Part artistic study, part intimate memoir, this book illuminates the technique and repertory of American dancer Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) and her enduring legacy from the perspective of an artist and scholar who has reconstructed and performed her work for 35 years. Providing an overview of modern activities and trends in the teaching and performance of Duncan's dance, the author describes her own work directing The Isadora Duncan Dance Ensemble, the company that sought to implement Duncan's mission to create not a school of dance but "a school of life."
Set against the sweeping backdrop of Europe and the United States in the early 20th century, this is the story of Isadora Duncan--the most accurate account of her magnificent life yet. of photos.
Unquestionably brave, creative, and erudite, the free spirit Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) captivated the American, European, and Soviet cultural scenes with her innovative modern dance and un-self-conscious lifestyle.
"The history of American dance reflects the nation's tangled culture. Dancers from wildly different backgrounds watched, imitated, and stole from one another. Audiences everywhere embraced the result as deeply American. Chronicling dance from the minstrel stage to the music video, Megan Pugh shows how freedom--that nebulous, contested American ideal--emerged as a genre-defining aesthetic. Ballerinas mingled with slumming thrill-seekers, and hoedowns showed up on elite opera-house stages. Steps invented by slaves captivated the British royalty and the Parisian avant-garde. Dances were better boundary crossers than their dancers, however, and the racism and class conflicts that haunt everyday life shadow American dance as well. Center stage in America Dancing is a cast of performers who slide, glide, stomp, and swing their way through history. At the nadir of U.S. race relations, cakewalkers embraced the rhythms of black America. On the heels of the Harlem Renaissance, Bill Robinson tap-danced to stardom. At the height of the Great Depression, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers unified highbrow and popular art. In the midst of 1940s patriotism, Agnes de Mille brought jazz and square dance to ballet, then took it all to Broadway. In the decades to come, the choreographer Paul Taylor turned pedestrian movements into modern masterpiecds, and Michael Jackson moonwalked his way to otherworldly stardom. These artists both celebrated and criticized the country, all while inspiring others to get moving. For it is partly by pretending to be other people, Pugh argues, that Americans discover themselves ... America Dancing demonstrates the centrality of dance in American art, life, and identity, taking us to watershed moments when the nation worked out a sense of itself through public movement"--Publisher's description.
Throughout her history, the ballerina has been perceived as the embodiment of beauty and perfection--the feminine ideal. But the reality is another story. From the earliest ballerinas in the 17th century--who often led double lives as concubines--through the poverty of the corps de ballet dancers in the 1800's and the anorexic and bulimic ballerinas of George Balanchine, starvation and exploitation have plagued ballerinas throughout history. Using the stories of great dancers such as Anna Pavlova, Isadora Duncan, Suzanne Farrell, Gelsey Kirkland, Evelyn Hart, Marie Camargo, and Misty Copeland, Deirdre Kelly exposes the true rigors for women in ballet. She rounds her critique with examples of how the world of ballet is slowly evolving for the better. But to ensure that this most graceful of dance forms survives into the future, she says that the time has come to rethink ballet, to position the ballerina at its center and accord her the respect she deserves.
From the author of The Agitators, the acclaimed and captivating true story of two restless society girls who left their affluent lives to “rough it” as teachers in the wilds of Colorado in 1916. In the summer of 1916, Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood, bored by society luncheons, charity work, and the effete men who courted them, left their families in Auburn, New York, to teach school in the wilds of northwestern Colorado. They lived with a family of homesteaders in the Elkhead Mountains and rode to school on horseback, often in blinding blizzards. Their students walked or skied, in tattered clothes and shoes tied together with string. The young cattle rancher who had lured them west, Ferry Carpenter, had promised them the adventure of a lifetime. He hadn’t let on that they would be considered dazzling prospective brides for the locals. Nearly a hundred years later, Dorothy Wickenden, the granddaughter of Dorothy Woodruff, found the teachers’ buoyant letters home, which captured the voices of the pioneer women, the children, and other unforgettable people the women got to know. In reconstructing their journey, Wickenden has created an exhilarating saga about two intrepid women and the “settling up” of the West.
A graphic biography of the pioneering, free-spirited "Mother of Modern Dance" In 1899, performing in the drawing rooms of London's elite, Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) was already laying the foundations for modern dance. Her performances were visceral, free-flowing, and expressive; she danced barefoot. The 22-year-old from California was shattering the conventions of traditional ballet and, in doing so, enchanting high society. In Isadora, Julie Birmant and Cl ment Oubrerie capture the astonishing life and scandalous times of the so-called "Mother of Modern Dance" from her arrival in Europe to her tragic death in 1927. This extraordinary graphic novel spans Duncan's meetings with Auguste Rodin and Loie Fuller, her dazzling on-stage career, and the development of a style of dance--inspired by natural forms and Greek sculpture--that would become her enduring legacy.
The fabulous life and times of one of our wittiest, most endearing and enduring caricaturists—in his own words and inimitable art. Sorel has given us "some of the best pictorial satire of our time ... [his] pen can slash as well as any sword” (The Washington Post). Alongside more than 172 of his drawings, cartoons, and caricatures—and in prose as spirited and wickedly pointed as his artwork—Edward Sorel gives us an unforgettable self-portrait: his poor Depression-era childhood in the Bronx (surrounded by loving Romanian immigrant grandparents and a clan of mostly left-leaning aunts and uncles); his first stabs at drawing when pneumonia kept him out of school at age eight; his time as a student at New York’s famed High School of Music and Art; the scrappy early days of Push Pin Studios, founded with fellow Cooper Union alums Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast, which became the hottest design group of the 1960s; his two marriages and four children; and his many friends in New York’s art and literary circles. As the “young lefty” becomes an “old lefty,” Sorel charts the highlights of his remarkable life, by both telling us and showing us how in magazines and newspapers, books, murals, cartoons, and comic strips, he steadily lampooned—and celebrated—American cultural and political life. He sets his story in the parallel trajectory of American presidents, from FDR’s time to the present day—with the candor and depth of insight that could come only from someone who lived through it all. In Profusely Illustrated, Sorel reveals the kaleidoscopic ways in which the personal and political collide in art—a collision that is simultaneously brilliant in concept and uproarious and beautiful in its representation.
