Modern Dancing

Modern Dancing PDF Author: Vernon Castle
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ballroom dancing
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Written by one of the most famous exhibition ballroom teams of the century, the manual covers a large variety of dances popular during the ragtime era, including the tango, one step, hesitation waltz, and maxixe. A large portion of the book is devoted to grace and etiquette, appropriate dance dresses for women, and music. Many photographs of the famous couple enhance the manual.

Modern Dancing

Modern Dancing PDF Author: Vernon Castle
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ballroom dancing
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Written by one of the most famous exhibition ballroom teams of the century, the manual covers a large variety of dances popular during the ragtime era, including the tango, one step, hesitation waltz, and maxixe. A large portion of the book is devoted to grace and etiquette, appropriate dance dresses for women, and music. Many photographs of the famous couple enhance the manual.

Shall We Dance? The True Story of the Couple Who Taught The World to Dance

Shall We Dance? The True Story of the Couple Who Taught The World to Dance PDF Author: Douglas Thompson
Publisher: Metro Publishing
ISBN: 1784182230
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
On the eve of the Great War, they had the world at - and watching - their feet. If God is in the details, they were divine.Vernon and Irene Castle were the world's first true celebrity couple. He, an Englishman, was tall and slim, as poised as an elegant evening out, a template for the Hollywood idols who would follow. In a staid age, she, a New Yorker, was a glorious, modern beauty, with her haired cropped into a 'shock', a disdain for crippling corsets, a love of a martini and a good time.Together, they beat the censors and made their vibrant dancing acceptable for all. In the fashionable quarters of New York they opened a dance school and night clubs to which Society flocked. They broke the rules by touring with black musicians, and led the way forward to the Charleston-galloping Gatsby Generation. They enlightened and enchanted from London to Paris to New York, spreading a breathless joy, as though their music had one note, and their dances one step, too many. Launching one racy dance craze after another, they taught the world to dance - and often dress - the way we do today. Adored and acclaimed, they were stars long before the celebrity constellations grew crowded.Yet the whirlwind story of perhaps the most influential dance team ever is also one of tragedy. Their timing, so perfect in everything else, saw Vernon Castle, at the height of their fame, return to England to enlist in the Royal Flying Corps; he saw action as a pilot on the Western Front, winning the Croix de Guerre, while his wife made special appearances to support the Allied war effort. And then, in February 1918, he was killed in a flying accident in Texas, while training American pilots for war. Irene received a last note from him: 'When you receive this letter I shall be gone out of your sweet life. You may be sure that I died with your sweet name on my lips... be brave and don't cry, my angel.'She and many others did cry, for as far as the world was concerned Vernon and Irene Castle could have danced all night, and for ever.'The afternoon was already planned; they were going dancing - for those were the great days: Maurice was tangoing in "Over the River", the Castles were doing a stiffed-leg walk in the third act of the 'Sunshine Girl' - a walk that gave the modern dance a social position and brought the nice girl into the café, thus beginning a profound revolution in American life. The great rich empire was feeling its oats and was out for some not too plebeian, yet not too artistic fun.' - F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'The Perfect Life', one of the Basil and Josephine Stories, first published in the Saturday Evening Post, 5 January 1929.

The Song Is You

The Song Is You PDF Author: Bradley Rogers
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609387333
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Musicals, it is often said, burst into song and dance when mere words can no longer convey the emotion. This book argues that musicals burst into song and dance when one body can no longer convey the emotion. Rogers shows how the musical’s episodes of burlesque and minstrelsy model the kinds of radical relationships that the genre works to create across the different bodies of its performers, spectators, and creators every time the musical bursts into song. These radical relationships—borne of the musical’s obsessions with “bad” performances of gender and race—are the root of the genre’s progressive play with identity, and thus the source of its subcultural power. However, this leads to an ethical dilemma: Are the musical’s progressive politics thus rooted in its embrace of regressive entertainments like burlesque and minstrelsy? The Song Is You shows how musicals return again and again to this question, and grapple with a guilt that its joyous pleasures are based on exploiting the laboring bodies of its performers. Rogers argues that the discourse of “integration”—which claims that songs should advance the plot—has functioned to deny the radical work that the musical undertakes every time it transitions into song and dance. Looking at musicals from The Black Crook to Hamilton, Rogers confronts the gendered and racial dynamics that have always under-girded the genre, and asks how we move forward.

The Dial

The Dial PDF Author: Francis Fisher Browne
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 1068

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Book Description


Vernon and Irene Castle's Ragtime Revolution

Vernon and Irene Castle's Ragtime Revolution PDF Author: Eve Golden
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813137608
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Vernon and Irene Castle popularized ragtime dancing in the years just before World War I and made dancing a respectable pastime in America. The whisper-thin, elegant Castles were trendsetters in many ways: they traveled with a black orchestra, had an openly lesbian manager, and were animal-rights advocates decades before it became a public issue. Irene was also a fashion innovator, bobbing her hair ten years before the flapper look of the 1920s became popular. From their marriage in 1911 until 1916, the Castles were the most famous and influential dance team in the world. Their dancing schools and nightclubs were packed with society figures and white-collar workers alike. After their peak of white-hot fame, Vernon enlisted in the Royal Canadian Flying Corps, served at the front lines, and was killed in a 1918 airplane crash. Irene became a movie star and appeared in more than a dozen films between 1917 and 1922. The Castles were depicted in the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie Vernon and Irene Castle's Ragtime Revolution (1939), but the film omitted most of the interesting and controversial aspects of their lives. They were more complex than posterity would have it: Vernon was charming but irresponsible, Irene was strong-minded but self-centered, and the couple had filed for divorce before Vernon's death (information that has never before been made public). Vernon and Irene Castle's Ragtime Revolution is the fascinating story of a couple who reinvented dance and its place in twentieth-century culture.

Ballroom

Ballroom PDF Author: Hilary French
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789145163
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
A tune-filled, light-footed people’s history of ballroom dancing, from Vernon and Irene Castle and Arthur Murray to Dancing with the Stars. In the early twentieth century, American ragtime and the Parisian Tango fueled a dancing craze in Britain. Public ballrooms—which had never been seen before—were built throughout the country, providing a glamorous setting for all classes to dance. The new styles of dance being defined and taught in the 1920s, as well as the films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the 1930s, ensured that ballroom dancing continued to be the most popular pastime until the 1960s, rivaled only by the cinema. This book explores the vibrant history of Ballroom and Latin: the dances, the lavish venues, competitions, and influential instructors. It also traces the decline of competitive dancing and its resurgence in recent years with the hugely popular TV shows Strictly Come Dancing and Dancing with the Stars.

Choreomania

Choreomania PDF Author: Kélina Gotman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190840412
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
When political protest is read as epidemic madness, religious ecstasy as nervous disease, and angular dance moves as dark and uncouth, the 'disorder' being described is choreomania. At once a catchall term to denote spontaneous gestures and the unruly movements of crowds, 'choreomania' emerged in the nineteenth century at a time of heightened class conflict, nationalist policy, and colonial rule. In this book, author K lina Gotman examines these choreographies of unrest, rethinking the modern formation of the choreomania concept as it moved across scientific and social scientific disciplines. Reading archives describing dramatic misformations-of bodies and body politics-she shows how prejudices against expressivity unravel, in turn revealing widespread anxieties about demonstrative agitation. This history of the fitful body complements stories of nineteenth-century discipline and regimentation. As she notes, constraints on movement imply constraints on political power and agency. In each chapter, Gotman confronts the many ways choreomania works as an extension of discourses shaping colonialist orientalism, which alternately depict riotous bodies as dangerously infected others, and as curious bacchanalian remains. Through her research, Gotman also shows how beneath the radar of this colonial discourse, men and women gathered together to repossess on their terms the gestures of social revolt.

Hop on Pop

Hop on Pop PDF Author: Henry Jenkins III
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822327370
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 776

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Book Description
Hop on Pop showcases the work of a new generation of scholars—from fields such as media studies, literature, cinema, and cultural studies—whose writing has been informed by their ongoing involvement with popular culture and who draw insight from their lived experiences as critics, fans, and consumers. Proceeding from their deep political commitment to a new kind of populist grassroots politics, these writers challenge old modes of studying the everyday. As they rework traditional scholarly language, they search for new ways to write about our complex and compelling engagements with the politics and pleasures of popular culture and sketch a new and lively vocabulary for the field of cultural studies. The essays cover a wide and colorful array of subjects including pro wrestling, the computer games Myst and Doom, soap operas, baseball card collecting, the Tour de France, karaoke, lesbian desire in the Wizard of Oz, Internet fandom for the series Babylon 5, and the stress-management industry. Broader themes examined include the origins of popular culture, the aesthetics and politics of performance, and the social and cultural processes by which objects and practices are deemed tasteful or tasteless. The commitment that binds the contributors is to an emergent perspective in cultural studies, one that engages with popular culture as the culture that "sticks to the skin," that becomes so much a part of us that it becomes increasingly difficult to examine it from a distance. By refusing to deny or rationalize their own often contradictory identifications with popular culture, the contributors ensure that the volume as a whole reflects the immediacy and vibrancy of its objects of study. Hop on Pop will appeal to those engaged in the study of popular culture, American studies, cultural studies, cinema and visual studies, as well as to the general educated reader. Contributors. John Bloom, Gerry Bloustein, Aniko Bodroghkozy, Diane Brooks, Peter Chvany, Elana Crane, Alexander Doty, Rob Drew, Stephen Duncombe, Nick Evans, Eric Freedman, Joy Fuqua, Tony Grajeda, Katherine Green, John Hartley, Heather Hendershot, Henry Jenkins, Eithne Johnson, Louis Kaplan, Maria Koundoura, Sharon Mazer, Anna McCarthy, Tara McPherson, Angela Ndalianis, Edward O’Neill, Catherine Palmer, Roberta Pearson, Elayne Rapping, Eric Schaefer, Jane Shattuc, Greg Smith, Ellen Strain, Matthew Tinkhom, William Uricchio, Amy Villarego, Robyn Warhol, Charles Weigl, Alan Wexelblat, Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Nabeel Zuberi

Brentano's Book Chat

Brentano's Book Chat PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description


Catalog of Copyright Entries

Catalog of Copyright Entries PDF Author: Library of Congress. Copyright Office
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American drama
Languages : en
Pages : 1686

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Book Description