For twenty-five years, Ann Cooper Albright has been exploring the intersection of cultural representation and somatic identity in dance. For Albright, dancing is a physical inquiry, a way of experiencing and participating in the world, and her writing reflects an interdisciplinary approach to seeing and thinking about dance. In her engagement as both a dancer and a scholar, Albright draws on her kinesthetic sensibilities as well as her intellectual knowledge to articulate how movement creates meaning. Throughout Engaging Bodies movement and ideas lean on one another to produce a critical theory anchored in the material reality of dancing bodies. This blend of cultural theory and personal circumstance will be useful and inspiring for emerging scholars and dancers looking for a model of writing about dance that thrives on the interconnectedness of watching and doing, gesture and thought.

Through the Eyes of a Dancer compiles the writings of noted dance critic and editor Wendy Perron. In pieces for The SoHo Weekly News, Village Voice, The New York Times, and Dance Magazine, Perron limns the larger aesthetic and theoretical shifts in the dance world since the 1960s. She surveys a wide range of styles and genres, from downtown experimental performance to ballets at the Metropolitan Opera House. In opinion pieces, interviews, reviews, brief memoirs, blog posts, and contemplations on the choreographic process, she gives readers an up-close, personalized look at dancing as an art form. Dancers, choreographers, teachers, college dance students-and anyone interested in the intersection between dance and journalism-will find Perron's probing and insightful writings inspiring. Through the Eyes of a Dancer is a nuanced microcosm of dance's recent globalization and modernization that also provides an opportunity for new dancers to look back on the traditions and styles that preceded their own.

The figure of Carmen has emerged as a cipher for the unfettered female artist. Dance historian and performance theorist Ninotchka Bennahum shows us Carmen as embodied historical archive, a figure through which we come to understand the promises and dangers of nomadic, transnational identity, and the immanence of performance as an expanded historical methodology. Bennahum traces the genealogy of the female Gypsy presence in her iconic operatic role from her genesis in the ancient Mediterranean world, her emergence as flamenco artist in the architectural spaces of Islamic Spain, her persistent manifestation in Picasso, and her contemporary relevance on stage. This many-layered geography of the Gypsy dancer provides the book with its unique nonlinear form that opens new pathways to reading performance and writing history. Includes rare archival photographs of Gypsy artists.

In postwar America, any assertion of difference from the mainstream anticommunist culture carried professional and personal risks. For this reason, modern dance artists left much of what they thought unsaid. Instead they expressed themselves in movement. 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. Concentrating on choreographers whose artistic work conceived dance in terms of action, Rebekah J. Kowal shows how specific choreographic projects demonstrated increasing awareness of the stage as a penetrable space, one on which socially suspect or marginalized modes of being could be performed with relative impunity and exerted in the real world. Artists covered include Martha Graham, José Limón, Anna Sokolow, Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Donald McKayle, Talley Beatty, and Anna Halprin.

The unique career of choreographer Liz Lerman has taken her from theater stages to shipyards, and from synagogues to science labs. In this wide-ranging collection of essays and articles, she reflects on her life-long exploration of dance as a vehicle for human insight and understanding of the world around us. Lerman has been described by the Washington Post as "the source of an epochal revolution in the scope and purposes of dance art. " Here, she combines broad outlooks on culture and society with practical applications and accessible stories. Her expansive scope encompasses the craft, structure, and inspiration that bring theatrical works to life as well as the applications of art in fields as diverse as faith, aging, particle physics, and human rights law. Offering readers a gentle manifesto describing methods that bring a horizontal focus to bear on a hierarchical world, this is the perfect book for anyone curious about the possible role for art in politics, science, community, motherhood, and the media.To explore Lerman's dances about science and tools for embodied learning please visit her Science Choreography website: http://sciencechoreography.wesleyan.edu/. The site is a valuable resource for teachers from middle school through the university level.

This small and beautifully illustrated book showcases the work of two great American modernists, painter Abraham Walkowitz and dancer Isadora Duncan. Born in the same year (1878), both artists influenced the development of modern art in the early twentieth century by blending figurative gesture with abstraction. Duncan grew up in a free-spirited and artistic household in California and then moved to Europe. Walkowitz immigrated to the United States from Russia when he was a child and lived most of his life in New York City, where he studied at Cooper Union School and the National Academy of Design.Walkowitz and Duncan met in 1906 in Paris at the studio of the sculptor Auguste Rodin. Deeply impressed by Duncan's musicality and expressivity, Walkowitz drew thousands of images of Duncan dancing throughout his life. Because Walkowitz's renderings of Duncan were produced quickly, they carry an element of improvisational vitality that matches the dynamic energy of her presence onstage. In her introductory essay, author Ann Cooper Albright weaves literary theory, art criticism, and dance history into a fluid narrative to explore how Walkowitz's drawings realize Duncan's dancing on paper. Modern Gestures reproduces over fifty watercolors of this unique oeuvre, many of which have never before been published. A perfect gift, this sumptuous little volume will provide hours of enjoyment to anyone interested in dance or modern art.

Poised at the intersection of Asian American studies and dance studies, Choreographing Asian America is the first book-length examination of the role of Orientalist discourse in shaping Asian Americanist entanglements with U.S. modern dance history. Moving beyond the acknowledgement that modern dance has its roots in Orientalist appropriation, Yutian Wong considers the effect that invisible Orientalism has on the reception of work by Asian American choreographers and the conceptualization of Asian American performance as a category. Drawing on ethnographic and choreographic research methods, the author follows the work of Club O' Noodles-a Vietnamese American performance ensemble-to understand how Asian American artists respond to competing narratives of representation, aesthetics, and social activism that often frame the production of Asian American performance.

In this stunning new collection of reviews and essays, dance critic Marcia B. Siegel grapples with the floating identity of ballet, as well as particular ballets, and with the expanding environment of spectacle in which ballet competes for an audience. Drawn from a wide variety of published sources, these writings concentrate on canonical works of ballet and how the performances of these works have been changing in significant ways. Siegel writes with a keen awareness of the history and mythology that surround particular works, while remaining attentive to the new ways in which a work is interpreted and re-presented by contemporary choreographers and dancers. Through her readable and provocative writings, Siegel offers critical insight into performances of the past twenty-five years to give us a new understanding of ballet in performance. The volume includes over one hundred pieces on a variety of ballet topics, from specific dances and dancers to companies and choreographers, ranging from Swan Lake and The Nutcracker to Nijinsky, Balanchine, Tharp, and Morris to the Bolshoi, the Joffrey, the Miami City Ballet, the Boston Ballet, to name just a few.

Movable Pillars traces the development of dance as scholarly inquiry over the course of the 20th century, and describes the social-political factors that facilitated a surge of interest in dance research in the period following World War II. This surge was reflected in the emergence of six key dance organizations: the American Dance Guild, the Congress on Research in Dance, the American Dance Therapy Association, the American College Dance Festival Association, the Dance Critics Association, and the Society of Dance History Scholars. Kolcio argues that their founding between the years 1956 and 1978 marked a new period of collective action in dance and is directly related to the inclusion of moving bodies in scholarly research and the ways in which dance studies interfaces with other fields such as feminist studies, critical research methods, and emancipatory education. An impeccable work of archival scholarship and interpretive history, Movable Pillars features nineteen interviews with dance luminaries who were intimately involved in the early years of each group. This is the first book to focus on the founding of these professional organizations and constitutes a major contribution to the understanding of the development of dance in American higher education.

The Dancer Within is a collection of photographic portraits and short essays based on confessional interviews with forty dancers and entertainers, many of them world-famous. Well-known on the concert stage, on Broadway, in Hollywood musicals, and on television, the personalities featured in this book speak with extraordinary candor about all stages of the dancer's life-from their first dance class to their signature performances and their days of reflection on the artist's life. The Dancer Within reveals how these artists triumphed, but also how they overcame adversity, including self-doubt, injuries, and aging. Most of all, this book is about the courage, commitment, love, and passion of these performers in their quest for artistic excellence. The reader will quickly realize that "the dancer within" is a metaphor of the human spirit.

One of the most famous dancers of the early 1900s, Loïe Fuller created an extraordinary sensation in Paris with her manipulations of hundreds of yards of silk, swirling high above her and lit dramatically from below. Her work inspired artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Auguste Rodin, and Stéphane Mallarmé, and she embodied many of the decorative themes of Art Nouveau. Because her work highlights important issues in dance such as the role of technology in defining a dancing signature, the emergence of a modern movement sensibility, and the role of popular entertainment in early modern dance, Fuller is a critical figure through whom to study the changing representations of women dancers in the early twentieth century. Author Ann Cooper Albright places Fuller in the context of fin-de-siècle culture and offers a compelling analysis of Fuller's innovations in lighting and movement that includes full-color reproductions of original posters, archival photos, and magazine and newspaper clippings. Traces of Light adds significantly to the literature on twentieth-century dance, illuminating a pioneer who helped to shape modern performance and stagecraft. There is a digital web companion to this book at http://learningobjects.wesleyan.edu/wespress/traces/.

A groundbreaking choreographer, lighting designer, composer, and costumer, Alwin Nikolais (1910-1993) is recognized as one of the twentieth century's most innovative artists. Incorporating novel technological and performance tactics, he invented a total language of non-literal dance theater that attracted audiences worldwide for over forty years. The Returns of Alwin Nikolais is the first book devoted to a critical analysis of Nikolais's work, and it provides a broad and important overview of his artistic and philosophical trajectory. The volume brings together essays by scholars of dance history, theater studies, music, and art history, and includes primary materials such as reviews, diary excerpts, and photographs. It is a valuable resource for teachers and students of art and culture.Contributors: PHILIP AUSLANDER, HERBERT BLAU, JANA FEINMAN, MARK FRANKO, BOB GILMORE, CLAUDIA GITELMAN, YVONNE HARDT, REBEKAH KOWAL, RANDY MARTIN, NAIMA PREVOTS, AND MARCIA SIEGEL.

One of the most popular and widely performed dance styles in India and around the world, bharata natyam has made the transition from its beginnings in the temples and courts of southern India to a highly respected international phenomenon. In this study of a classical dance form, author Janet O'Shea tracks the choreographic transformations that accompanied the transfer of bharata natyam to the urban concert stage in the 1930s and 1940s. At Home in the World situates these changes within the political debates of their time, and further ties the concerns of this period to present-day practice. The history of this dance is also a history of India itself, and readers can trace various national struggles over gender identity, regionalism, and globalism through O'Shea's narrative. With over 250 teachers in the United States alone, bharata natyam offers a remarkable case study of how a traditional art form moves into the world.

In the wake of the blockbuster television success of "Dancing with the Stars," competitive ballroom dance has become a subject of new fascination-and renewed scrutiny. Known by its practitioners as DanceSport, ballroom is a significant dance form and a fascinating cultural phenomenon. In this first in-depth study of the sport, dancer and dance historian Juliet McMains explores the "Glamour Machine" that drives the thriving industry, delving into both the pleasures and perils of its seductions. She further explores the broader social issues invoked in American DanceSport: representation of "Latin," economics that often foster inequality, and issues of identity, including gender, race, class, and sexuality. Putting ballroom dance in the larger contexts of culture and history, Glamour Addiction makes an important contribution to dance studies, while giving new and veteran enthusiasts a unique and unprecedented glimpse behind the scenes.

During her twelve years with Ballet Society and the New York City Ballet, Barbara Milberg worked under the direction of George Balanchine. She rose from corps de ballet to soloist, danced leading roles in Swan Lake and Illuminations, and performed in celebrated world premieres. In this observant and poignant memoir, she shares her recollections of Balanchine, his craft and his values, and lends insight into surprising aspects of his personality. Fisher gives readers a rare glimpse inside Balanchine's artistry, including vivid accounts of the makings of such important ballets as Schoenberg's Opus 34, AGON, and the world-famous Nutcracker. Told through the eyes of a young dancer in what seemed a truly magical place and time, In Balanchine's Company is ideal for ballet fans young and old. Rich in anecdote, insight, and humor, it offers a unique perspective on one of the twentieth century's cultural giants.

A Game for Dancers examines the difficulties American modern dancers faced as the Cold War took hold and the genre became institutionalized after its pioneering phase. It draws on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu to explore the interconnections between art and politics while paying close attention to modern dance's ambivalent relationship to the market. At the heart of the book is an inquiry into modernism itself, and how dancers struggled with modernist ideas of abstraction and autonomy while rarely questioning them. Crucial, too, is the issue of embodiment, which appeared to answer modernist skepticism of representation and aid modern dance's elusive pursuit of independence. Subjects include modernist dance theory, the emergence of new constituencies including African-American choreographers, and the work of Merce Cunningham and Alwin Nikolais, whose objectivism was declared a new modern dance vanguard in the 1950s.