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Simple guidelines for the business of "making up dances!"Choreographers do not make dances out of words. They compose them in thevocabulary of movement. Dr. Ellfeldt has long demonstrated her command ofthat vocabulary in her own dance compositions. Now, in A Primer forChoreographers, she has undertaken the difficult task of explaining itsalphabet to beginning students. Beginning with a brief definition of dance, thisbook supplies young dancers not with an easy explanation of the process ofchoreography, but with some tools for finding their own processes. It is aprimer, a beginner's book, which identifies the alphabet and the rules ofgrammar and spelling of dance. It is not a how-to book, for no one is sure howto succeed as a choreographer--except by really trying. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A pretty good book
This book, like the title says, is a primer for choreographers. That means this book explains the basics to beginners like me. It explained in rich language how choreographers should do their jobs well. It helped me understand that dance is more than a bunch of people moving around. In someplaces, it gets a little hard to understand and a little too philosophical,but overall, it is a good, informative book. I would recommend this toameteur choreographers, but not to those with more experience. ... Read more

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On choreography: "Choreography is a negotiation with the patterns your body is thinking"

On rules: "Try breaking the rules on a need to break the rules basis"

A Choreographer’s Handbook invites the reader to investigate how and why to make a dance performance. In an inspiring and unusually empowering sequence of stories, ideas and paradoxes, internationally renowned dancer, choreographer and teacher Jonathan Burrows explains how it’s possible to navigate a course through this complex process.

It is a stunning reflection on a personal practice and professional journey, and draws upon five years’ of workshop discussions, led by Burrows.

Burrows’ open and honest prose gives the reader access to a range of exercises, meditations, principles and ideas on choreography that allow artists and dance-makers to find their own aesthetic process.

It is a book for anyone interested in making performance, at whatever level and in whichever style.

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Text instruction can go only so far in teaching how to create dances. Dance Composition Basics picks up where other textbooks leave off, with a bound-in DVD that features professional choreographers and dancers in action.

Designed for beginning college-level dance composition courses and dance educators at the middle and high school levels, this textbook and DVD package highlights selected portions of original dance compositions by two noted choreographers. The works of Alonzo King (Chants and Dreamer) and Dwight Rhoden (Verge) are recorded and analyzed to sequence the choreographic process. Students are able to witness a progression that takes them from conceiving and refining an idea to improvising and solving movement problems to shaping and performing dances.

The methods featured in Dance Composition Basics can be applied to a variety of dance styles including ballet, modern, and jazz. Each of the 27 lessons serves as a starting point that encourages novice dancers to embark on their own attempts at choreography with more confidence.

Structured to present concepts from simple to complex, the chapters cover the body, space, time, energy, and choreographic devices. Each chapter is divided into lessons based on the dance element or concept highlighted. The lessons challenge students to create solo, duet, trio, and group works. Each lesson includes the following components:

• One choreographic concept
• Video documentation of the choreographic concept
• Vocabulary words
• Introductory statement
• Warm-up
• Structured improvisations
• Creative choreographic problems
• Questions for discussion
• Assessment rubrics

  The DVD supplements the written instruction in a progression that no textbook alone could achieve. It shows dancers as they solve movement problems, and it shows choreographers as they mold their works from conception to stage performance. DVD footage also captures the decision-making and problem-solving tactics used by each choreographer. With these concrete examples, students can form a basis of comparison when completing their own assignments.

  Dance Composition Basics is a practical introduction to the methods and tools used in composing dances that engages students in the process—the preferred method of learning and teaching dance composition today. Through real-world examples, this text and DVD package demonstrates the direct relationship of the activities learned in the dance composition class to the current practices used byprofessional choreographers. ... Read more

  Customer Reviews (1)

  Super Good
  This book is awsome for those who start dance composition, it gives good explanation and the samples on the video are worth watching several times. I highly recommend this book. ... Read more

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With members of four generations deeply involved in music and dancing, the Christensen Brothers are indisputably the United States' closest equivalent to the European tradition of dance dynasties. Their story sheds light on the history of ballet in twentieth-century America, both through their accomplishments as dancers, teachers, and company directors, and through their association with some of the most significant figures of the dance world such as Lincoln Kirstein, George Balanchine, Sol Hurok, and the Ford Foundation's W. McNeil Lowry. This triple biography encompasses the brothers' Mormon pioneer heritage, the circumstances that led them to enter vaudeville with a ballet act, and the rise and fall especially in the American West of companies with which they were associated for over six decades of their lives. This book provides an alternative to the New York-oriented volumes that so often pass as histories of American dance.
Debra Hickenlooper Sowell received the De la Torre Bueno Special Ci ... Read more

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A pioneer choreographer in modern American dance, Anna Sokolow has led a bewildering, active international life. Her meticulous biographer Larry Warren once looked up Anna Sokolow in a few reference books and found that she was born in three different years and that her parents were from Poland except when they were in Russia, and found many other inaccuracies.
Drawing on material from nearly 100 interviews, Larry Warren has created a fascinating account and assessment of the life and work of Anna Sokolow, whose nomadic career was divided between New York, Mexico, and Israel.
Setting her work on more than 70 dance companies, Anna Sokolow not only pioneered the development of a personal approach to movement, which has become part of the language of contemporary dance, but also created such masterpieces as Rooms, dealing with loneliness and alienation, and Dreams, which concerns the inner torment of victims of the Nazi Holocaust. Her unflinching look at the darker sides of experien ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

An artist's view on the 20th century
Anna Sokolow, (1910-2000) through her long creative life and through teaching of new and
independent living
generations of artists, was always busy in art and not in her credits. Anna is an outstanding example of an
artist who uses art as a way to communicate and to inspire. This book illustrates what it means to be total artist and completely committed to Art. It illustrates how art is a
language that enables people from different classes, countries, and cultures to communicate and discover collective
human feelings. The book takes the view that Anna was the right person at the right place at the
right time exposing us to an artistic giant and looking at the events of the twentieth century through her eyes. Many people from many
professions try to deal with past, present, and future, and I feel that
artists like Picasso (painting), and Sokolow (body movement) have a different kind of understanding of
their specific period, with social involvement without pretense and with their pure, penetrating, and
minimalist language. this is their wayreacting to a Society that sometimes criticizes them for their independent
ways. This book is an an excellent basis for further study of Anna Sokolow's life and art. ... Read more

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Dorothy Madden's lively book about Louis Horst (''You don't call me Mr. Horst, you call me Louis,'' he always said) makes for compulsive reading. She follows Horst's extraordinary life, punctuating her narrative with reminiscences, illuminating anecdotes from her personal store of memories, as well as the shared thoughts of others, all interspersed with her choice of evocative and expressive photographs and illustrations, to create a dynamic and memorable portrait of this key figure in American modern dance.
''Louis Horst: musician, composer, pianist, violonist, pit player, arranger, super accompanist (all sorts), conductor, régisseur, stage manager, tour tartar, catalyst, editor, writer, critic, teacher, consoler, the Sherlock Holmes of restaurants, keeper of journals and budgets, loan provider, lover, friend...'' ... Read more

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José Limón is universally recognized as one of the most important modern dancers of the 20th century.His technique is still taught at major colleges and dance schools; his dance company continues to revive his works, plus presents new works.His most famous work, The Moor's Pavanne, has been presented around the world by ballet and modern dance companies.This book presents a series of essays about Limón's life and works by noted scholars and dancers who were associated with Limón.It serves as a perfect introduction to his choreography and legacy.The book should appeal to fans of modern dance. ... Read more

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William Forsythe’s twenty year career as director of the Frankfurt Ballet helped to reinvigorate the language of classical dance. His work today continues to see him lauded as one of the greatest choreographers of the postwar era. He is responsible for challenging fundamental assumptions about staging ballet, and for creating work that draws from such diverse fields as higher mathematics, architecture and neuroscience.

This collection brings together essays from a diverse range of critical voices on ballet and contemporary dance studies, alongside analysis and testament from Forsythe’s collaborators and company members, as well as the director himself.

Forsythe’s craft is studied in relation to a variety of production elements, with essays examining the balletic approach, performance history and development, and the use of lighting and music. William Forsythe and the Practice of Choreography offers students and practitioners of ballet and contemporary dance a fascinating insight into the creative world of this visionary director.

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The writings of six choreographers are assembled in this book and the leap they have taken to go from the medium of choreography into written text constitutes a form of translation. Some of the texts investigate the possibilities of written language as invention, others use it as a means to illustrate specific tenets or describe choreographic projects. All yield insight into the process of coaxing language from the body. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Steps across boundaries
A wonderful multidisciplinary approach which shows that Dance can be political and literary, in addition to being physical and visual.Engages the reader to consider dance and choreography in a new way -- includingthat there need not be an edge to the stage, i.e. that the stage can be theworld so that the performance can even be the self of the"viewer." ... Read more

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Centering on Ninette de Valois's formative years as a choreographer and a shaper of British ballet, this book closely examines her 1934 ballet Bar aux Folies-Bergère, which was inspired by the famous Edouard Manet painting and created for Marie Rambert's company, then known as the Ballet Club. ... Read more

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"Nobody is born a dancer," said Mikhail Baryshnikov. "Youhave to want it more than anything."The ten dancers and choreographers in this collection shaped their rawtalent with passion and intensity. All have made unparalleledcontributions to the world of dance, and their stories present anoverview of dance in America.Author Carin T. Ford's lively text and delightful anecdotes introducemiddle grade and young adult readers to ten greats in American dance-- from ballet to modern dance to Broadway and more. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

A recollection of a bygone era
This is an extraordinary book, I read it twice through, as it is 'unputdownable.' It is a remarkably vivid account of childhood and growing to maturity in a bygone era at a time of great cultural and social changes.The humanity of the writer shines through and it is a gripping story frombeginning to end. Nijinska's narrative shows how difficult it was to beNijinsky's sister and still retain her own identity and develop her owntalent. Dare I say it, I would rather read about her than her brother?

Though it may seem a quibble, once Nijinska has graduated from TheImperial Theatre School I start to 'hear' two voices in this book,Nijinska's and an editor's padding out the narrative with sometimesdebatable information and facts which are easily verified elsewhere,especially with regard to Diaghilev's production plans in 1914, that flatlycontradict Nijinska's writing. Likewise the dating of the New Style Westerndates as opposed to the Russian dates, 13 days behind the rest of Europeprior to the Revolution, gets muddled at times, most notably in the news ofNijinsky's marriage. One picture is wrongly captioned, leading me to wonderabout others. However, in such a great work, these are but small quibbles.[Check the group photograph of a celebration for Matilda Kschessinska,there is a circle around the face of a sweet, affectionate looking lady,meant to depict Kschessinska, but it is the sparkling eyed, dark hairedlady directly below her who is actually Kschessinska.]

BronislavaNijinska's memoir covers the early years of her long creative life, leavingone longing for more, what a pity, a very great pity that a second volumedetailing her later work throughout the world has never been published. ... Read more

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How do women set up institutions? How has higher education helped or hindered women in the world of dance? These are some of the questions addressed through interviews and researched by the educators and dancers Sharon E. Friedler and Susan B. Glazer inDancing Female.
In dealing with some of the tensions, joys, frustrations, and fears women experience at various points of their creative lives, the contributors strike a balance between a theoretical sense of feminism and its practice in reality. This book presents answers to basic questions about women, power, and action.
Why do women choreographers choose to create the dances they do in the manner they do? How do women in dance work independently and organizationally? ... Read more

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The German choreographer Kurt Jooss (1901-1979) developed, with Sigurd Leeder, a style and technique of dance based on Laban's principles of Space Harmony. Jooss' contribution made a major impact on modern dance history and yet only four of his ballets survive intact today: Pavane on the Death of an Infanta, Big City, A Ball in Old Vienna, and the anti-war ballet The Green Table. This book describes and analyses these four ballets, placing the birth of modern dance and the development of Jooss' social and humanitarian concerns within the cultural and political context of the Weimar Republic. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Jules Perrot Master of the Romantic Ballet
Wonderful history by the best historian of the 19th century ballet.Very detailed and complete.Excellent contemporary dance prints.A classic of the period. ... Read more