In this book choreographers provide their definitions and interpretations of modern dance based on their own experience.

A stunning celebration of movement and dance in hundreds of breathtaking photographs by the creative team behind NYC Dance Project. The Art of Movement is an exquisite collection of photographs by well-known dance photographers Ken Browar and Deborah Ory that capture the movement, flow, energy, and grace of many of the most accomplished dancers in the world. Featured are more than 70 dancers from companies including American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Martha Graham Dance Company, Boston Ballet, Royal Danish Ballet, The Royal Ballet, Abraham in Motion, and many more. Accompanying the photographs are intimate and inspiring words from the dancers, as well as from choreographers and artistic directors on what dance means to them.

During the past thirty years, Native American dance has emerged as a visible force on concert stages throughout North America. In this first major study of contemporary Native American dance, Jacqueline Shea Murphy shows how these performances are at once diverse and connected by common influences. Demonstrating the complex relationship between Native and modern dance choreography, Shea Murphy delves first into U.S. and Canadian federal policies toward Native performance from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, revealing the ways in which government sought to curtail authentic ceremonial dancing while actually encouraging staged spectacles, such as those in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows. She then engages the innovative work of Ted Shawn, Lester Horton, and Martha Graham, highlighting the influence of Native American dance on modern dance in the twentieth century. Shea Murphy moves on to discuss contemporary concert dance initiatives, including Canada’s Aboriginal Dance Program and the American Indian Dance Theatre. Illustrating how Native dance enacts, rather than represents, cultural connections to land, ancestors, and animals, as well as spiritual and political concerns, Shea Murphy challenges stereotypes about American Indian dance and offers new ways of recognizing the agency of bodies on stage. Jacqueline Shea Murphy is associate professor of dance studies at the University of California, Riverside, and coeditor of Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance.

Breadth of Bodies seeks to investigate and dismantle the language and stereotypes often used to describe professional dancers with disabilities. Spearheaded by dancer/writer Emmaly Wiederholt and dance educator Silva Laukkanen with illustrations by visual artist Liz Brent-Maldonado, the team collected interviews with 35 professional dance artists with disabilities from 15 countries, asking about training, access, and press, as well as looking at the state of the field.

"From the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 to the declaration of war against Germany in 1917, American artists and designers used their well-honed visual skills to campaign for or against intervention. During this period, Old Glory assumed its present role as a patriotic icon. After the war, as Americans tried to forget the horrors their soldiers had encountered abroad, medical advances in facial reconstruction for disfigured combatants gave rise to cosmetic plastic surgery and a flourishing makeup industry, elements in a conspicuously new distaste for plainness and aging and obsession with youth and beauty. Flags and Faces analyzes these respective aspects of American visual culture in the shadow of the First World War"--Provided by publisher.

The face contributes a vital, yet often overlooked, component of dance performance. Facial Choreographies: Performing the Face in Popular Dance examines what the face does in dance and what it may mean. Author Sherril Dodds focuses on popular presentational dance, which permits the face to be one of excess and spectacle, as well as disclosure or deception. The concept of facial choreography resists the idea that the expressive countenance in dance is simply by chance, and instead conceives its movement as purposeful, creative, and communicative. The book centers on three facial case studies: global celebrity Michael Jackson, whose face has occupied a site of fervent controversy; Maddie Ziegler, child star of the reality television series Dance Moms and de facto face of pop star Sia; and a community of hip hop dancers who engage in fiercely contested dance battles. Chapters are organized according to action-expressions, actively working even in times of stillness: SMILE, LOOK, FROWN, CRY, SCREAM, and LAUGH. Across each case study, the book explores pedagogies of facial composition, the purpose of codified expressions, and how dancers re-choreograph their faces as a critical unworking of what a dancing visage might represent. Facial choreographies engender opportunity for startling creativity, the articulation of identity, a cathartic expression of emotions and attitudes, and the capacity to dismantle previously held assumptions. As the dancing face tauntingly slips between visual, sensory, and kinetic registers it ensures that nothing can be taken at face value.

The book explores the revolutionary impact of modern dance on European culture in the early twentieth century. Edward Ross Dickinson uncovers modern dance's place in the emerging 'mass' culture of the modern metropolis and reveals the connections between dance, politics, culture, religion, the arts, psychology, entertainment, and selfhood.

Each chapter begins with a brief biography and concludes with a chronological works list.

Senegal has played a central role in contemporary dance due to its rich performing traditions, as well as strong state patronage of the arts, first under French colonialism and later in the postcolonial era. In the 1980s, when the Senegalese economy was in decline and state fundingwithdrawn, European agencies used the performing arts as a tool in diplomacy. This had a profound impact on choreographic production and arts markets throughout Africa. In Senegal, choreographic performers have taken to contemporary dance, while continuing to engage with neo-traditional performance, regional genres like the sabar, and the popular dances they grew up with. A historically informed ethnography of creativity, agency, and the fashioning of selves through the different life stages in urban Senegal, this book explores the significance of this multiple engagement with dance in a context of economic uncertainty and rising concerns over morality in the public space.