Dance Writings
Dance Writings

Author: Edwin Denby

Publisher: Random House Incorporated

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 608

ISBN-13: 9780394749846

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Collects a variety of articles on dance by influential New York journalist and master critic Edwin Denby which he wrote for Dance Magazine, Modern Music journal, and the Herald Tribune

Writing about Dance
Writing about Dance

Author: Wendy Oliver

Publisher: Human Kinetics Publishers

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 9780736076104

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This comprehensive guide provides students with instructions for writing about dance in many different contexts. It brings together the many different kinds of writing that can be effectively used in a variety of dance classes from technique to appreciation.

Dance Writings & Poetry
Dance Writings & Poetry

Author: Edwin Denby

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1998-01-01

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780300069853

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Edwin Denby, who died in 1983, was the most important and influential American dance critic of this century. His reviews and essays, which he wrote for almost thirty years, were possessed of a voice, vision, and passion as compelling and inspiring as his subject. He was also a poet of distinction -- a friend to Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, and John Ashbery. This book presents a sampling of his reviews, essays, and poems, an exemplary collection that exhibits the elegance, lucidity, and timelessness of Denby's writings.The volume includes Denby's reactions to choreography ranging from Martha Graham to George Balanchine to the Rockettes, as well as his reflections on such general topics as dance in film, dance criticism, and meaning in dance. Denby's writings are presented chronologically, and they not only provide a picture of how his dance theories and reviewing methods evolved but also give an informal history of dance in New York from the late 1930s to the early 1960s. The book -- the Only collection of Denby's writings currently in print -- is an essential resource for students and lover of dance.

Dance Pathologies
Dance Pathologies

Author: Felicia M. McCarren

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780804735247

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A history of dance’s pathologization may startle readers who find in dance performance grace, discipline, geometry, poetry, and the body’s transcendence of itself. Exploring dance’s historical links to the medical and scientific connotations of a “pathology,” this book asks what has subtended the idealization of dance in the West. It investigates the nineteenth-century response, in the intersections of dance, literature, and medicine, to the complex and long-standing connections between illness, madness, poetry, and performance. In the nineteenth century, medicine becomes a major cultural index to measure the body’s meanings. As a particularly performative form of madness, nineteenth-century hysteria preserved the traditional connection to dance in medical descriptions of “choreas.” In its withholding of speech and its use of body code, dance, like hysteria, functions as a form of symptomatic expression. Yet by working like a symptom, dance performance can also be read as a commentary on symptomatology and as a condition of possibility for such alternative approaches to mental illness as psychoanalysis. By redeeming as art what is “lost” in hysteria, dance expresses non-hysterically what only hysteria had been able to express: the somatic translation of idea, the physicalization of meaning. Medicine’s discovery of “idea” manifesting itself in the body in mental illness strikingly parallels a literary fascination with the ability of nineteenth-century dance to manifest “idea,” suggesting that the evolution of medical thinking about mind-body relations as they malfunction in madness, as well as changes in the cultural reception of danced representations of these relations, might be paradigmatic shifts caused by the same cultural factors: concern about the body as a site of meaning and about vision as a theater of knowledge.

The Oxford Dictionary of Dance
The Oxford Dictionary of Dance

Author: Debra Craine

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2010-08-19

Total Pages: 512

ISBN-13: 0199563446

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This comprehensive and up-to-date dictionary provides all the information necessary for dance fans to navigate the diverse dance scene of the 21st century. It includes entries ranging from classical ballet to the cutting edge of modern dance.

Dancing in the Blood
Dancing in the Blood

Author: Edward Ross Dickinson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-07-14

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 1108171281

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This is a remarkable account of the revolutionary impact of modern dance on European cultural life in the early twentieth century. Edward Ross Dickinson uncovers modern dance's place in the emerging 'mass' culture of the modern metropolis, sufficiently ubiquitous and high-profile to spark media storms, parliamentary debates, and exasperated denunciations even from progressive art critics. He shows how modern dance spoke in multiple registers - as religious and as scientific; as redemptively chaste and scandalously sensual; as elitist and popular. He reveals the connections between modern dance and changing gender relations and family dynamics, imperialism, racism, and cultural exchanges with the wider non-European world, and new conceptions of selfhood. Ultimately the book finds in these complex and often contradictory connections a new way of understanding the power of modernism and modernity and their capacity to revolutionize and transform the modern world in the momentous, creative, violent middle decades of the twentieth century.

Dance Writings
Dance Writings

Author: Edwin Denby

Publisher: Dance Books Limited

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 632

ISBN-13:

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Edwin Denby (1903-1983) was the most important and influential American dance critic of the 20th century. His reviews and essays were possessed of a voice, vision, and passion as compelling and inspiring as his subject. As dance critic, first for "Modern Music" and then for the "New York Herald Tribune", Denby permanently changed the way we think and talk about dance. This volume presents his reviews from "Modern Music" and the "Tribune" in chronological order, providing not only a picture of how Denby's dance theories and reviewing methods evolved, but also an informal history of the dance in New York from 1936 through 1945. The reviews glimpse the vanished dancers and dances that were most particularly of their time, especially Alicia Markova, Alexandra Danilova, Martha Graham, and George Balanchine. It was Balanchine on whom Denby focused after he left the "Tribune", and all of his post-"Tribune" writings on Balanchine and the New York City Ballet are presented here in one section, providing a history of the early artistic development of the company and of Balanchine himself, while also showing Denby's most eloquent and deeply felt writing. Finally there are his post-1945 reviews, essays, and lectures on such general dance subjects as the phenomenon of a truly good leap, classicism in ballet, and dance criticism itself. Courtly, unassertive but precise, concerned, concise and sometimes severe in his criticism, Denby was convinced that dance was not only a social and physical activity but also a joyous, moral one that "affirmed the beauty of the human spirit." As well as his exemplary artists Denby also wrote with care and generosity about dancers as varied as Nijinsky, Pearl Primus, Merce Cunningham and Sonja Henie. Cornfield's introduction is both appreciative and discerning; Mackay's biography sensitively describes a poet, dancer, novelist, translator and critic of high standards who was widely liked and admired. Essential for serious balletomanes.