Books published by Dance Books Ltd

Talks about the art of character dancing in classical ballet. This book deals with class character exercises and gives specific character dances in various national styles.

The Golden Age presents a detailed overview of the development of ballet in Soviet Russia, from its fight for survival in the early years after the 1917 revolutions through the onset of the Cold War. Their achievements in creating the Soviet Golden Age were truly remarkable.

New Edition of the classic book, first published in 1944. It remains the definitive work on the masterpiece of the Romantic Ballet, Giselle.

Uncompromising innovator, researcher,dancer and scholar, mentor and matriarchShe is a bishop's daughter with a silver-spoonchildhood and youthful traumas throughthe death of her father, wartime separationand teenage poverty. Valerie's meeting, agedsixteen, with the extraordinary HungarianRudolf Laban, guru of expressionist dance,set her on a life-long career devoted toquestioning, championing and developinghis initial insights into dance as a deeplysignificant art form for human wellbeing.Her writing exposes her battles to integratedance practice with dance scholarship in aworld set up to keep them apart.She shares the difficulties of balancing thedemands of family with professional lifeexacerbated by the catastrophic illness of herhusband John and her own experience ofmental breakdown.She describes her travels taking dance allover the globe and collecting evidence acrossEurope of Laban's leadership of German dancein the 1920s and 1930s, work that the Naziregime almost succeeded in annihilating.The book traces her support of what isnow Trinity Laban Conservatoire for Musicand Dance, from being in its first cohort ofstudents in a grubby studio in Manchester tobeing honoured as a Fellow in its Herzog andde Meuron award-winning building in SouthLondon.Valerie shares her wholehearted commitmentto whatever was on offer at difference stages ofher life from performing and choreographing,renovating a Victorian garden and runningclubs for disadvantaged people, writing booksand directing documentaries, educatingdancers and dance makers, engaging withall manner of people along the way from theleft-wing theatre director Joan Littlewood tothe establishment Archbishop of Canterburyor the astounding choreographer WilliamForsythe, while nurturing her family and embracing Quakerism.

Choreutics gives a cogent account of the basis of Laban's Space Harmony.

This classic book is the definitive work on one of ballet's greatest and most popular works, Swan Lake.The book is in two parts. The first describes the evolution of Swan Lake from its initial conception to its first realisation by the Austrian choreographer Julius Wenzel Reisinger, which was a comparative failure, followed by the story of the ballet's resuscitation and eventual triumph by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov. Included are the original synopses of both the original Reisinger production and the Petipa-Ivanov version. There is an account of Tchaikovsky and his score, together with details of the original settings and costumes, and many of those designed for later productions.The second part of the book is concerned with the actual presentation of the ballet. The choreography of all four acts of the Petipa-Ivanov version is set out in full, with explanations of not only the stage action, but also of how the dancers move, the kind of steps they do, the gestures they make and what they are intended to express. The various roles are also analysed from the dancers' points of view, and some of the problems that may confront both dancer and producer are considered and resolved.Finally, there is a survey of some of the great dancers who over the years have achieved distinction in the roles of Odette-Odile and Prince Siegfried.

After a distinguished career as a dancer, Nicolai Serrebrenikov became one of the leading teachers at the Vaganova Choreographic School in St. Petersburg. In this major work on pas de deux, the students and teachers are taken step by step through the fundamentals of double work to the most complex enchainements of the classical repertoire.The translator and editor, Joan Lawson, studied dance with Margaret Morris and Serafina Astafieva, and later became of of the first English ballet dancers to study in Soviet Russia, subsequently becoming a distinguished and much-loved teacher at the Royal Ballet School in London.

A reprint of a notation score. It provides a facsimile of Louis Pecour's 17th-century dance manual in Feuillet notation.

Rudolf Laban's provocative, experimental, explosive dance theatre works have lain hidden since the Third Reich deliberately annihilated his name. This book exposes Laban's audacity and his significance for dance theatre today, giving access to his creative practices as he provided dance audiences with shock, amusement, and awe.

Laban's The Mastery of Movement on the Stage, first published in 1950, quickly came to be accepted as the standard work on his conception of human move­ment. When he died, Laban was in the process of preparing a new edition of the book, and so for some time after his death it was out of print. That a second edition appeared was solely due to the efforts of Lisa Ullmann, who, better than any other person, was aware of the changes that Laban had intended to make. The rather broader treatment of the subject made advis­able the change of title, for it was recognised that the book would appeal to all who seek to understand movement as a force in life. In this fourth edition Lisa Ullmann has taken the opportunity to make margin annotations to indicate the subject matter referred to in a particular section of the text, so that specified topics may be easily found. Kinetograms have been added to most of the examples in Chapters 2 and 3, as Laban originally intended, for the growing number of people who read and write movement notation. Lisa Ullmann has also compiled an Appendix on the the structure of effort, drawing largely on material from an unpublished book by Laban. The relationship between the inner motivation of movement and the outer functioning of the body is explored. Acting and dancing are shown as activities deeply concerned with man's urge to establish values and meanings. The student is introduced to basic principles underlying movement expres­sion and experience and the numerous exercises are intended to challenge his or her intellectual, emotional and physical responses. The many descrip­tions of movement scenes and mine-dances are designed to stimulate penetra­tion into man's inner life from where movement and action originate.

Sets out the classes taught in their first three years of study to students at the USSR's main school of classical ballet, the Vaganova Choreographic School in Leningrad. This book presents a detailed exposition of the teaching methods of one of the world's great ballet schools.

Drawn partly from the scattered remnants of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and partly from extraordinary new talent, Colonel W de Basil's company of dancers kept alive the heritage of the Russian ballet for a period spanning virtually twenty years. This title tells the story of the de Basil ballet.

Soviet ballet immediately following the Russian Revolution of 1917 until the advent of Stalin in the thirties is one of the most important, yet least documented, periods in ballet history.In this new study Elizabeth Souritz, former head of the Dance Section of the Moscow Institute of the History of the Arts, draws on Russian archival material, theatre literature, and reminiscences of performers, designers and choreographers to paint a powerful and colourful picture of this influential time.

Tamara Tchinarova was born in Romania in 1919 and began her dance training in Paris with emigre ballerinas from the Imperial Russian Ballet. This autobiography highlights Tamara's life in Romania and her dancing career, the marriage to Peter Finch, through to her subsequent career as adviser and interpreter for many Russian ballet companies.

Pierre Rameau's "Le Maitre a Danser" is the standard work on the technique of 18th century dancing. It was first published in Paris in 1725, and bore the printed recommendation of the celebrated dancer and maitre de ballet Louis Pecour.

In 1860 the great Danish choreographer and ballet-master, August Bournonville, wrote a series of eight public letters, which were published simultaneously in France and Turin. Bournonville's letters, featured in this volume, express his views on many aspects of ballet in his time.

The dancer and choreographer Jean-George Noverre's 'Letters on Dancing and Ballets' were first published in Stuttgart in 1760. They set forth his ideas for the reform of ballet, ideas which were considered revolutionary in their day and indeed anticipated changes to be carried out more than a century later.

"School of Classical Dance" is the official textbook of the Vaganova School and takes the reader from the basic concepts of the syllabus to the most complicated exercises taught at the end of the eight-year course.