Author: Isa Partsch-Bergsohn Publisher: Dance Horizons ISBN: Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 116
Book Description
This is the story of three passionate choreographers and their colleagues who created European modern dance in the twentieth century despite the storms of war and oppression. It begins with Rudolf Laban, innovator and guiding force, and continues with the careers of his two most gifted and influential students, Mary Wigman and Kurt Jooss. Included are others who made significant contributions: Hanya Holm, Sigurd Leeder, Gret Palucca, Berthe Trumpy, Vera Skoronel, Yvonne Georgi and Harold Kreutzberg. The first book to weave together the connections among these extraordinary artists, The Makers of Modern Dance in Germany contains interviews, personal recollections and translations from German publications - all of which have never appeared before. Illustrated with archival photographs.
Author: Royd Climenhaga Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 0429883927 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 176
Book Description
This newly-updated second edition explores Pina Bausch’s work and methods by combining interviews, first-hand accounts, and practical exercises from her developmental process for students of both dance and theatre. This comprehensive overview of her work offers new and exciting insight into the theatrical approach of a singular performance practitioner. This is an essential introduction to the life and work of one of the most significant choreographers/directors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As a first step towards critical understanding, and as an initial exploration before going on to further, primary research, Routledge Performance Practitioners offer unbeatable value for today’s student.
Author: Harry Eiss Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1443852880 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 430
Book Description
The lights dim and soon the theatre becomes dark. The audience conversations end with a few softly dissipating whispers, and the movie begins. Nina Sayers, a young ballerina, dances the prologue to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, a ballet expressing a story drawn from Russian folk tales about a princess who has been turned into a White Swan and can only be turned back if a man swears eternal fidelity to her. However, this is not that ballet. This is the beginning of Black Swan, a controversial movie employing symbolism in a complex interweaving of dance and film to reveal the struggles and paradoxes of everything from a female rite-of-passage to questions about where artistic expression should demand self-sacrifice and whether such sacrifice is worth the price. The dance floor is the stage of life, the place where physical actions take on the symbolic meanings of mythology and express the deepest archetypes of the human mind. This book explores how dance gives shape to those human needs and how it reflects, and even creates, the maps of meaning and value that structure our lives. Though the volume looks at all the forms of dance, it focuses on three main categories in particular: religious, social, and artistic. Since the American Musical and subsequent Musical Videos have both reflected and influenced our current world, they receive the most space—such acclaimed performers as Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland, Ricky Nelson, Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson, such important composers and lyrists as Gershwin, Rodgers-and-Hammerstein, Porter, Berlin, Webber, Bernstein, the Beatles, and the Who, and such choreographers as Graham, Balanchine, Robbins and Fosse are examined in particular detail.
Author: Victoria Phillips Publisher: ISBN: 0190610360 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 497
Book Description
""I am not a propagandist," declared the matriarch of American modern dance Martha Graham while on her State Department funded-tour in 1955. Graham's claim inspires questions: the United States government exported Graham and her company internationally to over twenty-seven countries in Europe, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Near and Far East, and Russia representing every seated president from Dwight D. Eisenhower through Ronald Reagan, and planned under George H.W. Bush. Although in the diplomatic field, she was titled "The Picasso of modern dance," and "Forever Modern" in later years, Graham proclaimed, "I am not a modernist." During the Cold War, the reconfigured history of modernism as apolitical in its expression of "the heart and soul of mankind," suited political needs abroad. In addition, she declared, "I am not a feminist," yet she intersected with politically powerful women from Eleanor Roosevelt, Eleanor Dulles, sister of Eisenhower's Dulles brothers in the State Department and CIA, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Betty Ford, and political matriarch Barbara Bush. While bringing religious characters on the frontier and biblical characters to the stage in a battle against the atheist communists, Graham explained, "I am not a missionary." Her work promoted the United States as modern, culturally sophisticated, racially and culturally integrated. To her abstract and mythic works, she added the trope of the American frontier. With her tours and Cold War modernism, Graham demonstrates the power of the individual, immigrants, republicanism, and, ultimately freedom from walls and metaphorical fences with cultural diplomacy with the unfettered language of movement and dance"--
Author: Jens Richard Giersdorf Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres ISBN: 029928963X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 249
Book Description
The Body of the People is the first comprehensive study of dance and choreography in East Germany. More than twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jens Richard Giersdorf investigates a national dance history in the German Democratic Republic, from its founding as a Communist state that supplanted the Soviet zone of occupation in 1949 through the aftermath of its collapse forty years later, examining complex themes of nationhood, ideology, resistance, and diaspora through an innovative mix of archival research, critical theory, personal narrative, and performance analysis. Giersdorf looks closely at uniquely East German dance forms—including mass exercise events, national folk dances, Marxist-Leninist visions staged by the dance ensemble of the armed forces, the vast amateur dance culture, East Germany’s version of Tanztheater, and socialist alternatives to rock ‘n’ roll—to demonstrate how dance was used both as a form of corporeal utopia and of embodied socialist propaganda and indoctrination. The Body of the People also explores the artists working in the shadow of official culture who used dance and movement to critique and resist state power, notably Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, Arila Siegert, and Fine Kwiatkowski. Giersdorf considers a myriad of embodied responses to the Communist state even after reunification, analyzing the embodiment of the fall of the Berlin Wall in the works of Jo Fabian and Sasha Waltz, and the diasporic traces of East German culture abroad, exemplified by the Chilean choreographer Patricio Bunster.
Author: Fiona Macintosh Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0191634387 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
When the eighteenth-century choreographer Jean-Georges Noverre sought to develop what is now known as modern ballet, he turned to ancient pantomime as his source of inspiration; and when Isadora Duncan and her contemporaries looked for alternatives to the strictures of classical ballet, they looked to ancient Greek vases for models for what they termed 'natural' movement. This is the first book to examine systematically the long history of the impact of ideas about ancient Greek and Roman dance on modern theatrical and choreographic practices. With contributions from eminent classical scholars, dance historians, theatre specialists, modern literary critics, and art historians, as well as from contemporary practitioners, it offers a very wide conspectus on an under-explored but central aspect of classical reception, dance and theatre history, and the history of ideas.
Author: Jennifer Homans Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks ISBN: 0812984781 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 817
Book Description
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • “A fascinating read about a true genius and his unrelenting thirst for beauty in art and in life.”—MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOV Winner of the Plutarch Award for Best Biography and the Marfield Prize for Arts Writing • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award, and the Kirkus Prize • Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize Based on a decade of unprecedented research, the first major biography of George Balanchine, a broad-canvas portrait set against the backdrop of the tumultuous century that shaped the man The New York Times called “the Shakespeare of dancing”—from the bestselling author of Apollo’s Angels New York Times Editors’ Choice • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, NPR, Oprah Daily Arguably the greatest choreographer who ever lived, George Balanchine was one of the cultural titans of the twentieth century—The New York Times called him “the Shakespeare of dancing.” His radical approach to choreography—and life—reinvented the art of ballet and made him a legend. Written with enormous style and artistry, and based on more than one hundred interviews and research in archives across Russia, Europe, and the Americas, Mr. B carries us through Balanchine’s tumultuous and high-pitched life story and into the making of his extraordinary dances. Balanchine’s life intersected with some of the biggest historical events of his century. Born in Russia under the last czar, Balanchine experienced the upheavals of World War I, the Russian Revolution, exile, World War II, and the Cold War. A co-founder of the New York City Ballet, he pressed ballet in America to the forefront of modernism and made it a popular art. None of this was easy, and we see his loneliness and failures, his five marriages—all to dancers—and many loves. We follow his bouts of ill health and spiritual crises, and learn of his profound musical skills and sensibility and his immense determination to make some of the most glorious, strange, and beautiful dances ever to grace the modern stage. With full access to Balanchine’s papers and many of his dancers, Jennifer Homans, the dance critic for The New Yorker and a former dancer herself, has spent more than a decade researching Balanchine’s life and times to write a vast history of the twentieth century through the lens of one of its greatest artists: the definitive biography of the man his dancers called Mr. B.
Author: Nadine George-Graves Publisher: Oxford Handbooks ISBN: 0199917493 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 1057
Book Description
This handbook brings together genres, aesthetics, cultural practices and historical movements that provide insight into humanist concerns at the crossroads of dance and theatre, broadening the horizons of scholarship in the performing arts and moving the fields closer together.
Author: Lilian Karina Publisher: Berghahn Books ISBN: 9781571816887 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 400
Book Description
The Nazis burned books and banned much modern art. However, few people know the fascinating story of German modern dance, which was the great exception. Modern expressive dance found favor with the regime and especially with the infamous Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda. How modern artists collaborated with Nazism reveals an important aspect of modernism, uncovers the bizarre bureaucracy which controlled culture and tells the histories of great figures who became enthusiastic Nazis and lied about it later. The book offers three perspectives: the dancer Lilian Karina writes her very vivid personal story of dancing in interwar Germany; the dance historian Marion Kant gives a systematic account of the interaction of modern dance and the totalitarian state, and a documentary appendix provides a glimpse into the twisted reality created by Nazi racism, pedantic bureaucrats and artistic ambition.
Author: Ashley Killar Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd ISBN: 1803132574 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 512
Book Description
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.
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Author: Isa Partsch-Bergsohn
Author: Royd Climenhaga
Author: Harry Eiss
Author: Victoria Phillips
Author: Jens Richard Giersdorf
Author: Fiona Macintosh
Author: Jennifer Homans
Author: Nadine George-Graves
Author: Lilian Karina
Author: Ashley Killar