During an improvised performance, both dancers and audience members reflect on how the dance is being made. They ask themselves: What will happen next? What choices will each dancer make? And how will these decisions contribute to the overall effect and significance of the performance? Trained as a jazz pianist, Richard Bull did not uphold the opposition often found in dance between improvisation and composition. Instead, he believed that dancers, like jazz musicians, could craft a piece spontaneously in performance. Analyzing performances by Bull and many of his contemporaries, Susan Foster argues that their diverse practices embody distinctive values representative of different artistic communities, yet they all share a capacity to reflect on their own making, in a sense, describing themselves.

Over the past fifty years national dance companies from Turkey, Egypt, Mexico, Greece, the former USSR and Croatia have dominated concert stages throughout the world. Anthony Shay makes coherent sense of these national programs, which have previously received scant academic attention. Specifically, he looks at the ways through which these companies spread political, ethnic and cultural messages by accruing symbolic and cultural capital for their respective nation-states. In his analysis, Shay draws on cultural studies, political science and anthropology to create a work that cuts across disciplines. As the first book to address the topic of state-sponsored folk dance ensembles and their structures, Choreographic Politics examines the repertoires, performances and choreographic strategies of these companies within the political, social, gendered and ethnic contexts in which each company was created. In addition, Shay's study includes a look at music, costumes, and various artistic directors and choreographers.

In this insightful new book, Mark Franko explores the many genres of theatrical dancing during the radical decade of the 1930s and their relationship to labor movements, including Fordist and unionist organizational structures, the administrative structures of the Federal Dance and Theatre Project, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and the Communist Party. Franko shows how the structures of labor organization were reproduced and acted out - but also profoundly reasoned through in corporeal terms - by choreography and performance of the proletarian mass dance, the chorus line of the Ziegfeld Follies and the reflexive backstage musical film, Martha Graham's modern dance, the revolutionary dance movement of the proletarian avant-garde, African-American "ethnic" opera-ballet, and Lincoln Kirstein's "American" ballet.The contributions of many important personalities of American theatrical, visual and literary culture are included in this study. Franko's focus extends from the direct impact of performances on audiences to the reviewing, reporting and photography of print journalism.

The 'Hood Comes First looks at the increasingly specific emphasis on real neighborhoods and streets in rap music and hip hop culture as an urgent response to the cultural and geographical ghettoization of black urban communities. Examining rap music, along with ancillary hip hop media including radio, music videos, rap press and the cinematic 'hood genre, Murray Forman analyzes hip hop culture's varying articulations of the terms "ghetto," "inner-city," and "the 'hood," and how these spaces, both real and imaginary, are used to define individual and collective identity.Negotiating academic, corporate, and "street" discourses, Forman assesses the dynamics between race, social space and youth. Race, class and national identification are recast and revised within rap's spatial discourse, concluding with the construction of "the 'hood," a social and geographic symbol that has become central to concepts of hip hop authenticity. Additionally, the book analyzes the processes within the music and culture industries through which hip hop has been amplified and disseminated from the 'hood to international audiences.

Provides a comprehensive selection of some 200 definitively dated, hand-written texts, sampled from among the 30,000 manuscripts preserved in the major public collections of Europe, the Middle East, the former USSR and North America. Selected specimen pages from these manuscripts are presented in chronological order, and span the period from AD 862 to 1911. Each text is illustrated by a high-quality colour facsimile of a typical page, and is accompanied by an alphabet table for the folio in question and a sample transcription. All photographs are new, taken especially for the Album. Thanks to the large format of the volume it has been possible to show all manuscript pages (except the very largest) in actual size. In addition, each facsimile page is accompanied by a colour enlargement of several lines of the text, enabling the reader to study the lettering in even greater detail. In a separate section, computerised tables are used to show changes in the forms of individual letters. By following the development of letter shapes, it is possible to discern the evolutionary process of the Armenian scripts in a far more detailed and sophisticated manner than the traditional division of the Armenian hands into types: erkat‘agir, bolorgir, nôtrgir, ðùagir, thereby providing much more precise datings than those previously available to scholars. The foundations are thus laid for a better understanding of the chronology of Armenian manuscripts and the literature and art they contain. This volume will be an indispensable tool for any serious student of the Armenian language, literature and art, and its innovative approach to the study of lettering will be of interest to paleographers and codicologists.

The first serious ethnomusicological study of Malagasy music, Recollecting from the Past evokes the complex sound and performative aesthetic in Madagascar called maresaka. Maresaka pertains not only to musical expression but extends into ways of remembering the past, aesthetics of everyday life, and Malagasy concepts of self and community. Ron Emoff focuses on tromba spirit possession ceremonies in which Malagasy use devotional practice as an occasion to expressively re-figure worlds often impeded by colonialism and postcolonial phenomena, extreme material poverty, and widespread illness. Malagasy not only preserve the past, but they interpret, revalue and transform it to their own ends. Music is crucial to these performances since powerful ancestral spirits will not enter into the present if not enticed by masterful musical performances, and so music itself provides a complex symbolic system with which Malagasy can recall and reconstruct the past. This groundbreaking study will be of interest to readers in the fields of anthropology, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, African studies, postcolonial and performance studies.

The thirteen essays that comprise Global Noise explore the hip hop scenes of Europe, Anglophone and Francophone Canada, Japan and Australia within their social, cultural and ethnic contexts. Countering the prevailing colonialist view that global hip hop is an exotic and derivative outgrowth of an African-American-owned idiom subject to assessment in terms of American norms and standards, Global Noise shows how international hip hop scenes, like those in France and Australia, developed by first adopting then adapting US models and establishing an increasing hybridity of local linguistic and musical features. The essays reveal diasporic manifestations of international hip hop that are rarely acknowledged in the growing commentary on the genre in the US. In the voices of rappers from around the globe with divergent backgrounds of race, nationality, class and gender, the authors find a consistent rhetoric of opposition and resistance to institutional forms of repression and the construction of a cohesive, historically-based subculture capable of accommodating regional and national diversities.CONTRIBUTORS: Roger Chamberland, Ian Condry, David Hesmondhalgh, Claire Levy, Ian Maxwell, Caspar Melville, Sarah Morelli, Mark Pennay, André J.M. Prévos, Ted Swedenburg, Jacqueline Urla and Mir Wermuth.

This volume includes articles on mannerist furniture from a Northern Essex County, Massachusetts shop, the career and work of David Evans, early New York turned chairs, the Lisle desk-and-bookcase from Rhode Island, a Salem cabinetmakers' price book, two early eighteenth-century Schränke, as well as book reviews and bibliography.

Reports of two church excavations, St Martin-at-Palace, Norwich and St Michael, Bowthorpe, undertaken prior to their re-building and re-use. The reports cover the earliest evidence for occupation of the site and the phases of re-building, repair and ruin (in the case of St Michael's) from the Anglo-Saxon period through to their present state.

The initial aim of the Danish archaeological campaigns in Bahrain was to look for settlements contemporary with the "Hundred Thousand Gravemounds". After the first few campaigns it was evident, however, that the island was such a rich archaeological field that investigation of all periods from the earliest flint-using culture to the later Islamic world was called for. Among the Islamic remains was an exceptionally fine collection of Early Islamic pottery and glass recovered from the rubbish which filled up a well at the Barbar site where a temple from around 2000BC was excavated. These remains are published in this volume along with finds from the Islamic settlement at the Qala'a mound, especially the Islamic Fortress.

Why has a nineteenth-century author with an elitist reputation proved so popular with directors as varied as William Wyler, François Truffaut, and James Ivory? A partial answer lies in the way many of Henry James's recurring themes still haunt us: the workings of power, the position of women in society, the complexities of sexuality and desire.Susan Griffin has assembled fifteen of the world's foremost authorities on Henry James to examine both the impact of James on film and the impact of film on James. Anthony Mazella traces the various adaptations of The Turn of the Screw, from novel to play to opera to film. Peggy McCormack examines the ways the personal lives of Peter Bogdanovich and then-girlfriend Cybill Shepherd influenced critical reaction to Daisy Miller (1974). Leland Person points out the consequences of casting Christopher Reeve -- then better known as Superman -- in The Bostonians (1984) during the conservative political context of the first Reagan presidency. Nancy Bentley defends Jane Campion's anachronistic reading of Portrait of a Lady (1996) as being more "authentic" than the more common period costume dramas. Dale Bauer observes James's influence on such films as Next Stop, Wonderland (1998) and Notting Hill (1999). Marc Bousquet explores the ways Wings of the Dove (1997) addresses the economic and cultural situations of Gen-X viewers. Other fascinating essays as well as a complete filmography and bibliography of work on James and film round out the collection.

From palace to village street to international stage, Korean dance is a vibrant and complex art comprised of many different forms. In Perspectives on Korean Dance, Judy Van Zile brings together the first comprehensive English language study of this multifaceted art. Van Zile's broad overview includes explanations of key terminology and iconography, as well as discussions of the Korean National Treasure system, the role of shamanic dances when they are performed outside of sacred or ritual contexts, and facets of the careers of Kim Ch'on-hung, a former court dancer, and Ch'oe Sung-hui, who toured the US in the late 1930s. A final chapter examines the role of Korean dance in Hawai'i, where it is an important and at times contested identity marker for residents of Korean ancestry. Explorations of specific dances and dancers illustrate how Korean dance functions in a variety of contexts as an expression of cultural identity. As Van Zile shows, the forms of Korean dance have been modified and reinvented through the process of cross cultural influence' through colonialism, governmental support and intervention, and community building among emigrants as they vie for legitimacy on the national and international stages. The book is lavishly illustrated with 42 color plates and includes a helpful glossary of Korean terms.

This new collection of essays surveys the history of dance in an innovative and wide-ranging fashion. Editors Dils and Albright address the current dearth of comprehensive teaching material in the dance history field through the creation of a multifaceted, non-linear, yet well-structured and comprehensive survey of select moments in the development of both American and World dance. This book is illustrated with over 50 photographs, and would make an ideal text for undergraduate classes in dance ethnography, criticism or appreciation, as well as dance history-particularly those with a cross-cultural, contemporary, or an American focus. The reader is organized into four thematic sections which allow for varied and individualized course use: Thinking about Dance History: Theories and Practices, World Dance Traditions, America Dancing, and Contemporary Dance: Global Contexts. The editors have structured the readings with the understanding that contemporary theory has thoroughly questioned the discursive construction of history and the resultant canonization of certain dances, texts and points of view. The historical readings are presented in a way that encourages thoughtful analysis and allows the opportunity for critical engagement with the text.

One of the more widely discussed and inventive exponents of contemporary British art, Sam Taylor-Wood has spent a decade creating film and photographic works that extend the boundaries of their media. She worked closely with Bruce Mau Design on this project to give unprecedented insight into the usually private or suppressed source images behind her work.

" For years fiddlers and folklorists have prized the old-time fiddle tunes from Kentucky. Many of the most outstanding country music artists hail from the state, including Bill Monroe, widely regarded as the founder of bluegrass music. Even Aaron Copland lifted, note-for-note, a Kentucky fiddler's performance of "Bonaparte's Retreat" for the "Hoedown" section of his ballet Rodeo. That tune and nearly 200 others are transcribed here, most for the first time. They are taken from recordings of Kentucky fiddlers, many of whom were born before 1900, practitioners of a style of playing now extremely rare. Jeff Todd Titon places the tunes in their historical context, provides biographical sketches of the performers, and offers suggestions for contemporary fiddlers who want to use the book for performance. A compact disc of recordings is also included.

Both as a dancer and a choreographer, José Limón electrified audiences from the1930s to the 1960s. With his striking looks and charismatic presence, he was American modern dance's first male star. Born in Culiacán, Mexico, in 1908, the eldest of twelve children, he came to the United States when he was seven. In 1928, after a year at UCLA as an art major, he left for New York. Here, he attended his first modern dance concert and discovered his destiny. He spent the 1930s with the Humphrey-Weidman group. Then, in the 1940s, after a stint in the army, and with Doris Humphrey as artistic advisor, he formed one of the outstanding modern dance companies of the postwar era. His greatest works -- The Moor's Pavane, La Malinche, The Traitor, A Choreographic Offering, There is a Time, Missa Brevis -- extolled a humanism that endeared them to audiences the world over. Although Limón died in 1972, all these dances remain in the Limón Dance Company's active repertory.This memoir was commissioned by Wesleyan University Press in the late 1960s. Left unfinished at the time of Limón's death, it stands on its own as a Joycean account of the coming of age of an unusually perceptive dance artist. Limón writes with eloquence of his Mexican childhood. And of the numerous figures he memorializes, from Martha Graham to José Covarrubias, none is more luminously evoked than Doris Humphrey, the "goddess," "nymph," and "caryatid" of his life. Sensitively edited by Lynn Garafola, the book includes a complete list of Limón's works, richly informative notes, rare photographs, and a detailed bibliography. This is the single most important book on Limón and a riveting memoir of modern dance during its golden age