Dance / Drama: Dance Contemporary

Offering an up-to-date and comprehensive examination of modern dance, this book offers alphabetically arranged essays, selected, written and reviewed by expert contributors.

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.

How To Do Things with Dance positions modern dance as a vital critical discourse, and suggests that dances of the late 1940s and the 1950s can be seen as compelling agents of social change.

Composing While Dancing: An Improviser's Companion examines the world of improvisational dance and the varied approaches to this art form. Each chapter focuses on an important aspect of improvisation including spatial relations, the eyes, and the dancing image. Included are sample practices from the artists profiled, exercises for further research, and a glossary of terms.

"Danielle Goldman's contribution to the theory and history of improvisation in dance is rich, beautiful and extraordinary. In her careful, rigorously imaginative analysis of the discipline of choreography in real time, Goldman both compels and allows us to become initiates in the mysteries of flight and preparation."

First examining the personal essentials demanded by dance, this book then looks at the pitfalls inherent in the act of performing. It asks questions about the essence of dance, going on to the tools required for roles, with the sixth question being the performance itself.

Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years incorporates images of performances and rehearsals, along with candid photographs by many important photographers (including Annie Leibovitz and Peter Hujar). The book also features examples of Cunningham's choreographic notes, as well as scores, and set and costume designs by the artists with whom he has collaborated over the years.