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Subject Area: Dance
Hagood, Thomas K.2000 0-7734-7799-3 428 pages
This work traces the history of the university in western culture from its origins in medieval Europe to its evolution in America with a focus on events and circumstances that made possible the inclusion of dance as an academic discipline. It then examines the development of dance in higher education from the inception of the first program at Teachers College, Columbia University in 1913 to the present. With illustrations.
Sherrod, Elgie Gaynell
2022 1-4955-0988-5 516 pages
"In the chapters that follow, I illustrate the dance pedagogy created by Black dance artists in the 1930s and 1940s in America. I discuss the ways in which this dance instruction undergirded the emergence of the Black concert dance construct, which manifested in the late 1950s and took on a definitive global presence in the 1960s with the popularity of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. In this discussion, I document the dance contributions of dance pioneer Katherine Dunham and her peers, whose works blazed a trail for many contemporary dance artists." -Dr. Elgie Gaynell Sherrod
Willis-Aarnio, Peggy
2002 0-7734-7074-3 744 pages
In addition to biographical information on Agrippina Vaganova, this book describes and discusses where the teaching method came from, and how Vaganova took this information and distilled it to its essence and then organized it in a codified, rational way so that the method could be consistently and accurately taught. Also available is an accompanying set of 8 videotapes. 1-3 Beginning Level of Classical Ballet Lesson; 4-6 Intermediate Level of Classical Ballet Lesson; 7-8 Advanced Level of Classical Ballet Lesson ($99.95 for the set) Telephone (716) 754-2788 or email sales@mellenpress.com to place your order.
Wintersteen, Benjamin
2010 0-7734-3688-X 180 pages
This book examines the religious, mythological and performance elements of the traditional Afro-Caribbean street festival. Using the theories of performance, political economy and symbolic analysis, this work elucidates how elements of African, European and South American cultures interact to produce a unique understanding of the colonial and post-colonial experience.
Noble, Cynthia Nazzaro
2005 0-7734-6052-7 220 pages
Bessie Schönberg was one of the foremost dance educators of the 20th century and was highly influential in contemporary dance. Schönberg taught at Sarah Lawrence College from 1936 to 1975, where she created and directed one of the first autonomous dance departments in American higher education. Founded on the philosophy of progressive arts education, the Sarah Lawrence program served as an important example for other emerging dance programs in the decades between the 1940s and 1970s, a time of significant growth in college dance programs in the United States. Some of her former students became well-known professional choreographers and dance educators, including Carolyn Adams, Elizabeth Keen, Meredith Monk, Lucinda Childs and Victoria Marks, and several contributed information to this study.
Schönberg’s life and career were deeply intertwined with many of the most important figures in American modern dance, including Martha Graham and Martha Hill; with historically significant events such as the emergence of the Bennington Summer School of Dance; and with premiere dance institutions such as Dance Theater Workshop, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, The Julliard School and Dance Theatre of Harlem. The book examines her early life in Germany and family background, her years of professional preparation in America as a dancer and educator, and her educational experiences at Bennington College Summer School of the Dance. It also describes curricular innovations that chairperson Schönberg instituted at Sarah Lawrence, and her original methodology for teaching choreography, as observed at Jacob’s Pillow and Dance Theater Workshop.
Wilkinson, Desi
2023 1-4955-1121-9 164 pages
"This book charts the recent historical development of a valued and respected Breton popular cultural identity--both at home and abroad--through the invention and diffusion of an event, the fest noz. This [is a] unique, structured platform for the performance of one of Europe's most vibrant forms of traditional dance music. Informed by the techniques of ethnography, the discipline of ethnomusicology, as well as my own participation as a musician, learner, performer, and researcher, I ...situate the development of the fest noz to highlight its social, cultural, aesthetic, political, and economic significance. I also...convey something of what it looks, sounds, and feels like to circulate as a musician, dancer, and participant in the world of traditional music in Brittany, through forty years around the turn of the twenty-first century." -Desi Wilkinson (Introduction) This book was originally published by Pendragon Press in 2016.
Hoffman, Hadassah H.
2004 0-7734-6226-0 224 pages
This study explores how the development of humanistic psychology paralled the evolution of modern dance, and what the connections were between the fields as they grew. This is a study of three fields developing within the 20th century. It demonstrates the relevance of the arts to humanistic psychology, and the ways in which the psychologists and dancers influenced each other.
McPherson, Elizabeth
2008 0-7734-5122-6 228 pages
This book looks at the life of Martha Hill, the prominent educator and founding director of three pivotal degree-granting college dance programs or departments and two summer festivals. The first-hand narratives provide in-depth perspectives on Hill’s life and legacy. This book contains 28 black and white photographs.
Sherrod, Elgie Gaynell
2018 0-7734-3539-1 392 pages
This book, originally written as a doctoral dissertation at Temple University, describes the theory and pedagogy of the major Black dance artists of the 1930’s and 1940’s. The most important of these was Katherine Dunham whose thought influenced a large number of 20th century anthropologists and sociologists.
Dr. Sherrod’s book is important not merely because it recovers the artistic and cultural contributions of dozens of major Black dancers, but also because it documents their enormous social and political influence on mid-century American society.
Roy, Diane Carole
2014 0-7734-4285-5 360 pages
A highly original look at Australian multiculturalism through the exploration of the significance of a Slovak traditional music and dance performance in Melbourne employing three methodologies; Goffman’s analysis of interactional behavior, Conversation Analysis, and statistical survey techniques which unified the Foucauldian theoretical framework of the data giving the findings added cogency.
Bartelt, Guillermo
2022 1-4955-0993-1 132 pages
Dr. Guillermo Bartelt uses sociolinguistic analysis in his study of American Indian English. In this book, he focuses specifically on the powwow: "As a participant observer, I found powwows to offer fascinating discourse data for ethnographic and linguistic interpretations." He proceeds by, "analyzing the cognitive and social functions of discourse and semiotics in the context of powwow events in rural Oregon and Washington as well as urban Southern California."
Hamilton, Ishvani
1990 0-88946-723-4 205 pages
This book is the story of Ishvani Hamilton's early life in India, as the proper daughter of a wealthy Moslem family in Bombay. It was a period when western ideas were challenging traditional ways, and Ishvani Hamilton abandoned her life in India to go to Europe with her sister, working in the theatre and developing modern dance.
Dixon, Melanye White
2011 0-7734-1592-0 244 pages
This publication documents the work of pioneering ballet pedagogue Marion D. Cuyjet and presents a historical and descriptive study of her teaching career and school within its sociocultural context.
Ito, Michio
2018 1-4955-0688-6 124 pages
This work offers the first complete translation of an autobiographical talk the dancer and choreographer Michio Ito gave in Japanese in 1955, which was originally transcribed and published in 1965 as "Omoide wo kataru: Taka no i shutsuen no koto nado" (Reminiscences: On Appearing in At the Hawk's Well and Other matters). Ito's memorable account of an important interlude in the history of early twentieth-century Anglophone modernism has been recognized as a significant primary source in the scholarship of Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, and Modernist studies more generally. This translated text includes 8 color photos.
Hodson, Millicent
2023 1-4955-1159-6 300 pages
This book is meant to share something of the creative efforts and results involved in reconstruction Vaslav Nijinsky's second ballet, Jeux, choreographed in 1913 to a commissioned score by Claude Debussy with designs and costumes by Leon Bakst. ...The book as a whole attempts to document the reconstructed choreography of Jeux. While it is impossible to record every decision and all the reasons for each one, I have tried to demonstrate the modus operandi for giving material form to a dance legend. -Millicent Hodson (Preface) This book was originally published by Pendragon Press in 2008.
Lancos, Jonette
2007 0-7734-5463-2 620 pages
Charles Weidman (1901-1975), a distinguished dancer and choreographer, is recognized as an originator of twentieth-century American dance. This study traces Weidman’s life from his early years in the Midwest, including his training at the Denishawn School, his friendship with Martha Graham and José Limón, his partnership with Doris Humphrey and Pauline Lawrence, in establishing their Humphrey-Weidman School and Company, to the formation of the Expression of Two Arts Theatre with visual artist Mikhail Santaro. This work examines Weidman’s concert works, Broadway shows, and opera productions, where his modern dance ideas revitalized these theatrical forms. Weidman’s training system is analyzed by stressing its lineage, his men’s group, rebound principle, floor work, use of drums and rhythm, and his kinetic pantomime. The study follows global influences on early modern dance, of which Weidman was a part, and which were motivating factors in his artistic development. This work investigates how Weidman’s aesthetic values are related to modernism; his interest in preserving his works for future generations; it also contains recollections from dancers who have performed with Weidman. Now, thirty years after his death, evidence is beginning to shed new light on Charles Weidman’s enormous influence upon and legacy for modern American dance. This book contains 39 photos.
Relationships Between Score and Choreography in Twentieth-Century Dance Music, Movement and Metaphor
Hodgins, Paul1992 0-7734-9552-5 240 pages
This study examines the aesthetic interdependence of the two disciplines. It begins with a questionnaire-based survey which reveal the pervasive influence of music on a viewer's perception of movement. It proposes a paradigm which can be used to identify and categorize relationships between choreography and score. Acknowledged classics such as Apollo, Agon, Errand Into the Maze, and The Catherine Wheel are subjected to detailed choreomusical analysis, utilizing the paradigm as part of a comprehensive examination of music-movement affinities. Current dance scholarship has virtually ignored the area of music-dance relationships, so this book will be useful for courses on music for dancers, dance philosophy and aesthetics, dance history, choreography, movement and analysis, and other areas of dance scholarship.
Thomas, Kenneth
2008 0-7734-4926-4 156 pages
In contrast to recent historiography, this work reasserts the argument that slaves were not merely the victims of a brutal regime, but lived largely separate lives within a distinct sphere.
Risner, Doug
2009 0-7734-4661-3 216 pages
This study investigates the competitive world of pre-professional Western concert dance training and education in the U.S. as experienced and lived by boys and young men, an under-represented population in the field. This work examines the discourses of professional dance preparation through theoretical and narrative approaches that combine to illuminate the highly gendered professional dance world as evidenced through the minds and bodies of male adolescents and young adults.
Risner, Doug
2021 1-4955-0924-9 216 pages
With a Foreword by Ramsay Burt. This book addresses the fact that "a lack of scholarly attention has been paid to this burgeoning research area in the U.S., especially in terms of book-length studies."
While research on the topic of boys who dance is scant, the author states that "what we do know, though tentative, provides cause for concern, linked as it is to dominant notions of masculinity, pervasive homophobia, and boys' neglect, harassment, and social isolation."
Krtolica, Marija
2023 1-4955-1058-1 336 pages
This is an "oversized" (8x10) softcover book. "This study places choreographic examples in a dialogue with the dance and interdisciplinary scholarship, with an aim to expose the unapparent alleys for a socio-historically informed mode of spectatorship. This kind of spectatorship ponders the unique conditions of the development of dance expression, and, at the same time, examines the intersections between the medical theory, political violence, and bodies' visibility on the stage. The concept of hystericization, as it is reconsidered in this study, invites a historico-political performance analysis that embraces performers' and witnesses' responses, and emphasizes the intersubjective and political dimension of the enactment of hysterical symptoms." -from the Author's "Introduction"
Moore, Carol-Lynne
2009 0-7734-4777-6 376 pages
This study of Rudolf Laban, pre-eminent dance theorist of the twentieth century, provides the first comprehensive analysis of his theoretical explorations. Based upon an examination of unpublished writings and drawings from the final two decades of Laban’s career, the work traces Laban’s systematic integration of various strands of research and delineates how he used “harmony” as an analogic metaphor to illuminate the deep structure of dance and movement. This book contains thirteen color photographs.
Braswell, Suzanne Fuller
2017 1-4955-0541-3 500 pages
Examining the poetics of modernity in terms of the incorporation of movement and dance, this work explores how dance and literary scholarship are part of the interdisciplinary field of dance poetics. Reviewing French literature of the 19th and 20th centuries the author's notion of "kinepoetics" demonstrates how the dynamism of dance and pure movement are expressions of the literary text.
Temple, Michele
2001 0-7734-7428-5 168 pages
This work focuses on eight of the dances, the ‘istampittas,’ linked etymologically to the ‘estampie,’ a French dance, whose origins are here examined with an eye toward Italian and French music and civilization, as well as the music and society of the Arabs.
Harris, John Wesley
2006 0-7734-5798-4 280 pages
There has never been a comprehensive survey in English of all the main forms of traditional Japanese drama – kyogen, noh, kabuki and puppetry. Individual works have been written on each form in abundance, some of them in English, and the majority of them are excellent, but they do not make the reader aware of the close connections between all of these older theatrical forms – their common origins in sacred dance, the high degree of stylization they all share, the selectivity in their use of gesture, the symbolic function of costume, the strict code of honour, which westerners often find so difficult to understand, and the heady mixture of violence with the appreciation of elegant form and a fragile, ephemeral beauty. The forms and conventions of theatre involved are also unique and challenge many of the theories that have been developed about the western stage. In fact, traditional Japanese drama is an area of theatre which should form an essential part of every dramatic specialist’s education.
Willis-Aarnio, Peggy
2002 0-7734-4890-X
An accompanying set of 8 videotapes. 1-3 Beginning Level of Classical Ballet Lesson; 4-6 Intermediate Level of Classical Ballet Lesson; 7-8 Advanced Level of Classical Ballet Lesson ($99.95 for the set) Telephone (716) 754-2788 or email sales@mellenpress.com to place your order.
Soll, Beth
2002 0-7734-7115-4 564 pages
This book examines the origins and growth of modern dance, demonstrating why it is a unique art form. The author includes citations from many critics, dancers, choreographers, and historians, and writers to contextualize her own views, as an academic, dancer, and choreographer.