In the summer of 1960, director C. Douglas Ramey took his Carriage House Players theater company down the street from their Old Louisville venue to Central Park, where the actors performed scenes from the Shakespeare classic Much Ado about Nothing. Buoyed by the enthusiastic audience response, Ramey's company returned to the park the next year for the first full season of the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival. More than sixty years later, Kentucky Shakespeare is now the oldest free, non-ticketed Shakespeare in the Park festival in the country. To commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the festival, in spring 2020 Kentucky Shakespeare cooperated with students in the University of Louisville's Department of History to record twenty entertaining and enlightening oral interviews with longtime members of the company.In Under the Greenwood Tree, author Tracy K'Meyer captures the history of Kentucky Shakespeare in a series of carefully selected and edited transcripts of these interviews. In these pages, past and present cast and crew share their memories of the company's history, performances in the park, and the positive impact of its many outreach programs, from its inception in the 1960s, to its slump in the early 2000s, and on to its recent renaissance. An illuminating record of the collaborative artistry that brings Shakespeare's works to life, Under the Greenwood Tree offers readers a peek behind the curtain at the group's steadfast stewardship of the most important literature in the English language.

Originally written for the stage, We, the Women of Tehran illustrates from a female standpoint the origins and contradictions of the Iranian capital, and the rights of religious minorities and women. It showcases women who have played a leading role in various disciplines and sports but who all too often have simply become an element in the regime's propaganda. The volume presents a lively narrative with verses from the great Persian poets and a hefty dose of irony: as a way to laugh about complex issues and dismantle misleading stereotypes.

Theorizing the experiences of black and brown bodies in hip hop dance Baring Unbearable Sensualities brings together a bold methodology, an interdisciplinary perspective and a rich array of primary sources to deepen and complicate mainstream understandings of Hip Hop Dance, an Afro-diasporic dance form, which have generally reduced the style to a set of techniques divorced from social contexts. Drawing on close observation and interviews with Hip Hop pioneers and their students, Rosemarie A. Roberts proposes that Hip Hop Dance is a collective and sentient process of resisting oppressive manifestations of race and power. Roberts argues that the experiences of marginalized black and brown bodies materialize in and through Hip Hop Dance from the streets of urban centers to contemporary worldwide expressions. A companion web site contains over 30 video clips referenced in the text.

How NEA funding policies have shaped the field of dance Funding Bodies is the first scholarly study of NEA to focus specifically on dance. It departs from a choreographic question: How have federal grant guidelines rewarded specific patterns of dance practice and production? Drawing upon archival documentation of NEA narratives, program eligibility guidelines, and standards of evaluation as well as testimony from past and present insiders, Wilbur's work theorizes endowment as an economic and practical struggle by people with differential power and competing investments in the production and professionalization of dance. With a wealth of detail and previously untold stories, this institutional history brings clarity to the complex processes that underlie the continuing struggle to achieve equitable resource distribution and parity of opportunity in American dance. An online teaching guide is available.

The inside-out of dancer/Contact Quarterly editor Nancy Stark Smith's life as seen through the kaleidoscope of her thirty-six year involvement with Contact Improvisation. The book includes Q&As between the authors tracing the history of the dance form; photos of dancing and living; life stories; anecdotes from friends, colleagues, and family; and a description of Stark Smith's Underscore. The Underscore is a framework for practicing and researching dance improvisation that Stark Smith has been developing since the early 1990s. It is a score that guides dancers through a series of "changing states" from solo deepening/releasing and sensitizing to gravity and support, through group circulation and interaction, Contact Improvisation engagements, opening out to full group improvisation with compositional awareness, and back to rest and reflection.

Tracing a period in her life from the 1969 Woodstock Festival through the following years living on the land, this singular dance artist's direct and poetic writings bring a turbulent transitional era to life. Arriving in New York in the early 60's from California, she brought with her a series of pieces that proved to be a serious influence on the development of "postmodern" dance in years to come. Her "dance-constructions" were based on a concern with bodies in action, the movement not being stylized or presented for its visual line but rather as a physical fact. Combining drawings, "dance reports" (short descriptions of events whose movement made a deep impression on the author's memory), and documentary materials such as scores, descriptions, letters to colleagues, and photographic records of performances, Forti's eye toward creating idioms for exploring natural forms and behaviors is evident throughout.Simone Forti shifted from painting in 1955 to study dance with Anna Halprin and went on to study composition with Robert Dunn at the Merce Cunningham Studio leading to her association with Judson Dance Theater in the '60s. Her work spans from early minimalist dance-constructions, through animal movement studies, news animations, land portraits, and currently, Logomotion, an improvisational form based on the resonance between movement and the spoken word. She performs and teaches worldwide.

Inside Motion is a comprehensive study of anatomical imagery based on the Todd-Clark body alignment work as developed by dancer and teacher John Rolland. Carefully organized as a learning manual, it comprises a complete description of the skeletal system. The basic goal of the work is the improvement of one's physical balance through a creative learning process that integrates mental and physical capacities. Students are guided to both think and feel their way through the body and, in the process, release layers of hidden kinesthetic information.

Pioneering movement educator Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen's innovative approach to embodiment, movement analysis and reeducation, Body-Mind Centering, is the subject of this book of collected essays, interviews, and exercises written for Contact Quarterly dance journal between 1980 and 2009. Drawing from both Western and Eastern scientific knowledge, BMC is an experiential study of the body systems and the evolutionary developmental patterns that underlie human movement. Her unique viewpoint is made evident in twenty-one chapters addressing specific systems, including the organs, neuroendocrine system, fluids, developmental movement, reflexes, perceptual system, embryology, cellular, and autonomic nervous system. Over the last thirty years, BMC has engaged the interest of a wide range of people involved in dance, performing arts, athletics, therapy, healthcare, child development, meditation, and other body/mind disciplines. The third edition includes sixteen additional pages with new articles on inspiration, expiration, and dancing through the transitional fluid, a subject index and List of Explorations.

Moving Bodies, Navigating Conflict is a groundbreaking ethnographic examination of dance practice in Colombo, Sri Lanka, during the civil war (1983–2009). It is the first book of scholarship on bharata natyam (a classical dance originating in India) in Sri Lanka, and the first on the role of dance in the country’s war. Focusing on women dancers, Ahalya Satkunaratnam shows how they navigated conditions of conflict and a neoliberal, global economy, resisted nationalism and militarism, and advocated for peace. Her interdisciplinary methodology combines historical analysis, methods of dance studies, and dance ethnography.

Deborah Hay is an internationally renowned dance artist whose unique approach to bodily practice has had lasting impact on American choreography. Her commitment to dance as a process is as exquisite as it is provoking. Rooted in NYC’s 1960s experimental Judson Dance Theater in New York, Hay’s work has evolved through experimentation with a use of language that is unique to dance. This book is an exploration and articulation of Hay’s process, focusing on several of her most recent works.

Soloing on the page, choreographer Annie-B Parson rethinks choreography as dance on paper. Parson draws her dances into new graphic structures calling attention to the visual facts of the materiality of each dance work she has made. These drawings serve as both maps of her pieces in the aftermath of performance, and a consideration of the elements of dance itself. This book explores the meanings that form itself holds, and Parson’s visual maps of choreographic ideas inspire new thinking around the shared elements underneath all art making.

From the late 1960s until the present day, a significant number of women playwrights have emerged in Scottish theatre who have made a pioneering contribution to dramatic innovation and experimentation. Despite the critical reassessment of some of these authors in the last twenty years, their invaluable achievement in playwriting, within and outside Scotland, still deserves more thorough investigations and fuller acknowledgement. This work explores what is still uncharted territory by examining a selection of representative texts by Ann Marie di Mambro, Marcella Evaristi, Sue Glover, Jackie Kay, Liz Lochhead, Sharman Macdonald, and Joan Ure. The three macro-thematic areas of the book – the rewriting of the Shakespearean canon; the representation of female communities and minorities; and the conflicts between the self and society – find significant and paradigmatic expression in their dramas. All seven writers examined in this book have explored new theatrical methods, introduced aesthetic innovations and opened new perspectives to engage with the complexities of national, community and individual identities. This study will surely contribute to wider recognition of their achievement, so that their work can never again be described as “uncharted territory”.

A legendary beauty, hailed as one of the greatest singing actors of her time, Jarmila Novotná (1907--1994) was an internationally known opera soprano from the former Czechoslovakia. Best known for her performances in Der Rosenkavalier, The Marriage of Figaro, and La Traviata, she was a celebrated performer at the Metropolitan Opera and other theaters across Europe and the United States. A "natural screen actress," Novotná also appeared in Hollywood hits such as The Search (1948) with Montgomery Clift (with whom she shared an enduring friendship) and The Great Caruso (1951) with Mario Lanza. She was also considered a pioneering "crossover" star who performed on Broadway, and worked in radio and television with Bing Crosby and Abbott and Costello. This gifted artist captivated audiences worldwide, and while she was still a young woman, the Czech government treated her as a national heroine and its cultural ambassador.In Jarmila Novotná: My Life in Song, editor William V. Madison brings Novotná's own English-language version of her best-selling memoir to readers for the first time. The memoir details how, following her debut in 1925 at the National Theater in Prague, her fame quickly evolved into a tremendous musical career at a time of unprecedented political upheaval. Novotná provides eyewitness accounts of the Nazi takeovers of Germany and Austria, the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, and the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution in 1989, as well as her extensive travels in the United States during and after World War II.Throughout the memoir, lavishly illustrated with photos from her personal collection, Novotná shares entertaining stories about her time in Hollywood, an "unending stream of parties" -- including those hosted by Louis B. Mayer, co-founder of MGM Studios -- alongside such stars as Jimmy Stewart and Elizabeth Taylor. Novotná also offers revealing profiles of many notable artistic figures of the time, including director Max Reinhardt, composer Cole Porter, and conductor Arturo Toscanini, and dignitaries such as Dwight Eisenhower and TomᚠGarrigue Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia. This fascinating self-portrait offers a window on history and the reflections of a captivating and supremely talented figure who left an indelible mark on the performing arts.

Trisha Brown re-shaped the landscape of modern dance with her game-changing and boundary-defying choreography and visual art. Art historian Susan Rosenberg draws on Brown’s archives, as well as interviews with Brown and her colleagues, to track Brown’s deliberate evolutionary trajectory through the first half of her decades-long career. Brown has created over 100 dances, six operas, one ballet, and a significant body of graphic works. This book discusses the formation of Brown’s systemic artistic principles, and provides close readings of the works that Brown created for non-traditional and art world settings in relation to the first body of works she created for the proscenium stage. Highlighting the cognitive-kinesthetic complexity that defines the making, performing and watching of these dances, Rosenberg uncovers the importance of composer John Cage’s ideas and methods to understand Brown’s contributions. One of the most important and influential artists of our time, Brown was the first woman choreographer to receive the coveted MacArthur Foundation Fellowship “Genius Award.”

This volume is a sequel to Four Comedies of Calderón (1980), which was hailed by reviewers as superb, faithful, and actable. The three comedies in the present volume are generally counted among Calderón's masterpieces: Casa con dos puertas mala es de guardar (A House with Two Doors Is Difficult to Guard); No hay burlas con el amor (No Trifling with Love); Mañanas de abril y mayo (Mornings of April and May). For the first time theaters will have the opportunity of staging these three masterpieces of the Golden Age drama of Spain in accurate and charming English versions. The verse used is flexible and musical, preserving the atmosphere and much of the poetic quality of the originals. An introduction deals with the characteristics of the plays and with the problems they pose for the translator. Concise explanatory notes clarify Golden Age dramatic practices.

The Place of Dance is written for the general reader as well as for dancers. It reminds us that dancing is our nature, available to all as well as refined for the stage. Andrea Olsen is an internationally known choreographer and educator who combines the science of body with creative practice. This workbook integrates experiential anatomy with the process of moving and dancing, with a particular focus on the creative journey involved in choreographing, improvising, and performing for the stage. Each of the chapters, or "days," introduces a particular theme and features a dance photograph, information on the topic, movement and writing investigations, personal anecdotes, and studio notes from professional artists and educators for further insight. The third in a trilogy of works about the body, including Bodystories: A Guide to Experiential Anatomy and Body and Earth: An Experiential Guide, The Place of Dance will help each reader understand his/her dancing body through somatic work, create a dance, and have a full journal clarifying aesthetic views on his or her practice. It is well suited for anyone interested in engaging embodied intelligence and living more consciously.