This guide serves as a starting point for Dance students, faculty and staff who are using the ISU Library. Click on the tabs above to discover books, journal articles, databases and other resources to help you with your research.
"Featuring contributions from internationally recognized Hip Hop dancers, advocates, and scholars of various Hip Hop or streetdance practices, the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance Studies is the first collection devoted exclusively to the dances that fall under the rubric of Hip Hop. Each of its five sections explore different key themes relevant to streetdance: legacies and traditions, Hip Hop methodologies, the politics of identity, institutionalization, Hip Hop (dance) theatre, and issues of health, injury, and rehabilitation. This compendium of topics, approaches, theoretical influences, histories, and perspectives demonstrate the futures of a field in formation. It adds new resources to research in dance and Hip Hop studies, contributing to ongoing debates within Hip Hop dance communities globally"
"You, The Choreographer offers a synthesis of histories, theories, philosophies, and creative practices across diverse genres of concert dance choreography. The book is designed for readers at every stage of creative development who seek to refine their artistic sensibility. Through a review of major milestones in the field, including contributions to choreography from the humanities, arts, and modern sciences, readers will gain new perspectives on the historical development of choreography. Concise analyses of traditional fundamentals and innovative practices of dance construction, artistic research methods and approaches to artistic collaboration, offer readers new tools to build creative habits and expand their choreographic proficiencies. For teachers and students, this is a textbook. For emerging professionals, it is a professional-development tool. For established professionals, it is a companion handbook that reinvigorates inspiration. To all readers it offers a cumulative, systematic understanding of the art of dance making, with a wealth of cross-disciplinary references to create a dynamic map of creative practices in choreography"
"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"
"This book provides a practical introduction to researching and performing early Anglo-American secular music and dance with attention to their place in society. Supporting growing interest among scholars and performers spanning numerous disciplines, this book contributes quality new scholarship to spur further research on this overshadowed period of American music and dance. Organized in three parts, the chapters offer methodological and interpretative guidance and model varied approaches to contemporary scholarship. The first part introduces important bibliographic tools and models their use in focused examinations of individual objects of material musical culture. The second part illustrates methods of situating dance and its music in early American society as relevant to scholars working in multiple disciplines. The third part examines contemporary performance of early American music and dance from three distinct perspectives ranging from ethnomusicological fieldwork and phenomenology to the theatrical stage. Dedicated to scholar Kate Van Winkle Keller, this volume builds on her legacy of foundational contributions to the study of early American secular music, dance, and society. It provides an essential resource for all those researching and performing music and dance from the revolutionary era through the early nineteenth century"
"Ever since George Balanchine arrived on the American dance scene in 1933, his revolutionary, fleet-footed repertoire has been immortalized in the ballet canon. Yet most of the works he created in Russia as a budding choreographer have been lost to history—until now. In the first book to focus exclusively on Balanchine’s Russian ballets, Elizabeth Kattner offers new insights into the artistic evolution of a legend through her reconstruction of his first group ballet, Funeral March. Drawing on more than a decade of research conducted in archives in the United States and Europe, Kattner synthesizes textual descriptions, photographs, musical scores, and the comparative study of other early Balanchine ballets in order to re-create this forgotten work. By interpreting and building upon these historical findings in the studio and in performance, this project enables dance history to be experienced kinesthetically. Addressing the controversy surrounding whether unrecorded dances should be reconstructed in the first place, Kattner meticulously describes her research methodologies, providing a valuable resource for other scholars seeking to revive history in this way. Finding Balanchine’s Lost Ballets enriches our understanding of Balanchine’s development as a choreographer through its ambitious, original approach to the subject. Kattner argues for the importance of dance reconstruction, when correctly approached, as a tool for reimagining the past and charting the future possibilities of dance history research"
Now in its eleventh edition, this classic and comprehensive handbook has been revised to bring it up to date with changes on the dance floor and in the rules of dance competitions. The Quickstep, Waltz, Foxtrot, and Tango are all illustrated and described in great detail, as well as the versions of most dances approved for championships. Diagrams demonstrate every step from both the leader's and follower's perspective and a collection of photographs new to this edition celebrate the diverse range of dancers involved with ballroom. This is the go-to book for dancers, competition judges, teachers and anyone who needs to be at the forefront of today's ballroom technique, from amateur practice to international championships"
"In Dance for Sports, author, teacher, dancer, athlete, and researcher Margo Apostolos offers a new training approach for athletes and coaches that synthesizes common techniques between athletics and dance. By utilizing this approach, in- and off-season athletes can improve efficiency and technique. Throughout the book, Apostolos shows the potential exchange between sport and dance in exercises that focus on overlapping physical components of both practices including flexibility, strength, coordination, agility, balance, and timing. She also demonstrates how dance serves sport as a cross training activity with additional opportunities for athletes to explore creativity, improvisation, and mindfulness. Discussion with athletes from several sports interweaves each chapter to expand the learning process and offer useful anecdotes. Based upon the author's decades-long career and extensive experience with athletes and coaches in a variety of sports such as football, basketball, swimming, tennis, track and field and more, Dance for Sports provides a fully integrative guide for students and instructors alike"
"Baring Unbearable Sensualities brings together a bold methodology, an interdisciplinary perspective and a rich array of primary sources to deepen and complicate mainstream understandings of Hip Hop dance, which have generally reduced it to a set of techniques divorced from social contexts. Drawing on close observation and interviews with Hip Hop pioneers and their students, Rosemarie A. Roberts proposes a framework that opens up new theoretical space for considering collective knowledge formations and collective knowledge production. Roberts argues that the historical, cultural and social experiences of marginalized black and brown bodies materialize in and through Hip Hop dance from the streets of the South Bronx and other urban centers to contemporary worldwide expressions. An Afro-diasporic dance form, Hip Hop dance, she argues, is a provocative and sentient process of resisting oppressive manifestations of race and power. A companion web site contains over 30 video clips referenced in the text"
"In the twenty-first century, values of competition underpin the free-market economy and aspirations of individual achievement shape the broader social world. Consequently, ideas of winning and losing, success and failure, judgment and worth, influence the dance that we see and do. Across stage, studio, street, and screen, economies of competition impact bodily aesthetics, choreographic strategies, and danced meanings. In formalized competitions, dancers are judged according to industry standards to accumulate social capital and financial gain. Within the capitalist economy, dancing bodies compete to win positions in prestigious companies, while choreographers hustle to secure funding and attract audiences. On the social dance floor, dancers participate in dance-offs that often include unspoken, but nevertheless complex, rules of bodily engagement. And the media attraction to the drama and spectacle of competition regularly plays out in reality television shows, film documentaries, and Hollywood cinema. Drawing upon a diverse collection of dances across history and geography, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Competition asks how competition affects the presentation and experience of dance and, in response, how dancing bodies negotiate, critique, and resist the aesthetic and social structures of the competition paradigm"
"The history of dance theory has never been told. Writers in every age have theorized prescriptively, according to their own needs and ideals, and theorists themselves having continually asserted the lack of any pre-existing dance theory. Dance Theory: Source Readings from Two Millennia of Western Dance revives and reintegrates dance theory as a field of historical dance studies, presenting a coherent reading of the interaction of theory and practice during two millennia of dance history. In fifty-five selected readings with explanatory text, this book follows the various constructions of dance theories as they have morphed and evolved in time, from ancient Greece to the twenty-first century. Dance Theory is a collection of source readings that, commensurate with current teaching practice, foregrounds dance and performance theory in its presentation of western dance forms. Divided into nine chapters organized chronologically by historical era and predominant intellectual and artistic currents, the book presents a history of an idea from one generation to another. Each chapter contains introductions that not only provide context and significance for the individual source readings, but also create narrative threads that link different chapters and time periods. Based entirely on primary sources, the book makes no claim to cite every source, but rather, in connecting the dots between significant high points, it attempts to trace a coherent and fair narrative of the evolution of dance theory as a concept in Western culture"
"Designed for beginning college-level dance composition courses and dance courses at the middle and high school levels, this textbook and its ancillaries highlight selected portions of original dance compositions by two famous choreographers"
"Focusing on Western theatre dance, Choreography Invisible explores the metaphysics of dances and choreographic works. It draws on a range of resources from analytic philosophy of art to develop the argument that dances are repeatable structures of action. The book also analyses the idea of the dance work in long-term historical perspective. Tracing different ways in which dances have been conceptualised across time, the book considers changing notions of authorship, fixity, persistence and autonomy from the fifteenth century to the present day. The modern work-concept is interrogated, its relativity and contested status (particularly within contemporary dance practice) acknowledged. As the dance work disappears from contemporary discourse, what can be said about the kind of thing it is? Choreography invisible considers the materials of dance-making and the nature (and limits) of choreographic authorship. It explores issues of identity and persistence, including why distinct (and sometimes very various) performances are still treated as performances of the same work. The book examines how dances survive through time and what it means for a dance work to be lost, considering the extent to which practices of dance reconstruction and reenactment can recuperate or reconstitute lost choreography. The focus here is dance, but the book addresses issues with wider implications for the metaphysics of art, including how the historical relativity of art practices should inflect analytic arguments about the nature of art works, and what place such works have within a broader ontology of human and natural worlds"
"The neo-burlesque movement seeks to restore a sense of glamour, theatricality, and humor to striptease. Neo-burlesque performers strut their stuff in front of audiences that appreciate their playful brand of pro-sex, often gender-bending, feminism. Performance studies scholar and acclaimed burlesque artist Lynn Sally offers an inside look at the history, culture, and philosophy of New York's neo-burlesque scene. Revealing how twenty-first century neo-burlesque is in constant dialogue with the classic burlesque of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she considers how today's performers use camp to comment on preconceived notions of femininity. She also explores how the striptease performer directs the audience's gaze, putting on layers of meaning while taking off layers of clothing. Through detailed profiles of iconic neo-burlesque performers such as Dita Von Teese, Dirty Martini, Julie Atlas Muz, and World Famous *BOB*, this book makes the case for understanding neo-burlesque as a new sexual revolution. Yet it also examines the broader community of "Pro-Am" performers who use neo-burlesque as a liberating vehicle for self-expression. Raising important questions about what feminism looks like, Neo-Burlesque celebrates a revolutionary performing art and participatory culture whose acts have political reverberations, both onstage and off"
"This collection of new essays explores connections between dance, modernism, and modernity by examining the ways in which leading dancers have responded to modernity. Burt and Huxley examine dance examples from a period beginning just before the First World War and extending to the mid-1950s, ranging across not only mainland Europe and the United States but also Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific Asian region, and the UK. They consider a wide range of artists, including Akarova, Gertrude Colby, Isadora Duncan, Katherine Dunham, Margaret H’Doubler, Hanya Holm, Michio Ito, Kurt Jooss, Wassily Kandinsky, Margaret Morris, Berto Pasuka, Uday Shankar, Antony Tudor, and Mary Wigman. The authors explore dancers’ responses to modernity in various ways, including within the contexts of natural dancing and transnationalism. This collection asks questions about how, in these places and times, dancing developed and responded to the experience of living in modern times, or even came out of an ambivalence about or as a reaction against it. Ideal for students and practitioners of dance and those interested in new modernist studies, Dance, Modernism, and Modernity considers the development of modernism in dance as an interdisciplinary and global phenomenon"
"Site-based dance performance and sited movement explorations implicate dance makers, performers and audience members in a number of dialogical processes between body, site and environment. This book aims to articulate international approaches to the making, performing and theorising of site-based dance. Drawing on perspectives from three practitioner-academics based in three distinct world regions – Europe, North America and Oceania – the authors explore a range of practices that engage with sociocultural, political, ecological and economic discourses, and demonstrate how these discourses both frame and inform processes of site dance making as well as shape the ways in which such interventions are conceived and evaluated. Intended for artists, scholars and students, (Re)Positioning Site Dance is an important addition to the theoretical discourse on place and performance in an era of global sociopolitical and ecological transformation"
This book supplies tools for scaffolding research skills alongside examples of undergraduate research in dance scholarship. Dance can be studied as an expressive embodied art form with physical, cognitive, and affective domains, and as an integral part of society, history, and vast areas of interdisciplinary content. To this end, the guidance provided by this book will equip future dance professionals with the means to move the field of dance forward. Chapters 1-9 guide students through the fundamentals of research methods, providing a foundation to help students get started in understanding research protocols and processes. Students will learn skills such as how to choose a research topic, refine research questions, conduct literature reviews, cite sources, synthesize and analyze data, develop conclusions and results, and present their findings. Chapters 10-19 detail forms of undergraduate research in a rich diversity of fields within dance that are taught in many collegiate dance programs including dance therapy, history, science, psychology, education, and technology, in addition to public scholarship, choreography, and interdisciplinary topics. The book also includes a final chapter which provides annotated online resources, and many of its chapters are supported by examples of abstracts of capstone projects, senior theses, and conference presentations by undergraduate researchers across the United States. Suitable for both professors and students, Undergraduate Research in Dance is an ideal reference book for any course that has a significant opportunity for the creation of new knowledge, or as an essential interdisciplinary connection between dance and other disciplines.
"In 1933 choreographer George Balanchine and impresario Lincoln Kirstein embarked on an elusive quest to found a ballet company and school in the United States. Though their efforts would eventually result in the creation of the New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet, the first decade of their collaborative efforts was anything but assured. Tracing the tangled histories of two
of the most important figures in twentieth-century dance, Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise offers a fresh perspective on a pivotal period in cultural history. Deeply researched using sources only made available in recent years, the book challenges the mythologies surrounding the early years of the Balanchine-Kirstein enterprise. It also reveals the full extent of Kirstein's essential role and offers reconstructive analysis of lost
works, as well as new and surprising details regarding some of Balanchine's most iconic ballets, including Serenade, Apollo, and Concerto Barocco. This history involved artists including Richard Rodgers, Martha Graham, George Gershwin, Katherine Dunham, Vera Zorina, and Igor Stravinsky, as well as dozens of lesser known players
whose contributions have yet to be fully acknowledged. Capturing the full sweep of Balanchine and Kirstein's collaborative work across multiple genres and institutions, this book reveals their partnership in all of its exciting and ungainly complexity, showing how the 1930s Balanchine was not the artist that he would eventually become, and
how the same was true of the institutions that he and
Kirstein jointly created."
"... strikes the perfect balance between hard science and practicality, making it an ideal resource for dance educators working with dancers of all ages and abilities. Gilbert presents the latest brain research and its implications for dance educators and dancers. She makes the research findings accessible and easy to digest, always connecting the science to the teaching and learning that takes place in classrooms and studios." Pub. descr.
Oxford studies in dance theory. Contents:
Modernism and American ballet -- Making ballet 1: Billy the Kid, 1938 -- Lincoln Kirstein's social modernism and the Cultural Front -- Making ballet 2: Rodeo, 1942 -- Edwin Denby's objectivist modernism and the New York School -- Making ballet 3: Western Symphony, 1954 -- The making of an American ballet institution in the Cultural Cold War in Europe -- Conclusion : "We drink the health of the guy that died."
"In October 2017, four internationally influential practitioners of immersive experiences gathered at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center on Staten Island in New York for a panel discussion on the creation of immersive productions. The panel, entitled "All the World is a Stage," was part of the Future of Storytelling Festival 2017 (FoST FEST), advertised as "the world's leading immersive storytelling event." During this discussion, each of the four panelists described examples of their work. Hector Harkness, Associate Director of Punchdrunk International, explained how the company created productions that "rip up the rules for the audience" so they can "go beyond the boundaries of closed environments." Food technologist, experience designer, and multimedia artist Emilie Baltz described inviting audiences to step up to a microphone and use their tongues, teeth, and lips to play musical popsicles in an installation called PopStars. Jon Sands, founder of Poets in Unexpected Places, revealed how his strategic placement of poets on subway cars across New York City turned commutes into impromptu poetry slams for unsuspecting riders, some of whom joined in by improvising their own poetic works. Justin "JB" Bolognino, CEO (Chief Experience Officer) of META, an experience production company, described his commissioning of Jon Morris, artistic director of the Brooklyn-based Windmill Factory, to design a music-festival queue into an experiential artwork. Entitled Right Passage, the work was a "room-scale sound and light performance installation" involving moving walls that guided festival participants efficiently into the concert venue (Windmill Factory 2017). Through their detailed descriptions of how their productions organized the bodies of performers and spectators in space and time, the panelists hinted at the presence of choreography in their productions"
"Dancing the World Smaller examines international dance performances in New York City in the 1940s as sites in which dance artists and audiences contested what it meant to practice globalism in mid-twentieth-century America. During and after the Second World War, modern dance and ballet thrived in New York City, a fertile cosmopolitan environment in which dance was celebrated as an emblem of American artistic and cultural dominance. In the ensuing Cold War years, American choreographers and companies were among those the U.S. government sent abroad to serve as ambassadors of American cultural values and to extend the nation's geo-political reach. Less-known is that international dance performance, or what was then-called 'ethnic' or 'ethnologic' dance, enjoyed strong support among audiences in the city and across the nation as well. Produced in non-traditional dance venues, such as the American Museum of Natural History, the Ethnologic Dance Center, and Carnegie Hall, these performances elevated dance as an intercultural bridge across human differences and dance artists as transcultural interlocutors. Dancing the World Smaller draws on extensive archival resources, as well as critical and historical studies of race and ethnicity in the U.S., to uncover a hidden history of globalism in American dance and to see artists such as La Meri, Ruth St. Denis, Asadata Dafora, Pearl Primus, José Limón, Ram Gopal, and Charles Weidman in new light. Debates over globalism in dance proxied larger cultural struggles over how to reconcile the nation's new role as a global superpower. In dance as in cultural politics, Americans labored over how to realize diversity while honoring difference and manage dueling impulses toward globalism, on the one hand, and isolationism, on the other"
"The Western approach to dance is largely focused on control and mastery of technique, both of which are certainly necessary skills for improving performance. But mindful attention, despite its critical role in high performance, has gotten short shrift—until now. Attention and Focus in Dance, a how-to book rooted in the 20 years of attentional focus findings of researcher Gabriele Wulf, will help dancers unlock their power and stamina reserves, enabling efficient movement, heightening their sensory perception and releasing their dance potential. Author Clare Guss-West—a professional dancer, choreographer, teacher and holistic practitioner—presents a systematic, science-based approach to the mental work of dance. Her approach helps dancers hone the skills of attention, focus and self-cueing to replenish energy and enhance their physical and artistic performance"
"The collection of essays demonstrates that ballet is not a single white Western dance form but has been shaped by a range of other cultures. In so doing, the authors open a conversation and contribute to the discourse beyond the vantage point of mainstream to look at such issues as homosexuality and race. And to demonstrate that ballet’s denial of the first and exclusion of the second needs rethinking. This is an important contribution to dance scholarship. The contributors include professional ballet dancers and teachers, choreographers, and dance scholars in the UK, Europe and the USA to give a three dimensional overview of the field of ballet beyond the traditional mainstream. It sets out to acknowledge the alternative and parallel influences that have shaped the culture of ballet and demonstrates they are alive, kicking and have a rich history. Ballet is complex and encompasses individuals and communities, often invisiblized, but who have contributed to the diaspora of ballet in the twenty-first century. It will initiate conversations and contribute to discourses about the panorama of ballet beyond the narrow vantage point of the mainstream – White, patriarchal, Eurocentric, heterosexual constructs of gender, race and class"
"Dynamic Cartography analyses the works of Rudolf Laban, Lawrence Halprin, Anne Bogart, Adolphe Appia, Cedric Price, Joan Littlewood, and Hélio Oiticica. They are practitioners who have worked on different areas of enquiry--from the existing relations between body and space through movement, events, or actions--but whose work has never been presented from this perspective or in this context. The work and methodologies set up by these practitioners enable us to develop a practice-based exploration. Some of the experiments in the book--Micro-actions I and II--explore the presence of the body in the space. In Kinetography I and II, Laban's dance notation system--kinetography--is used to create these dynamic cartographies. Kinetography III proposes the analysis of an urban public space through the transcription of the body movement contained on it. The series Dynamic Cartographies I, II, and III, analyses movement in geometrically controlled spaces through the Viewpoints techniques by Anne Bogart. Finally, Wooosh! and Trellick Tales present two projects in which performance is applied in order to analyse and understand urban and architectural space"
"Fifty Contemporary Choreographers is a unique and authoritative guide to the lives and work of prominent living contemporary choreographers; this third edition includes many new names in the field of choreography. Representing a wide range of dance genres and styles, each entry locates the individual in the context of contemporary dance and explores their impact. Those studied include: Kyle Abraham Germaine Acogny William Forsythe Marco Goeke Akram Khan Wayne McGregor Crystal Pite Frances Rings Hofesh Shechter Sasha Waltz With an updated introduction by Deborah Jowitt and further reading and references throughout, this text is an invaluable resource for all students and critics of dance and all those interested in the ever-changing world and variety of contemporary choreography"
"Musical theatre dance is an ever-changing, evolving dance form, egalitarian in its embrace of any and all dance genres. It is a living, transforming art developed by exceptional dance artists and requiring dramaturgical understanding, character analysis, knowledge of history, art, design and most importantly an extensive knowledge of dance both intellectual and embodied. Its ghettoization within criticism and scholarship as a throw-away dance form, undeserving of analysis: derivative, cliché ridden, titillating and predictable, the ugly stepsister of both theatre and dance, belies and ignores the historic role it has had in musicals as an expressive form equal to book, music and lyric. The standard adage, 'when you can't speak anymore sing, when you can't sing anymore dance' expresses its importance in musical theatre as the ultimate form of heightened emotional, visceral and intellectual expression. Through in-depth analysis author Liza Gennaro examines Broadway choreography through the lens of dance studies, script analysis, movement research and dramaturgical inquiry offering a close examination of a dance form that has heretofore received only the most superficial interrogation. This book reveals the choreographic systems of some of Broadway's most influential dance-makers including George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Jerome Robbins, Katherine Dunham, Bob Fosse, Savion Glover, Sergio Trujillo, Steven Hoggett and Camille Brown. Making Broadway Dance is essential reading for theatre and dance scholars, students, practitioners and Broadway fans"
A thorough examination of ballet pointe shoes and pointe techniques, giving advice on how to select the best fit, care for and custom-order shoes. Includes discussions of pointe readiness, technique, injuries, remedies, medical and therapy facilities.
"Originally published as a special issue of Research in Dance Education, now with an added chapter, this text acknowledges and celebrates the increasingly diverse careers and employment networks in which dance professionals and dance educators are engaged. Addressing issues and developments relating to the workplace of dance, the text explores what it means to transcend the boundary between dance as passion, and dance as employment. Chapters explore challenges of professional practice including limitations on access, precarity, bodily risk, gender inequality, and sexual harassment, and challenge the status quo to offer readers new ways of thinking about dance, and how this might translate into professional practice and work. Ultimately celebrating the passion which motivates dancers to embark on a professional career, and highlighting the elation and joy which such employment can bring, this volume encourages dance professionals, students, and educators to imagine things differently and develop teaching approaches, curricula, work places, and communities which capitalise on the diversity and dedication of individuals in the field. This text will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, researchers, academics, professionals in the field of Dance, Dance Education, Choreography and related art forms, Curriculum studies and Sociology of Education"
Nearly four hundred and fifty years in, ballet still resonates-though the stages have become international, and the dancers, athletes far removed from noble amateurs. While vibrations from the form's beginnings clearly resound, much has transformed. Nowadays ballet dancers aspire to work across disciplines with choreographers who value a myriad of abilities. Dance theorists and historians make known possibilities and polemics in lieu of notating dances verbatim, and critics do the daily work of recording performance histories and interviewing artists. Ideas circulate, questions arise, and discussions about how to resist ballet's outmoded traditions take precedence. In the dance community, calls for innovation have defined palpable shifts in ballet's direction and resultantly we have arrived at a new moment in its history that is unquestionably recognized as a genre onto its own: Contemporary Ballet. An aspect of this recent discipline is that its dancemakers, more often than not, seek to reorient the viewer by celebrating what could be deemed vulnerabilities, re-construing ideals of perfection, problematizing the marginalized/mainstream dichotomy, bringing audiences closer in to observe, and letting the art become an experience rather than a distant object preciously guarded out of reach. Hence, the practice of ballet is moving to become a less-mediated and more active process in many circumstances. Performers and audiences alike are challenged, and while convention is still omnipresent, choices are being made. For some, this approach has been drawn on for decades, and for others it signifies a changing of the guard, yet however we arrive there, the conclusion is the same: Contemporary Ballet is not a style. That is to say, it is not a trend, phase, or fashionable term that will fade, rather it is a clear period in ballet's time deserved of investigation. And it is into this moment that we enter"
"A lovingly researched and thoughtfully created portrait of the Nicholas Brothers, Fayard and Harold, two of the most explosive dancers of the twentieth century who refined a centuries-old tradition of percussive dance into the rhythmic brilliance of jazz tap at its zenith. Interweaves an intimate portrait of these great performers with a richly detailed history of jazz music and jazz dance, bringing their act to life and explaining their significance through a colourful analysis of their eloquent footwork and full-bodied expressiveness. Captures the Brohers' soaring careers, from Cotton Club appearances with Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Jimmy Lunceford, to film-stealing big-screen performances with Chick Webb, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller. Drawing on endless hours of interviews with the Nicholas brothers themselves, Brotherhood in Rhythm documents their struggles against the nets of racism and segregation that constantly enmeshed their careers and denied them the recognition they deserved"
A comprehensive guide to conducting empirical research in dance Research Methods in the Dance Sciences introduces concepts and practices that support effective, empirical research in the dance sciences, including medical science. A valuable new resource for this growing field, this book provides foundational knowledge for anyone who wants to understand, apply, and conduct research with dancers and proposes ways to facilitate more collaboration between the many disciplines that often overlap in this area. In this volume, pioneers of dance medicine and science guide readers through the stages of the research process. They address topics such as choosing a research question, writing a literature review, developing a framework and methodology, influencing the field, and progressing in a research career. Offering dance-specific examples as illustrations, this volume provides clear and instructive strategies for developing a solid repertoire of research skills to examine dance and movement-centered activities. It is ideal for practicing and aspiring dancers, teachers, and clinicians in fields including exercise physiology, motor learning, behavioral sciences, food sciences, medicine, psychology, and somatics who are interested in dance science research "-
Kinethic California: Dancing Funk and Disco Era Kinships documents the emergence of new forms of black social and vernacular dance invented by youth living in 1970s California, who helped build the foundations of contemporary hip hop/streetdance culture. Naomi Macalalad Bragin weaves interviews and ethnographies of first-generation (1960s-70s) dancers of strutting, boogaloo, robotting, popping, locking, waacking, and punking styles, as it advances a theory of dance as kinetic kinship formation through a focus on techniques and practices of the dancers themselves. She offers that the term given to these collective movement practices is kinethic to bring attention to motion at the core of black aesthetics that generate dances as forms of kinship beyond blood relation. Kinethics reorient dancers toward kinetic kinship in ways that give continuity to black dance lineages under persistent conditions of disappearance and loss.
