Frederick Ashton and His Ballets

Frederick Ashton and His Ballets PDF Author: David Vaughan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 586

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Book Description
This revised edition of Vaughan's seminal work includes a new final chapter and an updated chronology of work. It should be useful for both historians of 20th-century ballet and for lovers of Ashton's work.

Frederick Ashton and His Ballets

Frederick Ashton and His Ballets PDF Author: David Vaughan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 586

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Book Description
This revised edition of Vaughan's seminal work includes a new final chapter and an updated chronology of work. It should be useful for both historians of 20th-century ballet and for lovers of Ashton's work.

Frederick Ashton's Ballets

Frederick Ashton's Ballets PDF Author: Geraldine Morris
Publisher: Dance Books Limited
ISBN: 9781852731595
Category : Ballet
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In this ground-breaking study of style in six ballets by Sir Frederick Ashton, Geraldine Morris examines the contribution they have made to twentieth century dance and art. Central to the discussion are questions about performance and its connection with style. What do we mean by style in dance? How do we identify it? How can it be retained? Can choreographed movement be distinguished from the danse d'ecole? Does any of this matter? Having considered the nature of style and its relationship to early twentieth century training in Britain, Morris goes on to discuss the six works: A Wedding Bouquet, Illuminations, Birthday Offering, Jazz Calendar, Daphnis and Chloe and A Month in the Country. Delivered with verve and enthusiasm, her analysis and examination of Ashton's role, together with that of the dancers, designers, writers and musicians, is both innovative and thought-provoking. The book is intended for dancers, students and dance enthusiasts who have enjoyed these great works and wish to understand them more fully. Having danced with the Royal Ballet during the years when Ashton was the company's Director, the author brings inside knowledge, informed and enlivened by years of studying the dances. The result is exhilarating and enlightening but also controversial. Geraldine Morris is a Senior Lecturer in Dance Studies at the University of Roehampton.

Secret Muses

Secret Muses PDF Author: Julie Kavanagh
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571143528
Category : Choreographers
Languages : en
Pages : 675

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Book Description
A biography of the choreographer Frederick Ashton which traces his progress from Peruvian childhood and unhappy schooldays, through initiation into a homosexual artistic coterie, to a varied career in dance, culminating in public and royal acclaim.

Apollo's Angels

Apollo's Angels PDF Author: Jennifer Homans
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679603905
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 640

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY For more than four hundred years, the art of ballet has stood at the center of Western civilization. Its traditions serve as a record of our past. Lavishly illustrated and beautifully told, Apollo’s Angels—the first cultural history of ballet ever written—is a groundbreaking work. From ballet’s origins in the Renaissance and the codification of its basic steps and positions under France’s Louis XIV (himself an avid dancer), the art form wound its way through the courts of Europe, from Paris and Milan to Vienna and St. Petersburg. In the twentieth century, émigré dancers taught their art to a generation in the United States and in Western Europe, setting off a new and radical transformation of dance. Jennifer Homans, a historian, critic, and former professional ballerina, wields a knowledge of dance born of dedicated practice. Her admiration and love for the ballet, as Entertainment Weekly notes, brings “a dancer’s grace and sure-footed agility to the page.”

Frederick Ashton's Ballets

Frederick Ashton's Ballets PDF Author: Geraldine Morris
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197747116
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
The second edition of Frederick Ashton's Ballets: Style, Performance, Choreography adds two further ballets to this ground-breaking study of Frederick Ashton's choreography. It not only examines the contribution these ballets made to twentieth century dance art, but also presents a detailed account of Ashton's work and dances, demonstrating his remarkable choreographic and artistic talent. Having danced with the Royal Ballet Company during the years Ashton was Director, author, Geraldine Morris also draws on her years as an academic in the field. As well as highlighting the dances, the book explores the contribution made by Ashton's collaborators, both designers and musicians. Central is the issue of identity and how style can be retained in dance, despite alterations in training. It considers the problem of how the values of ballet training change, thereby affecting contemporary performances of his works. Through eight works Morris examines the various sources that Ashton used, whether they were dances with words, or those influenced by dancers' movement style, jazz dance, abstraction, mysticism, or narrative. With this new material, the second edition makes a significant contribution to dance scholarship.

Frederick Ashton and His Ballets

Frederick Ashton and His Ballets PDF Author: David Vaughan
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 552

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Book Description


Wrights & Wrongs

Wrights & Wrongs PDF Author: Peter Wright
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1783197196
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 762

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Book Description
Peter Wright has been a dancer, choreographer, teacher, producer and director in the theatre as well as in television for over 70 years. In Wrights & Wrongs, Peter offers his often surprising views of today's dance world, lessons learned – and yet to learn – from a lifetime's experience of ballet, commercial theatre and television. Peter started his career in wartime, with the Kurt Jooss company. He has worked with such greats as Pina Bausch, Margot Fonteyn, Rudolf Nureyev, Marcia Haydée, Richard Cragun, Monica mason, Karen Kain, Miyako Yoshida and Carlos Acosta - as well as today's generation of starts including Alina Cajocaru, Marianela Nunez, Natalia Osipova and Lauren Cuthbertson. While now regarded as part of the British ballet establishment, for many years Peter developed his career outside London, particularly in Germany with John Cranko's Stuttgart Ballet. That distance gives him a unique and unrivalled view on ballet companies. His close association with choreographers Frederick Ashton, Ninette de Valois, founder of the Royal Ballet, Kenneth MacMillan and David Bintley gives Peter an authoritative perspective on British ballet. Wrights and Wrongs includes black-and-white photographs from Wright's career, and as Exeunt magazine comments: 'Anyone with an interest in British ballet will find plenty to occupy them in Wright's book... the many dramas and delights of his life in dance spring forth from the page with brio.'

Ballet

Ballet PDF Author: Jennifer Jackson
Publisher: The Crowood Press
ISBN: 1785008315
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
Ballet is a detailed guide to creative practice and performance. Compiled by ten leading practitioners, each chapter focuses on an aspect of ballet as a performing art. Together they outline a journey from the underpinning principles of ballet, through an appreciation of different styles and schooling, into the dance studio for practice in class and beyond. With additional insights from highly acclaimed dancers, choreographers and teachers, this practical guide offers advice on fundamental and advanced training and creative development. As well as providing information from dance science research into training well-being, this book supports the individual dancer in their artistic growth, offering strategies for exploration and discovery. Topics include: principles, styles and schooling of classical ballet; fundamental technique and advanced expression; developing versatility and creative thinking; advice on injury management, nutrition and lifestyle; choreography and music and, finally, best practice in the rehearsal studio is covered. 'A wonderfully accessible and comprehensive resource about the individual disciplines involved in ballet', Leanne Benjamin OBE, former Principal of The Royal Ballet and international coach.

To Dance is Human

To Dance is Human PDF Author: Judith Lynne Hanna
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226315495
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Exploring dance from the rural villages of Africa to the stages of Lincoln Center, Judith Lynne Hanna shows that it is as human to dance as it is to learn, to build, or to fight. Dance is human thought and feeling expressed through the body: it is at once organized physical movement, language, and a system of rules appropriate in different social situations. Hanna offers a theory of dance, drawing on work in anthropology, semiotics, sociology, communications, folklore, political science, religion, and psychology as well as the visual and performing arts. A new preface provides commentary on recent developments in dance research and an updated bibliography.

I Was a Dancer

I Was a Dancer PDF Author: Jacques D'Amboise
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307595234
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
“Who am I? I’m a man; an American, a father, a teacher, but most of all, I am a person who knows how the arts can change lives, because they transformed mine. I was a dancer.” In this rich, expansive, spirited memoir, Jacques d’Amboise, one of America’s most celebrated classical dancers, and former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet for more than three decades, tells the extraordinary story of his life in dance, and of America’s most renowned and admired dance companies. He writes of his classical studies beginning at the age of eight at The School of American Ballet. At twelve he was asked to perform with Ballet Society; three years later he joined the New York City Ballet and made his European debut at London’s Covent Garden. As George Balanchine’s protégé, d’Amboise had more works choreographed on him by “the supreme Ballet Master” than any other dancer, among them Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux; Episodes; A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream; Jewels; Raymonda Variations. He writes of his boyhood—born Joseph Ahearn—in Dedham, Massachusetts; his mother (“the Boss”) moving the family to New York City’s Washington Heights; dragging her son and daughter to ballet class (paying the teacher $7.50 from hats she made and sold on street corners, and with chickens she cooked stuffed with chestnuts); his mother changing the family name from Ahearn to her maiden name, d’Amboise (“It’s aristocratic. It has the ‘d’ apostrophe. It sounds better for the ballet, and it’s a better name”). We see him. a neighborhood tough, in Catholic schools being taught by the nuns; on the streets, fighting with neighborhood gangs, and taking ten classes a week at the School of American Ballet . . . being taught professional class by Balanchine and by other teachers of great legend: Anatole Oboukhoff, premier danseur of the Maryinsky; and Pierre Vladimiroff, Pavlova’s partner. D’Amboise writes about Balanchine’s succession of ballerina muses who inspired him to near-obsessive passion and led him to create extraordinary ballets, dancers with whom d’Amboise partnered—Maria Tallchief; Tanaquil LeClercq, a stick-skinny teenager who blossomed into an exquisite, witty, sophisticated “angel” with her “long limbs and dramatic, mysterious elegance . . .”; the iridescent Allegra Kent; Melissa Hayden; Suzanne Farrell, who Balanchine called his “alabaster princess,” her every fiber, every movement imbued with passion and energy; Kay Mazzo; Kyra Nichols (“She’s perfect,” Balanchine said. “Uncomplicated—like fresh water”); and Karin von Aroldingen, to whom Balanchine left most of his ballets. D’Amboise writes about dancing with and courting one of the company’s members, who became his wife for fifty-three years, and the four children they had . . . On going to Hollywood to make Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and being offered a long-term contract at MGM (“If you’re not careful,” Balanchine warned, “you will have sold your soul for seven years”) . . . On Jerome Robbins (“Jerry could be charming and complimentary, and then, five minutes later, attack, and crush your spirit—all to see how it would influence the dance movements”). D’Amboise writes of the moment when he realizes his dancing career is over and he begins a new life and new dream teaching children all over the world about the arts through the magic of dance. A riveting, magical book, as transformative as dancing itself.