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This book explores the Broadway legacy of choreographer Agnes de Mille, from the 1940s through the 1960s. Six musicals are discussed in depth—Oklahoma!, One Touch of Venus, Bloomer Girl, Carousel, Brigadoon, and Allegro. Carousel and Brigadoon were de Mille’s most influential and lucrative Broadway works. The other three shows exemplify aspects of her legacy that have not been fully examined, including the impact of her ideas on some of the composers with whom she worked; her ability to incorporate a previously conceived work into the context of a Broadway show; and her trailblazing foray into the role of choreographer/director. Each chapter emphasizes de Mille’s unique contributions to the original productions. Several themes emerge. First, character development remained at the heart of de Mille’s Broadway work. She often took minor characters, represented with minimal or no dialogue, and fleshed out their stories. Second, de Mille often came into conflict with her collaborators because of her strong views, but her dances added a layer of meaning that resulted in more complex final products. Finally, de Mille saw much of her choreography as an authorship and argued that she should be given the same rights as the librettist and the composer. Her work as an activist contributed to revisions in dance copyright law and the founding of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, a theatrical union that protects the rights of directors and choreographers. Agnes de Mille

Albion’s Dance was inspired by the author’s memory of her childhood ballet teacher who danced in Britain during World War Two. Dancers’ memoirs and the writings of dance critics are central resources for this book that asks how ballet in Britain survived during the war and how the end of war resulted in a newly refined national ballet. Exploring the so-called ballet boom during World War Two, the larger story of this book is one of how art and artists thrive during conflict, and how they respond pragmatically and creatively to privation and duress. The way ballet participated in propagandistic discourse and answered to a public mood of pragmatism and idealism are part of this story. Also considered are the distinct roles of dance critics, male and female dancers, producers, audiences, and choreographers. Each population contributed to the creation of a uniquely British ballet identity. After the war, British ballet emerged on the international stage demonstrating superb qualities of dramatic acuity, musicality, and sensitivity to the classic ballets.

Alla Osipenko is one of history’s greatest ballerinas, a courageous rebel who paid the price for speaking truth to the Soviet state. At Leningrad’s Kirov Ballet, Osipenko’s lines, shapes, and movement both exemplified the venerable traditions of Russian ballet and projected those traditions into uncharted and experimental realms. Her sharp tongue and candid independence, as well as her almost reckless flouting of Soviet rules for personal and political conduct, soon found her all but quarantined in Russia. An internationally acclaimed ballerina at the height of her career, she had to persist against constant attempts by the Soviet state and the Kirov administration to humble her. Throughout the book, Osipenko talks frankly and freely in a way that few Russians of her generation have allowed themselves to do. The book chronicles her life to the age of eighty-two—a great-grandmother, still outspoken, and still a dynamic participant in the international world of ballet. A cast of characters drawn from all sectors of Soviet and post-perestroika society makes this biography as encyclopedic and encompassing as a great Russian novel.

Here for the first time in English are freshly translated essays on famous women in the arts, in contemporary Russian life, and especially in the world of classical dance written by Russia’s foremost ballet critic of his day, Akim Volynsky (1861–1926). Volynsky’s depiction of the body beautiful onstage at St. Petersburg’s storied Maryinsky Theater is preceded by his earlier writings on women in Leonardo da Vinci, Dostoevsky, and Otto Weininger, and on such illustrious female personalities as Zinaida Gippius, Liubov Gurevich, Ida Rubinstein, and Lou Andreas-Salome. Volynsky was a man for whom the realm of art was largely female in form and whose all-encompassing image of woman constituted the crux of his aesthetic contemplation, which crossed over into the personal and libidinal. His career looks ahead to another Petersburg-bred “high priest” of classical dance, George Balanchine; indeed, with their undeniable proclivity toward ballet’s female component, Volynsky’s dance writings, illuminated here by examples of his earlier “gendered” criticism, invite speculation on how truly groundbreaking and forward-looking this understudied critic is.

This book employs twenty-five years' worth of rich interviews with black and white Virginians, Tennesseeans, and Kentuckians to explore the evolution and social uses of dance in each region. It analyzes how issues as disparate as industrialization around coal, race relations, and the 1970s folk revival profoundly influenced freestyle clogging and other dance forms. The book then reveals how African Americans and Native Americans, as well as European immigrants drawn to the timber mills and coal fields, added to local dance vocabularies. By placing each community in its sociopolitical and economic context, the book explores how the formal and stylistic nuances found in Appalachian dance reflect the beliefs, shared understandings, and experiences of the community at large. The book examines the dynamism of Appalachian dance traditions and the creativity involved in their evolution. Focusing on six dance communities, the book documents the experience of dancing as people have enjoyed it, or continue to enjoy it. It also explores the dance communities' divergent responses to social change, including industrialization, as well as the use of dance for community development.

Before ‘Fred and Ginger’, there was ‘Fred and Adele’, a show business partnership and a cultural sensation like no other. It is difficult in our ‘celebrity’-sated era to comprehend what a genuine phenomenon the Astaires were. At the height of their success in the mid-1920s the siblings were seasoned transatlantic commuters, ambassadors of an art form they had helped to revolutionize, adored by audiences, feted by royalty, and courted socially by the elite in just about every field of endeavour. They seemed to define the Jazz Age. They were Gershwin’s music in motion; a fascinating pair who wove fascinating rhythms in song and dance. The story of Fred and Adele Astaire is an extraordinary one and is told here in depth and within its historical and theatrical context. It is not merely the first part of Fred’s long and illustrious career; it holds a significance and a fascination of its own, as well as having implications for Astaire’s subsequent career, which have not been fully appreciated. The story of the Astaires is also the story of an era. Born at the close of the nineteenth century, they, in effect, grew up together with the new century. Manifestly children of their time, they glamorously embodied the interwar style they had partly originated. At the same time, their appeal as performers was based largely on their apparent defiance of the darker aspects of the interwar psyche. They were an affirmation of life and hope in the midst of a prevalent crisis of faith and identity.

George Balanchine is today one of the most celebrated figures in twentieth-century ballet and is closely identified with the two institutions he helped found in collaboration with Lincoln Kirstein: the School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet. During the early years of their efforts in the 1930s, Balanchine and Kirstein’s enterprise underwent numerous changes and transformations. The complexity of their endeavors has been misrepresented in many existing accounts of their lives and careers, in part because their activities have not been assessed as a whole. This book chronicles Balanchine’s and Kirstein’s work between 1933 and 1940 in the spheres of ballet, opera, Broadway musicals, and Hollywood cinema. This new account shows the ways in which their collective and individual efforts influenced and affected one another and ultimately shaped the character of the institutions they would eventually found. The work of the short-lived organizations the American Ballet (1935–38) and Ballet Caravan (1936–40) brought together dozens of dancers and collaborators, and the activity of these companies was closely related to work of the School of American Ballet as well as Balanchine’s projects in Broadway musical theater and film.

This book is a dual biography of the early lives of two key figures in Russian ballet: famed choreographer George Balanchine and his close childhood friend and extraordinary ballerina Liidia (Lidochka) Ivanova. Tracing the lives and friendship of these two dancers from years just before the 1917 Russian Revolution to Balanchine's escape from Russia in 1924, this book sheds new light on a crucial flash point in the history of ballet. The book weaves a fascinating tale about this decisive period in the life of the man who would become the most influential choreographer in modern ballet. Abandoned by his mother at the St. Petersburg Imperial Ballet Academy in 1913 at the age of nine, Balanchine spent his formative years studying dance in Russia's tumultuous capital city. It was there, as he struggled to support himself while studying and performing, that Balanchine met Ivanova. A talented and bold dancer who grew close to the Bolshevik elite in her adolescent years, Ivanova was a source of great inspiration to Balanchine—both during their youth together, and later in his life, after her mysterious death just days before they had planned to leave Russia together in 1924. The book shows that although Balanchine would have a great number of muses, many of them lovers, the dark beauty of his dear friend Lidochka would inspire much of his work for years to come.

Widely regarded as the foremost choreographer of contemporary ballet, George Balanchine was, and continues to be, an institution and major inspiration in the world of dance. This book provides a technical explanation of the stylistic approaches that he taught in New York City between 1940 and 1960, as recorded by two prominent dancers who studied with him at that time. It replicates moments in the studio with the influential teacher, describing his instructions and corrections for twenty-four classes. These lessons not only introduce Balanchine's methods for executing steps, but also discuss the organization and development of his classes, shedding light on the aesthetics of his unique and celebrated style of movement.

There are many different methods for teaching classical ballet—Bournonville, Vaganova, Cecchetti—the Royal Academy of Dancing being the most widely known. All of these methods are effective tools for presenting the technique and art of ballet. Knowing how to use these tools successfully requires more than being a devotee of the technique; it also requires the mastering of various skills. In this book, the author aims to share his extensive knowledge of how to teach rather than focus exclusively on what to teach, arguing that it is not enough for a ballet teacher to be well trained in technique, but that he or she must also know how to utilize pedagogical skills. The book is appropriate for either followers of a single methodology or for those who have adopted a more eclectic approach to technique. The author believes that effective teaching skills—proper demonstration, counting, correcting, musicality, anatomical approach, etc.—do not come automatically just because one has trained as a dancer. He covers all areas involving dance, from history to injury prevention, from anatomy and kinesiology to vocabulary and music, and even offers pragmatic advice on the business of starting a dance school.

This book explores the transformations undergone by the residents of a Midwestern town when they step out on the dance floor for the very first time. The book uses sensitive fieldwork as well as the author's own immersion in ballroom culture to lead readers into a community that springs up around ballroom dance. It demonstrates how the contemporary performance of ballroom dance among amateurs generates feelings of positive personal transformation, of becoming beautiful. The book also discusses the dance hall as a social space where disparate groups come together to move in synchrony, along with the ways in which race, class, and gender converge in ballroom dancing. The result is a portrait of the real people who connect with others, change themselves, and join a world that foxtrots to its own rules, conventions, and rewards. The author's eye for revealing, humorous detail adds warmth and depth to discussions around critical perspectives on the experiences the dance hall provides, the nature of partnership and connection, and the notion of how dancing allows anyone to become beautiful. The book also considers the relationship between aesthetic values and becoming beautiful.

This book constructs a wide-ranging cultural history to explore the earliest stage works of Leonard Bernstein, written during World War II: the Broadway musical On the Town, the ballet Fancy Free, and a nightclub comedy act called The Revuers. Bernstein and his collaborators—including the choreographer Jerome Robbins and the writing team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green—crossed artistic, political, ethnic, and racial boundaries with abandon. With the zeal of youth, these emerging artists infused their work with progressive political ideals. On the Town focused on sailors enjoying a day of shore leave, and its first production featured a mixed-race cast, contributing an important chapter to the racial desegregation of American performance. It projected an equitable inter-racial urban vision in an era when racial segregation was being enforced contentiously in the U.S. military. The show starred the dancer Sono Osato, even as her father was interned together with so many Japanese Americans. Fancy Free amiably encoded its own dissenting narratives. Based on a controversial painting by Paul Cadmus, it grew out of a complex web of gay relationships. The book explores cross fertilizations across art forms and high-low divides, drawing on intensive archival research, FBI files, interviews with surviving cast members, and previously untapped criticism in African American newspapers.

Bob Fosse’s work continues to be the most recognizable of the great choreographers of Broadway’s post–World War II golden age. This book offers deep analysis of Fosse’s development as a choreographer, including the various dance influences he absorbed as a young performer. It examines key Fosse dances and contextualizes them across his career. It looks at how he influenced changes in the musical theater, particularly as a director, and how early mentors George Abbott and Jerome Robbins shaped his theatrical outlook. It compares his work to that of peers like Robbins, Gower Champion, Michael Bennett, and others. The book also examines his choreography for film and looks at how his film experiences influenced his stage work. It also considers the impact of his three marriages—all to dancers—on his career. Finally, the book investigates how Fosse’s evolution as both artist and individual mirrored the social and political climate of his era and allowed him to comfortably ride a wave of cultural changes.

In the early twentieth century, female performers regularly appeared on the stages and screens of American cities. Though advertised as dancers, mimics, singers, or actresses, they often exceeded these categories. Instead, their performances adopted an aesthetic of intermediality, weaving together techniques and elements drawn from a wide variety of genres and media, including ballet, art music, photography, early modern dance, vaudeville traditions, silent film, and more. Onstage and on-screen, performers borrowed from existing musical scores and narratives, referred to contemporary shows, films, and events, and mimicked fellow performers, skating neatly across various media, art forms, and traditions. The performances and conceptions of art that emerged were innovative, compelling, and deeply meaningful. This book examines these performances and the performers behind them, focusing particularly on the ways in which they negotiated turn-of-the-century American social and cultural issues, including technological developments and commodification, new modes of perception, evolving understandings of the body and the self, and shifting conceptions of gender, race, and sexual identity. Tracing the various modes of intermediality at work on- and offstage, Body Knowledge re-imagines early twentieth-century art and entertainment as both fluid and convergent.

This book provides a sweeping cultural and historical examination of Diaspora dance genres. The book investigates social dances brought to the islands by Europeans and Africans, including quadrilles and drum/dances as well as popular dances that followed, such as Carnival parading, Pan-Caribbean danzas, rumba, merengue, mambo, reggae, and zouk. The book reviews sacred dance and closely documents combat dances, such as Martinican ladja, Trinidadian kalinda, and Cuban juego de maní. In drawing on scores of performers and consultants from the region as well as on the author's own professional dance experience and acumen, the book adeptly places Caribbean dance in the context of cultural and economic globalization, connecting local practices to transnational and global processes and emphasizing the important role of dance in critical regional tourism. Throughout, the book reveals impromptu and long-lasting Diaspora communities of participating dancers and musicians.

This book documents the unorthodox case of the Sexy Jewess, a distinctive figure of twenty-first-century American Jewishness. Versions of her image proliferate in US popular culture among neoburlesque, movie musicals, comedic television, ballet parody, and progressive pornography. In embodied plays with sexed-up self-display, the Sexy Jewess revises long-standing stereotypes of the ugly hag, the insatiable Jewish mother, and the self-obsessed Jewish American princess that sustain images of excess even as they have assimilated into the American mainstream. Talking back and dancing back at these stereotypes through gender and humor rebellion, a slew of celebrity and lesser known performers play up their Jewish and female difference as self-conscious comments on their majoritarian sameness. In doing so, performers invoke the Sexy Jewess as a postassimilatory, postfeminist persona with radical and conservative effects. The introduction, five chapters, and the conclusion show how this occurs in a spectrum of spectacle embodiments across a range of performance contexts. Extending across stage and screen legacies of a hundred years, The Case of the Sexy Jewess links humor to classed ideas about sexiness and links ethnicity to gendered constructions of race. Unique to the study of American Jewishness but not limited by its scope, the book situates the body as a site of critical agency in discussions of parody and representational politics, with an emphasis on cultural appropriation and reappropriation that provokes questions applicable to a wide range of other identity acts and impersonations.

This book addresses the interface between choreography and war in this century. The book challenges concepts of choreography as solely a structuring mechanism and an aesthetics of politics that is exclusively resistant. Instead, in the context of 21st-century war, it calls for a rethinking of choreography that incorporates the disorder and dispersion of power away from nation-states, which is central to this century. The book is composed of an introduction and sixteen chapters which work across a number of disciplines through field notes, case studies, participant observations, and photographs, as well as chapters reflecting on war issues and their relationship to choreographic practices.

This book provides a historical and cultural analysis of US–based dance-makers’ investment in intellectual property rights. Although federal copyright law in the United States did not recognize choreography as a protectable class prior to the 1976 Copyright Act, efforts to win copyright protection for dance began eight decades earlier. In a series of case studies stretching from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first, the book reconstructs those efforts and teases out their raced and gendered politics. Rather than chart a narrative of progress, the book shows how dancers working in a range of genres have embraced intellectual property rights as a means to both consolidate and contest racial and gendered power. A number of the artists featured in the book are well-known white figures in the history of American dance, including modern dancers Loïe Fuller, Hanya Holm, and Martha Graham, and ballet artists Agnes de Mille and George Balanchine. But the book also uncovers a host of marginalized figures—from the South Asian dancer Mohammed Ismail, to the African American pantomimist Johnny Hudgins, to the African American blues singer Alberta Hunter, to the white burlesque dancer Faith Dane—who were equally interested in positioning themselves as subjects rather than objects of property, as possessive individuals rather than exchangeable commodities. Choreographic copyright, the book argues, has been a site for the reinforcement of gendered white privilege as well as for challenges to it.

This book traces the emergence and spread of the choreomania concept through colonial medical and ethnographic circles, showing how fantasies of instability—and of the Oriental other—haunted scientific modernity. Scenes from the archives of medical history, neurology, psychiatry, sociology, religion, and popular journalism show how the discursive history of the ‘dancing mania’ moved and transformed with its translations throughout the colonial world. From antiquarian references to ancient Greek bacchanals and medieval St. Vitus’s dances, to scientific reperformances of early modern religious ecstasies, and American government anthropology, ‘choreomania’ arose to signal every sort of gestural and choreographic unrest. Village kermesses, revolutionary crowds, and neuromotor disorders—including hysteria, epilepsy, and chorea—were among the many unruly forms of locomotion indiscriminately compared to bacchanalian turmoil. So too, charges of spontaneous political agitation levied against demonstrators from Africa and South America to the South Seas reveal heightened anxieties about the spread of social disorder. Initially employed to describe ‘contagious’ popular dances, jerking movements, and convulsions, with decolonization, the ‘dancing disease’ increasingly described the fitful drama of anti-European revolt. Closely indebted to the work of Michel Foucault, this book opens a new chapter on the way we think epidemic madness and the organization and disorganization of bodies and disciplines in the modern age. Setting ideas about disruptively moving bodies at the heart of the scientific enterprise, this book argues that disciplines themselves were at once more porous and mobile than is commonly allowed, and that ‘dance’ itself has to be radically reimagined across fields.

Consuming Dance examines dance in television and online advertising as both cultural product and cultural meaning-maker. The text interweaves semiotics, choreographic analysis, cultural studies, media studies, and critical theory to place contemporary dance-in-advertising in dialogue with other dance media. Grounding contemporary advertising within media and cultural history, the work both analyzes examples from early television and performs semiotic readings of historical references within later ads. Analysis of individual commercials and campaigns reveals how commercials act as rhizomatic assemblages of cultural history as traditional advertising positioning strategies engage with content, conventions, and discourses from other disciplines and cultural forms. The text explores the power of dance in advertising, examining how it generates affect and spectacle in service of both brand identity and the construction of the commodity-sign. This analysis of dance’s power, in turn, reveals advertising’s intertextuality and its contributions to social identity and the construction of the neoliberal subject. Ultimately, the text highlights advertising’s contradictions, exposing how its appropriation of dance functions as a response simultaneously to marketing needs, shifting ideologies, and growing cultural diversity all while continuing to serve the needs of neoliberal capitalism.