Modern

Matthew Rushing, an exceptional professional dancer that has taken the dance world by storm. Matthew began his professional career at age 17, and has continued to perform for 30 years with The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Through much hard work, and dedication Matthew also transitioned into leadership positions; first as Rehearsal Director/Guest Artist, and is presently the Associate Artistic Director. This amazing versatile dancer is a perfect fit for the high caliber repertoire company of The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Matthew is not only an amazing dancer, but also an outstanding humanitarian. Enjoy Matthew's journey as you turn the pages of his biographical story. The author Toni Lynn is a native of Pittsburgh, PA. She is a graduate of the University of California, Irvine, with a Masters of Fine Arts degree in Dance, and a Bachelor of Arts in dance from Point Park University, Pittsburgh, PA. Toni started dancing at the age of 11, and at 12 was awarded a summer scholarship to study dance at the University Of Pittsburgh. She danced with The Pittsburgh Black Theater Dance Ensemble, Barbara Sullivan's Atlanta Dance Theater, and Chester Whitmore's Central Avenue Dance Ensemble, Los Angeles. Toni was the featured dancer for actress Della Reese's 70th birthday party. She is also proud to be an original member of the WNBA Los Angeles Sparks 'Ole Skool' Dance Crew. She is presently a itinerant dance teacher for Los Angeles Unified School District. Toni is the proud mother of two adult sons, DeMarius and Scott

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Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and Cultural Theory in the Early Twentieth Century offers a new interpretation of European modernist dance by addressing it as guiding medium in a vibrant field of gestural culture that ranged across art and philosophy. Taking further Cornelius Castoriadis's concept of the social imaginary, it explores this imaginary's embodied forms. Close readings of dances, photographs, and literary texts are juxtaposed with discussions of gestural theory by thinkers including Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, and Aby Warburg. Choreographic gesture is defined as a force of intermittency that creates a new theoretical status of dance. Author Lucia Ruprecht shows how this also bears on contemporary theory. She shifts emphasis from Giorgio Agamben's preoccupation with gestural mediality to Jacques Rancière's multiplicity of proliferating, singular gestures, arguing for their ethical and political relevance. Mobilizing dance history and movement analysis, Ruprecht highlights the critical impact of works by choreographers such as Vaslav Nijinsky, Jo Mihaly, and Alexander and Clotilde Sakharoff. She also offers choreographic readings of Franz Kafka and Alfred Döblin. Gestural Imaginaries proposes that modernist dance conducts a gestural revolution which enacts but also exceeds the insights of past and present cultural theory. It makes a case for archive-based, cross-medial, and critically informed dance studies, transnational German studies, and the theoretical potential of performance itself.

This collection of new essays explores connections between dance, modernism, and modernity, by examining the way in which leading dancers have responded to modernity. Dance, Modernism, and Modernity considers the development of modernism in dance as an interdisciplinary and global phenomenon.

A visionary, a mystic, a lover, a leader, a dancer, an artist, a teacher, a theorist.Rudolf Laban (1879 - 1958) was all these things. Born in fin-de-siecle Austro-Hungary, Laban lived in Austria, France, and Germany. Though he began as a painter, architect and illustrator, it is in movement and dance that Laban made a lasting impact. He was a performer, a choreographer, and a mentor, but his ideas were always part of a broader vision of of movement - as theatre art, as community celebration, and as self-discovery. Through his research into movement he uncovered the interconnections of the body and the psyche, the individual and the group, and he devised a revolutionary system of movement notation that is till in use today.

Reflecting the breadth and diversity of dance in the Asia-Pacific region, this volume provides an in-depth and comprehensive study of Taiwan's dance history. Taiwan is home to several indigenous tribes with unique rituals and folk dance traditions, with an array of eclectic influences including martial arts and Peking Opera from China, and dance forms such as contemporary, neo-classical, post-modern, jazz, ballroom, and hip-hop from the West. Dance in Taiwan, led by pioneers such as choreographers Liu Feng-shueh and Lin Hwai-min, continues to have a strong presence in both performance and educational arenas. In 1973, Lin Hwai-min created Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, the country's internationally acclaimed modern dance company, and simultaneously produced a generation of dancers not only trained in modern dance and ballet, but also in Chinese aesthetics and history, tai-chi and meditation. Including the voices of dance professionals, scholars and critics, this collection of articles highlights the emerging trends and challenges faced by dance in Taiwan. It examines the history, creative development, education, training, and above all, the hybrid practices that give Taiwanese dance a unique identity, making it central to the renaissance of Asian contemporary dance. In describing how the intersections of dance cultures are marked by exchanges, research and pedagogy, it shows the way choreographers, performers, associated artists and companies of the region choose to imaginatively invent, blend, fuse, select and morph the multiple influences, revitalising and preserving cultural heritage while oscillating between tradition and change.

Watching Weimar Dance asks what audiences saw in the peculiarly turbulent and febrile moment of the Weimar Republic. It closely analyses the reception of various performances, from cabaret to concert dance and experimental theatre, in their own time and place - at home in interwar Germany, on tour, and later returning from exile after World War II. Spectator reports that performers died or became half-machine archived not only the physicality of past performance, but also the ways audiences used the temporary world of the stage to negotiate pressing social issues, from female visibility within commodity culture to the functioning of human-machine hybrids in an era of increasing technologization. These accounts offer offer limit cases for the body on stage and, in so doing, speak to the preoccupations of the day. Approaching a range of performance artists, including Oskar Schlemmer, Valeska Gert, Kurt Jooss, Mary Wigman, Bertolt Brecht, Anita Berber, and the Tiller Girl troupes, through archives of watching, the reception of these performances also revises and complicates understandings of Ausdruckstanz as the representative dance of this moment in Germany. They further reveal how such practices came to be reconfigured and imbued with new significance in the post-war era. By bringing insights from theatre, dance, and performance studies to German cultural studies, and vice versa, Watching Weimar Dance develops a culturally-situated model of watching that not only offers a revisionist narrative, but also demonstrates new methods for dance scholarship to shape cultural history.

Soloists ignited the modern dance movement and have been a source of its constant renewal. Pioneering dancers such as Loïe Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Maud Allan embodied the abstraction and individuality of the larger modernist movement while making astounding contributions to their art. Nevertheless, solo dancers have received far less attention in the literature than have performers and choreographers associated with large companies.In On Stage Alone, editors Claudia Gitelman and Barbara Palfy take an international approach to the solo dance performance. The essays in this standout volume broaden the dance canon by bringing to light modern dance soloists from Europe, Asia, and the Americas who have shaped significant, sustained careers by performing full programs of their own choreography.Featuring in-depth examinations of the work of artists such as Michio Ito, Daniel Nagrin, Ann Carlson, and many others, On Stage Alone reveals the many contributions made by daring solo dancers from the dawn of the twentieth century through today. In doing so, it explores many important statements these soloists made regarding topics such as freedom, personal space, individuality, and gender in the modern era.

Employing a cultural theory approach, this book explores the relationship between popular dance and value. It traces the shifting value systems that underpin popular dance scholarship and considers how different dancing communities articulate complex expressions of judgment, significance and worth through their embodied practice.