America Dancing

Author : Maureen Needham
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 9780252069994
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Megan Pugh
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300201311
Total Pages : 413 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Susan Leigh Foster
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 9780520063334
Total Pages : 342 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Constance Valis Hill
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190225386
Total Pages : 462 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Carol Spindel
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 0814781276
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dancing at Halftime written by Carol Spindel and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2002-10 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A topical discussion of the controversial use of American Indian mascots by college-level and professional sports teams.

Author : Benjamin Dangl
Publisher : AK Press
ISBN 13 : 1849350469
Total Pages : 160 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Elizabeth B. Schwall
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469662981
Total Pages : 319 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dancing with the Revolution written by Elizabeth B. Schwall and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elizabeth B. Schwall aligns culture and politics by focusing on an art form that became a darling of the Cuban revolution: dance. In this history of staged performance in ballet, modern dance, and folkloric dance, Schwall analyzes how and why dance artists interacted with republican and, later, revolutionary politics. Drawing on written and visual archives, including intriguing exchanges between dancers and bureaucrats, Schwall argues that Cuban dancers used their bodies and ephemeral, nonverbal choreography to support and critique political regimes and cultural biases. As esteemed artists, Cuban dancers exercised considerable power and influence. They often used their art to posit more radical notions of social justice than political leaders were able or willing to implement. After 1959, while generally promoting revolutionary projects like mass education and internationalist solidarity, they also took risks by challenging racial prejudice, gender norms, and censorship, all of which could affect dancers personally. On a broader level, Schwall shows that dance, too often overlooked in histories of Latin America and the Caribbean, provides fresh perspectives on what it means for people, and nations, to move through the world.

Author : Tamara Stevens
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 0313375186
Total Pages : 244 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Ann Morris
Publisher : Diane Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 9780756775773
Total Pages : 40 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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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!

Author : Brian Seibert
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
ISBN 13 : 1429947616
Total Pages : 670 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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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.