Download or read book Ned Wayburn and the Dance Routine written by Barbara Naomi Cohen-Stratyner and published by University of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wayburn's famous chorus lines and dance routines for vaudeville, Broadway, and Hollywood films mined every movement idiom of the day -- from tap, toe, ballet, and ballroom to acrobatic and musical comedy styles. This first major study of Wayburn is important reading for anyone interested in the intersections between the popular stage and the mass culture industry.
Download or read book Rank Ladies written by M. Alison Kibler and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2005-10-12 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A disrobing acrobat, a female Hamlet, and a tuba-playing labor activist--all these women come to life in Rank Ladies. In this comprehensive study of women in vaudeville, Alison Kibler reveals how female performers, patrons, and workers shaped the rise and fall of the most popular live entertainment at the turn of the century. Kibler focuses on the role of gender in struggles over whether high or low culture would reign in vaudeville, examining women's performances and careers in vaudeville, their status in the expanding vaudeville audience, and their activity in the vaudevillians' labor union. Respectable women were a key to vaudeville's success, she says, as entrepreneurs drew women into audiences that had previously been dominated by working-class men and recruited female artists as performers. But although theater managers publicly celebrated the cultural uplift of vaudeville and its popularity among women, in reality their houses were often hostile both to female performers and to female patrons and home to women who challenged conventional understandings of respectable behavior. Once a sign of vaudeville's refinement, Kibler says, women became associated with the decay of vaudeville and were implicated in broader attacks on mass culture as well.
Download or read book Tap Roots written by Mark Knowles and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2002-06-03 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the development of tap dancing from ancient India to the Broadway stage in 1903, when the word "Tap" was first used in publicity to describe this new American style of dance, this text separates the cultural, societal and historical events that influenced the development of Tap dancing. Section One covers primary influences such as Irish step dancing, English clog dancing and African dancing. Section Two covers theatrical influences (early theatrical developments, "Daddy" Rice, the Virginia Minstrels) and Section Three covers various other influences (Native American, German and Shaker). Also included are accounts of the people present at tap's inception and how various styles of dance were mixed to create a new art form.
Download or read book Dance on the American Musical Theatre Stage written by Ray Miller and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-05-17 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. This 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.
Download or read book Musical Theatre Choreography written by Linda Sabo and published by Outskirts Press. This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Musical theatre choreography has indisputably evolved over the years and choreographers develop methods of working and philosophical approaches that should be documented but rarely are. Textual information is limited, and what has been written is generally more practical than theoretical, and is minimal compared to those books written for choreographers of modern and contemporary dance. By pointing out the similarities and dissimilarities between concert dance genres and theatre dance, and by identifying the specialized demands of crafting artistic and script-serving theatre dance and staging, this text differentiates musical theatre choreography as a separate and bona fide art form and suggests that 1) universities recognize it as such by offering training possibilities for future musical theatre choreographers, and 2) established choreographers of musicals begin to write down their own artistic processes to help fill the choreographic toolbox for young choreographers wanting to work in this field. In 1943, a light switch was flipped with the musical Oklahoma! when Rodgers' and Hammerstein's mission to keep the book absolutely central to the making of a musical was established. After that, other musical theatre artists followed suit causing standards to change. Now, no other artistic element in a musical makes a move without first ensuring that it serves the script. By creating original material that is integral to the telling of a story, composers and lyricists came to be thought of as dramatists. Likewise, Oklahoma! choreographer Agnes de Mille seamlessly integrated her dances and staging into the action and created character and situation-specific movement that actually helped forward the plot. Because of her groundbreaking advances, choreographers are now also expected to create dances that serve the script and help to tell the playwright's story. The choreographer, like the librettist, composer, and lyricist, is now positioned as dramatist, as well. In Part 1, the choreographer as dramatist is stressed as the author uses each chapter to reflect upon ways she analyzes librettos and scores to determine the function of each song in a musical and the stories that should be told through dances and staging created for each song. Drawing from her own experiences as a musical theatre director/choreographer, she reflects upon and shares her artistic process, not in a linear way, but anecdotally, to illustrate the kind of thinking that will lead her to effectively tackle the job at hand. At the end of each chapter, assignments are suggested that may be useful to aspiring choreographers and directors of musicals. This text is a valuable resource for teachers designing a course in theatre choreography on either the undergraduate or graduate level, as well as for professional directors and choreographers who want to think more deeply about their own work. Students of choreography will be asked to reflect upon and to work with techniques that are sometimes similar to, but also often oppositional to those learned in modern dance choreography courses. Part Two offers an overview of the scope of literature and representative articles that have been published on both topics, modern dance composition and musical theatre choreography, as it concisely traces the history of modern dance choreographic pedagogy, aligning it with concurrent trends happening within the American musical theatre since the mid-19th century.
Download or read book Female Spectacle written by Susan A. Glenn and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the French actress Sarah Bernhardt made her first American tour in 1880, the term feminism had not yet entered our national vocabulary. But over the course of the next half-century, a rising generation of daring actresses and comics brought a new kind of woman to center stage. Exploring and exploiting modern fantasies and fears about female roles and gender identity, these performers eschewed theatrical convention and traditional notions of womanly modesty. They created powerful images of themselves as ambitious, independent, and sexually expressive New Women. Female Spectacle reveals the theater to have been a powerful new source of cultural authority and visibility for women. Ironically, theater also provided an arena in which producers and audiences projected the uncertainties and hostilities that accompanied changing gender relations. From Bernhardt's modern methods of self-promotion to Emma Goldman's political theatrics, from the female mimics and Salome dancers to the upwardly striving chorus girl, Glenn shows us how and why theater mattered to women and argues for its pivotal role in the emergence of modern feminism.
Download or read book Vaudeville old new written by Frank Cullen and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 1362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dance Me a Song written by Beth Genné and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the history of famous Hollywood collaborations as the palimpsest of dance, film, and musical techniques were developed over time. Provides lively and necessary scholarship for all dance enthusiasts
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of The American Musical written by Raymond Knapp and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-03 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text presents keywords and critical terms that deepen analysis and interpretation of the musical. Taking into account issues of composition, performance, and reception, the book's contributors bring a range of practical and theoretical perspectives to bear on their considerations of American musicals.
Download or read book The Art of Stage Dancing written by Ned Wayburn and published by New York : The Ned Wayburn studios of stage dancing, Incorporated. This book was released on 1925 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Studies in Dance History written by and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Work of Dance written by Mark Franko and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2002-06-10 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the complex relationship between dance, work and labor in the 1930s. In this insightful new book, Mark Franko explores the many genres of theatrical dancing during the radical decade of the 1930s and their relationship to labor movements, including Fordist and unionist organizational structures, the administrative structures of the Federal Dance and Theatre Project, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and the Communist Party. Franko shows how the structures of labor organization were reproduced and acted out — but also profoundly reasoned through in corporeal terms — by choreography and performance of the proletarian mass dance, the chorus line of the Ziegfeld Follies and the reflexive backstage musical film, Martha Graham's modern dance, the revolutionary dance movement of the proletarian avant-garde, African-American "ethnic" opera-ballet, and Lincoln Kirstein's "American" ballet. The contributions of many important personalities of American theatrical, visual and literary culture are included in this study. Franko's focus extends from the direct impact of performances on audiences to the reviewing, reporting and photography of print journalism.
Download or read book Dance in Musical Theatre written by Phoebe Rumsey and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-12-14 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Oklahoma! and West Side Story, to Spring Awakening and Hamilton, dance remains one of the most important and key factors in musical theatre. Through the integration of song and dance in the 'dream ballets' of choreographers like Agnes De Mille; the triple threat performances of Jerome Robbins' dancers; the signature style creation by choreographers like Bob Fosse with dancers like Gwen Verdon; and the contemporary, identity-driven work of choreographers like Camille A. Brown, the history of the body in movement is one that begs study and appreciation. Dance in Musical Theatre offers guidelines in how to read this movement by analyzing it in terms of composition and movement vocabulary whilst simultaneously situating it both historically and critically. This collection provides the tools, terms, history, and movement theory for reading, interpreting, and centralizing a discussion of dance in musical theatre, importantly, with added emphasis on women and artists of color. Bringing together musical theatre and dance scholars, choreographers and practitioners, this edited collection highlights musical theatre case studies that employ dance in a dramaturgically essential manner, tracking the emergence of the dancer as a key figure in the genre, and connecting the contributions to past and present choreographers. This collection foregrounds the work of the ensemble, incorporating firsthand and autoethnographic accounts that intersect with historical and cultural contexts. Through a selection of essays, this volume conceptualizes the function of dance in musical: how it functions diegetically as a part of the story or non-diegetically as an amplification of emotion, as well as how the dancing body works to reveal character psychology by expressing an unspoken aspect of the libretto, embodying emotions or ideas through metaphor or abstraction. Dance in Musical Theatre makes dance language accessible for instructors, students, and musical theatre enthusiasts, providing the tools to critically engage with the work of important choreographers and dancers from the beginning of the 20th century to today.
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 Catherine Littlefield written by Sharon Skeel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While she is best remembered today as founder of the Philadelphia Ballet and the director and driving force behind the famous Littlefield School of Ballet, from which Balanchine drew the nucleus for his School of American Ballet, Catherine Littlefield (1905-51) and her oeuvre were in many ways emblematic of the full representation of dance throughout entertainments of the first half of the 20th century. From her early work as a teenager dancing for Florenz Ziegfeld to her later work in choreographing extravagant ice skating shows, a remarkable dance with 90 bicyclists for the 1940 World's Fair, and on television as resident choreographer for The Jimmy Durante Show, Littlefield was amongst the first choreographers to bring concert dance to broader venues, and her legacy lives on today in her enduring influence on generations of American ballet dancers. As the first biography of Littlefield, Catherine Littlefield: A Life in Dance traces her life in full from birth through childhood experiences dancing on the Academy of Music's grand stage, and from her foundation of the groundbreaking Philadelphia Ballet Company in 1935 to her later work in television and beyond. Littlefield counted among her many glamorous friends and colleagues writer Zelda Fitzgerald, conductor Leopold Stokowski, and composer Kurt Weill. This biography also provides an engrossing portrait of the remarkable Littlefield family, many of whom were instrumental to Catherine's success. With the unflagging support of her generous husband and indomitable mother, Littlefield gave shape to the course of American ballet in the 20th century long before Balanchine arrived in the United States.
Download or read book Histories of the Musical written by Raymond Knapp and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American musical is a paradox. On stage or screen, musicals at once hold a dominant and a contested place in the worlds of entertainment, art, and scholarship. Born from a mélange of performance forms that included opera and operetta, vaudeville and burlesque, minstrelsy and jazz, musicals have always sought to amuse more than instruct, and to make money more than make political change. In spite of their unapologetic commercialism, though, musicals have achieved supreme artistry and have influenced culture as much as if not more than any other art form in America, including avant-garde and high art on the one hand, and the full range of popular and commercial art on the other. Reflecting, refracting, and shaping U.S. culture since the early twentieth century, musicals converse with shifting dynamics of gender and sexuality, ethnicity and race, and the very question of what it means to be American and to be human. The chapters gathered in this book, Volume I of the reissued Oxford Handbook, explore the American musical from both the outside and the inside. This first volume concentrates in particular on large-scale, more philosophical issues of relevance to the genre, considering issues of historical situations and formal procedure as they bear on the narratives we make concerning productions and performers, artists and audiences, commerce and context. The first four essays discuss ways of defining histories and texts, and apprehending the formal choices of singers and dancers; the second group of four take up the subtle challenges of the genre's signal transformations out of minstrelsy and Tin Pan Alley to "integration" and beyond.
