Dance

Dance PDF Author: Detroit Institute of Arts
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300211610
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A landmark examination of the art and artists inspired by American dance from 1830 to 1960 As an enduring wellspring of creativity for many artists throughout history, dance has provided a visual language to express such themes as the bonds of community, the allure of the exotic, and the pleasures of the body. This book is the first major investigation of the visual arts related to American dance, offering an unprecedented, interdisciplinary overview of dance-inspired works from 1830 to 1960. Fourteen essays by renowned historians of art and dance analyze the ways dance influenced many of America's most prominent artists, including George Caleb Bingham, William Sidney Mount, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Cecilia Beaux, Isamu Noguchi, Aaron Douglas, Malvina Hoffman, Edward Steichen, Arthur Davies, William Johnson, and Joseph Cornell. The artists did not merely represent dance, they were inspired to think about how Americans move, present themselves to one another, and experience time. Their artwork, in turn, affords insights into the cultural, social, and political moments in which it was created. For some artists, dance informed even the way they applied paint to canvas, carved a sculpture, or framed a photograph. Richly illustrated, the book includes depictions of Irish-American jigs, African-American cakewalkers, and Spanish-American fandangos, among others, and demonstrates how dance offers a means for communicating through an aesthetic, static form. Distributed for the Detroit Institute of Arts Exhibition Schedule: Detroit Institute of Arts (03/20/16-06/12/16) Denver Art Museum (07/10/16-10/02/16) Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (10/22/16-01/16/17)

Dance

Dance PDF Author: Detroit Institute of Arts
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300211610
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
A landmark examination of the art and artists inspired by American dance from 1830 to 1960 As an enduring wellspring of creativity for many artists throughout history, dance has provided a visual language to express such themes as the bonds of community, the allure of the exotic, and the pleasures of the body. This book is the first major investigation of the visual arts related to American dance, offering an unprecedented, interdisciplinary overview of dance-inspired works from 1830 to 1960. Fourteen essays by renowned historians of art and dance analyze the ways dance influenced many of America's most prominent artists, including George Caleb Bingham, William Sidney Mount, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Cecilia Beaux, Isamu Noguchi, Aaron Douglas, Malvina Hoffman, Edward Steichen, Arthur Davies, William Johnson, and Joseph Cornell. The artists did not merely represent dance, they were inspired to think about how Americans move, present themselves to one another, and experience time. Their artwork, in turn, affords insights into the cultural, social, and political moments in which it was created. For some artists, dance informed even the way they applied paint to canvas, carved a sculpture, or framed a photograph. Richly illustrated, the book includes depictions of Irish-American jigs, African-American cakewalkers, and Spanish-American fandangos, among others, and demonstrates how dance offers a means for communicating through an aesthetic, static form. Distributed for the Detroit Institute of Arts Exhibition Schedule: Detroit Institute of Arts (03/20/16-06/12/16) Denver Art Museum (07/10/16-10/02/16) Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (10/22/16-01/16/17)

Dance and American Art

Dance and American Art PDF Author: Sharyn R. Udall
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 029928803X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
From ballet to burlesque, from the frontier jig to the jitterbug, Americans have always loved watching dance, whether in grand ballrooms, on Mississippi riverboats, or in the streets. Dance and American Art is an innovative look at the elusive, evocative nature of dance and the American visual artists who captured it through their paintings, sculpture, photography, and prints from the early nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. The scores of artists discussed include many icons of American art: Winslow Homer, George Caleb Bingham, Mary Cassatt, James McNeill Whistler, Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, Edward Steichen, David Smith, and others. As a subject for visual artists, dance has given new meaning to America’s perennial myths, cherished identities, and most powerful dreams. Their portrayals of dance and dancers, from the anonymous to the famous—Anna Pavlova, Isadora Duncan, Loïe Fuller, Josephine Baker, Martha Graham—have testified to the enduring importance of spatial organization, physical pattern, and rhythmic motion in creating aesthetic form. Through extensive research, sparkling prose, and beautiful color reproductions, art historian Sharyn R. Udall draws attention to the ways that artists’ portrayals of dance have defined the visual character of the modern world and have embodied culturally specific ideas about order and meaning, about the human body, and about the diverse fusions that comprise American culture.

Making Music for Modern Dance

Making Music for Modern Dance PDF Author: Katherine Teck
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199876746
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
Making Music for Modern Dance traces the collaborative approaches, working procedures, and aesthetic views of the artists who forged a new and distinctly American art form during the first half of the 20th century. The book offers riveting first-hand accounts from innovative artists in the throes of their creative careers and provides a cross-section of the challenges faced by modern choreographers and composers in America. These articles are complemented by excerpts from astute observers of the music and dance scene as well as by retrospective evaluations of past collaborative practices. Beginning with the careers of pioneers Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn, and continuing through the avant-garde work of John Cage for Merce Cunningham, the book offers insights into the development of modern dance in relation to its music. Editor Katherine Teck's introductions and afterword offer historical context and tie the artists' essays in with collaborative practices in our own time. The substantive notes suggest further materials of interest to students, practicing dance artists and musicians, dance and music history scholars, and to all who appreciate dance.

Modern Bodies

Modern Bodies PDF Author: Julia L. Foulkes
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807862025
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
In 1930, dancer and choreographer Martha Graham proclaimed the arrival of "dance as an art of and from America." Dancers such as Doris Humphrey, Ted Shawn, Katherine Dunham, and Helen Tamiris joined Graham in creating a new form of dance, and, like other modernists, they experimented with and argued over their aesthetic innovations, to which they assigned great meaning. Their innovations, however, went beyond aesthetics. While modern dancers devised new ways of moving bodies in accordance with many modernist principles, their artistry was indelibly shaped by their place in society. Modern dance was distinct from other artistic genres in terms of the people it attracted: white women (many of whom were Jewish), gay men, and African American men and women. Women held leading roles in the development of modern dance on stage and off; gay men recast the effeminacy often associated with dance into a hardened, heroic, American athleticism; and African Americans contributed elements of social, African, and Caribbean dance, even as their undervalued role defined the limits of modern dancers' communal visions. Through their art, modern dancers challenged conventional roles and images of gender, sexuality, race, class, and regionalism with a view of American democracy that was confrontational and participatory, authorial and populist. Modern Bodies exposes the social dynamics that shaped American modernism and moved modern dance to the edges of society, a place both provocative and perilous.

The Art of Movement

The Art of Movement PDF Author: Ken Browar
Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal
ISBN: 0316435155
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
A stunning celebration of movement and dance in hundreds of breathtaking photographs by the creative team behind NYC Dance Project. The Art of Movement is an exquisite collection of photographs by well-known dance photographers Ken Browar and Deborah Ory that capture the movement, flow, energy, and grace of many of the most accomplished dancers in the world. Featured are more than 70 dancers from companies including American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Martha Graham Dance Company, Boston Ballet, Royal Danish Ballet, The Royal Ballet, Abraham in Motion, and many more. Accompanying the photographs are intimate and inspiring words from the dancers, as well as from choreographers and artistic directors on what dance means to them.

America Dancing

America Dancing PDF Author: Megan Pugh
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300201311
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
"The history of American dance reflects the nation's tangled culture. Dancers from wildly different backgrounds watched, imitated, and stole from one another. Audiences everywhere embraced the result as deeply American. Chronicling dance from the minstrel stage to the music video, Megan Pugh shows how freedom--that nebulous, contested American ideal--emerged as a genre-defining aesthetic. Ballerinas mingled with slumming thrill-seekers, and hoedowns showed up on elite opera-house stages. Steps invented by slaves captivated the British royalty and the Parisian avant-garde. Dances were better boundary crossers than their dancers, however, and the racism and class conflicts that haunt everyday life shadow American dance as well. Center stage in America Dancing is a cast of performers who slide, glide, stomp, and swing their way through history. At the nadir of U.S. race relations, cakewalkers embraced the rhythms of black America. On the heels of the Harlem Renaissance, Bill Robinson tap-danced to stardom. At the height of the Great Depression, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers unified highbrow and popular art. In the midst of 1940s patriotism, Agnes de Mille brought jazz and square dance to ballet, then took it all to Broadway. In the decades to come, the choreographer Paul Taylor turned pedestrian movements into modern masterpiecds, and Michael Jackson moonwalked his way to otherworldly stardom. These artists both celebrated and criticized the country, all while inspiring others to get moving. For it is partly by pretending to be other people, Pugh argues, that Americans discover themselves ... America Dancing demonstrates the centrality of dance in American art, life, and identity, taking us to watershed moments when the nation worked out a sense of itself through public movement"--Publisher's description.

Queer Dance

Queer Dance PDF Author: Clare Croft
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199377332
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
'Queer Dance' challenges social norms and enacts queer coalition across the LGBTQ community. The text joins forces with feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial work to consider how bodies are forces of social change.

Perspectives on American Dance

Perspectives on American Dance PDF Author: Jennifer Atkins
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813065658
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Dancing embodies cultural history and beliefs, and each dance carries with it features of the place where it originated. Influenced by different social, political, and environmental circumstances, dances change and adapt. American dance evolved in large part through combinations of multiple styles and forms that arrived with each new group of immigrants. Perspectives on American Dance is the first anthology in over twenty-five years to focus exclusively on American dance practices across a wide span of American culture. This volume and its companion show how social experience, courtship, sexualities, and other aspects of life in America are translated through dancing into spatial patterns, gestures, and partner relationships. This volume of Perspectives on American Dance features essays by a young generation of authors who write with familiarity about their own era, exploring new parameters of identity and evaluating a wide variety of movement practices being performed in spaces beyond traditional proscenium stages. Topics include "dorky dancing" on YouTube; same-sex competitors on the TV show So You Think You Can Dance; racial politics in NFL touchdown dances; the commercialization of flash mobs; the connections between striptease and corporate branding; how 9/11 affected dance; the criminalization of New York City club dancing; and the joyous ironies of hipster dance. This volume emphasizes how dancing is becoming more social and interactive as technology opens up new ways to create and distribute dance. The accessible essays use a combination of movement analysis, thematic interpretation, and historical context to convey the vitality and variety of American dance. They offer new insights on American dance practices while simultaneously illustrating how dancing functions as an essential template for American culture and identity. Contributors: Jennifer Atkins | Jessica Berson | J. Ellen Gainor | Patsy Gay | Ansley Jones | Kate Mattingly | Hannah Schwadron | Sally Sommer, Ph.D. | Ina Sotirova | Dawn Springer | Michelle T. Summers | Latika L. Young | Tricia Henry Young 

Before, Between, and Beyond

Before, Between, and Beyond PDF Author: Sally Banes
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299221539
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
Sally Banes has been a preeminent critic and scholar of American contemporary dance, and Before, Between, Beyond spans more than thirty years of her prolific work. Beginning with her first published review and including previously unpublished papers, this collection presents some of her finest works on dance and other artistic forms. It concludes with her most recent research on Geroge Balanchine's dancing elephants. In each piece, Banes's detailed eye and sensual prose strike a rare balance between description, context, and opinion, delineating the American artistic scene with remarkable grace. With contextualizing essays by dance scholars Andrea Harris, Joan Acocella, and Lynn Garafola, this is a compelling, insightful indispensable summation of Banes's critical career.

Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures

Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures PDF Author: Kristin Juarez
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781737838807
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures is the first monograph dedicated to the pivotal work of African American choreographer and video artist Blondell Cummings. The book accompanies an exhibition of the same name co-organized by the Getty Research Institute and Art + Practice, on view at Art + Practice in Los Angeles from September 18, 2021 through February 19, 2022.A foundational figure in dance, Cummings bridged postmodern dance experimentation and Black cultural traditions. Through her unique movement vocabulary, which she called "moving pictures," Cummings combined the visual imagery of photography and the kinetic energy of movement in order to explore the emotional details of daily rituals and the intimacy of Black home life. In her most well-known work Chicken Soup (1981), Cummings remembered the family kitchen as a basis for her choreography; the dance was designated an American Masterpiece by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2006. This book draws from Cummings's personal archive and includes performance ephemera and numerous images from digitized recordings of Cummings's performances and dance films; newly commissioned essays by Samada Aranke, Thomas F. DeFrantz, and Tara Aisha Willis; remembrances by Marjani Forté-Saunders, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Meredith Monk, Elizabeth Streb, Edisa Weeks, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar; a 1995 interview with Cummings by Veta Goler; and transcripts from Cummings's appearances at Jacob's Pillow and the Wexner Center for the Arts. Bringing together reprints, an extended biography, a chronology of her work, rarely seen documentation, and new research, this book begins to contextualize Cummings's practice at the intersection of dance, moving image, and art histories.