Making Dances That Matter

Making Dances That Matter
Author: Anna Halprin
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2019-02-08
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0819575666

Anna Halprin, vanguard postmodern dancer turned community artist and healer, has created ground-breaking dances with communities all over the world. Here, she presents her philosophy and experience, as well as step-by-step processes for bringing people together to create dances that foster individual and group well-being. At the heart of this book are accounts of two dances: the Planetary Dance, which continues to be performed throughout the world, and Circle the Earth. The Circle the Earth workshop for people living with AIDS has generated dozens of "scores" for others to adapt. In addition, the book provides a concrete guide to Halprin's celebrated Planetary Dance. Now more than 35 years old, Planetary Dance promotes peace among people and peace with the Earth. Open to everyone, it has been performed in more than 50 countries. In 1995 more than 400 participants joined her in a Planetary Dance in Berlin commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Potsdam Agreements, at the end of World War II. More recently, she took the Planetary Dance to Israel, bringing together Israelis and Palestinians as well as other nationalities. Throughout this book Halprin shows how dance can be a powerful tool for healing, learning and mobilizing change, and she offers insight and advice on facilitating groups. If we are to survive, Halprin argues, we must learn, experientially, how our individual stories weave together and strengthen the fabric of our collective body. Generously illustrated with photographs, charts and scores, this book will be a boon to dance therapists, educators and community artists of all types.

Moving Toward Life

Moving Toward Life
Author: Anna Halprin
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2015-01-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0819575933

Anna Halprin is one of the most important innovators in the history of modern dance, performance art, and post-modern dance. Moving Toward Life brings together for the first time her essays, interviews, manifestos, and teaching materials, along with over 100 illustrations, providing a rich account of the work that radicalized an entire generation of performers. Since the late 1950s, Halprin has been at the forefront of experiments in dance, from improvisation and street theatre to dances in the environment and healing dances. A brief overview of Halprin's career shows how her work has prefigured — and transfigured — crucial developments in postmodern dance. In the 1960s, Halprin invented the "workshop," and in the wake of the Watts riots, her multiracial company broke boundaries in their confrontational political performances. In the 1970s, she organized "community rituals" to explore how individual creativity feeds positively into group dynamics. These healing social events led to her current work with cancer survivors and people challenging AIDS and their caregivers. Depicting Halprin's deep commitment to social change, Moving Toward Life presents an engaging, critical document of the life of one of the most influential and least known luminaries of American dance. Sally Banes and Janice Ross join Rachel Kaplan in providing introductory essays to sections of the book.

A Map of Making Dances

A Map of Making Dances
Author: Stuart Hodes
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 1998
Genre: Music
ISBN:

This all-inclusive guide to the art of creating dance moves and routines, written by the advisor and former dancer of the Martha Graham School and company, contains 247 projects that guide the user through a myriad of topics. Concepts and techniques such as form, sequencing, variation, surrealism, abstract movement, improvisation, ritual and ceremony, space, and floor patterns are examined and explained, encouraging the student to experiment and create with movement.

Anna Halprin

Anna Halprin
Author: Janice Ross
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2009-05-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0520260058

This comprehensive biography examines Halprin's fascinating life in the context of American culture - in particular popular culture and the West Coast as a center of artistic experimentation from the Beats through the Hippies to the present.

Dances that Describe Themselves

Dances that Describe Themselves
Author: Susan Leigh Foster
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2002-09-04
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780819565518

An inquiry into improvisation as practiced by Richard Bull and his contemporaries.

Let's Dance!

Let's Dance!
Author: Valerie Bolling
Publisher: Thinkingdom
Total Pages: 16
Release: 2020-06-16
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1635923638

This rhythmic showcase of dances from all over the world features children of diverse backgrounds and abilities tapping, spinning, and boogying away! Tap, twirl, twist, spin! With musical, rhyming text, author Valerie Bolling shines a spotlight on dances from across the globe, while energetic art from Maine Diaz shows off all the moves and the diverse people who do them. From the cha cha of Cuba to the stepping of Ireland, kids will want to leap, dip, and zip along with the dances on the page!

Celluloid Classicism

Celluloid Classicism
Author: Hari Krishnan
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2019-10-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0819578886

Received a special citation from The de la Torre Bueno© First Book Award Committee of the Dance Studies Association (2020). The book has been hailed as "an invaluable addition to the scholarship on Bharatanatyam." Celluloid Classicism provides a rich and detailed history of two important modern South Indian cultural forms: Tamil Cinema and Bharatanatyam dance. It addresses representations of dance in the cinema from an interdisciplinary, critical-historical perspective. The intertwined and symbiotic histories of these forms have never received serious scholarly attention. For the most part, historians of South Indian cinema have noted the presence of song and dance sequences in films, but have not historicized them with reference to the simultaneous revival of dance culture among the middle-class in this region. In a parallel manner, historians of dance have excluded deliberations on the influence of cinema in the making of the "classical" forms of modern India. Although the book primarily focuses on the period between the late 1920s and 1950s, it also addresses the persistence of these mid-twentieth century cultural developments into the present. The book rethinks the history of Bharatanatyam in the twentieth century from an interdisciplinary, transmedia standpoint and features 130 archival images.

What Makes That Black?

What Makes That Black?
Author: Luana
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2016
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1483454797

We all can name some of the Africanist aesthetic-structures that fuel African American and American art ... Syncopation, Improvisation, Call and Response, Cool, Polyrhythm, or Innovation as an ambition- But there are many, many more. What Makes That Black? The African-American Aesthetic identifies and defines seventy-four elements of the aesthetic through text and illustration. Using the magnificent camerawork of R.J. Muna, Sharen Bradford, Jae Man Joo, Rachel Neville, James Barry Knox, and more- as they point their cameras at Alonzo King LINES Ballet, Complexions Contemporary Ballet, and jazz artists such as Cécile McLorin Salvant and Wynton Marsalis- a specific artistic consciousness or sensibility visually unfolds. Luana even joins the camera crew as she shoots Oakland Street Graffiti.

Dancing Through It

Dancing Through It
Author: Jenifer Ringer
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2014-02-20
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 069815150X

“A glimpse into the fragile psyche of a dancer.” —The Washington Post Jenifer Ringer, a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, was thrust into the headlines after her weight was commented on by a New York Times critic, and her response ignited a public dialogue about dance and weight. Ballet aficionados and aspiring performers of all ages will want to join Ringer behind the scenes as she shares her journey from student to star and candidly discusses both her struggle with an eating disorder and the media storm that erupted after the Times review. An unusually upbeat account of life on the stage, Dancing Through It is also a coming-of-age story and an inspiring memoir of faith and of triumph over the body issues that torment all too many women and men.