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"Dancers United States Biography."
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Anna Halprin : experience as dance
This comprehensive biography examines Halprin's fascinating life in the context of American culture - in particular popular culture and the West Coast as a center of artistic experimentation from the Beats through the Hippies to the present.
Book
Anna Halprin : experience as dance
Anna Halprin pioneered what became known as \"postmodern dance,\" creating work that was key to unlocking the door to experimentation in theater, music, Happenings, and performance art. This first comprehensive biography examines Halprin's fascinating life in the context of American culture--in particular popular culture and the West Coast as a center of artistic experimentation from the Beats through the Hippies. Janice Ross chronicles Halprin's long, remarkable career, beginning with the dancer's grandparents--who escaped Eastern European pogroms and came to the United States at the turn of the last century--and ending with the present day, when Halprin continues to defy boundaries between artistic genres as well as between participants and observers. As she follows Halprin's development from youth into old age, Ross describes in engrossing detail the artist's roles as dancer, choreographer, performance theorist, community leader, cancer survivor, healer, wife, and mother. Halprin's friends and acquaintances include a number of artists who charted the course of postmodern performance. Among her students were Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, Meredith Monk, and Robert Morris. Ross brings to life the vital sense of experimentation during this period. She also illuminates the work of Anna Halprin's husband, the important landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, in the context of his wife's environmental dance work. Using Halprin's dance practices and works as her focus, Ross explores the effects of danced stories on the bodies who perform them. The result is an innovative consideration of how experience becomes performance as well as a masterful account of an extraordinary life.
eBook
Fred Astaire
Tracing Fred Astaire's life from his birth in Omaha to his death in his late 80s in Hollywood, this book discusses his early days with his talented and outspoken sister Adele, his gifts as a singer, and his many movie dance partners, among them Rita Hayworth, Eleanor Powell, Cyd Charisse, and Betty Hutton.
Book
The Dance Claimed Me
Pearl Primus (1919-1994) blazed onto the dance scene in 1943 with stunning works that incorporated social and racial protest into their dance aesthetic. InThe 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. They trace Primus's path from her childhood in Port of Spain, Trinidad, through her rise as an influential international dancer, an early member of the New Dance Group (whose motto was \"Dance is a weapon\"), and a pioneer in dance anthropology.
Primus traveled extensively in the United States, Europe, Israel, the Caribbean, and Africa, and she played an important role in presenting authentic African dance to American audiences. She engendered controversy in both her private and professional lives, marrying a white Jewish man during a time of segregation and challenging black intellectuals who opposed the \"primitive\" in her choreography. Her political protests and mixed-race tours in the South triggered an FBI investigation, even as she was celebrated by dance critics and by contemporaries like Langston Hughes.
ForThe Dance Claimed Me, the Schwartzes interviewed more than a hundred of Primus's family members, friends, and fellow artists, as well as other individuals to create a vivid portrayal of a life filled with passion, drama, determination, fearlessness, and brilliance.
eBook
Merce Cunningham : the modernizing of modern dance
This book, by Roger Copeland, is about Merce Cunningham's impact on modern dance.
eBook
Frontiers : the life and times of Bonnie Bird : American modern dancer and dance educator
This book, by Karen Bell-Kanner, is a collection of interviews and letters by American modern dancer Bonnie Bird.
eBook
La Meri and her life in dance : performing the world
This book is both a biography of La Meri and an analysis of the significance of her theory and practice, with attention to her own performance, choreography, writings, and teaching.
Book
Done into Dance
This cultural study of modern dance icon Isadora Duncan is the first to place her within the thought, politics and art of her time. Duncan's dancing earned her international fame and influenced generations of American girls and women, yet the romantic myth that surrounds her has left some questions unanswered: What did her audiences see on stage, and how did they respond? What dreams and fears of theirs did she play out? Why, in short, was Duncan's dancing so compelling? First published in 1995 and now back in print, Done into Dance reveals Duncan enmeshed in social and cultural currents of her time — the moralism of the Progressive Era, the artistic radicalism of prewar Greenwich Village, the xenophobia of the 1920s, her association with feminism and her racial notion of Americanness.
eBook