Grab your tutu - it’s time for ballet class! Full of bright and lively photographs, ballet terms, and easy-to-understand definitions, this fun introduction to a ballet class will have little dancers eager to take center stage and reach for the stars.
A chic and informative guide to the Ballet Beautiful method, featuring dance-inspired exercises, wellness tips, and lifestyle advice that help readers achieve ballerina confidence and self-esteem. After a career with the New York City Ballet, Mary Helen Bowers created Ballet Beautiful, a fitness and lifestyle program inspired by ballet’s artistry and athleticism. Designed to give anyone a ballerina body, Bowers’s targeted exercises tone and lengthen muscles, develop good posture, and teach grace in movement. Since launching in 2008, Bowers and her training have been sought after by celebrities and models (Alexa Chung, Liv Tyler, and Miranda Kerr, to name a few), as well as thousands of women across the globe through their streaming service. This book delves into the Ballet Beautiful universe, showing readers how to attain a ballerina’s lean and powerful physique and graceful poise via exercises, posture lessons, wellness tips, and fashion and beauty advice that can be effortlessly incorporated into everyday routines. The book features original images by the legendary photographers Inez and Vinoodh coupled with technical photographs illustrating the Ballet Beautiful workout and lifestyle. A refreshing antidote to traditional fitness programs and restrictive diets, this book is a stylish and instructional guide to transforming your body and life though ballet.
A distinguished dance critic offers an enchanting introduction to the art of ballet As much as we may enjoy Swan Lake or The Nutcracker, for many of us ballet is a foreign language. It communicates through movement, not words, and its history lies almost entirely abroad -- in Russia, Italy, and France. In Celestial Bodies, dance critic Laura Jacobs makes the foreign familiar, providing a lively, poetic, and uniquely accessible introduction to the world of classical dance. Combining history, interviews with dancers, technical definitions, descriptions of performances, and personal stories, Jacobs offers an intimate and passionate guide to watching ballet and understanding the central elements of choreography. Beautifully written and elegantly illustrated with original drawings, Celestial Bodies is essential reading for all lovers of this magnificent art form.
From the acclaimed, controversial singer-songwriter Sinéad O’Connor comes a revelatory memoir of her fraught childhood, musical triumphs, fearless activism, and of the enduring power of song. Blessed with a singular voice and a fiery temperament, Sinéad O’Connor rose to massive fame in the late 1980s and 1990s with a string of gold records. By the time she was twenty, she was world famous—living a rock star life out loud. From her trademark shaved head to her 1992 appearance on Saturday Night Live when she tore up Pope John Paul II’s photograph, Sinéad has fascinated and outraged millions. In Rememberings, O’Connor recounts her painful tale of growing up in Dublin in a dysfunctional, abusive household. Inspired by a brother’s Bob Dylan records, she escaped into music. She relates her early forays with local Irish bands; we see Sinéad completing her first album while eight months pregnant, hanging with Rastas in the East Village, and soaring to unimaginable popularity with her cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2U.” Intimate, replete with candid anecdotes and told in a singular form true to her unconventional career, Sinéad’s memoir is a remarkable chronicle of an enduring and influential artist.
Becoming parents draws us into philosophical quandaries before our children have even been born. Why do most of us want to have children? Should we make new people, despite life's travails and our crowded world? Is adoptive parenthood just the same as biological parenthood? Once children arrive, the questions start to be a mix of the profound and the practical. Should we share our lifestyle with our children, no matter how unusual? Should we vaccinate and may we circumcise? Should we encourage gender differences? Tracing the arc of parenthood from the earliest days to the college years and beyond, Jean Kazez explores 18 questions for philosophical parents, applying the tools of philosophy and drawing on personal experience. The Philosophical Parent offers a novel account of the parent-child relationship and uses it to tackle a variety of parenting puzzles, but more than that, Kazez celebrates both having children and philosophical reflection. Her book provides a challenging but cheerful companion for thoughtful parents and parents-to-be.
Finding Balance: Fitness, Health, and Training for a Lifetime in Dance gives an overview of issues faced by all performing dancers: injury and treatment; technique and training; fitness; nutrition and diet; and career management. The text includes both easy-to-read overviews of each topic and "profiles" of well known dancers and how they have coped with these issues. The new edition includes: Updated and new profiles. Expanded injury and injury treatment information. Updated dance science and physiology findings, and new references. Updated diet guidelines, Expanded and updated "Taking Control" section. It concludes with a list of selected dance/arts medicine clinics, a bibliography, glossary, and text notes.
Shortly after the New York Times had hailed John Cranko’s achievement as 'The German Ballet Miracle', his death mid-Atlantic deprived the world of one of its greatest choreographers. After leaving his native South Africa at eighteen, never to return, Cranko quickly became a resident choreographer with the Royal Ballet. He collaborated closely with luminaries such as Benjamin Britten and John Piper and encouraged the young Kenneth MacMillan. Tirelessly innovative, he devised a hit musical revue, Cranks as well as perennial favourites such as Pineapple Poll. His charm and wit endeared him to colleagues and royalty alike, but in the late 1950s his star began to wane. This, and a much-publicised scandal, drove Cranko to leave England for Germany. There, his work as director and choreographer of the Stuttgart Ballet enjoyed phenomenal success in USA, Russia and Europe. Fifty years after his tragically early death, Cranko’s story ballets continue to enrich ballet audiences around the world. The author danced in the Stuttgart Ballet’s premieres of Cranko’s Onegin, Romeo and Juliet and many more. He reveals the man behind the masterpieces and explores an array of lesser-known works, bringing to light fascinating facts about the genesis of Cranko’s ballets. Lavishly illustrated with rare photographs, the book contains Cranko’s personal letters and extensive reference material. It brings the reader surprising insights into the life and work of a truly exceptional man of theatre.