Collects a variety of articles on dance by influential New York journalist and master critic Edwin Denby which he wrote for Dance Magazine, Modern Music journal, and the Herald Tribune

This comprehensive guide provides students with instructions for writing about dance in many different contexts. It brings together the many different kinds of writing that can be effectively used in a variety of dance classes from technique to appreciation.

Edwin Denby, who died in 1983, was the most important and influential American dance critic of this century. His reviews and essays, which he wrote for almost thirty years, were possessed of a voice, vision, and passion as compelling and inspiring as his subject. He was also a poet of distinction -- a friend to Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, and John Ashbery. This book presents a sampling of his reviews, essays, and poems, an exemplary collection that exhibits the elegance, lucidity, and timelessness of Denby's writings.The volume includes Denby's reactions to choreography ranging from Martha Graham to George Balanchine to the Rockettes, as well as his reflections on such general topics as dance in film, dance criticism, and meaning in dance. Denby's writings are presented chronologically, and they not only provide a picture of how his dance theories and reviewing methods evolved but also give an informal history of dance in New York from the late 1930s to the early 1960s. The book -- the Only collection of Denby's writings currently in print -- is an essential resource for students and lover of dance.

How does literature imagine its own powers of representation? Françoise Meltzer attempts to answer this question by looking at how the portrait—the painted portrait, framed—appears in various literary texts. Alien to the verbal system of the text yet mimetic of the gesture of writing, the textual portrait becomes a telling measure of literature's views on itself, on the politics of representation, and on the power of writing. Meltzer's readings of textual portraits—in the Gospel writers and Huysmans, Virgil and Stendhal, the Old Testament and Apuleius, Hawthorne and Poe, Kafka and Rousseau, Walter Scott and Mme de Lafayette—reveal an interplay of control and subversion: writing attempts to veil the visual and to erase the sensual in favor of "meaning," while portraiture, with its claims to bringing the natural object to "life," resists and eludes such control. Meltzer shows how this tension is indicative of a politics of repression and subversion intrinsic to the very act of representation. Throughout, she raises and illuminates fascinating issues: about the relation of flattery to caricature, the nature of the uncanny, the relation of representation to memory and history, the narcissistic character of representation, and the interdependency of representation and power. Writing, thinking, speaking, dreaming, acting—the extent to which these are all controlled by representation must, Meltzer concludes, become "consciously unconscious." In the textual portrait, she locates the moment when this essential process is both revealed and repressed.

Edwin Denby (1903-1983) was the most important and influential American dance critic of the 20th century. His reviews and essays were possessed of a voice, vision, and passion as compelling and inspiring as his subject. As dance critic, first for "Modern Music" and then for the "New York Herald Tribune", Denby permanently changed the way we think and talk about dance. This volume presents his reviews from "Modern Music" and the "Tribune" in chronological order, providing not only a picture of how Denby's dance theories and reviewing methods evolved, but also an informal history of the dance in New York from 1936 through 1945. The reviews glimpse the vanished dancers and dances that were most particularly of their time, especially Alicia Markova, Alexandra Danilova, Martha Graham, and George Balanchine. It was Balanchine on whom Denby focused after he left the "Tribune", and all of his post-"Tribune" writings on Balanchine and the New York City Ballet are presented here in one section, providing a history of the early artistic development of the company and of Balanchine himself, while also showing Denby's most eloquent and deeply felt writing. Finally there are his post-1945 reviews, essays, and lectures on such general dance subjects as the phenomenon of a truly good leap, classicism in ballet, and dance criticism itself. Courtly, unassertive but precise, concerned, concise and sometimes severe in his criticism, Denby was convinced that dance was not only a social and physical activity but also a joyous, moral one that "affirmed the beauty of the human spirit." As well as his exemplary artists Denby also wrote with care and generosity about dancers as varied as Nijinsky, Pearl Primus, Merce Cunningham and Sonja Henie. Cornfield's introduction is both appreciative and discerning; Mackay's biography sensitively describes a poet, dancer, novelist, translator and critic of high standards who was widely liked and admired. Essential for serious balletomanes.

"The German choreographer Kurt Jooss (1901-1979) belonged to a generation of artists who grew up and matured between the two world wars. Jooss was a major innovator in dance and an active participant in Weimar culture. Suzanne K. Walther provides a brief political and cultural history of the Weimar Republic; an overview of dance and choreography during this period leads to a detailed account of the contributions of Rudolf von Laban to German dance and his early association and life-long friendship with Jooss. The author provides complete descriptions and analyses of the four extant Jooss ballets: Pavane on the Death of an Infanta, Big City, A Ball in Old Vienna, and the award-winning anti-war ballet The Green Table. It also provides a full assessment of Jooss's fundamental contributions to the development of German modern dance, his aesthetic legacy, his concern with the social and humanitarian issues of his time, and the lasting influence of his pedagogical methods."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Embracing dramatic similarities, glaring disjunctions, and striking innovations, this book explores the history and context of dance on the land we know today as the United States of America. Designed for weekly use in dance history courses, it traces dance in the USA as it broke traditional forms, crossed genres, provoked social and political change, and drove cultural exchange and collision. The authors put a particular focus on those whose voices have been silenced, unacknowledged, and/or uncredited – exploring racial prejudice and injustice, intersectional feminism, protest movements, and economic conditions, as well as demonstrating how socio-political issues and movements affect and are affected by dance. In looking at concert dance, vernacular dance, ritual dance, and the convergence of these forms, the chapters acknowledge the richness of dance in today’s USA and the strong foundations on which it stands. Milestones are a range of accessible textbooks, breaking down the need-to-know moments in the social, cultural, political, and artistic development of foundational subject areas. This book is ideal for undergraduate courses that embrace culturally responsive pedagogy and seek to shift the direction of the lens from western theatrical dance towards the wealth of dance forms in the United States.