Remote Research and Dance: Available E-Books

Surveying the state of American ballet in a 1913 issue of McClure's Magazine, author Willa Cather reported that few girls expressed any interest in taking ballet class and that those who did were hard-pressed to find anything other than dingy studios and imperious teachers. One hundred years later, ballet is everywhere.

A richly informed, up-to-date performance guide to more than 140 favorite ballets, from the classical era to the present day.

A critical triumph, Simon Morrison's "sweeping and authoritative" (Guardian) work, Bolshoi Confidential, details the Bolshoi Ballet's magnificent history from its earliest tumults to recent scandals.

Unique among the arts, ballet has no written texts or standardized notation. It is a storytelling art passed on from teacher to student. A ballerina dancing today is a link in a long chain of dancers stretching back to sixteenth-century Italy and France.

From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, a lively and inspired biography celebrating the centennial of this master choreographer, dancer, and stage director. In this deft biography, Wendy Lesser presents Jerome Robbins's life through his major dances, providing a sympathetic, detailed portrait of her subject.

The world-renowned New York City Ballet developed their proven wellness program to help dancers reach their potential without compromising their health. As one of the key designers of this program, former dancer and clinical psychologist Linda Hamilton, Ph.D. provides the essential principles of wellness that will help you achieve your goals in all levels and forms of dance. These include keeping yourself physically healthy, nutritionally sound, and mentally prepared as a dancer. New York City Ballet's celebrated program, here for the first time in book form, highlights every tool you'll need to stay in great shape.

Weeks presents a unique exercise program that helps build core strength increase flexibility & reduce stress; an excellent tool for beginning and intermediate yoga & Pilates students--must-have for athletes who wish to balance their exercise routine.

Perfect for newly independent readers'the amazing true story of Michaela DePrince, one of America's top ballerinas. At the age of three, Michaela DePrince found a photo of a ballerina that changed her life.

On summer nights Marisol helps out in Papi's music store. As customers come and go, they share memories of the Latin music and dance of their various homelands, expressed in a dazzling array of poetry. The diversity of Latin American music is brought to life in poems that swivel, sway, and sizzle with the rhythms of merengue, vallenatos, salsa, and samba.

Born on the unlit streets of Buenos Aires, tango was inspired by the music of European immigrants who crossed the ocean to Argentina, lured by the promise of a better life. It found its home in the city's marginal districts, where it was embraced and shaped by young men who told stories of prostitutes, petty thieves, and disappointed lovers through its music and movements.

Modern Moves traces the movement of American social dance styles between black and white cultural groups and between immigrant and migrant communities during the early twentieth century. Its central focus is New York City, where the confluence of two key demographic streams - an influx ofimmigrants from Eastern Europe and the growth of the city's African American community particularly as it centered Harlem - created the conditions of possibility for hybrid dance forms like blues, ragtime, ballroom, and jazz dancing.

Arguably the world's most popular partnered social dance form, salsa's significance extends well beyond the Latino communities which gave birth to it. The growing international and cross-cultural appeal of this Latin dance form, which celebrates its mixed origins in the Caribbean and in Spanish Harlem, offers a rich site for examining issues of cultural hybridity and commodification in the context of global migration.

This book explores the Broadway legacy of choreographer Agnes de Mille, from the 1940s through the 1960s. Six musicals are discussed in depth - Oklahoma!, One Touch of Venus, Bloomer Girl, Carousel, Brigadoon, and Allegro. Oklahoma!, Carousel, and Brigadoon were de Mille's most influential and lucrative Broadway works. The other three shows exemplify aspects of her legacy that have not been fully examined, including the impact of her ideas on some of the composers with whom she worked; her ability to incorporate a previously conceived work into the context of a Broadway show; and her trailblazing foray into the role of choreographer/director.

Bob Fosse (1927-1987) is recognized as one of the most significant figures in post-World War II American musical theater. A fascinating look at the evolution of Fosse as choreographer and director, Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical considers Fosse's career in the context of changes in the Broadway musical theater over four decades. It traces his early dance years and the importance of mentors George Abbott and Jerome Robbins on his work. It examines how each of the important women in his adult life--all dancers--impacted his career and influenced his dance aesthetic. Finally, the book investigates how his evolution as both artist and individual mirrored the social and political climate of his era and allowed him to comfortably ride a wave of cultural changes.

Broadway, the Golden Years, is a wonderfully readable group portrait of the great Broadway choreographer-directors: Jerome Robbins, Agnes de Mille, Gower Champion, Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett, Tommy Tune, Graciela Daniele, and Susan Stroman.

Tony and Olivier Award-winning Bob Avian's dazzling life story, Dancing Man: A Broadway Choreographer's Journey, is a memoir in three acts. Candid, witty, sometimes shocking, and always entertaining, here at last is the ultimate up-close and personal insider's view from a front row seat at the creation of the biggest, brightest, and best Broadway musicals of the past fifty years.

Luc Waldon always figured he knew what his passion was: football. He lives it, he breathes it--and he thinks he has what it takes to go all the way to the NFL. So when his football coach orders him to sign up for contemporary-dance classes to improve his game, Luc's less than thrilled. When he realizes that dance might actually be his true passion, he faces a tough decision. Is he willing to leave behind the field and a real shot at professional sports, and disappoint his parents, his coach and his teammates, in order to pursue a new dream?

Learn about the thrilling world of choreography and find out what it takes to make it in this competitive career.

From Nelson George, supervising producer and writer of the hit Netflix series, "The Get Down," Hip Hop America is the definitive account of the society-altering collision between black youth culture and the mass media.

Hip-Hop Within and Without the Academy explores why hip-hop has become such a meaningful musical genre for so many musicians, artists, and fans around the world. Through multiple interviews with hip-hop emcees, DJs, and turntablists, the authors explore how these artists learn and what this music means in their everyday lives.

It's not just rap music. Hip-hop has transformed theater, dance, performance, poetry, literature, fashion, design, photography, painting, and film, to become one of the most far-reaching and transformative arts movements of the past two decades. American Book Award-winning journalist Jeff Chang, author of the acclaimed Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, assembles some of the most innovative and provocative voices in hip-hop to assess the most important cultural movement of our time.

From Southern Greece to northern Russia, people living in agrarian communities have long believed in "dancing goddesses," mystical female spirits who spend their nights and days dancing in the fields and forests. In The Dancing Goddesses, archaeologist, linguist, and lifelong folkdancer Elizabeth Wayland Barber follows the trail of these spirit maidens--long associated with fertility, marriage customs, and domestic pursuits--from their early appearance in traditional folktales and harvest rituals to their more recent incarnations in fairytales and present-day dance.

Pre-Classic Dance Forms supplies its readers with complete historical descriptions of 16th and 17th century dances. For the student of music and dance, Horst offers a brief, readable introduction to this important era of dancing and its customs and styles and shows how the early dances influenced the growth of modern dance in this century.

These essays reveal an art that in the early stages of its development invariably resonated with 'context', and was widely exploited for social and political purposes. Contributions explore the nature of dance forms and, in explaining their evolution, highlight the discovery of significant links between rhetoric, discourses on art and architecture, and the language used by dancing masters.In paying tribute to a major pioneer in the discipline of dance studies, this study presents a compelling argument for the universality of dance, for its character as central to human experience, and for its power to stimulate endeavor across an unexpectedly broad front of experience and expression.

John Martin, arguably the first modern dance critic in America and trail-blazer for the art form's validity in the public sector, first published The Modern Dance in 1933 and claimed it to be "perhaps the first attempt...to analyze the American modern dance." The book is the text of four lectures delivered by Martin at the New School for Social Research in New York City (1931-1932) on the dance form as a philosophic perspective.

Modern Dance Techniques and Teaching is truly one of a kind: it is the only book to be published documenting Martha Graham's movement philosophy, as recorded by two of Graham's original followers. The purpose of the book, according to its authors, is "to analyze, illustrate and organize for teaching purposes some of the vocabulary (techniques) of modern dance to provide a reference and a guide for teachers and students of modern dance.

What is "modern dance" and how does it differ from ballet and other forms of theatrical dancing-who made it what it is? These questions and their answers are the subjects around which Margaret Lloyd has written a unique and endlessly entertaining book.

The Body is a Clear Place is a collection of ten intelligent, lyrical essays that serve as a testament to Erick Hawkins' long career in dance. The last two essays were written especially for this volume while the first eight essays were collected from speeches, statements and articles Hawkins has written.

The Dance Technique of Doris Humphrey and Its Creative Potential pays respect to the work of American modern dance pioneer Doris Humphrey. Her theories of movement, based upon the principles of Fall and Recovery, are no less well-known by reputation than by their pervasive influence.

Robert Rauschenberg is a work of collaborative oral biography that tells the story of one of the twentieth century's great artists through a series of interviews with key figures in his life--family, friends, former lovers, professional associates, studio assistants, and collaborators.

Pearl Primus (1919-1994) blazed onto the dance scene in 1943 with stunning works that incorporated social and racial protest into their dance aesthetic. In "The Dance Claimed Me," Peggy and Murray Schwartz, friends and colleagues of Primus, offer an intimate perspective on her life and explore her influences on American culture, dance, and education.

Offering an incisive rejoinder to traditional histories of modernism and postmodernism, this original book examines the 1960s performance work of three New York artists who adapted modernist approaches to form for the medium of the human body. Finding parallels between the tactility of a drip of paint and a body's reflexive movements, Elise Archias argues convincingly that Yvonne Rainer (b. 1934), Carolee Schneemann (b. 1939), and Vito Acconci (b. 1940) forged a dialogue between modernist aesthetics and their own artistic community's embrace of all things ordinary through work that explored the abstraction born of the body's materiality.

Drawing on the postmodern perspective and concerns that informed her groundbreaking Terpischore in Sneakers, Sally Bane's Writing Dancing documents the background and development of avant-garde and popular dance, analyzing individual artists, performances, and entire dance movements. With a sure grasp of shifting cultural dynamics, Banes shows how postmodern dance is integrally connected to other oppositional, often marginalized strands of dance culture, and considers how certain kinds of dance move from the margins to the mainstream.

Here is the vibrant, colorful, high-stepping story of tap -- the first comprehensive, fully documented history of a uniquely American art form, exploring all aspects of the intricate musical and social exchange that evolved from Afro-Irish percussive step dances like the jig, gioube, buck-and-wing, and juba to the work of such contemporary tap luminaries as Gregory Hines, Brenda Bufalino, Dianne Walker, and Savion Glover.

Roscoe Riley doesn't mean to break the rules Don't Tap-Dance on Your Teacher Rat-tat-TAT Tap shoes make the best noise ever But tap dancing? The big boys say that's just for girls. Roscoe promised to tap in the school talent show. When the teasing starts, will he keep his word?

First in a delicious series: Five friends and dancers on a Russian river cruise discover it takes legwork to solve a murder.   It's never too late to kick up your heels. Just ask Tina, Janice, Pat, Mary Louise, and Gini--a.k.a. the Happy Hoofers. After posting a video of their tap-dancing routine on the internet, the leggy ladies find themselves booked to perform on a lavish river cruise up the Volga from Moscow to St. Petersburg.

In New York Times bestselling author Walter Dean Myers's last novel, he delivers a gripping story based on the life of a real dancer known as Master Juba, who lived in the nineteenth century. This engaging historical novel is based on the true story of the meteoric rise of an immensely talented young black dancer, William Henry Lane, who influenced today's tap, jazz, and step dancing. With meticulous and intensive research, Walter Dean Myers has brought to life Juba's story. The novel includes photographs, maps, and other images from Juba's time and an afterword from Walter Dean Myers's wife about the writing process of Juba!

The very letters of the two words seem, as they are written, to redden with the blood-stains of unavenged crime. There is Murder in every syllable, and Want, Misery and Pestilence take startling form and crowd upon the imagination as the pen traces the words." So wrote a reporter about Five Points, the most infamous neighborhood in nineteenth-century America, the place where "slumming" was invented.