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Dance

Parks Library Dance Resources

2019 New Books in Dance

Conditioning for Dance

It uses the principles of resistance training, physics, anatomy, biomechanics, and neuroplasticity (using imagery for positive mental and physical changes) as applied to dance conditioning. Conditioning for Dance blends imagery, focus, and conditioning exercises for dancers to enhance their technique and performance while practicing injury-prevention strategies. Franklin uses experiential anatomy to show and explain how the conditioning principles work to condition your body. As you undertake the exercises, you gain awareness of the body's function and design and take in the knowledge of the principles through movement. This method, known as the Franklin Method, leads to greater understanding of your body, enhanced performance, and fewer injuries. Franklin developed the training systems within the book as well as a line of equipment, including the Franklin Band and Franklin Balls. Franklin has designed the exercises to transfer directly into dance steps; as such, they are appropriate for incorporating into the preparation time for dance classes.

Back to the Dance Itself

In Back to the Dance Itself, Sondra Fraleigh edits essays that illuminate how scholars apply a range of phenomenologies to explore questions of dance and the world; performing life and language; body and place; and self-knowing in performance. Some authors delve into theoretical perspectives, while others relate personal experiences and reflections that reveal fascinating insights arising from practice. Collectively, authors give particular consideration to the interactive lifeworld of making and doing that motivates performance. Their texts and photographs study body and the environing world through points of convergence, as correlates in elemental and constant interchange modeled vividly in dance. Selected essays on eco-phenomenology and feminism extend this view to the importance of connections with, and caring for, all life. Contributors: Karen Barbour, Christine Bellerose, Robert Bingham, Kara Bond, Hillel Braude, Sondra Fraleigh, Kimerer LaMothe, Joanna McNamara, Vida Midgelow, Ami Shulman, and Amanda Williamson.

Ballet Matters

 Part memoir, part dance history and ethnography, this critical study explores ballet's power to inspire and to embody ideas about politics, race, women's agency, and spiritual experience. The author knows that dance relates to life in powerful individual and communal ways, reflecting culture and embodying new ideas. Although ballet can appear (and sometimes is) elite and exclusionary, it also has revolutionary potential.

The Routledge Dance Studies Reader

The Routledge Dance Studies Readerhas been expanded and updated, giving readers access to thirty-seven essential texts that address the social, political, cultural, and economic impact of globalization on embodiment and choreography.  These interdisciplinary essays in dance scholarship consider a broad range of dance forms in relation to historical, ethnographic, and interdisciplinary research methods including cultural studies, reconstruction, media studies, and popular culture. This new third edition expands both its geographic and cultural focus to include recent research on dance from Southeast Asia, the People's Republic of China, indigenous dance, and new sections on market forces and mediatization. Sections cover: Methods and approaches Practice and performance Dance as embodied ideology Dance on the market and in the media Formations of the field. The Routledge Dance Studies Readerincludes essays on concert dance (ballet, modern and postmodern dance, tap, kathak, and classical khmerdance), popular dance (salsa and hip-hop), site-specific performance, digital choreography, and lecture-performances. It is a vital resource for anyone interested in understanding dance from a global and contemporary perspective.

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Competition

In the twenty-first century, values of competition underpin the free-market economy and aspirations of individual achievement shape the broader social world. Consequently, ideas of winning and losing, success and failure, judgment and worth, influence the dance that we see and do. Acrossstage, studio, street, and screen, economies of competition impact bodily aesthetics, choreographic strategies, and danced meanings. In formalized competitions, dancers are judged according to industry standards to accumulate social capital and financial gain. Within the capitalist economy, dancingbodies compete to win positions in prestigious companies, while choreographers hustle to secure funding and attract audiences. On the social dance floor, dancers participate in dance-offs that often include unspoken, but nevertheless complex, rules of bodily engagement. And the media attraction tothe drama and spectacle of competition regularly plays out in reality television shows, film documentaries, and Hollywood cinema. Drawing upon a diverse collection of dances across history and geography, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Competition asks how competition affects the presentation andexperience of dance and, in response, how dancing bodies negotiate, critique, and resist the aesthetic and social structures of the competition paradigm.

The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance

The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance provides a comprehensive introduction to and analysis of this global art form. Originating in Japan in the 1960s, butoh was a major innovation in 20thcentury dance and performance, and it continues to shape-shift around the world. Taking inspiration from the Japanese avant-garde, Surrealism,¿Happenings, and authors such as Genet and Artaud, its influence can be seen throughout contemporary performing arts, music, and visual art practices. This Companion places the form in historical context, documents its development in Japan and its spread around the world, and brings together the theory and the practice of this compelling dance. The interdisciplinarity evident in the volume reflects the depth and the breadth of butoh, and the editors bring specially commissioned essays by leading scholars and dancers together with translations of important early texts.

Beginning Hip-Hop Dance

Beginning Hip-Hop Dance is a part of Human Kinetics' Interactive Dance Series. The series includes resources for ballet, modern, tap, jazz, musical theater, and hip-hop dance that support introductory dance technique courses taught through dance, physical education, and fine arts departments. Each student-friendly text includes a web resource offering video clips of dance instruction, assignments, and activities. The Interactive Dance Series offers students a collection of guides to learning, performing, and viewing dance. ............................................................................................................................................................. Since its development in the United States in the 1970s, hip-hop has grown to become a global dance phenomenon. In Beginning Hip-Hop Dance, students gain a strong foundation and learn the fundamentals of hip-hop techniques as they venture into the exciting world of this dance genre. 

Psychology for Dancers

Psychology for Dancers: Theory and Practice to Fulfil Your Potential examines how psychological theory can be related to dance practice. Aimed at the dancer who wants to maximize their potential but has no grounding in psychology, the book begins with an examination of basic psychological concepts, approaches and methods, before applying theory to dance. The book explores why dance is so important in many people¿s lives: as a form of fitness, a profession, or visual entertainment. Each chapter then examines a different aspect of psychology related to dance in an applied context. Self-perception is examined as dancers are under great scrutiny; a grounded sense of self will ensure a positive perception of self-worth and body image, and suggestions are made as to how a healthy and motivational climate can be created. The book also places an emphasis on how cognitive skills are as important as technical skills, including the ability to learn and recall steps and choreography as efficiently as possible. Social factors are related to the dance context, with a discussion of effective leadership and communication skills and the importance of group cohesion. Finally, there is a review of the impact of emotions on dance practice and how best to manage these emotions. Each chapter reviews important psychological theories, offering practical suggestions on how they can be applied to dance practice. Psychology for Dancers is an invaluable resource for students, professionals, and teachers of dance.

Movements of Interweaving

Movements of Interweaving is a rich collection of essays exploring the concept of interweaving performance cultures in the realms of movement, dance, and corporeality. Focusing on dance performances as well as on scenarios of cultural movements on a global scale, it not only challenges the concept of intercultural dance performances, but through its innovative approach also calls attention to the specific qualities of "interweaving" as a form of movement itself. Divided into four sections, this volume features an international team of scholars uniting to develop a new critical perspective on the cultural practices of movement, travel and migration in and beyond dance.

Dance for Sports

In Dance for Sports, author, teacher, dancer, athlete, and researcher Margo Apostolos offers a new training approach for athletes and coaches that synthesizes common techniques between athletics and dance. By utilizing this approach, in- and off-season athletes can improve efficiency andtechnique. Throughout the book, Apostolos shows the potential exchange between sport and dance in exercises that focus on overlapping physical components of both practices including flexibility, strength, coordination, agility, balance, and timing. She also demonstrates how dance serves sport as a crosstraining activity with additional opportunities for athletes to explore creativity, improvisation, and mindfulness. Discussion with athletes from several sports interweaves each chapter to expand the learning process and offer useful anecdotes. Based upon the author's decades-long career andextensive experience with athletes and coaches in a variety of sports such as football, basketball, swimming, tennis, track and field and more, Dance for Sports provides a fully integrative guide for students and instructors alike.

Sonidos Negros

How is the politics of Blackness figured in the flamenco dancing body? What does flamenco dance tell us about the construction of race in the Atlantic world? Sonidos Negros traces how, in the span between 1492 and 1933, the vanquished Moor became Black, and how this figure, enacted in termsof a minstrelized Gitano, paradoxically came to represent Spain itself. The imagined Gypsy about which flamenco imagery turns dances on a knife's edge delineating Christian and non-Christian, White and Black worlds. This figure's subversive teetering undermines Spain's symbolic linkage of religion with race, a prime weapon of conquest. Flamenco's Sonidos Negros live inthis precarious balance, amid the purposeful confusion and ruckus cloaking embodied resistance, the lament for what has been lost, and the values and aspirations of those rendered imperceptible by enslavement and colonization.

Moving Otherwise

Moving Otherwise examines how contemporary dance practices in Buenos Aires, Argentina enacted politics within climates of political and economic violence from the mid-1960s to the mid-2010s. From the repression of military dictatorships to the precarity of economic crises, contemporary dancersand audiences consistently responded to and reimagined the everyday choreographies that have accompanied Argentina's volatile political history. The titular concept, "moving otherwise" names how both concert dance and its off-stage practice and consumption offer alternatives to and modes to critiquethe patterns of movement and bodily comportment that shape everyday life in contexts marked by violence. Drawing on archival research based in institutional and private collections, over fifty interviews with dancers and choreographers, and the author's embodied experiences as a collaborator and performer with active groups, the book analyzes how a wide range of practices moved otherwise, includingconcert works, community dance initiatives, and the everyday labor that animates dance. It demonstrates how these diverse practices represent, resist, and remember violence and engender new forms of social mobilization on and off the theatrical stage.