created in collaboration with the studio behind the Harry Potter films 20th ANNIVERSARY: Released to coincide with the 20th anniversary celebration of the first Harry Potter film.

The Sunday Times top 10 bestseller. Laugh along with Michael McIntyre as he lifts the curtain on his life in his long-awaited autobiography. Michael's first book ended with his big break at the 2006 Royal Variety Performance. Waking up the next morning in the tiny rented flat he shared with his wife Kitty and their one-year-old son, he was beyond excited about the new glamorous world of show business. Unfortunately, he was also clueless . . . In A Funny Life, Michael honestly and hilariously shares the highs and the lows of his rise to the top and desperate attempts to stay there. It's all here, from his disastrous panel show appearances to his hit TV shows, from mistakenly thinking he'd be a good chat show host and talent judge, to finding fame and fortune beyond his wildest dreams and becoming the biggest-selling comedian in the world. Along the way he opens his man drawer, narrowly avoids disaster when his trousers fall down in front of three policemen and learns the hard way why he should always listen to his wife. Michael has had a silly life, a stressful life, sometimes a moving and touching life, but always A Funny Life.

In seiner jungsten Erzahlung zeichnet Ralph Pordzik das eindringliche und bewegende Portrait eines Paars, das sich auseinandergelebt hat und dessen Trennung zum Anlass einer beklemmenden Analyse ihrer gemeinsam verbrachten Jahre und Erlebnisse wird. Dabei eroffnet sich dem Leser schrittweise ein Jenseits der alltaglichen Erfahrung, das durch Sprache und Kommunikation wohl ermoglicht wird, aber in seinen Paradoxien durch die gemeinsam und gegeneinander gefuhrten Gesprache nicht mehr fassbar ist.

In this text a variety of voices and opinions are heard discussing aspects of musical performance. These include those of: a conductor responding to questions about opera in translation and other questions relating to opera; a singer writing about the difficulties and rewards of taking the title role in three different productions of an opera; two orchestral musicians describe their journey into the profession and provide an insight into it; and an ardent concert and opera lover relates his feelings when listening to music in various environments.

This book examines Shakespearean adaptations through the critical lens of fan studies and asks what it means to be a fan of Shakespeare in the context of contemporary media fandom. Although Shakespeare studies and fan studies have remained largely separate from one another for the past thirty years, this book establishes a sustained dialogue between the two fields. In the process, it reveals and seeks to overcome the problematic assumptions about the history of fan cultures, Shakespeare's place in that history, and how fan works are defined. While fandom is normally perceived as a recent phenomenon focused primarily on science fiction and fantasy, this book traces fans' practices back to the eighteenth century, particularly David Garrick's Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769. Shakespeare's Fans connects historical and scholarly debates over who owns Shakespeare and what constitutes an appropriate adaptation of his work to online fan fiction and commercially available fan works.

Originally published in 1977 and long out of print, Maurice Yacowar's Hitchcock's British Films was the first volume devoted solely to the twenty-three films directed by Alfred Hitchcock in his native England before he came to the United States. As such, it was the first book to challenge the assumption that Hitchcock's ""mature"" period in Hollywood, from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, represented the director's best work. In this traditional auteurist examination of Hitchcock's early work, author Maurice Yacowar considers Hitchcock's British films in chronological order, reads the composition of individual shots and scenes in each, and pays special attention to the films' verbal effects. Yacowar's readings remain compelling more than thirty years after they were written, and some-on Downhill, Champagne, and Waltzes from Vienna-are among the few extended interpretations of these films that exist. Alongside important works such as Murder!, the first The Man Who Knew Too Much, Secret Agent, The Lady Vanishes, and Blackmail, readers will appreciate Yacowar's equal attention to lesser-known films like The Pleasure Garden, The Ring, and The Manxman. Yacowar dissects Hitchcock's precise staging and technical production to draw out ethical themes and metaphysical meanings of each film, while keeping a close eye on the source material, such as novels and plays, that Hitchcock used as the inspiration for many of his screenplays. Yacowar concludes with an overview of Hitchcock as auteur and an appendix identifying the director's appearances in these films. A foreword by Barry Keith Grant and a preface to the second edition from Yacowar complete this comprehensive volume. Anyone interested in Hitchcock, classic British cinema, or the history of film will appreciate Yacowar's accessible and often witty exploration of the director's early work.

Writers are storytellers. The best of them have utilized the principles of myth to create masterful stories that are dramatic, entertaining and psychologically true. Based on the work of Joseph Campbell, this edition provides an insider's look at how writers (both fiction and non-fiction) can utilize mythic structure to create powerful narratives. Writers will discover step by step guidelines for structuring plots and creating realistic characters. This new 4th edition adds 30% new material.

This political comedy from acclaimed film, theatre, and television legend Larry Gelbart examines the long-term consequences of the Bush-era White House through an imaginary hearing investigating the abrogation of human rights under the Bush regime.
Hillary Clinton is now president and, in an attempt to sift through the debris of the post-Bush regime, holds a congressional meeting to explore how the atrocities during the previous administration could have possibly happened. As the hearing progresses, some shocking truths about the infamous conservative leaders are revealed.

Art and life become disturbingly interchangeable when a sculptor of baby dolls meets a woman desperate to recreate the past. This dark comedy takes an unsettling look at work, latex, and the power of creation.
Nominee 2011 Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award, Best Original Script

Il problema della sinistra di oggi risiede tutto nella parcellizzazione sociale e nell'incapacita di andare oltre gli interessi particolari, sui quali il capitalismo finanziario speculativo fa leva per scalzare i diritti acquisiti dei lavoratori per soppiantarli coi propri.

Michael Shurtleff has been casting director for  Broadway shows like Chicago and  Becket and for films like The  Graduate and Jesus Christ  Superstar. His legendary course on auditioning has  launched hundreds of successful careers. Now in this  book he tells the all-important HOW for all  aspiring actors, from the beginning student of acting to  the proven talent trying out for that  chance-in-a-million role!

It's up to a little seven year-old girl named Eve to save Christmas for everyone What will become of Christmas when Santa Claus and the citizens of the North Pole are kidnapped by a bunch of directionally challenged pirates? This wondrous musical is destined to become a holiday tradition for you and your entire family.