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Performing Arts
In this book from the critically acclaimed, multimillion-copy best-selling Little People, BIG DREAMS series, discover the true story of ballet dancer Anna Pavlova. Little Anna fell in love with ballet after watching a performance with her mother. At the age of just nine years old, she auditioned for the famous Imperial Ballet! But...she was rejected. The set-back didn't stop Anna--she auditioned again a year later and was accepted into the company. Although ballet was her passion, it didn't always come easily to her, and she worked fiercely to become the best. After her training was complete, she performed across Russia and later formed her own company with which she toured the world. The story of Anna Pavlova, one of the greatest dancers to have ever lived, teaches us that with hard work, our talents can take us wherever we want to go. This inspiring book features stylish and quirky illustrations and extra facts at the back, including a biographical timeline with historical photos and a detailed profile of the star's life. Little People, BIG DREAMS is a best-selling biography series for kids that explores the lives of outstanding people, from designers and artists to scientists and activists. All of them achieved incredible things, yet each began life as a child with a dream. This empowering series of books offers inspiring messages to children of all ages, in a range of formats. The board books are told in simple sentences, perfect for reading aloud to babies and toddlers. The hardcover and paperback versions present expanded stories for beginning readers. With rewritten text for older children, the treasuries each bring together a multitude of dreamers in a single volume. You can also collect a selection of the books by theme in boxed gift sets. Activity books and a journal provide even more ways to make the lives of these role models accessible to children. Inspire the next generation of outstanding people who will change the world with Little People, BIG DREAMS!
This volume features a wide range of plays that reimagine Shakespeare works from Borderlands perspectives. For several decades, Chicanx and Indigenous theatermakers have been repurposing Shakespeare's plays to reflect the histories and lived realities of the US-Mexico Borderlands and to create space to tell stories of and for La Frontera. Celebrating this rich tradition, The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera brings a wide range of Borderlands Shakespeare plays together for the first time in a multi-volume open-access scholarly edition. This anthology celebrates the dynamic, multilingual reworking of canon and place that defines Borderlands Shakespeare, and it situates these geographically and temporally diverse plays within the robust study of Shakespeare's global afterlives. The editors offer a critical framework for understanding the artistic and political traditions that shape these plays and the place of Shakespeare within the multilayered colonial histories of the region. Borderlands Shakespeare plays, they contend, do not simply reproduce Shakespeare in new contexts but rather use his work in innovative ways to negotiate colonial power and to envision socially just futures.
The untold story of Chicago's pivotal role as a country and folk music capital. Chicago is revered as a musical breeding ground, having launched major figures like blues legend Muddy Waters, gospel soul icon Mavis Staples, hip-hop firebrand Kanye West, and the jazz-rock band that shares its name with the city. Far less known, however, is the vital role Chicago played in the rise of prewar country music, the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s, and the contemporary offspring of those scenes. In Country and Midwestern, veteran journalist Mark Guarino tells the epic century-long story of Chicago's influence on sounds typically associated with regions further south. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and deep archival research, Guarino tells a forgotten story of music, migration, and the ways that rural culture infiltrated urban communities through the radio, the automobile, and the railroad. The Midwest's biggest city was the place where rural transplants could reinvent themselves and shape their music for the new commercial possibilities the city offered. Years before Nashville emerged as the commercial and spiritual center of country music, major record labels made Chicago their home and recorded legendary figures like Bill Monroe, The Carter Family, and Gene Autry. The National Barn Dance--broadcast from the city's South Loop starting in 1924--flourished for two decades as the premier country radio show before the Grand Ole Opry. Guarino chronicles the makeshift niche scenes like "Hillbilly Heaven" in Uptown, where thousands of relocated Southerners created their own hardscrabble honky-tonk subculture, as well as the 1960s rise of the Old Town School of Folk Music, which eventually brought national attention to local luminaries like John Prine and Steve Goodman. The story continues through the end of the twentieth century and into the present day, where artists like Jon Langford, The Handsome Family, and Wilco meld contemporary experimentation with country traditions. Featuring a foreword from Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Robbie Fulks and casting a cross-genre net that stretches from Bob Dylan to punk rock, Country and Midwestern rediscovers a history as sprawling as the Windy City--celebrating the creative spirit that modernized American folk idioms, the colorful characters who took them into new terrain, and the music itself, which is still kicking down doors even today.
A full-color visual history of dance from the waltz to modern hip-hop, with 200+ illustrations from the British Library collections, including photographs, cartoons, step notation, magazines and musical scores. This title reveals the incredible impact of dance on society, rebalancing gender dynamics, shattering expectations of class and embracing cross-cultural influences. Dance is at the heart of diverse cultures around the globe, from the increasing popularity of salsa clubs, to break dance battles that gather crowds in the street, to the constant stream of dance routines going viral on TikTok. But behind the glitzy performances are amazing and unpredictable histories: the shocking debut of the waltz in eighteenth-century Vienna; the power of African-American influence on the jive and Lindy hop; and the early foundations of hip-hop in funk and disco styles. Tango, samba, Charleston, cha cha cha, rumba - each dance has distinct rhythms, quality of movement and complex rules to learn and follow. But they all shook up society and gave ordinary people the freedom of self-expression. Choreographer Robert Hylton navigates an extraordinary array of photographs, periodicals and ephemera from the British Library collections, which reveal the true origins of the popular dance styles that have, at one point or another, swept the population off their feet.
Jessica Hopper's criticism is a trenchant and necessary counterpoint not just on music, but on our culture at large. --Annie Clark, St. Vincent
An acclaimed, career-spanning collection from a fiercely feminist and revered contemporary rock critic, reissued with new material
Throughout her career, spanning more than two decades, Jessica Hopper, a revered and pioneering music critic, has examined women recording and producing music, in all genres, through an intersectional feminist lens. The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic features oral histories of bands like Hole and Sleater Kinney, interviews with the women editors of 1970s-era Rolling Stone, and intimate conversations with iconic musicians such as Björk, Robyn, and Lido Pimienta. Hopper journeys through the truths of Riot Grrrl's empowering insurgence; decamps to Gary, Indiana, on the eve of Michael Jackson's death; explodes the grunge-era mythologies of Nirvana and Courtney Love; and examines the rise of emo. The collection also includes profiles and reviews of some of the most-loved, and most-loathed, women artists making music today: Fiona Apple, Kacey Musgraves, M.I.A., Miley Cyrus, Lana Del Rey.
In order for the music industry to change, Hopper writes, we need “the continual presence of radicalized women . . . being encouraged and given reasons to stay, rather than diminished by the music which glues our communities together.” The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic―published to acclaim in 2015, and reissued now with new material and an introduction by Samantha Irby―is a rallying cry for women-centered history and storytelling, and a groundbreaking, obsessive, razor-sharp panorama of music writing crafted by one of the most influential critics of her generation.
A major biography--the first in three decades--of one of the most important artistic forces of the twentieth century, the legendary American dancer and choreographer who upended dance, propelling the art form into the modern age, and whose profound and pioneering influence is still being felt today. "Brings together all the elements of Graham's colorful life...with wit, verve, critical discernment, and a powerful lyricism."--Mary Dearborn, acclaimed author of Ernest Hemingway Time magazine called her "the Dancer of the Century." Her technique, used by dance companies throughout the world, became the first long-lasting alternative to the idiom of classical ballet. Her pioneering movements--powerful, dynamic, jagged, edgy, forthright--combined with her distinctive system of training, were the epitome of American modernism, performance as art. Her work continued to astonish and inspire for more than sixty years as she choreographed more than 180 works. At the heart of Graham's work: movement that could express inner feeling. Neil Baldwin, author of admired biographies of Man Ray ("Truly definitive . . . absolutely fascinating" --Patricia Bosworth) and Thomas Edison ("Absorbing, gripping, a major contribution to our understanding of a remarkable man and a remarkable era" --Robert Caro), gives us the artist and performer, the dance monument who led a cult of dance worshippers as well as the woman herself in all of her complexity. Here is Graham, from her nineteenth-century (born in 1894) Allegheny, Pennsylvania, childhood, to becoming the star of the Denishawn exotic ballets, and in 1926, at age thirty-two, founding her own company (now the longest-running dance company in America). Baldwin writes of how the company flourished during the artistic explosion of New York City's midcentury cultural scene; of Erick Hawkins, in 1936, fresh from Balanchine's School of American Ballet, a handsome Midwesterner fourteen years her junior, becoming Graham's muse, lover, and eventual spouse. Graham, inspiring the next generation of dancers, choreographers, and teachers, among them: Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor. Baldwin tells the story of this large, fiercely lived life, a life beset by conflict, competition, and loneliness--filled with fire and inspiration, drive, passion, dedication, and sacrifice in work and in dance creation.
A Chicago Tribune Book of 2019, Notable Chicago Reads A Booklist Top 10 Arts Book of 2019 A No Depression Top Music Book of 2019 Curtis Mayfield. The Chi-Lites. Chaka Khan. Chicago's place in the history of soul music is rock solid. But for Chicagoans, soul music in its heyday from the 1960s to the 1980s was more than just a series of hits: it was a marker and a source of black empowerment. In Move On Up, Aaron Cohen tells the remarkable story of the explosion of soul music in Chicago. Together, soul music and black-owned businesses thrived. Record producers and song-writers broadcast optimism for black America's future through their sophisticated, jazz-inspired productions for the Dells and many others. Curtis Mayfield boldly sang of uplift with unmistakable grooves like "We're a Winner" and "I Plan to Stay a Believer." Musicians like Phil Cohran and the Pharaohs used their music to voice Afrocentric philosophies that challenged racism and segregation, while Maurice White of Earth, Wind, and Fire and Chaka Khan created music that inspired black consciousness. Soul music also accompanied the rise of African American advertisers and the campaign of Chicago's first black mayor, Harold Washington, in 1983. This empowerment was set in stark relief by the social unrest roiling in Chicago and across the nation: as Chicago's homegrown record labels produced rising stars singing songs of progress and freedom, Chicago's black middle class faced limited economic opportunities and deep-seated segregation, all against a backdrop of nationwide deindustrialization. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews and a music critic's passion for the unmistakable Chicago soul sound, Cohen shows us how soul music became the voice of inspiration and change for a city in turmoil.
This book charts the personal and professional journey of Greg Doran, Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company from 2012 until 2022 and "one of the great Shakespearians of his generation" (Sunday Times).
During his illustrious career, Doran has directed or produced all of the plays within Shakespeare's First Folio -- a milestone reached in the same year that the world celebrates the 400th anniversary of its original publication. Each chapter looks at a different play, considering the choices made and weaving in both autobiographical detail and background on the RSC, as well as giving insights into key collaborations, including those with actors such as Judi Dench, David Tennant, Harriet Walter, Patrick Stewart, Simon Russell Beale, Paterson Joseph and Doran's husband, the late Antony Sher, as well as seminal practitioners such as Cicely Berry, John Barton and Terry Hands. The book also includes 16 striking pages with stills from some of the RSC plays. Through Doran's account of this extraordinary journey, we see how Henry VIII, initially regarded as a poisoned chalice, became his lucky break; how the tragedy of 9/11 unfolded during a matinee of King John and how the language of the play went some way in helping to articulate the unfathomable; how a RSC supporter bequeathed their skull to the company to be used as Yorick in Hamlet; how meeting Nelson Mandela inspired the production of Julius Caesar; how Falstaff was introduced to China for the very first time; and how arachnophobia informed the production of Macbeth. This book uniquely captures the excitement, energy, surprises, joys and agonies of working on these greatest of plays; sheds new light on these plays through Doran's own research and discoveries made in the rehearsal room; and gives unprecedented access into the craft, life and loves of this exceptional director.*signed copies available*
From the very beginning, the blues has had a close connection with the LGBTQ community. There is a long and decorated history of so-called 'dirty blues' songs, stretching back beyond the earliest attempts to capture the blues on record. The 1920s and 30s saw the release of dozens of raunchy, bawdy blues recordings aimed at a knowing LGBTQ audience. Queer Blues tells the story of the pioneering LGBTQ composers and entertainers that wrote, performed, and recorded these wonderfully outlandish, life-affirming songs and chronicles, including: Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Josephine Baker to Frankie 'Half-Pint' Jaxon and many more. This is the definitive account of the LGBTQ trailblazers of early blues and a fascinating consideration of the intersection between music and LGBTQ history, from the award-winning Darryl W. Bullock.
During the past thirty years, Native American dance has emerged as a visible force on concert stages throughout North America. In this first major study of contemporary Native American dance, Jacqueline Shea Murphy shows how these performances are at once diverse and connected by common influences.
Demonstrating the complex relationship between Native and modern dance choreography, Shea Murphy delves first into U.S. and Canadian federal policies toward Native performance from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, revealing the ways in which government sought to curtail authentic ceremonial dancing while actually encouraging staged spectacles, such as those in Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows. She then engages the innovative work of Ted Shawn, Lester Horton, and Martha Graham, highlighting the influence of Native American dance on modern dance in the twentieth century. Shea Murphy moves on to discuss contemporary concert dance initiatives, including Canada's Aboriginal Dance Program and the American Indian Dance Theatre.
Illustrating how Native dance enacts, rather than represents, cultural connections to land, ancestors, and animals, as well as spiritual and political concerns, Shea Murphy challenges stereotypes about American Indian dance and offers new ways of recognizing the agency of bodies on stage.
Jacqueline Shea Murphy is associate professor of dance studies at the University of California, Riverside, and coeditor of Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance.