Dance’s Duet with the Camera: Motion Pictures is a collection of essays written by various authors on the relationship between live dance and film. Chapters cover a range of topics that explore dance film, contemporary dance with film on stage, dance as an ideal medium to be captured by 3D images and videodance as kin to site-specific choreography. This book explores the ways in which early practitioners such as Loïe Fuller and Maya Deren began a conversation between media that has continued to evolve and yet still retains certain unanswered questions. Methodology for this conversation includes dance historical approaches as well as mechanical considerations. The camera is a partner, a disembodied portion of self that looks in order to reflect on, to mirror, or to presage movement. This conversation includes issues of sexuality, race, and mixed ability. Bodies and lenses share equal billing.

Dance in TV advertisements has long been familiar to Americans as a silhouette dancing against a colored screen, exhibiting moves from air guitar to breakdance tricks, all in service of selling the latest Apple product. But as author Colleen T. Dunagan shows in Consuming Dance, the advertising industry used dance to market items long before iPods. In this book, Dunagan lays out a comprehensive history and analysis of dance commercials to demonstrate the ways in which the form articulates with, informs, and reflects U.S. culture. In doing so, she examines dance commercials as cultural products, looking at the ways in which dance engages with television, film, and advertising in the production of cultural meaning. Throughout the book, Dunagan interweaves semiotics, choreographic analysis, cultural studies, and critical theory in an examination of contemporary dance commercials while placing the analysis within a historical context. She draws upon connections between individual dance-commercials and the discursive and production histories to provide a thorough look into brand identity and advertising's role in constructing social identities.

Although Film Studies has successfully (re)turned attention to matters of style and interpretation, its sibling discipline has left the territory uncharted - until now. The question of how television operates on a stylistic level has been critically underexplored, despite being fundamental to our viewing experience. This significant new work redresses a vital gap in Television Studies by engaging with the stylistic dynamics of TV; exploring the aesthetic properties and values of both the medium and particular types of output (specific programmes); and raising important questions about the way we judge television as both cultural artifact and art form. Television Aesthetics and Style provides a unique and vital intervention in the field, raising key questions about television's artistic properties and possibilities. Through a series of case-studies by internationally renowned scholars, the collection takes a radical step forward in understanding TV's stylistic achievements.

Liz Aggiss and Billy Cowie, known collectively as Divas Dance Theatre, are renowned for their highly visual, interdisciplinary brand of dance performance that incorporates elements of theatre, film, opera, poetry and vaudevillian humour. Anarchic Dance, consisting of a book and downloadable resources, is a visual and textual record of their boundary-shattering performance work. The downloadable resources feature extracts from Aggiss and Cowie's work, including the highly-acclaimed dance film Motion Control (premiered on BBC2 in 2002), rare video footage of their punk-comic live performances as The Wild Wigglers and reconstructions of Aggiss's solo performance in Grotesque Dancer. These films are cross-referenced in the book, allowing readers to match performance and commentary as Aggiss and Cowie invite a broad range of writers to examine their live performance and dance screen practice through analysis, theory, discussion and personal response. Extensively illustrated with black and white and colour photographs Anarchic Dance, provides a comprehensive investigation into Cowie and Aggiss’s collaborative partnership and demonstrates a range of exciting approaches through which dance performance can be engaged critically.

The most comprehensive resource available on dance films and videos in current distribution in the United States. An essential tool for any dance and/or film reference collection.

The life and work of motion picture director Robert Altman (1925-2006) are interpreted from a variety of perspectives in this collection of essays. Actors, historians, film scholars, and cultural theorists reflect on Altman and his five-decade career and discuss the significance of music, history and genre in his films. Two actors who have appeared in some of the filmmaker's most important works are prominently represented, with a statement from Elliot Gould (MASH, The Long Goodbye, California Split) and an essay by Michael Murphy (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Nashville, Tanner '88). The collection ends with an essay on the importance of death in the director's final productions The Company (2003) and Prairie Home Companion (2006) by noted Altman scholar Robert T. Self.

Matthew Bourne and His Adventures in Dance is an intimate and in-depth conversation between the prize-winning pioneer of ballet and contemporary dance Matthew Bourne and the New York Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay. In 1987, a small, aspirant dance group with a striking name made its debut on the London fringe. In 1996, Adventures in Motion Pictures made history as the first modern dance company to open a production in London's West End. From this achievement, AMP sailed triumphantly to Broadway - winning three Tony Awards - guided by Artistic Director Matthew Bourne. Even before the inception of AMP, Bourne was fascinated by theatre, by characterization, and by the history of dance. In his early works - Spitfire, Town & Country and Deadly Serious - Bourne brought a novel approach to dance. And in his reworkings of the classics of the ballet canon - Nutcracker, Swan Lake, Cinderella - Bourne created witty, vivid, poignant productions that received great acclaim. In the first decade of the new millennium, the company name was changed to New Adventures, and Bourne's 'classics', as well as Bourne's new works - The Car Man, Play Without Words, Edward Scissorhands and Dorian Gray - achieved levels of box-office popularity that have seldom, if ever, been matched in dance. In addition, his choreography for various musicals - My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins and Oliver! - have run for years in the West End and on Broadway. The detail in which Bourne discusses his work with Alastair Macaulay is unprecedented. The two explore Bourne's upbringing, his training and influences, and his distinctive creative methods. Bourne's notebooks, his sources and his collaboration with dancers all form part of the discussion in this book.