This unique journal and activity book offers little dancers the ideal way to record their progress and reinforce their lessons. Thirty charmingly illustrated pages are packed with practical checklists, inspiring tips, fill-in-the-blanks, and a dictionary of terms every ballet dancer should know. A special place to note dance class highlights and goals, this book offers families a keepsake treasure.

Introduces the world of ballet and presents its notable stories, dancers, techniques, and routines.

From the author of the acclaimed Everybody Was So Young, the definitive and major biography of the great choreographer and Broadway legend Jerome Robbins To some, Jerome Robbins was a demanding perfectionist, a driven taskmaster, a theatrical visionary; to others, he was a loyal friend, a supportive mentor, a generous and entertaining companion and colleague. Born Jerome Rabinowitz in New York City in 1918, Jerome Robbins repudiated his Jewish roots along with his name only to reclaim them with his triumphant staging of Fiddler on the Roof. A self-proclaimed homosexual, he had romances or relationships with both men and women, some famous—like Montgomery Clift and Natalie Wood—some less so. A resolutely unpolitical man, he was forced to testify before Congress at the height of anti-Communist hysteria. A consummate entertainer, he could be paralyzed by shyness; nearly infallible professionally, he was conflicted, vulnerable, and torn by self-doubt. Guarded and adamantly private, he was an inveterate and painfully honest journal writer who confided his innermost thoughts and aspirations to a remarkable series of diaries and memoirs. With ballets like Dances at a Gathering, Afternoon of a Faun, and The Concert, he humanized neoclassical dance; with musicals like On the Town, Gypsy, and West Side Story, he changed the face of theater in America. In the pages of this definitive biography, Amanda Vaill takes full measure of the complicated, contradictory genius who was Jerome Robbins. She re-creates his childhood as the only son of Russian Jewish immigrants; his apprenticeship as a dancer and Broadway chorus gypsy; his explosion into prominence at the age of twenty-five with the ballet Fancy Free and its Broadway incarnation, On the Town; and his years of creative dominance in both theater and dance. She brings to life his colleagues and friends—from Leonard Bernstein and George Balanchine to Robert Wilson and Robert Graves—and his loves and lovers. And she tells the full story behind some of Robbins’s most difficult episodes, such as his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee and his firing from the film version of West Side Story. Drawing on thousands of pages of documents from Robbins’s personal and professional papers, to which she was granted unfettered access, as well as on other archives and hundreds of interviews, Somewhere is a riveting narrative of a life lived onstage, offstage, and backstage. It is also an accomplished work of criticism and social history that chronicles one man’s phenomenal career and places it squarely in the cultural ferment of a time when New York City was truly “a helluva town.”

How is music affected by its translation, interpretation and adaptation with, through, and by dance? How might notation of dance and music act as a form of translation? How does music influence the creation of dance? How might dance and music be understood to exchange and transfer their content, sense and process during both the creative process and the interpretative process? Bringing together chapters that explore theory and practice, this book questions the process and role translation has to play in the context of music and dance. It provides a range of case studies across this interdisciplinary field, and is not restricted by genre, style or cultural location. As one of very few volumes to explore translation in relation to music and to overtly tackle this topic in terms of dance, it moves the argument from a broad notion of text and translation, to think critically about the sound and movement arts of music and dance, using translation as a model to better understand the collaboration of these art forms.