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The author witnesses various forms of entertainment while in London, including the theatre and circus. The manner in which plays are acted, and balls and musical parties conducted, in Europe is (entirely) different from that of Hindoostan. In India, people send for the singers to their own houses, where they view the entertainments, and spend a large sum of money for one night's amusement. In Europe, a few individuals usually enter into partnership, (or) as it is called in English, a company. In one night, dancers and musicians collect five or six thousand rupees in exchange for entertaining the audience. The author also saw an exhibition near the bazar of the Haymarket of a tall and corpulent female standing more than five cubits.

A discussion of the evidence that, even before the Byzantine period, there were also female pantomime dancers on the Roman scene. Despite the terminological confusion created by the variety of terms used to describe dancers in the ancient sources, certain unarguable instances of references to female pantomime performers may not be explained away. The chapter reviews the evidence from inscriptions, especially at Pompeii, and argues that a crucial piece of epigraphic evidence from Gaul has been overlooked. This gravestone celebrates a teenage girl named Hellas, who had worked as a pantomime dancer in the Julio‐Claudian or slightly later period, and was memorialised as such by her proud father Sotericus. The conclusion that women were also celebrated performers of pantomime has important implications for our understanding of Roman culture.

This chapter describes the career and teaching philosophy of Roni Mahler, who has been a principal with the National Ballet of Washington, D.C., and a soloist with the American Ballet Theatre. She is on the faculty of the Juilliard School, and defines technique as the vehicle which moves you around the stage so that you can communicate with the audience. Mahler also says that a true teacher knows how to guide every different body—to stand up, not fall down—and to make people care about what you are doing onstage.

This chapter presents some suggestions for ballet teachers. Teachers who depend on students attending their classes for their livelihood, or who have a following of less than totally dedicated serious advanced dancers, should not give classes as Balanchine gave them. They are more for professionals who want to discover the basic purity of each movement and step. They are hard on the body. One must approach them as explorations of the numerous forms of a given theme. What Balanchine's steps give the dancer is an awareness of exactly how a movement should be done musically and physically. Consequently, these combinations are of great value to teachers and to dancers who may be performing Balanchine's ballets.

This chapter describes the experiences of the author as a dancer in the early 1950s. Specifically, she gives an account of an average workday by describing a day on her company's first tour in Europe in 1952, as well as an idea of what the logistics of their lives were like, as members of a poor company.

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts from the author. He says that there are intrinsic characteristics or qualities in his training, both in technique and performance, which go far beyond merely training the body and mind to dance. Training in ballet prepares dancers for performing careers, albeit relatively short ones, and also prepares them for life. It offers them what entrepreneurs possess, and what corporate, educational, research, and nonprofit enterprises seek in future associates and executives.

This chapter describes the author's experiences as a student at the School of American Ballet when Balanchine needed dancers to form his company. In order to shape his dancers to perform his choreography in the way he desired, Balanchine started to train them in his style. He gave two-hour classes that were designed to help his dancers achieve “perfection,” as the advanced classes at the Kirov school were called. Balanchine's intention was to speed up our development because he needed an instant company.

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts from the authors. A thread runs through Balanchine's teaching that pertains not only to the innovations he made in technique, but also to musicality and timing. The dancer was another musician. But instead of creating sound, the dancer became visible sound. Each and every dancer is just as important as each and every musician in creating the magic of sound and movement. What we take for granted as part of our technique did not exist before the 1950s. Before Balanchine's time, the glissade did not end with both feet simultaneously. The jeté and assemblé with legs held together out to the side, the preparations for steps, and the speed and breadth of movement were what Balanchine added to classical ballet. The intricate partnering in pas de deux and the use of the vibrato that underlies the melody are part of Balanchine's legacy to us.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief description of the author's teaching career. It then identifies several flaws that he has observed in the training progression of dancers and the manner in which teachers instruct. The pedagogical skills covered in this book are the tools used to help teachers plan and deliver an effective ballet class. The book does not delve deeply into the “correct way” to teach technique, as this will certainly cause disagreement among those who come from different training backgrounds. In this area concerning technique, it touches upon only those points that are considered universally acknowledged by well-trained teachers from all methods.

This chapter describes the career and teaching philosophy of Damara Bennett, Director of the School of Oregon Ballet Theatre. Bennett, who was formerly with San Francisco Ballet, defines technique as what you need in order to express the art form, whether for an abstract or a story ballet. It is also how the steps relate to other steps—what steps are connector steps. Technique is also support; it is your partner.

Stavros Stavrou Karayanni challenges the Orientalist notion that belly dance was historically a female performance genre through an investigation of the 19th‐century male dancers of Cairo. Analysis reveals the breathless hypocrisy of travelers who had an “imperial gaze” (Gustave Flaubert, Vivant Denon, Gerard de Nerval) and who lingered over the performances of highly popular male belly dance performances in 19th‐century Egypt, at the same time pronouncing them obscene and indecent. Karayanni recuperates the art of these dancing bodies, which had been erased from history by scandalized colonial writers and postcolonial subalterns. Also considered are historical male dancers, as well as their contemporary counterparts whose choreographies continue to negotiate gender, sexuality, and imperial standards of masculinity.

In the development of the study of the affinity between parts of Senecan tragedy and what we know about the texts (libretti) danced in pantomime, the author of this chapter (a trained dancer herself) looks at three features in the dramas that have often been criticised: their loose dramatic structure, running commentaries on another participant's actions, and lengthy narrative set‐pieces. In close readings of key texts from several plays, including Troades, Agamemnon and Hercules Furens, the chapter shows how apparently intractable problems related to the possibility of staging the plays disappear entirely if pantomimic performances formed part of the entertainment; moreover, the very verse construction, rhythm, and style display features that would offer great potential for choreographic realization by a dancer. This has important implications for our understanding of Seneca's dramaturgy.

This chapter begins with the tap challenge between the Nicholas Brothers in the 1940 musical Down Argentine Way. This three-and-a-half minute jazz-tap routine captured the spirit, tempo, and wildly infectious energy of swing. As dance music, swing had a flowing, streamlined 4/4 beat, which made for a smooth sound. For jazz tap dancers, the steady beat was the base on which one could multiply time and syncopate smooth propulsions, which gave the impression of the beat speeding ahead. The chapter looks at the inflections of swing in the tap dancing of, among others, the Condos Brothers, Ann Miller, Mable Lee, and Eleanor Powell; and at its varying degrees of influence on such Irish American tap dancers as James Cagney, Ray Bolger, George Murphy, Donald O’Connor, and Gene Kelly, whose heritage in Irish-stepping styles had been integrated into a modern American style of jazz dancing.

This chapter presents Frances Gershwin Godowski's opinion about her brother George Gershwin. It states that Gershwin had a reputation as a ladies' man, however, he was always somewhat guarded about more personal details. Despite his great success and peer pressure, Gershwin never married and was to some degree self-conscious or defensive about most aspects of his life and work. It adds that Gershwin was a good painter and dancer.

Providing an overview of the tumultuous life and stellar accomplishments of silent screen star Barbara La Marr, the Prologue begins with her emergence into newspaper headlines as notorious, teenaged Reatha Watson—-reported kidnapped at sixteen, banished from Los Angeles by juvenile authorities for being “too beautiful” at seventeen, and soon barred by film studios from working as an actress for her scandalous activities—-and ends with her death at twenty-nine. Barbara’s impressive careers as a dancer, in vaudeville, and as a screenwriter are touched upon. Her tremendous impact as a reigning silent screen actress is then spotlighted: how her volatile sex appeal, glamour, talent, meteoric film career, and predilection to live life on her own terms bewitched her peers and the world whilst her explosive private life continued playing out in gossip columns and newspaper headlines.