Choreographers Handbook

Internationally renowned dancer, choreographer and teacher Jonathan Burrows explains how to navigate a course through the complex process of creating dance. He provides choreographers with an active manifesto and shares his wealth of experience of choreographic practice to allow each artist and dance-maker to find his or her own aesthetic process.

On choreography: "Choreography is a negotiation with the patterns your body is thinking" On rules: "Try breaking the rules on a need to break the rules basis" A Choreographer’s Handbook invites the reader to investigate how and why to make a dance performance. In an inspiring and unusually empowering sequence of stories, ideas and paradoxes, internationally renowned dancer, choreographer and teacher Jonathan Burrows explains how it’s possible to navigate a course through this complex process. It is a stunning reflection on a personal practice and professional journey, and draws upon five years’ of workshop discussions, led by Burrows. Burrows’ open and honest prose gives the reader access to a range of exercises, meditations, principles and ideas on choreography that allow artists and dance-makers to find their own aesthetic process. It is a book for anyone interested in making performance, at whatever level and in whichever style.

Choreography is the highly creative process of interpreting and coordinating movement, music and space in performance. By tracing different facets of development and exploring the essential artistic and practical skills of the choreographer, this book offers unique insights for apprentice dance makers. With key concepts and ideas expressed through an accessible writing style, the creative tasks and frameworks offered will develop new curiosity, understanding, skill and confidence. The chapters cover the key areas of engagement including what is a choreographer; getting started; improvisation and ideas; context, stage geometry and atmosphere; movement as dance in time and space; solo, duet, trio and group choreography and finally, structure and the 'choreographic eye'. This is an ideal companion for dancers and dance students wanting to express their ideas through choreography and develop their skills to effectively articulate them in performance. It is superbly illustrated with 143 practical colour and black & white photographs and diagrams. Kate Flatt has over forty years' experience as a choreographer, mentor and teacher.

The first and only sourcebook for theatre directors and choreographers.

This is a comprehensive reference work to 970 choreographers and dance directors who worked in nearly 3,500 films. For each, there is a vital biography, a description of their choreographic style, a listing of their stage, television, music video, nightclub and concert credits, and a listing of the movies they choreographed. A decade-by-decade history of dance on film and a filmography of choreographically important works in each decade are included.

"Nearly four hundred and fifty years in, ballet still resonates-though the stages have become international, and the dancers, athletes far removed from noble amateurs. While vibrations from the form's beginnings clearly resound, much has transformed. Nowadays ballet dancers aspire to work across disciplines with choreographers who value a myriad of abilities. Dance theorists and historians make known possibilities and polemics in lieu of notating dances verbatim, and critics do the daily work of recording performance histories and interviewing artists. Ideas circulate, questions arise, and discussions about how to resist ballet's outmoded traditions take precedence. In the dance community, calls for innovation have defined palpable shifts in ballet's direction and resultantly we have arrived at a new moment in its history that is unquestionably recognized as a genre onto its own: Contemporary Ballet. An aspect of this recent discipline is that its dancemakers, more often than not, seek to reorient the viewer by celebrating what could be deemed vulnerabilities, re-construing ideals of perfection, problematizing the marginalized/mainstream dichotomy, bringing audiences closer in to observe, and letting the art become an experience rather than a distant object preciously guarded out of reach. Hence, the practice of ballet is moving to become a less-mediated and more active process in many circumstances. Performers and audiences alike are challenged, and while convention is still omnipresent, choices are being made. For some, this approach has been drawn on for decades, and for others it signifies a changing of the guard, yet however we arrive there, the conclusion is the same: Contemporary Ballet is not a style. That is to say, it is not a trend, phase, or fashionable term that will fade, rather it is a clear period in ballet's time deserved of investigation. And it is into this moment that we enter"--

First published in 1988 by Longman (UK), the Handbook moves chronologically through the milestones of the dance world, focusing on 200 major dancers, dance companies, and choreographers. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Musicians who work professionally with ballet and dance companies sometimes wonder if they haven’t entered a foreign country—a place where the language and customs seem so utterly familiar and so bafflingly strange at the same. To someone without a dance background, phrases and terms--boy’s variation, pas d’action, apothéose—simply don’t fit their standard musical vocabulary. Even a familiar term like adagio means something quite different in the world of dance. Like any working professional, those conductors, composers, rehearsal pianists, instrumentalists and even music librarians working with professional ballet and dance companies must learn what dance professionals talk about when they talk about music. In Ballet Music: A Handbook Matthew Naughtin provides a practical guide for the professional musician who works with ballet companies, whether as a full-time staff member or as an independent contractor. In this comprehensive work, he addresses the daily routine of the modern ballet company, outlines the respective roles of the conductor, company pianist and music librarian and their necessary collaboration with choreographers and ballet masters, and examines the complete process of putting a dance performance on stage, from selection or existing music to commissioning original scores to staging the final production. Because ballet companies routinely revise the great ballets to fit the needs of their staff and stage, audience and orchestra, ballet repertoire is a tangled web for the uninitiated. At the core of Ballet Music: A Handbook lies an extensive listing of classic ballets in the standard repertoire, with information on their history, versions, revisions, instrumentation, score publishers and other sources for tracking down both the original music and subsequent musical additions and adaptations. Ballet Music: A Handbook is an invaluable resource for conductors, pianists and music librarians as well as any student, scholar or fan of the ballet interested in the complex machinery that works backstage before the curtain goes up.

From the dance floor of a tango club to group therapy classes, from ballet to community theatre, improvised dance is everywhere. For some dance artists, improvisation is one of many approaches within the choreographic process. For others, it is a performance form in its own right. And while it has long been practiced, it is only within the last twenty years that dance improvisation has become a topic of critical inquiry. With The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation in Dance, dancer, teacher, and editor Vida L. Midgelow provides a cutting-edge volume on dance improvisation in all its facets. Expanding beyond conventional dance frameworks, this handbook looks at the ways that dance improvisation practices reflect our ability to adapt, communicate, and respond to our environment. Throughout the handbook, case studies from a variety of disciplines showcase the role of individual agency and collective relationships in improvisation, not just to dancers but to people of all backgrounds and abilities. In doing so, chapters celebrate all forms of improvisation, and unravel the ways that this kind of movement informs understandings of history, socio-cultural conditions, lived experience, cognition, and technologies.

Dance and Light examines the interconnected relationship between movement and design, the fluid partnership that exists between the two disciplines, and the approaches that designers can take to enhance dance performances through lighting design. The book demystifies lighting for the dancer and helps designers understand how the dancer/choreographer thinks about their art form, providing insight into the choreographer’s process and exploring how designers can make the most of their resources. The author shares anecdotes and ideas from an almost 50-year career as a lighting designer, along with practical examples and insights from colleagues, and stresses the importance of clear communication between designers, choreographers, and dancers. Attention is also given to the choreographer who wants to learn what light can do to help enhance their work on stage. Written in short, stand-alone chapters that allow readers to quickly navigate to areas of interest, Dance and Light is a valuable resource for lighting design classes wishing to add a section on dance lighting, as well as for choreography classes who want to better equip young artists for a significant collaborative partnership.