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An expanded documentation -- combining oral history, drawings, video stills and an annotated script -- of Big Dance Theater's Another Telepathic Thing (2000), which combined Mark Twain's novella The Mysterious Stranger, illicitly recorded audition tapes, several parasols, and many other ingenious things.

Greta Garbo proclaimed him as her favorite director. Actors, actresses, and even child stars were so at ease under his direction that they were able to deliver inspired and powerful performances. Academy--Award--nominated director Clarence Brown (1890--1987) worked with some of Hollywood's greatest stars, such as Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Mickey Rooney, Katharine Hepburn, and Spencer Tracy. Known as the "star maker," he helped guide the acting career of child sensation Elizabeth Taylor (of who...

Multi-disciplined artist Mihail Chemiakin's exquisitely drawn costume sketches, stage sets and production design come to life in this extraordinary record of the two-act ballet premiered in St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theater in 2005. Based on "The Story of a Hard Nut" from the Nutcracker and the Mouse King by E.T.A. Hoffmann, "The Magic Nut" is a ballet conceived by artist Mihail Chemiakin as a prologue to "The Nutcracker" in which we learn how the Nutcracker comes to be. Here Chemiakin tells th...

Leif Anderson's Dancing with My Father is both a loving tribute to her unusual and famous father, Mississippi artist Walter Anderson, and an honest look at the effects he has had upon her personal life and her artistry. Due to Walter Anderson's erratic behavior and recurring absences, Leif Anderson experienced a difficult childhood. Never comfortable with home and fatherhood, Walter Anderson often affected family life as an alien and fearful force. Through her lyrical vignettes, Leif Anderson gr...

An award-winning author's journey to break out of the expectations of midlife and reclaim the daring of her girlhood by dancing in the world's most popular ballet, The Nutcracker, with a professional company.Like generations of little girls, Lauren Kessler fell in love with ballet the first time she saw The Nutcracker, and from that day, at age five, she dreamed of becoming a ballerina. But when she was twelve, her very famous ballet instructor crushed those dreams-along with her youthful self-a...

The most comprehensive, beautiful book ever to be published on dance in America. We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and the wonder of life. This is the function of the American dance. Groundbreaking choreographer Martha Graham deeply understood the power and complexity of dance--particularly as it evolved in her home country.American Dance, by critic a...

Undimmed Lustre: The Life of Antony Tudor is a chronological biography of one of the most creative forces in dance of the 20th century. Born in 1908 in London, Tudor was raised in a lower middle class family on the streets of London's meat market district. Although he had no formal exposure to dance, he spent the first decade of his professional life as one of the founding members of the Ballet Rambert. In America, he became an all-important force and a prime mover in American Ballet Theatre fo...

Rudolf Nureyev, one of the most iconic dancers of the twentieth century, had it all: beauty, genius, charm, passion, and sex appeal. No other dancer of our time has generated the same excitement, for both men and women, on or off the stage. In this superb biography, Julie Kavanagh deftly brings us through the professional and personal milestones of Nureyev's life and career: his education at the Kirov school in Leningrad; his controversial defection from the USSR in 1961; his long-time affair...

This edited collection draws on the conference, Attending to Movement: Somatic Perspectives on Living in this World, run at C-DaRE, the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University, 12 - 14 July, 2013. Somatic practitioners, dance artists and scholars from a wide range of subject domains cross discipline borders and investigate the approaches that embodied thinking and action can offer to philosophical and socio-cultural inquiry. The book celebrates and builds upon the work of visionary dance...

Senegal has played a central role in contemporary dance due to its rich performing traditions, as well as strong state patronage of the arts, first under French colonialism and later in the postcolonial era. In the 1980s, when the Senegalese economy was in decline and state fundingwithdrawn, European agencies used the performing arts as a tool in diplomacy. This had a profound impact on choreographic production and arts markets throughout Africa. In Senegal, choreographic performers have taken...

During his career Douglas Wright established himself as New Zealand's leading contemporary dancer and choreographer. He started out with the Limbs Dance Company in 1980, then worked in New York with the Paul Taylor Company and DV8 Physical Theatre in London before forming the Douglas Wright Dance Company in Auckland in 1989. During this time he created over 30 major dance works, which culminated in his 2006 masterpiece 'Black Milk', his last major work. The dance critic Jennifer Shennan wrote, '...

At eighty-seven, Patricia Wilde remains a grande dame of the ballet world. As a young star she toured America in the company of the Ballet Russe. In her heyday in the 1950s and ’60s, she was a first-generation member and principal dancer of New York City Ballet during the uniquely dramatic Balanchine era—the golden age of the company and its hugely gifted, influential, exploitative, and dictatorial director. In Wilde Times, Joel Lobenthal brings the world of Wilde and Balanchine, of Tanaquil Le...

Comprising over 150 black and white photographs of the Australian Ballet, this volume is aimed at anyone interested in dance or photography. The result of an intimate relationship between dancers and photographer, the book captures the poise and athleticism of the art form.

The ballet Don Quixote, with music by Ludwig Minkus and scenario and original choreography by Marius Petipa, is one of the most enduring creations to have emerged from the flowering of the ballet in late 19th-century Russia. Still popular, it has become a standard repertory piece in ballet companies all over the world. The work was first performed in Moscow at the Bolshoi Theater on 14/26 December 1869. The plot, in four acts and eight scenes, was based on an episode which Petipa had developed f...

International vaudeville star and Broadway prima ballerina Jeanne Devereaux performed for millions across Europe and America in her prime. Born Jean Helman, she entered showbiz young as a trouper performing in palatial theaters and was one of the last vaudevillians surviving into the 2010s. In her final years she indulged her passion for research and writing in the Huntington Library's Rothenberg Reading Room, losing none of her intelligence and wit despite a failing memory. Drawing on interview...

The contributors - two Slavicists, a musicologist and an art historian - offer a detailed exploration of the ballet, Petrushka, which premiered in Russia in 1911 and became one of the most important and influential theatrical works of the modernist period.

Bandoneon: Working with Pina Bausch is a new translation of Raimund Hoghe’s original rehearsal diary that documented the legendary Tanztheater Wuppertal’s work on Bandoneon (1980), illustrated with photos of the production by Ulli Weiss, and personal images and notes from the dancers. This unique book records the method Pina Bausch developed and used, as seen by one of her close collaborators, Raimund Hoghe, who worked as dramaturg for the company for a decade (1979–1989). It follows the work...

Robert le Diable: The Ballet of the Nuns offers a new approach to the study of one of the most ground-breaking works in European ballet history. Based on the choreographic notations made by the great nineteeth-century Danish choreographer, August Bournonville, this spectral dance scene has been recreated by Knud Arne Jurgensen with the precision afforded by Labanotation, here recorded by Ann Hutchinson Guest. Supported by extensive historical source materials and study and performance notes, thi...

Italian ballet in the eighteenth century was dominated by dancers trained in the virtuoso style that combined French ballet technique with a vigorous athleticism that made Italian dancers in demand all over Europe. Gennaro Magri's Trattato teorico-prattico di ballo, the only work from the eighteenth century that explains the practices of midcentury Italian theatrical dancing, is a starting point for this investigation of an influential type of ballet and its connections to the operatic and theat...

Introducing a ballet class in a book. Created by Lise Friedman, a passionate ballerina as a little girl who grew up to dance with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and photographed by K.C. Bailey, whose dance photography is part of the Lincoln Center Dance Collection, "First Lessons in Ballet" is an intimate and innovative approach that takes the reader right into the studio and teaches basic steps and positions. Each spread works as a lesson. On the left, in a full-length, silhouetted photog...

Grazioso Cecchetti"s dance method was written up by the great teacher himself, yet lay dormant, until the editor of this volume found it and made it accessible to a wider audience'

"Janet Sassoon has had two careers, first as a ballerina with an international reputation and now as a classical dance teacher and coach in international demand. At age seven, Miss Sassoon began her training with the San Francisco Ballet. By age ten, Miss Sassoon was performing in roles with the San Francisco Opera and Ballet companies. At fifteen, she moved to Paris to continue her studies with Leo Staats, Lubov Egorova, Olga Preobrajenska, and Mathilde Kschessinska. Miss Sassoon joined the int...