Dorothy Madden's lively book about Louis Horst (You don't call me Mr. Horst, you call me Louis, he always said) makes for compulsive reading. She follows Horst's extraordinary life, punctuating her narrative with reminiscences, illuminating anecdotes from her personal store of memories, as well as the shared thoughts of others, all interspersed with her choice of evocative and expressive photographs and illustrations, to create a dynamic and memorable portrait of this key figure in American modern dance. Louis Horst: musician, composer, pianist, violonist, pit player, arranger, super accompanist (all sorts), conductor, régisseur, stage manager, tour tartar, catalyst, editor, writer, critic, teacher, consoler, the Sherlock Holmes of restaurants, keeper of journals and budgets, loan provider, lover, friend...

Four American women: Marcia Siegel, Deborah Jowitt, Arlene Croce and Nancy Goldner are writers who became dance critics partly by design. By showing us extensive examples from their vivid writing about dance, Diana Theodores presents a detailed and illuminating analysis of their styles and ideas from 1965 to 1985, the Golden Age of Dance in New York. For the first time, she presents these four writers as a school of dance criticism, four women who defined American dance in a key era of its recent history. About the Author

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.

The untold life story of All-of-a-Kind Family author Sydney Taylor, highlighting her dramatic influence on American children’s literature This is the first and only biography of Sydney Taylor (1904–1978), author of the award-winning All-of-a-Kind Family series of books, the first juvenile novels published by a mainstream publisher to feature Jewish children characters. The family—based on Taylor’s own as a child—includes five sisters, each two years apart, dressed alike by their fastidious immigrant mother so they all look the same: all-of-a-kind. The four other sisters’ names were the same in the books as in their real lives; only the real-life Sarah changed hers to the boyish Sydney while she was in high school. Cummins elucidates the deep connections between the progressive Taylor’s books and American Jewish experiences, arguing that Taylor was deeply influential in the development of national Jewish identity. This biography conveys the vital importance of children’s books in the transmission of Jewish culture and the preservation of ethnic heritage.

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The revolution that happened in the American dance world between 1932 until 1992 was as great, or even greater, than the earlier movement revolution instigated by the Ballets Russes. In his revealing book David Wood evokes this exciting period of change and describes the roles of the key creative personalities with whom he worked: Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, Jose Limon, Hanya Holm, Alwin Nikolais, Helen Tamiris, Sophie Maslow, Jane Dudley, and William Bales. David Wood has been a key figure in the American dance world for nearly 50 years, making numerous appearances on television as an actor/dancer and in Broadway musicals. He began working with Martha Graham in 1953, as a soloist, touring the world, performing roles in all the famous productions, especially Secular Games which Graham created for him. He has his own company BARD (Bay Area Repertory Dance) which has toured the United States and Europe. The choreography of Wood's signature work, Lorca's House of B

How do women set up institutions? How has higher education helped or hindered women in the world of dance? These are some of the questions addressed through interviews and researched by the educators and dancers Sharon E. Friedler and Susan B. Glazer in Dancing Female . In dealing with some of the tensions, joys, frustrations, and fears women experience at various points of their creative lives, the contributors strike a balance between a theoretical sense of feminism and its practice in reality. This book presents answers to basic questions about women, power, and action. Why do women choreographers choose to create the dances they do in the manner they do? How do women in dance work independently and organizationally?