Dancing Boy

A wordless picture book in the spirit of the Pied Piper of Hamelin; a free-spirited little boy spontaneously dances through town, wearing nothing but a smile, leading other children on a fun-filled romp.

Dancing Boys is one of the few scholarly works that demystify the largely unknown challenges of adolescent males in dance.

In the sleepy by-lanes of 1980s' Calcutta, a young boy spends hours in front of the mirror, draped in his mother's saris, his face layered with make-up, as he dances and twirls around the room. Often, when he dances, he catches a glimpse of a face that is his and not quite his. His mother is ashamed of her effeminate son; his friends tease him about his eccentricities; and Moyur grows up an unwitting outcast, misunderstood by all but his friend and neighbour, Jonali. Sensitive and evocative, this promising debut novel tells the story of Moyur, the boy who never quite fits in, and that of his twin sister Moyna, who died before she was born.

Inspired by watching a performance of the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, a young black boy longs to dance and enrolls in ballet school.

Winner of the Pura Belpré Illustrator Award A Kirkus Reviews Best Picture Book In soaring words and stunning illustrations, Margarita Engle and Rafael López tell the story of Teresa Carreño, a child prodigy who played piano for Abraham Lincoln. As a little girl, Teresa Carreño loved to let her hands dance across the beautiful keys of the piano. If she felt sad, music cheered her up, and when she was happy, the piano helped her share that joy. Soon she was writing her own songs and performing in grand cathedrals. Then a revolution in Venezuela forced her family to flee to the United States. Teresa felt lonely in this unfamiliar place, where few of the people she met spoke Spanish. Worst of all, there was fighting in her new home, too—the Civil War. Still, Teresa kept playing, and soon she grew famous as the talented Piano Girl who could play anything from a folk song to a sonata. So famous, in fact, that President Abraham Lincoln wanted her to play at the White House! Yet with the country torn apart by war, could Teresa’s music bring comfort to those who needed it most?

A People Book of the Week & a Kirkus Best Nonfiction of the Year An exquisite and inspiring memoir about one mother’s unimaginable choice in the face of oppression and abuse in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. In the days before Homeira Qaderi gave birth to her son, Siawash, the road to the hospital in Kabul would often be barricaded because of the frequent suicide explosions. With the city and the military on edge, it was not uncommon for an armed soldier to point his gun at the pregnant woman’s bulging stomach, terrified that she was hiding a bomb. Frightened and in pain, she was once forced to make her way on foot. Propelled by the love she held for her soon-to-be-born child, Homeira walked through blood and wreckage to reach the hospital doors. But the joy of her beautiful son’s birth was soon overshadowed by other dangers that would threaten her life. No ordinary Afghan woman, Homeira refused to cower under the strictures of a misogynistic social order. Defying the law, she risked her freedom to teach children reading and writing and fought for women’s rights in her theocratic and patriarchal society. Devastating in its power, Dancing in the Mosque is a mother’s searing letter to a son she was forced to leave behind. In telling her story—and that of Afghan women—Homeira challenges you to reconsider the meaning of motherhood, sacrifice, and survival. Her story asks you to consider the lengths you would go to protect yourself, your family, and your dignity.

Dancing to Learn: Cognition, Emotion, and Movement explores the rationale for dance as a medium of learning to help engage educators and scientists to explore the underpinnings of dance, and dancers as well as members of the general public who are curious about new ways of comprehending dance. Among policy-makers, teachers, and parents, there is a heightened concern for successful pedagogical strategies. They want to know what can work with learners. This book approaches the subject of learning in, about, and through dance by triangulating knowledge from the arts and humanities, social and behavioral sciences, and cognitive and neurological sciences to challenge dismissive views of the cognitive importance of the physical dance. Insights come from theories and research findings in aesthetics, anthropology, cognitive science, dance, education, feminist theory, linguistics, neuroscience, phenomenology, psychology, and sociology. Using a single theory puts blinders on to other ways of description and analysis. Of course, all knowledge is tentative. Experiments necessarily must focus on a narrow topic and often use a special demographic—university students, and we don’t know the representativeness of case studies.

There comes a day in a young child's life when the gift of childhood's magic begins to fade. A new firm voice of reason says that the fantastical, the miraculous, are not real and the belief in them is foolish. At that moment, the lights of the world dim, there is a deep sadness in a child's heart that goes largely unnoticed...unless he is lucky enough to have a magical grandpa who knows that a child's way of seeing is the soul's way of seeing. Journey with a boy and his beloved grandpa to the banks of the beautiful Ipswich River as they undertake a mission to see if an old fisherman's tale is true, if the catfish that live deep in the river's still pools really do come out to dance by the light of the full moon. Join them as the grandfather gives to his grandson the gift his own grandfather gave to him-keeping the sacred treasure of the magical as he grows into the real world.

A powerful story of one man's redemption through the Lakota Sun Dance ceremony. • Written by the only white man to be confirmed as a Sundance Chief by traditional Lakota elders. • Includes forewords by prominent Lakota spiritual leaders Leonard Crow Dog, Charles Chipps, Mary Thunder, and Jamie Sams. The Sun Dance is the largest and most important ceremony in the Lakota spiritual tradition, the one that ensures the life of the people for another year. In 1988 Michael Hull was extended an invitation to join in a Sun Dance by Lakota elder Leonard Crow Dog-- a controversial action because Hull is white. This was the beginning of a spiritual journey that increasingly interwove the life of the author with the people, process, and elements of Lakota spirituality. On this journey on the Red Road, Michael Hull confronted firsthand the transformational power of Lakota spiritual practice and the deep ambivalence many Indians had about opening their ceremonies to a white man. Sun Dancing presents a profound look at the elements of traditional Lakota ceremonial practice and the ways in which ceremony is regarded as life-giving by the Lakota. Through his commitment to following the Red Road, Michael Hull gradually won acceptance in a community that has rejected other attempts by white America to absorb its spiritual practices, leading to the extraordinary step of his confirmation as a Sun Dance Chief by Leonard Crow Dog and other Lakota spiritual leaders.