The complete history, on stage and behind the scenes.

The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies offers a full overview of the histories, practices, and critical and theoretical foundations of the rapidly changing landscape of screendance. Drawing on their practices, technologies, theories, and philosophies, scholars from the fields of dance, performance, visual art, cinema and media arts articulate the practice of screendance as an interdisciplinary, hybrid form that has yet to be correctly sited as an academic field worthy of critical investigation. Each chapter discusses and reframe current issues, as a means of promoting and enriching dialogue within the wider community of dance and the moving image. Topics addressed embrace politics of the body; agency, race, and gender in screendance; the relationship of choreography to image; constructs of space and time; representation and effacement; production and curatorial practice; and other areas of intersecting disciplines. The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies features newly-commissioned and original scholarship that will be essential reading for all those interested in the intersection of dance and the moving image, including film and video-makers, dance artists, screendance artists, academics and writers, producers, composers, as well as the wider interested public. It will become an invaluable resource for researchers and professionals in the field.

Here, John Badham, the acclaimed director of Saturday Night Fever, WarGames, Short Circuit, and many other classic films, unveils the secrets of directing and the techniques behind great action and suspense films.

If all disco means to you is records like 'I Will Survive' and 'YMCA', tacky fashions and glitter eyeshadow, this book will be a real revelation. For Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen, disco was an essential soundtrack to their lives. They loved its total hedonistic excess, its drive, its punch and its sweet, catchy melodies. For every chart hit that pounded into the public's consciousness, countless other better tracks were causing hair-raising highs on dance floors where Alan and Jussi and thousands of aficionados like them were strutting their funky stuff. Disco started in obscure underground clubs as a glamour-filled reaction to the plodding, self-indulgent rock music of the late '60s and really took off in the excitement-parched early '70s. Created by people marginalised by their colour (black), race (Latino), sexuality (gay) or class (working), the music and its attendant lifestyle inevitably became watered down and distorted once it slipped from the control of small independent labels and became a worldwide craze. The massive popularity of films such as Saturday Night Fever and the accompanying Bee Gees soundtrack led people to believe that this was disco. But the authors, by exploring such diverse strands as Eurodisco and roller disco, gay disco, and disco fashions, drugs and clubs, show this to be untrue, and instead uncover the magical, multi-layered genre in all its shining, strobe-lit glory. They believe in mirror balls.

'We didn't know what the film was about. We didn't know there was a conflict of image that could perhaps hurt us later on. It sort of grew, blew out of proportion.' - Barry Gibb In the late 70s, the Bee Gees spectacularly revived their career and, with their soundtrack to the Saturday Night Fever film, became the biggest disco group in the world. But when the disco boom crashed they went from icons to punch lines overnight. The band was inescapably frozen in time: all long, flowing manes, big teeth, falsettos, medallions, hairy chests, and skintight satin trousers, one finger forever pointing in the air. The Bee Gees would spend the next forty years trying to convince people there was more to them, growing ever more resentful of their gigantic disco success. 'We'd like to dress "Stayin' Alive" up in a white suit and gold chains and set it on fire,' they said. Stayin' Alive finally lifts that millstone from around their necks by joyfully reappraising and celebrating their iconic disco era. Taking the reader deep into the excesses of the most hedonistic of music scenes, it tells how three brothers from Manchester transformed themselves into the funkiest white group ever and made the world dance. No longer a guilty pleasure but a national treasure.

A history of the nightclub from Studio 54 to the Double Club Nightclubs and discothèques are hotbeds of contemporary culture. Throughout the 20th century, they have been centres of the avant-garde that question the established codes of social life and experiment with different realities, merging interior and furniture design, graphics and art with sound, light, fashion and special effects to create a modern Gesamtkunstwerk. Night Fever: A Design History of Club Culture examines the history of the nightclub, with examples ranging from Italian nightclubs of the 1960s that were created by members of the Radical Design group to the legendary Studio 54 in New York, Philippe Starck's Les Bains Douches in Paris and the more recent Double Club in London, conceived by German artist Carsten Höller for the Prada Foundation. Featuring films and vintage photographs, posters and fashion, Night Fever takes the reader on a fascinating journey through a world of glamour, subculture and the search for the night that never ends.