General

Conditioning for Dance

Conditioning for Dance improves your technique and performance in all dance forms by strengthening the body's core while improving your coordination, balance, alignment, and flexibility. The result is more lift without tension, deeper pliés, higher jumps with less effort, tighter turns, and improved extension and turnout.

The innovative, proven techniques in this book will help you execute key movements better as you

·strengthen the muscles you use in dance by performing exercises with elastic resistance bands;
·start and move in proper alignment using imagery;
·improve your balance and release tension through playful exercises with small balls;
·develop leg and torso power that translates to higher jumps and tighter turns; and
·optimize your flexibility through touch, movement awareness, and imagery.

Conditioning for Dance features 102 imagery illustrations paired with dance-specific exercises to help you maximize body-mind conditioning. The book culminates with a 20-minute, full-body barre workout routine designed to help you warm up, condition, and refine your dance technique.

By working the muscles through movements and ranges of motion that approximate the demands of your chosen dance form, you directly enrich your performance capabilities. And as you strengthen the body's core, stretch to gain just the right amount of flexibility, and incorporate the power of the mind, you unleash your full artistic and physical potential.

Dynamic Alignment Through Imagery

Destined to become a classic text and reference, Dynamic Alignment Through Imagery shows you how to use imaging techniques to improve posture and alignment and release excess tension. The book's 195 illustrations will help you visualize the images and exercises and show you how to use them in a variety of contexts.

Part I of Dynamic Alignment Through Imagery discusses the origins and uses of imagery and includes 36 exercises that demonstrate dynamic alignment in practice. You'll explore the importance of posture and dynamic alignment and discover how to use imagery to affect body movement.

Part II explains the biomechanical and anatomical principles behind complex imagery and illustrates 52 exercises to bring these principles to life. You'll learn how to use basic physics to create a strong yet fluid balance in your muscles and joints.

Part III provides 250 anatomical imagery exercises to help you fine-tune alignments and increase body awareness. The exercises focus on different regions of the body--the pelvis, hips, knees, lower legs, spine, shoulders, arms, hands, head, and neck--as well as on breathing. You can select specific images to address individual needs or follow the sequence presented in the book.

And Part IV provides 23 holistic exercises to sculpt and improve alignment in various positions--standing, supine, and sitting. These exercises will help you establish a body image that facilitates dynamic alignment and releases excess tension.

By practicing the techniques described in Dynamic Alignment Through Imagery, you'll tap into the power of imagery and create better movement.

The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition

The Viewpoints is a technique of improvisation that grew out of the postmodern dance world. It was first articulated by choreographer Mary Overlie, who broke down the two dominant issues performers deal with-space and time-into six categories. Since that time, directors Anne Bogart and Tina Landau have expanded her notions and adapted them for actors to function together spontaneously and intuitively and to generate bold, theatrical work.

The Viewpoints are a set of names given to certain principles of movement through time and space-they constitute a language for talking about what happens on stage. Coupling this with Composition, which is the practice of selecting and arranging the separate components of theatrical language into a cohesive work of art, provides theatre artists with an important new tool for creating and understanding their art form.

Primarily intended for the many theatre artists who, in the last several years, have become intrigued with Viewpoints yet have had no single source to refer to in their investigations. It can also be used by anyone with a general interest in collaboration and the creative process, whether in art, business or daily life.

Anne Bogart is Artistic Director of the SITI Company, which she founded with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki in 1992. She is the recipient of two OBIE Awards and a Bessie Award, and is an associate professor at Columbia University. Her recent works include Alice's Adventures; Bobrauschenbergamerica; Small Lives, Big Dreams; Marathon Dancing; and The Baltimore Waltz.

Tina Landau, noted director and playwright, whose original work includes Space (Time magazine 10 Best), Dream True (with composer Ricky Ian Gordon) and Floyd Collins (with composer Adam Guettel), which received the Lucille Lortel Award for Best Musical, an OBIE Award and seven Drama Desk nominations. She has been an ensemble member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company since 1997.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Exotic and Pole Dancing Illustrated (Complete Idiot's Guide to)

The new dance craze that’s sweeping the nation—with a DVD!

ItÂ’s been featured on Oprah three times, and now women all over America are building confidence, shedding pounds, and spicing up their love lives. In the first instructional book on the subject, a professional dancer and instructor provides easy to follow, step-by-step instructions that will enable women to become expert exotic and pole dancers in no time.
--Over 150 photos demonstrating all the moves
--The first instructional book on this new craze
?--Includes a specially made, high quality 60-minute instructional DVD
--Detailed advice about makeup, lighting, music, shoes, and costumes
--Step-by-step instructions on how to have a removable pole installed in oneÂ’s home

Gypsy: Memoirs of America's Most Celebrated Stripper

Gypsy Rose Lee’s memoir became a New York Times bestseller in 1957, inspiring the 1959 hit musical, two movies, and three revivals. Now a fourth, directed by Arthur Laurents and starring Patti LuPone, is lighting up New York, winning top Broadway theatre awards, including three 2008 Tony Awards, as well as raves from critics and audiences:

“No matter how long you live, you’ll never see a more exciting production.” —Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal

“Watch out, New York! This GYPSY is a wallop-packing show of raw power.” —Ben Brantley, The New York Times

“Not your ordinary theater experience. This is the best production of the best damn musical ever.” —Liz Smith, Syndicated Columnist

The memoir, which Gypsy began as a series of pieces for The New Yorker, contains photographs and newspaper clippings from her personal scrapbooks and an afterword by her son, Erik Lee Preminger. At turns touching and hilarious, Gypsy describes her childhood trouping across 1920s America through her rise to stardom as The Queen of Burlesque in 1930s New York—where gin came in bathtubs, gangsters were celebrities, and Walter Winchell was king.

Gypsy’s story features outrageous characters—among them Broadway’s funny girl, Fanny Brice, who schooled Gypsy in how to be a star; gangster Waxy Gordon, who fixed her teeth; and her indomitable mother, Rose, who lived by her own version of the Golden Rule: “Do unto others … before they do you.”

100 Lessons in Classical Ballet: The Eight-Year Program of Leningrad's Vaganova Choreographic School

The complete 8-year curriculum of Leningrad's famed Vaganova Choreographic School, which trained Nureyev, Baryshnikov, and Makarova, including over 100 photographs. A volume which no teacher, scholar, or student of the dance can afford to miss. "A serious, indeed indispensable, textbook." -Clive Barnes

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Ballroom Dancing, DVD Edition (Complete Idiot's Guide to)

Ballroom dancing is back! And now anyone can move like a pro. DVD included!

In addition to the step-by-step photos, footwork illustrations, and instruction covering all the common ballroom dances, this new edition of the bestselling Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Ballroom Dancing includes a 90-minute instructional DVD featuring award-winning dancer and dance instructor Jeff Allen. It corresponds with the text seamlessly, giving readers the next best thing to one-on-one instruction, at a fraction of the cost.
• The #1 selling ballroom dancing book
• Includes a fantastic, new instructional DVD and hundreds of illustrations and instructions
• Allen is a renowned, award-winning ballroom-dance teacher

The Pointe Book: Shoes, Training & Technique Second Edition

This guide provides a thorough examination of the pointe technique and pointe shoes. Dancers tired of their pointe shoes wearing out too quickly benefit from research that illuminates the shoemaking process and tips that show how to best fit, care for, and custom order their shoes. Interviews with ballet stars Martine van Hamel and Darci Kistler reveal their highly evolved but proven methods of caring for pointe shoes. The basics of the pointe technique, different pointe methods, and the history of pointe are discussed. A handy reference on pointe-related injuries and their remedies is included. This new edition offers the latest information on contemporary designs, materials, products, and suppliers. A sampling of pointe technique schools around the country offers an authoritative syllabus for teachers and students alike.

LION KING, THE: PRIDE ROCK ON BROADWAY

You saw the animated film, you bought the video, you couldn't get tickets to the stage show--here's the coffee-table book. But wait: what keeps The Lion King: Pride Rock on Broadway from being just another commercial Disney tie-in is the iconoclastic voice of director/designer Julie Taymor. She uses the text of this book as a diary for her personal struggle to merge her off-off-Broadway avant-garde sensibility with Disney's unabashedly bigtime commercial one. Her chronicle lends context to the already lush and abundant illustrations, photographs, and sketches of Taymor and her collaborators at work.

You saw the animated film, you bought the video, you couldn't get tickets to the stage show--here's the coffee-table book. But wait: what keeps The Lion King: Pride Rock on Broadway from being just another commercial Disney tie-in is the iconoclastic voice of director/designer Julie Taymor. She uses the text of this book as a diary for her personal struggle to merge her off-off-Broadway avant-garde sensibility with Disney's unabashedly bigtime commercial one. Her chronicle lends context to the already lush and abundant illustrations, photographs, and sketches of Taymor and her collaborators at work.

Diet for Dancers: A Complete Guide to Nutrition and Weight Control