Are you cursed with two left feet? Are your dance moves unrighteous? Do you refrain from getting down lest others judge you cruelly? Fear not. Salvation is at hand. Singing hymns of praise is standard practice-now it's time to set your feet a-tapping with a collection of original dance moves inspired by Jesus and the likes of Moses and John the Baptist. Dances include: the Water Walk, the Temptation Tango, the Judas Hustle, and The Apostolic Conga. Each dance move is outlined with: how to, inspiration, and an illustration. Slyly irreverent but ultimately festive, Dancing with Jesus is illustrated in full color. Best of all, two of the dances are animated for full effect by a lenticular cover and last-spread finale, making this a truly one-of-a-kind novelty item! As the Bible says in Ecclesiastes, there is, "A time to weep, a time to laugh, a time to mourn, a time to dance."

As dance training evolves and becomes more complex, knowledge of motor behavior is foundational in helping dancers learn and master new skills and become more efficient in integrating the skills. Motor Learning and Control for Dance is the first resource to address motor learning theory from a dance perspective. Educators and students preparing to teach will learn practical ways to connect the science behind dance to pedagogy in order to prepare dancers for performance. Dancers interested in performance from the recreational to professional levels will learn ways to enhance their technical and artistic progress. In language accessible even to those with no science background, Motor Learning and Control for Dance showcases principles and practices for students, artists, and teachers. The text offers a perspective on movement education not found in traditional dance training while adding to a palette of tools and strategies for improving dance instruction and performance. Aspiring dancers and instructors will explore how to develop motor skills, how to control movement on all levels, and—most important—how motor skills are best taught and learned. The authors, noted experts on motor learning and motor control in the dance world, explore these features that appeal to students and instructors alike: • Dance-specific photos, examples, and figures illustrate how to solve common problems various dance genres. • The 16 chapters prepare dance educators to teach dancers of all ages and abilities and support the development of dance artists and students in training and performance. • An extensive bibliography of sports and dance science literature allows teachers and performers to do their own research. • A glossary with a list of key terms at the back of the book. Part I presents an overview of motor behavior, covering motor development from birth to early adulthood. It provides the essential information for teaching posture control and balance, the locomotor skills underlying a range of complex dance skills, and the ballistic skills that are difficult to teach and learn, such as grand battement and movements in street dance. Part II explores motor control and how movement is planned, initiated, and executed. Readers will learn how the nervous system organizes the coordination of movement, the effects of anxiety and states of arousal on dance performance, how to integrate the senses into movement, and how speed and accuracy interact. Part III investigates methods of motor learning for dancers of all ages. Readers will explore how to implement a variety of instructional strategies, determine the best approaches for learning dance skills, and motivate and inspire dancers. This section also discusses how various methods of practice can help or hinder dancers, strategies for improving the recall of dance skills and sequences, and how to embrace somatic practice and its contribution to understanding imagery and motor learning. Motor Learning and Control for Dance addresses many related topics that are important to the discipline, such as imagery and improvisation. This book will help performers and teachers blend science with pedagogy to meet the challenge of artistry and technique in preparing for dance performance.

Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema, an ambitious study of two of South Asia's most popular cultural forms cinema and dance historicizes and theorizes the material and cultural production of film dance, a staple attraction of popular Hindi cinema. It explores how the dynamic figurations of the body wrought by cinematic dance forms from the 1930s to the 1990s produce unique constructions of gender, sexuality, stardom, and spectacle. By charting discursive shifts through figurations of dancer-actresses, their publicly performed movements, private training, and the cinematic and extra-diegetic narratives woven around their dancing bodies, the book considers the "women's question" via new mobilities corpo-realized by dancing women. Some of the central figures animating this corporeal history are Azurie, Sadhona Bose, Vyjayanthimala, Helen, Waheeda Rehman, Madhuri Dixit, and Saroj Khan, whose performance histories fold and intersect with those of other dancing women, including devadasis and tawaifs, Eurasian actresses, oriental dancers, vamps, choreographers, and backup dancers. Through a material history of the labor of producing on-screen dance, theoretical frameworks that emphasize collaboration, such as the "choreomusicking body" and "dance musicalization," aesthetic approaches to embodiment drawing on treatises like the Natya Sastra and the Abhinaya Darpana, and formal analyses of cine-choreographic "techno-spectacles," Dancing Women offers a variegated, textured history of cinema, dance, and music. Tracing the gestural genealogies of film dance produces a very different narrative of Bombay cinema, and indeed of South Asian cultural modernities, by way of a corporeal history co-choreographed by a network of remarkable dancing women.

Zen Buddhists have long taught that success at any task can be achieved only through a mastery of concentration. The college freshman and business professional alike will appreciate this effective approach to learning made enjoyable.

For many people step dancing is associated mainly with the Irish step-dance stage shows, Riverdance and Lord of the Dance, which assisted both in promoting the dance form and in placing Ireland globally. But, in this book, Catherine Foley illustrates that the practice and contexts of step dancing are much more complicated and fluid. Tracing the trajectory of step dancing in Ireland, she tells its story from roots in eighteenth-century Ireland to its diverse cultural manifestations today. She examines the interrelationships between step dancing and the changing historical and cultural contexts of colonialism, nationalism, postcolonialism and globalization, and shows that step dancing is a powerful tool of embodiment and meaning that can provoke important questions relating to culture and identity through the bodies of those who perform it. Focusing on the rural European region of North Kerry in the south-west of Ireland, Catherine Foley examines three step-dance practices: one, the rural Molyneaux step-dance practice, representing the end of a relatively long-lived system of teaching by itinerant dancing masters in the region; two, Rinceoirí na Ríochta, a dance school representative of the urbanized staged, competition orientated practice, cultivated by the cultural nationalist movement, the Gaelic League, established at the end of the nineteenth century, and practised today both in Ireland and abroad; and three, the stylized, commoditized, folk-theatrical practice of Siamsa Tíre, the National Folk Theatre of Ireland, established in North Kerry in the 1970s. Written from an ethnochoreological perspective, Catherine Foley provides a rich historical and ethnographic account of step dancing, step dancers and cultural institutions in Ireland.

Telling a riveting true story of the emergence and development of an American icon, this book traces swing dancing from its origins to its status as a modern-day art form. From its unlikely origins in the African slave trade, one of the saddest chapters of American history, swing dance emerged as a celebration of the soul. Swing is now recognized around the globe as a joyous partnered dance, uniquely Afro-American in origin and an American treasure. This book examines how the original swing style of the 1920s, the Lindy Hop, branched out and evolved with the changing dynamics of popular culture, paralleling the development of the nation. Swing Dancing covers the dance through the years of minstrelsy, the jazz age, the big band era, bebop, and the decline of partnered dancing in the 1960s. Swing experts and instructors Tamara and Erin Stevens have combined a compelling historic examination of swing dance with an assortment of riveting personal interviews and photographic documentation to create a comprehensive reference book on this important art form.

This 12-hour free course on the teaching of dancing skills looked at matters of safety, technique and movement in the context of contemporary dance.