Books

Dance Improvisations is a book for teachers of dance and acting, choreographers, directors, and dance therapists. Methodical, yet inventive, this book offers highly structured techniques for developing dancers’ ability to work together.

This classic book is a practical and philosophical exploration of dance improvisation, providing hundreds of ideas.

The first in a trilogy of books by one of the leading figures in American dance, Dance and the Specific Image includes more than 100 improvisational structures that Daniel Nagrin created with his company, the Workgroup, and taught in dance classes and workshops throughout the United States. Robby Barnett of the Pilobolus Dance Theater called the book “a vivid and fascinating document of his thinking—more movement and performance and, of course, on his own extraordinary life in dance.”

In her remarkable book, Sondra Horton Fraleigh examines and describes dance through her consciousness of dance as an art, through the experience of dancing, and through the existential and phenomenological literature on the lived body. She describes, with performance photographs, specific imagery in dance masterworks by Doris Humphrey, Anna Sokolow, Viola Farber, Nina Weiner, and Garth Fagan.

An introduction to research methods in dance addressed primarily to graduate students. The editors explore dance as evolutional, defining it in view of its intrinsic participatory values, its developmental aspects, and its purposes from art to ritual, and they examine the role of theory in research.

Spiced with wit and strong opinions, the third installment in Daniel Nagrin’s trilogy explores the art of choreography through the life’s work of an important artist. This is the first book to approach choreography through content rather than structure.

Combining critical analysis with personal history and poetry, Dancing Identity presents a series of interconnected essays composed over a period of fifteen years that explore the role of movement in defining our sense of self.

Pittsburgh in Stages offers the first comprehensive history of theater in Pittsburgh, placing it within the context of cultural development in the city and the history of theater nationally.Lynne Conner details the defining movements of each era and analyzes how public tastes evolved over time. She offers a fascinating study of regional theatrical development and underscores the substantial contribution of regional theater to American theatrical arts.

Dancing Into Darkness is Sondra Horton Fraleigh’s chronological diary of her deepening understanding of and appreciation for the art form of butoh, as she moves from a position of aesthetic response as an audience member to that of assimilation as a student of Zen and butoh. Fraleigh witnesses her own artistic and personal transformation through essays, poems, interviews, and reflections spanning twelve years of study, much of it in Japan.

Finally, a comprehensive book that covers all aspects of choreography from the most fundamental techniques to highly sophisticated artistic concerns. The Intimate Act of Choreography presents the what and how of choreography in a workable format that begins with basics – time, space, force – and moves on to the more complex issues faced by the intermediate and advanced choreographer – form, style, abstraction, compositional structures, and choreographic devices.