Twenty-four-year-old Paige Russell, still grieving the death of her single mother, defines herself as an orphan. Her obsession to find the father she never knew takes her to Tucson, Arizona, where she settles in as the newest ballroom instructor at Desert DanceSport. But Paige's newfound sense of belonging could be short-lived. Swirling under the glamorous surface of Desert DanceSport are rivalries and conflicts that threaten the future of the studio, and Paige is hiding a life-changing secret of her own. Studio owner Katherine Carrington is grappling with complicated cash-flow issues of her own making. As her stress level rises, her demeanor ricochets between controlling and neurotic. Katherine's identity is defined by her ownership of the studio, and losing it would mean losing herself. Aging playboy Marcos Stephanos, dance master and studio manager, is too distracted by the disarming new-hire Paige to focus on the warning signs of Katherine's erratic behavior. Will his nonchalance cost him his career? Top dance instructor Tony Moreno finds flirting with Paige so tantalizing he misses practice sessions with his ambitious, professional partner, Sylvie Goldstein. Instead of burning up the floor with Tony, Sylvie is smoking with resentment against her unwitting rival, Paige. Will misunderstood intentions and ego-driven altercations force the exposure of secrets and betrayals at the studio so many call home? Who will adapt and who will retreat when expectations clash with reality, and the status quo suddenly shifts? Laced with humor, Dancing Between the Beats offers an insider's view of the world of ballroom dance, along with a smattering of off-beat insights about relationships.

Between Beats: The Jazz Tradition and Black Vernacular Dance offers a new look at the complex intersections between jazz music and popular dance over the last hundred-plus years. Author Christi Jay Wells shows how popular entertainment and cultures of social dancing were crucial to jazz music's formation and development even as jazz music came to earn a reputation as a "legitimate" art form better suited for still, seated listening. Through the concept of choreographies of listening, the book explores amateur and professional jazz dancers' relationships with jazz music and musicians as jazz's soundscapes and choreoscapes were forged through close contact and mutual creative exchange. It also unpacks the aesthetic and political negotiations through which jazz music supposedly distanced itself from dancing bodies. Fusing little-discussed material from diverse historical and contemporary sources with the author's own years of experience as a social jazz dancer, it advances participatory dance and embodied practice as central topics of analysis in jazz studies. As it explores the fascinating history of jazz as popular dance music, it exposes how American anxieties about bodies and a broad cultural privileging of the cerebral over the corporeal have shaped efforts to "elevate" expressive forms such as jazz to elite status.

This fresh, inspirational approach shows how to frame the art of dance within the context of life and how to gain the tools to appreciate, discuss and write about dance as a fine art. It also helps develop creative thinking and self-expression.

The intertribal pow-wow is the most widespread venue for traditional Indian music and dance in North America. Heartbeat of the People is an insider's journey into the dances and music, the traditions and regalia, and the functions and significance of these vital cultural events. Tara Browner focuses on the Northern pow-wow of the northern Great Plains and Great Lakes to investigate the underlying tribal and regional frameworks that reinforce personal tribal affiliations. Interviews with dancers and her own participation in pow-wow events and community provide fascinating on-the-ground accounts and provide detail to a rare ethnomusicological analysis of Northern music and dance.

What are the arts? What functions do the arts serve in human life? There has been a surge of cognitive, biological, and evolutionary interest in the arts in recent years, most of it oriented towards individual artforms. However, there has been virtually no bridging work to integrate the arts under a single theoretical perspective. This book presents the first integrated cognitive account of the arts that unites visual art, theatre, literature, dance, and music into a single framework, with supporting discussions about creativity and aesthetics. Its comparative approach identifies both what is unique to each artform and what they share, shedding light on how the arts can combine with one another to form syntheses, such as choreographing dance movements to music, or setting lyrics to music to create a song. While studies in the psychology of the arts tend to focus on perceptual processes and aesthetic responses alone, this book offers a holistic sensorimotor account that examines the full gamut of processes from creation to perception. This allows for a broad discussion of the evolution of the arts, including the origins of rhythm, the co-evolution of music and language, the evolution of drawing, and cultural evolution of the arts. Finally, the book unifies a number of topics that have not previously been fully related to one another, including theatre and literature, music and language, creativity and aesthetics, dancing and acting, and visual art and music. A unique volume providing a bold new approach to the integration of the arts, for academics or general readers of the arts, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, anthropology, and evolutionary studies.