Beginning Modern Dance


Book Description

Beginning Modern Dance With HKPropel Access introduces undergraduate and high school students to modern dance as a performing art through participation, appreciation, and academic study in a dance technique course. In the book, 50 photos with concise descriptions support students in learning beginning modern dance technique and in creating short choreographic or improvisational studies. For those new to modern dance, the book provides a friendly orientation on the structure of a modern dance technique class and includes information regarding class expectations, etiquette, and appropriate attire. Students also learn how to prepare mentally and physically for class, maintain proper nutrition and hydration, and avoid injury. Beginning Modern Dance supports students in understanding modern dance as a performing art and as a medium for artistic expression. The text presents the styles of modern dance artists Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey and José Limón, Katherine Dunham, Lester Horton, and Merce Cunningham along with an introduction to eclectic modern dance style. Chapters help students begin to identify elements of modern dance as they learn, view, and respond to dance choreography and performance. Related materials delivered online via HKPropel include 38 interactive video clips and photos of dance technique to support learning and practice. In addition, e-journal and self-reflection assignments, performance critiques, and quizzes help students develop their knowledge of modern dance as both performers and viewers. Through modern dance, students learn new movement vocabularies and explore their unique and personal artistry in response to their world. Beginning Modern Dance supports your students in their experience of this unique and dynamic genre of dance. Beginning Modern Dance is a part of Human Kinetics’ Interactive Dance Series. The series includes resources for ballet, modern, tap, jazz, musical theater, and hip-hop dance that support introductory dance technique courses taught through dance, physical education, and fine arts departments. Each student-friendly text has related online learning materials including video clips of dance instruction, assignments, and activities. The Interactive Dance Series offers students a collection of guides to learning, performing, and viewing dance. Note: A code for accessing HKPropel is not included with this ebook but may be purchased separately.




Contemporary Dance in Cuba


Book Description

The lens of dance can provide a multifaceted view of the present-day Cuban experience. Cuban contemporary dance, or tecnica cubana as it is known throughout Latin America, is a highly evolved hybrid of ballet, North American modern dance, Afro-Cuban tradition, flamenco and Cuban nightclub cabaret. Unlike most dance forms, tecnica was created intentionally with government backing. For Cuba, a dancing country, it was natural--and highly effective--for the Revolutionary regime to link national image with the visceral power of dance. Written by a dancer who traveled and worked in Cuba from the 1970s to the present, this book provides an inside look at daily life in Cuba. From watching the great Alicia Alonso, to describing the economic trials of the 1990s "Special Period," the author uses history, humor, personal experience, rich description and extensive interviews to reveal contemporary life and dance in Cuba.




Modern Dance


Book Description




Basic Concepts in Modern Dance


Book Description

Presents an overview of the history of modern dance; discusses basic body movement, improvisation, and choreography; and includes illustrated exercises designed to help the dancer learn to use his or her body more effectively.




West Side Story


Book Description

This series of contemporary plays includes structured GCSE assignments for use by individuals or groups. These include questions which involve close reading, writing and discussion. This play places the "Romeo and Juliet" story in a New York gang-warfare context.




The Style of Movement


Book Description

Style meets movement: a new photography book featuring more than eighty of today's most famous dancers, captured in movement and styled in garments designed by some of fashion's biggest names. From renowned photographers Ken Browar and Deborah Ory, the husband-and-wife team behind NYC Dance Project and the best-selling photography book The Art of Movement, comes their follow-up book for fans of dance, fashion, and photography. Spotlighting today's greatest dancers--from ballet to modern--in clothing by today's and yesterday's most celebrated designers, this stunning volume takes the relationship between style, fashion, and dance as its subject. The dancers bring the pages to life with their grace and movement, becoming one with what they're wearing. Whether in couture gowns from Dior, Valentino, Oscar de la Renta, vintage Halston, Moschino, and Bill Blass, or in costumes designed by Martha Graham herself, the world-renowned dancers featured in these pages--including Tiler Peck, Daniil Simkin, Misty Copeland, Christine Shevchenko, Xander Parish, and Olga Smirnova--bring movement to style.




The Art of Movement


Book Description

A stunning celebration of movement and dance in hundreds of breathtaking photographs by the creative team behind NYC Dance Project. The Art of Movement is an exquisite collection of photographs by well-known dance photographers Ken Browar and Deborah Ory that capture the movement, flow, energy, and grace of many of the most accomplished dancers in the world. Featured are more than 70 dancers from companies including American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Martha Graham Dance Company, Boston Ballet, Royal Danish Ballet, The Royal Ballet, Abraham in Motion, and many more. Accompanying the photographs are intimate and inspiring words from the dancers, as well as from choreographers and artistic directors on what dance means to them.




A Revolution in Movement


Book Description

'A Revolution in Movement' illuminates how collaborations between dancers and painters shaped Mexico's postrevolutionary cultural identity. K. Mitchell Snow traces this relationship throughout nearly half a century of developments in Mexican dance - the emulation of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in the 1920s, the adoption of U.S.-style modern dance in the 1940s, and the creation of ballet-inspired folk dance in the 1960s. Snow describes the appearances in Mexico by Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova and Spanish concert dancer Tortóla Valencia, who helped motivate Mexico to express its own national identity through dance.




Meaning in Motion


Book Description

On dance and culture




Modern Bodies


Book Description

In 1930, dancer and choreographer Martha Graham proclaimed the arrival of "dance as an art of and from America." Dancers such as Doris Humphrey, Ted Shawn, Katherine Dunham, and Helen Tamiris joined Graham in creating a new form of dance, and, like other modernists, they experimented with and argued over their aesthetic innovations, to which they assigned great meaning. Their innovations, however, went beyond aesthetics. While modern dancers devised new ways of moving bodies in accordance with many modernist principles, their artistry was indelibly shaped by their place in society. Modern dance was distinct from other artistic genres in terms of the people it attracted: white women (many of whom were Jewish), gay men, and African American men and women. Women held leading roles in the development of modern dance on stage and off; gay men recast the effeminacy often associated with dance into a hardened, heroic, American athleticism; and African Americans contributed elements of social, African, and Caribbean dance, even as their undervalued role defined the limits of modern dancers' communal visions. Through their art, modern dancers challenged conventional roles and images of gender, sexuality, race, class, and regionalism with a view of American democracy that was confrontational and participatory, authorial and populist. Modern Bodies exposes the social dynamics that shaped American modernism and moved modern dance to the edges of society, a place both provocative and perilous.