A complete reference library in one volume, the Dance Encyclopedia is brimful of all the essential facts of the dance which have been scattered until now through hundreds of books, many of them inaccessible to most readers because of language and rarity.
While there are books about folk dances from individual countries or regions, there isn’t a single comprehensive book on folk dances across the globe. This illustrated compendium offers the student, teacher, choreographer, historian, media critic, ethnographer, and general reader an overview of the evolution and social and religious significance of folk dance. The Encyclopedia of World Folk Dancefocuses on the uniqueness of kinetic performance and its contribution to the study and appreciation of rhythmic expression around the globe. Following a chronology of momentous events dating from prehistoryto the present day, the entries in this volume include material on technical terms, character roles, and specific dances. The entries also summarize the historical and ethnic milieu of each style and execution, highlighting, among other elements, such features as: origins purpose rituals and traditions props dress holidays themes
Throughout the centuries, ballet has had a rich and ever-evolving role in the humanities. Renowned choreographers, composers, and performers have contributed to this unique art form, staging enduring works of beauty. Significant productions by major companies embrace innovations and adaptations, enabling ballet to thrive and delight audiences all over the globe. In The Encyclopedia of World Ballet,Mary Ellen Snodgrass surveys the emergence of ballet from ancient Asian models to the present, providing overviews of rhythmic movement as a subject of art, photography, and cinema. Entries in this volume reveal the nature and purpose of ballet, detailing specifics about leaders in classic design and style, influential costumers and companies, and trends in technique, partnering, variation, and liturgical execution. This reference covers: Choreographers Composers Costumers Dance companies Dancers Productions Set designers Techniques Terminology Among the principal figures included here are Alvin Ailey, Afrasiyab Badalbeyli, George Balanchine, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Pierre Beauchamp, Sergei Diaghilev, Agnes DeMille, Nacho Duato, Isadora Duncan, Boris Eifman, Mats Ek, Erté, Martha Graham, Inigo Jones, Louis XIV, Amalia Hernández Navarro, Rudolf Nureyev, Marius Petipa, Jerome Robbins, Twyla Tharp, and Agrippina Vaganova. This work also features dance companies from the Americas, Australia, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Korea, New Zealand, Russia, South Africa, and Vietnam. Productions include such universal narrative favorites as Coppélia, The Nutcracker, The Sleeping Beauty, Scheherazade, Firebird, and Swan Lake. Featuring a chronology that identifies key events and figures, this volume highlights significant developments in stage presentations over the centuries. The Encyclopedia of World Ballet will serve general readers, dance instructors, and enthusiasts from middle school through college as well as professional coaches and performers, troupe directors, journalists, and historians of the arts.
This is a comprehensive reference work to 970 choreographers and dance directors who worked in nearly 3,500 films. For each, there is a vital biography, a description of their choreographic style, a listing of their stage, television, music video, nightclub and concert credits, and a listing of the movies they choreographed. A decade-by-decade history of dance on film and a filmography of choreographically important works in each decade are included.
The National Book Award–winning author’s biographical novel of Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev: “Exuberant and exhilarating . . . a brilliant leap of imagination” (San Francisco Chronicle). In Dancer, Colum McCann tells the ballet icon’s story through the myriad voices of those who knew him. There is Anna Vasileva, Rudi’s first ballet teacher, who rescues her protégé from the stunted life of his provincial town; Yulia, whose sexual and artistic ambitions are thwarted by her Soviet-sanctioned marriage; and Victor, the Venezuelan street hustler, who reveals the lurid underside of the gay celebrity set. Spanning four decades and many worlds, from the horrors of the Second World War to the wild abandon of New York in the ‘80s, Dancer is peopled by a large cast of characters, obscure and famous: doormen and shoemakers, nurses and translators, Margot Fonteyn, Eric Bruhn, and John Lennon. And at the heart of the spectacle stands the artist himself, willful, lustful, and driven by a never-to-be-met need for perfection.
Rake, drunkard, aesthete, gossip, raconteur extraordinaire: the narrator of Bohumil Hrabal’s rambling, rambunctious masterpiece Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age is all these and more. Speaking to a group of sunbathing women who remind him of lovers past, this elderly roué tells the story of his life—or at least unburdens himself of a lifetime’s worth of stories. Thus we learn of amatory conquests (and humiliations), of scandals both private and public, of military adventures and domestic feuds, of what things were like “in the days of the monarchy” and how they’ve changed since. As the book tumbles restlessly forward, and the comic tone takes on darker shadings, we realize we are listening to a man talking as much out of desperation as from exuberance. Hrabal, one of the great Czech writers of the twentieth century, as well as an inveterate haunter of Prague’s pubs and football stadiums, developed a unique method which he termed “palavering,” whereby characters gab and soliloquize with abandon. Part drunken boast, part soul-rending confession, part metaphysical poem on the nature of love and time, this astonishing novel (which unfolds in a single monumental sentence) shows why he has earned the admiration of such writers as Milan Kundera, John Banville, and Louise Erdrich.
Dance Dance Dance—a follow-up to A Wild Sheep Chase—is a tense, poignant, and often hilarious ride through Murakami’s Japan, a place where everything that is not up for sale is up for grabs. As Murakami’s nameless protagonist searches for a mysteriously vanished girlfriend, he is plunged into a wind tunnel of sexual violence and metaphysical dread. In this propulsive novel, featuring a shabby but oracular Sheep Man, one of the most idiosyncratically brilliant writers at work today fuses together science fiction, the hardboiled thriller, and white-hot satire.