Body - Space - Expression: The Development Of Rudolf Laban's Movement And Dance Concepts (Approaches To Semiotics).

'Choreutics' can be said to contain the essence of Laban's thought as well as an elaboration of the framework which he found useful for the penetration of the bewildering complexity of human movement. This he based on the unity of space and movement and he recognised a natural order in which the energy from within unfolds in space.

In her unique collection of the verbal language of dance practitioners and researchers, Valerie Preston-Dunlop presents a comprehensive view of people in dance: what they do, their movement, their sound, and the space in which they work - from the standpoint of the performers, choreographers, audiences, administrators, and teachers. The words and phrases of their technical and vernacular languages, which are used to communicate what is essentially a non-verbal activity, have been collected in rehearsal classes and workshops by interviews, and from published sources. In this first collection of its kind Valerie Preston-Dunlop extends her selection of verbal language to include the various social and theatrical domains of dance.

Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body is a historical and theoretical examination of French court ballet of the late Renaissance and early baroque. Franko's analysis blends archival research with critical and cultural theory in order to resituate the burlesque tradition in its politically volatile context. He reveals the ideological tensions underlying experiments with autonomous dance in the early modern.

This biography of the dancer, choreographer, and artist Rudolf Laban offers a biographical discussion presenting Laban as a pioneering figure of European expressionism and the founding father of modern dance, as well as an analysis of the significance of Laban as an important representative of expressionist Modernism.

Here for the first time is an account of how each of thirteen historical as well as present-day systems cope with indicating body movement, time, space (direction and level) and other basic movement aspects of paper. A one-to-one comparison is made of how the same simple patterns, such as walking, jumping, turning, etc. are notated in each system.

The problem of recording movements of the human body is almost as old as the art of dancing: it has been said that the ancient Egyptians had a system of notation, but there is no real evidence to prove that this was so. The present system was developed by the Russian dancer Vladimir Ivanovich Stepanov at the end of the 19th century. It is based on existing music notation, and although basic is certainly practical: one has only to read the official testimonial, signed by such people as Petipa and Johanssen, to realise this. Lessons in the system were given at the Imperial Ballet Schools, and many ballets of the period were notated in it. Stepanov's book is no more than a skeleton key, showing the general principles of his system and their application, yet even as it stands it can be used to decipher old notations - it was by means of notations made in Stepanov's system that Nicolai Sergeyev was able to reproduce The Sleeping Princess for Diaghilev, and other ballets for the Sadler's Wells Ballet and International Ballet. More recently, other hands have used the system to revive ballets long thought to have been irrevocably lost.