"Textbook for undergrad general education and dance courses on the topic of dance around the world. It serves as a gateway into studying world cultures through dance"--

Song and dance style--viewed as nonverbal communications about culture--are here related to social structure and cultural history. Patterns of performance, theme, text and movement are analyzed in large samples of films an recordings from the whole range of human culture, according to the methods explained in this volume. Cantometrics, which means song as a measure of man, finds that traditions of singing trace the main historic distributions of human culture and that specific traits of performance are communications about identifiable aspects of society. The predictable and universal relations between expressive communication and social organization, here established for the first time, open up the possibility of a scientific aesthetics, useful to planners.

This overview of folk dancing in the United States showcases an important historical movement and explains how folk dance communities evolved to fulfill the needs of specific groups of people over time. While the general term "folk dance" encompasses a surprising variety of specific dances, there are three major recreational communities or forms: international folk dance, modern western square dance, and contra dance. Throughout the last century, millions of people have enjoyed folk dancing as an educational and recreational activity, regardless of the particular style. Folk Dancing explains the reasons for the folk dance movement that exploded in Europe and North America in the late 19th century. It describes the clubs, camps, festivals, and communities that sprang up, and examines the culture of the movement—the music, key individuals and events, types of clothing, and influences of technologies and popular culture. The book contains authoritative, original information gleaned from the author's own research conducted with hundreds of folk dance enthusiasts across America.

From healing, fertility, and religious rituals, through theatrical entertainment, to death ceremonies and ancestor worship, the updated and revised second edition of World Dance Cultures introduces an extraordinary variety of dance forms and their cultures, which are practiced around the world. This highly illustrated textbook draws on wide-ranging historical documentation and first-hand accounts taking in India, Bali, Java, Cambodia, China, Japan, Hawai‘i, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Africa, Türkiye, Spain, Native America, South America, and the Caribbean, with this second edition adding new chapters on the Pacific Islands, Southern Africa, France, and Cuba. Each chapter covers a certain region’s distinctive dances, pinpoints key issues and trends from the form’s development to its modern iteration, and offers a wealth of study features including: • Spotlights zooming in on key details of a dance form’s cultural, historical, and religious contexts • Explorations—first-hand descriptions by famous dancers and ethnographers, excerpts from anthropological fieldwork, or historical writings on the form • Think About—provocations to encourage critical analysis of dance forms and the ways in which they’re understood • Discussion Questions—starting points for group work, classroom seminars, or individual study. Offering a comprehensive overview of each dance form covered with over 100 full color photos, World Dance Cultures is an essential introductory resource for students and instructors alike.

Anne Green Gilbert’s Brain-Compatible Dance Education, Second Edition, strikes the perfect balance between hard science and practicality, making it an ideal resource for dance educators working with dancers of all ages and abilities. Gilbert presents the latest brain research and its implications for dance educators and dancers. She makes the research findings accessible and easy to digest, always connecting the science to the teaching and learning that takes place in classrooms and studios.