Download or read book I See America Dancing written by Maureen Needham and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Representing dancers, scholars, admirers, and critics, I See America Dancing is a diverse collection of primary documents and articles about the place and shape of dance in the United States from colonial times to the present. This volume offers a lively counterpoint between observers of the dance and dancers' views of what they do when they dance. Dance traditions represented include the Native American pow-wow; tribal music and dance activities on Sunday afternoons in New Orlean's Congo Square; the colonial Playford Balls and their modern offspring, country line dancing; and the Buddhist-inspired Japanese Bon dances in Hawaii. Anti-dance perspectives include government injunctions against Native American dancing and essays from a range of speakers who have declared the waltz, the twist, or the senior prom to be a careless quick-step away from hell or the brothel. I See America Dancing examines the styles that have marked theatrical dance in America, from French ballet to minstrel shows, and presents the views of influential dancers, choreographers, and the pioneers of early modern dance in America. Specific pieces examined include George Ballanchine's ballet Stars and Stripes, Yvonne Rainer's protest piece "Flag Dance, 1970," and Sonjé Mayo's "Naked in America." Covering historical social attitudes toward the dance as well as the performers and their works, I See America Dancing is a comprehensive, scholarly sourcebook that captures the energy and passion of this vital artform.
Download or read book I See America Dancing written by Frieda Gratzon and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book America Dancing written by Megan Pugh and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The history of American dance reflects the nation's tangled culture. Dancers from wildly different backgrounds watched, imitated, and stole from one another. Audiences everywhere embraced the result as deeply American. Chronicling dance from the minstrel stage to the music video, Megan Pugh shows how freedom--that nebulous, contested American ideal--emerged as a genre-defining aesthetic. Ballerinas mingled with slumming thrill-seekers, and hoedowns showed up on elite opera-house stages. Steps invented by slaves captivated the British royalty and the Parisian avant-garde. Dances were better boundary crossers than their dancers, however, and the racism and class conflicts that haunt everyday life shadow American dance as well. Center stage in America Dancing is a cast of performers who slide, glide, stomp, and swing their way through history. At the nadir of U.S. race relations, cakewalkers embraced the rhythms of black America. On the heels of the Harlem Renaissance, Bill Robinson tap-danced to stardom. At the height of the Great Depression, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers unified highbrow and popular art. In the midst of 1940s patriotism, Agnes de Mille brought jazz and square dance to ballet, then took it all to Broadway. In the decades to come, the choreographer Paul Taylor turned pedestrian movements into modern masterpiecds, and Michael Jackson moonwalked his way to otherworldly stardom. These artists both celebrated and criticized the country, all while inspiring others to get moving. For it is partly by pretending to be other people, Pugh argues, that Americans discover themselves ... America Dancing demonstrates the centrality of dance in American art, life, and identity, taking us to watershed moments when the nation worked out a sense of itself through public movement"--Publisher's description.
Download or read book America Dancing written by Megan Pugh and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of American dance reflects the nation’s tangled culture. Dancers from wildly different backgrounds learned, imitated, and stole from one another. Audiences everywhere embraced the result as deeply American. Using the stories of tapper Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, ballet and Broadway choreographer Agnes de Mille, choreographer Paul Taylor, and Michael Jackson, Megan Pugh shows how freedom—that nebulous, contested American ideal—emerges as a genre-defining aesthetic. In Pugh’s account, ballerinas mingle with slumming thrill-seekers, and hoedowns show up on elite opera house stages. Steps invented by slaves on antebellum plantations captivate the British royalty and the Parisian avant-garde. Dances were better boundary crossers than their dancers, however, and the issues of race and class that haunt everyday life shadow American dance as well. Deftly narrated, America Dancing demonstrates the centrality of dance in American art, life, and identity, taking us to watershed moments when the nation worked out a sense of itself through public movement.
Download or read book Reading Dancing written by Susan Leigh Foster and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Dance Perspectives Foundation de la Torre Bueno Prize Recent approaches to dance composition, seen in the works of Merce Cunningham and the Judson Church performances of the early 1960s, suggest the possibility for a new theory of choreographic meaning. Borrowing from contemporary semiotics and post-structuralist criticism, Reading Dancing outlines four distinct models for representation in dance which are illustrated, first, through an analysis of the works of contemporary choreographers Deborah Hay, George Balanchine, Martha Graham, and Merce Cunningham, and then through reference to historical examples beginning with court ballets of the Renaissance. The comparison of these four approaches to representation affirms the unparalleled diversity of choreographic methods in American dance, and also suggests a critical perspective from which to reflect on dance making and viewing.
Download or read book Dancing to America written by Ann Morris and published by Diane Publishing Company. This book was released on 1994-03-01 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anton Pankevich loves to dance. As a small child in Russia, he dreamed of being a ballet dancer and began training there. Now, years later, his dreams are becoming a reality. At 16, he is still dancing -- but in a new country. He is a student at the prestigious School of Amer. Ballet in NYC. Like the many immigrants who have come to the U.S. seeking freedom and a better way of life, Anton and his family left Russia a few years ago to begin life in America. So many things in America are different: the language, the customs and attitudes, his school -- even dancing! This book chronicles Anton's growth and perseverance, his commitment to his art, and how he meets the challenges he faces in his adopted land. Beautifully photographed!
Download or read book Tap Dancing America written by Constance Valis Hill and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-12 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive, fully documented history of a uniquely American art form, exploring all aspects of the intricate musical and social exchange that evolved from Afro-Irish percussive step dances like the jig, gioube, buck-and-wing, and juba to the work of such contemporary tap luminaries as Gregory Hines, Brenda Bufalino, Dianne Walker, and Savion Glover.
Download or read book Folk Dancing written by Erica M. Nielsen and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-07-22 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This overview of folk dancing in the United States showcases an important historical movement and explains how folk dance communities evolved to fulfill the needs of specific groups of people over time. While the general term "folk dance" encompasses a surprising variety of specific dances, there are three major recreational communities or forms: international folk dance, modern western square dance, and contra dance. Throughout the last century, millions of people have enjoyed folk dancing as an educational and recreational activity, regardless of the particular style. Folk Dancing explains the reasons for the folk dance movement that exploded in Europe and North America in the late 19th century. It describes the clubs, camps, festivals, and communities that sprang up, and examines the culture of the movement—the music, key individuals and events, types of clothing, and influences of technologies and popular culture. The book contains authoritative, original information gleaned from the author's own research conducted with hundreds of folk dance enthusiasts across America.
Download or read book Dancing with Dynamite written by Benjamin Dangl and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2010-11-09 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grassroots social movements played a major role electing left-leaning governments throughout Latin America. Subsequent relations between these states and "the streets" remain troubled. Contextualizing recent developments historically, Dangl untangles the contradictions of state-focused social change, providing lessons for activists everywhere.
Download or read book Swing Dancing written by Tamara Stevens and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-04-07 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Telling a riveting true story of the emergence and development of an American icon, this book traces swing dancing from its origins to its status as a modern-day art form. From its unlikely origins in the African slave trade, one of the saddest chapters of American history, swing dance emerged as a celebration of the soul. Swing is now recognized around the globe as a joyous partnered dance, uniquely Afro-American in origin and an American treasure. This book examines how the original swing style of the 1920s, the Lindy Hop, branched out and evolved with the changing dynamics of popular culture, paralleling the development of the nation. Swing Dancing covers the dance through the years of minstrelsy, the jazz age, the big band era, bebop, and the decline of partnered dancing in the 1960s. Swing experts and instructors Tamara and Erin Stevens have combined a compelling historic examination of swing dance with an assortment of riveting personal interviews and photographic documentation to create a comprehensive reference book on this important art form.
Download or read book What the Eye Hears written by Brian Seibert and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 670 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magisterial, revelatory, and-most suitably-entertaining, What the Eye Hears offers an authoritative account of the great American art of tap dancing. Brian Seibert, a dance critic for The New York Times, begins by exploring tap's origins as a hybrid of the jig and clog dancing from the British Isles and dances brought from Africa by slaves. He tracks tap's transfer to the stage through blackface minstrelsy and charts its growth as a cousin to jazz in the vaudeville circuits and nightclubs of the early twentieth century. Seibert chronicles tap's spread to ubiquity on Broadway and in Hollywood, analyzes its decline after World War II, and celebrates its rediscovery and reinvention by new generations of American and international performers. In the process, we discover how the history of tap dancing is central to any meaningful account of American popular culture. This is a story with a huge cast of characters, from Master Juba (it was probably a performance of his in a Five Points cellar that Charles Dickens described in American Notes for General Circulation) through Bill Robinson and Shirley Temple, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and Gene Kelly and Paul Draper to Gregory Hines and Savion Glover. Seibert traces the stylistic development of tap through individual practitioners, vividly depicting dancers both well remembered and now obscure. And he illuminates the cultural exchange between blacks and whites over centuries, the interplay of imitation and theft, as well as the moving story of African-Americans in show business, wielding enormous influence as they grapple with the pain and pride of a complicated legacy.What the Eye Hears teaches us to see and hear the entire history of tap in its every step.
Download or read book Dancing Across Borders written by Anthony Shay and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2008-05-13 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study describes and analyzes the phenomenal popularity of exotic dance forms in America. Throughout the twentieth century and especially since 1950, millions have begun learning and performing various Balkan dances, the tango, and other Latin American dances, along with the classical dances of India, Japan, and Indonesia. Most studies in dance ethnography and anthropology have focused specifically on "dancing in the field," or the dancing that native dancers do. This study, by contrast, examines the ways in which ethnic dancing has allowed many Americans to create more exciting, "exotic" and romantic identities. The author describes the uniquely American enthusiasm for exotic dances, and cites specific deficiencies in the U.S. cultural identity that have led many people to seek new feelings and experiences through exotic dance genres.
Download or read book The Art of the Dance written by Isadora Duncan and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The People Have Never Stopped Dancing written by Jacqueline Shea Murphy and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the past thirty years, Native American dance has emerged as a visible force on concert stages throughout North America. In this first major study of contemporary Native American dance, Jacqueline Shea Murphy shows how these performances are at once diverse and connected by common influences. Demonstrating the complex relationship between Native and modern dance choreography, Shea Murphy delves first into U.S. and Canadian federal policies toward Native performance from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, revealing the ways in which government sought to curtail authentic ceremonial dancing while actually encouraging staged spectacles, such as those in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows. She then engages the innovative work of Ted Shawn, Lester Horton, and Martha Graham, highlighting the influence of Native American dance on modern dance in the twentieth century. Shea Murphy moves on to discuss contemporary concert dance initiatives, including Canada’s Aboriginal Dance Program and the American Indian Dance Theatre. Illustrating how Native dance enacts, rather than represents, cultural connections to land, ancestors, and animals, as well as spiritual and political concerns, Shea Murphy challenges stereotypes about American Indian dance and offers new ways of recognizing the agency of bodies on stage. Jacqueline Shea Murphy is associate professor of dance studies at the University of California, Riverside, and coeditor of Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance.
Download or read book Dancing Modernism Performing Politics written by Mark Franko and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1995-08-22 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "... almost every page offers provocative commentary on the aesthetics and politics of modern dance." -- Signs "... [an] important step... in the ineluctable dance by postmodern historians across a bridge that spans the gaps among disciplines, between theory and practice, and betweeen present and past." -- Theatre Journal "This complex and important book needs to be read by anyone interested in dance history or the cultural politics of dance." -- Dance Theatre Journal "Mark Franko's Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics is challenging, groundbreaking, insightful, and, I believe, an important contribution to the field of dance scholarship." -- Dance Research Journal A revisionary account of the evolution of "modern dance" in which Mark Franko calls for a historicization of aesthetics that considers the often-ignored political dimension of expressive action. Includes an appendix of articles of left-wing dance theory, which flourished during the 1930s.
Download or read book Dancing Between Two Worlds written by Fred Gustafson and published by Paulist Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thought-provoking and sensitive book, a noted Jungian scholar explores the deepest elements in the American psyche that need healing to bring forth the best in both of the worlds we walk in: the highly differentiated and technologically developed Western civilization and the indigenous native "soul" that is the essence of each human being. The author demonstrates that this soul is forcefully represented in America in the experience of the Native American peoples and their relationship to the land and to the ancient "indigenous one" at the heart of our human rights.The author explores not only the best of Native American spiritual thought to rediscover that soul, but also the terrible psychic damage done to later settlers by five hundred years of violence against the original peoples. He sketches positive directions that will create a partnership between the two worlds of our past and bring them together in a "dance" that will encourage a more redemptive spiritual order+
Download or read book Consuming Dance written by Colleen T. Dunagan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether advertising clothes or technology, dance is staple of advertising today. 'Consuming Dance' offers a clear history and analysis of dance in advertising and demonstrates the ways in which the form articulates with, informs, and reflects U.S. culture.
