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Basic Principles of Classical Ballet
by Agrippina VaganovaAlthough the stars of Russian ballet Anna Pavlova and Tamara Karsavina possessed a national manner of dancing, there was no truly Russian school of dancing until the 1930s. The development of this school was largely due to Mme. Vaganova (1879-1951), not only a great dancer but also the teacher of Galina Ulanova and many others and an unsurpassed theoretician.The principles of Vaganova's system are presented in this well-known book. Mme. Vaganova's aim of creating a personal approach to the Russian dance was based on the critical assimilation of the experience of her contemporaries. Her ability to choose the best of what had been accomplished in the various ballet traditions (French, Italian, and Russian) and combine these into a unified teaching practice in itself amounted to a new school of dance. She firmly believed that the teaching process should be a planned exercise, ever changing with innovations in the dance. She sought from her pupils emotional expressiveness, strictness of form, a resolute, energetic manner of performance, and the understanding of the underlying coordination of movements.Her book discusses all basic principles of ballet, grouping movements by fundamental types. Chapters cover battements, rotary movements of the legs, the arms, poses of the classical dance, connecting and auxiliary movements, jumps, beats, point work, and turns as well as material for a sample lesson. Diagrams show clearly the exact foot, leg, arm, and body positions for the proper execution of many steps and movements. The result is a fundamental theory of dance that offers dancers, teachers, and ballet lovers information often difficult to locate in other books. 118 illustrations.
Blue Ridge Billy
by Lois LenskiA young boy dreams of music and sunshine in the Great Smoky Mountains As far as Billy is concerned, there's no sight more beautiful than the sun setting over the Blue Ridge Mountains. When the day is done, he sneaks away from his work to watch the sun go down. If his father knew, he would call Billy lazy, but Mama would understand. She knows life in the mountains is hard and that there's no point in living if a person can't take time to appreciate what he has. Billy dreams of the day when he can pick up his fiddle and sing the folk songs of his people. Until then, he will be content with the sun. This beautifully written novel tells a story of simple fun and irresistible pleasures in 1 of the most beautiful regions in the United States.
Really the Blues
by Ben Ratliff Mezz Mezzrow Bernard WolfeMezz Mezzrow was a Jewish boy from the slums of Chicago who learned to play the clarinet in reform school and pursued a life in music and a life of crime. He moved from Chicago to New Orleans to New York, working in brothels and bars, bootlegging, dealing drugs, getting hooked, doing time, producing records, and playing with the greats, among them Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, and Fats Waller. Really the Blues, the jive-talking memoir that Mezzrow wrote at the insistence of, and with the help of, the novelist Bernard Wolfe, is the story of an unusual and unusually American life, and a picture of a man who moved freely across racial boundaries when few could or did, "the odyssey of an individualist. . . the saga of a guy who wanted to make friends in a jungle were everyone was too busy making money."
Artists in Exile
by Joseph HorowitzDuring the first half of the twentieth century--decades of war and revolution in Europe--an "intellectual migration" relocated thousands of artists and thinkers to the United States, including some of Europe's supreme performing artists, filmmakers, playwrights, and choreographers. For them, America proved to be both a strange and opportune destination. A "foreign homeland" (Thomas Mann), it would frustrate and confuse, yet afford a clarity of understanding unencumbered by native habit and bias. However inadvertently, the condition of cultural exile would promote acute inquiries into the American experience. What impact did these famous newcomers have on American culture, and how did America affect them? George Balanchine, in collaboration with Stravinsky, famously created an Americanized version of Russian classical ballet. Kurt Weill, schooled in Berlin jazz, composed a Broadway opera. Rouben Mamoulian's revolutionary Broadway productions of Porgy and Bess and Oklahoma! drew upon Russian "total theater." An army of German filmmakers--among them F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, and Billy Wilder--made Hollywood more edgy and cosmopolitan. Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich redefined film sexuality. Erich Korngold upholstered the sound of the movies. Rudolf Serkin inspirationally inculcated dour Germanic canons of musical interpretation. An obscure British organist reinvented himself as "Leopold Stokowski." However, most of these gifted émigrés to the New World found that the freedoms they enjoyed in America diluted rather than amplified their high creative ambitions.A central theme of Joseph Horowitz's study is that Russians uprooted from St. Petersburg became "Americans"--they adapted. Representatives of Germanic culture, by comparison, preached a German cultural bible--they colonized. "The polar extremes," he writes, "were Balanchine, who shed Petipa to invent a New World template for ballet, and the conductor George Szell, who treated his American players as New World Calibans to be taught Mozart and Beethoven." A symbiotic relationship to African American culture is another ongoing motif emerging from Horowitz's survey: the immigrants "bonded with blacks from a shared experience of marginality"; they proved immune to "the growing pains of a young high culture separating from parents and former slaves alike."
Lore of the Lumber Camps
by E. C. BeckA collection of songs/ballads and stories of the Michigan lumber camps of the 1800's.
The Complete Canasta
by Ralph Michaels Charles H. Goren Josefina Artayeta De VielThis book teaches the reader how to play Canasta with 2, 4 or 6 people, and how to have a Canasta tournament.
I Remember
by Sheldon Harris Clyde E. Bernhardt John F. SzwedI Remember is a first-hand account of the world of black American music told by a man who has been part of that world for eighty years. Clyde E. B. Bernhardt worked with a number of bands, including King Oliver, Marion Hard, Cecil Scott, the Bascomb Brothers, and Joe Garland. He started his own band, the Blue Blazers, in 1946 and formed the Harlem Blues and Jazz Band in 1972.The book is a primary document that provides information about a part of the history of American music for which there is little documentation.
Movie Shoes (The Shoe Books)
by Noel StreatfeildFor the first time ever in the United States, the "Shoes" books are available as ebooks! Go behind the scenes of a movie in this beloved classic!Life is tough for the Winter family in London, with little money and Dad out of work. Luckily, Aunt Cora comes to the rescue with an invitation to live in California. From that moment on, talented Rachel and Tim dream of stardom in America. The family couldn't be more surprised when a movie producer picks plain, peevish Jane for the lead role of Mary in The Secret Garden. No one's ever noticed Jane before. Could this be the chance of a lifetime?Noel Streatfeild's "Shoes" books are some of the most popular of the thirty-eight books she wrote for children.
The Story of the Trapp Family Singers
by Maria Augusta TrappWith nearly 1,500 Broadway performances, six Tony Awards, more than three million albums sold, and five Academy Awards, The Sound of Music, based on the lives of Maria, the baron, and their singing children, is as familiar to most of us as our own family history. But much about the real-life woman and her family was left untold.Here, Baroness Maria Augusta Trapp tells in her own beautiful, simple words the extraordinary story of her romance with the baron, their escape from Nazi-occupied Austria, and their life in America.Now with photographs from the original edition.
Guests
by Russell LynesOur eminent founding father Ben Franklin once famously compared guests to stinking fish. While this assessment may seem a trifle harsh, the truth remains that social intercourse is a most risky endeavor. Who better to address this concern than the inimitable pundit Russell Lynes--a man renowned for his unparalleled expertise on the social graces and the many personality types who regularly abuse them? In this classic guide to "guesting," Lynes provides an indispensable overview of the rituals of behavior that make it possible to visit and be visited, and the necessary safeguards that protect us from our friends and our friends from us. It is a book that demands to be read by every potential guest and host, stinker and stinkee alike.
The Late Romances: Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest
by William ShakespeareThe first of Shakespeare's late romances moves spectacularly from one dramatic period to another as the hero, Pericles, sails off to adventure and love, and experiences what for him is a miracle. Cymbeline: A favorite romantic drama, this play of a wife unjustly accused of faithlessness moves from a world of intrigue and slander to one of reconciliation and forgiveness, and contains two of Shakespeare's most poignantly beautiful songs. The Winter's Tale: From a darkly melodramatic beginning to a joyous pastoral ending, this romance of a jealous king and his long-suffering queen is superb entertainment, with revelations, plot twists, and a final compelling theatrical moment of discovery. The Tempest: This tale of the exiled Duke of Milan, marooned on an enchanted island, is so richly filled with music and magic, romance and comedy, that its theme of love and reconciliation offers a splendid feast for the senses and the heart.
Night at the Vulcan (Roderick Alleyn #16)
by Ngaio MarshIn the make-believe world of the theater, Inspector Alleyn deals with the stark reality of murder and recasts the players in a deadly drama.
A Soviet Theatre Sketch Book (Routledge Revivals)
by Joseph MacleodFirst Published in 1951, A Soviet Theatre Sketch Book presents Joseph Macleod’s take on Russian Theatre in a semi-fictional way to show the effect of the productions upon different audiences. By using his pen as an artist uses his pencil, he gives, for the first time, an account of theatre audiences as composed of individual human beings and is able to paint the scenes vividly without neglecting the technical methods of the Soviet stage. By supple use of the sketch- book form, theatres, theatre-schools, actors, and actresses including some no longer appearing are painted into an all-over view of Russian and Ukrainian post-war life. In this book the author writes less immediately about the Soviet Union and does not depend on topicality or stop press news. Joseph Macleod and his wife visited the Soviet Union as the guests of the Russian and Ukrainian Societies for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of theatre, history of theatre, and performance studies.
Dance to the Piper
by Joan Acocella Agnes De MilleBorn into a family of successful playwrights and producers, Agnes de Mille was determined to be an actress. Then one day she witnessed the Russian ballet dancer Anna Pavlova, and her life was altered forever. Hypnotized by Pavlova's beauty, in that moment de Mille dedicated herself to dance. Her memoir records with lighthearted humor and wisdom not only the difficulties she faced--the resistance of her parents, the sacrifices of her training--but also the frontier atmosphere of early Hollywood and New York and London during the Depression. "This is the story of an American dancer," writes de Mille, "a spoiled egocentric wealthy girl, who learned with difficulty to become a worker, to set and meet standards, to brace a Victorian sensibility to contemporary roughhousing, and who, with happy good fortune, participated by the side of great colleagues in a renaissance of the most ancient and magical of all the arts."
Slipper Under Glass (Maggie Jones, Ballerina #1)
by Lee WyndhamThe Exotic World of The Dance... For seven years Maggie Jones has dedicated herself to the dance, dreaming of the day when she'll be Magda Jonescu, prima ballerina. She must prove herself not only to her generous Aunt Jo, who has paid for the lessons and sent fabulous gifts from exotic places, but also to her doubting family. Neither Maggie's father, who is allergic to her feathery costumes, nor her younger brother, who thinks dancing is for sissies, can understand the forces which drive Maggie to practice for hours on end. On Maggie struggles, assailed by doubts, but sustained by her dreams and a yellowed ballet slipper--kept under glass--in which Pavlova danced The Swan. Success comes to Maggie in a strange, unbelievable way and, faced with a golden opportunity, she must learn how to compromise reality with her dreams.
The Boys: A Memoir of Hollywood and Family
by Ron Howard Clint HowardHappy Days, The Andy Griffith Show, Gentle Ben—these shows captivated millions of TV viewers in the ’60s and ’70s. Join award-winning filmmaker Ron Howard and audience-favorite actor Clint Howard as they frankly and fondly share their unusual family story of navigating and surviving life as sibling child actors. <p><p> “What was it like to grow up on TV?” Ron Howard has been asked this question throughout his adult life. in The Boys, he and his younger brother, Clint, examine their childhoods in detail for the first time. For Ron, playing Opie on The Andy Griffith Show and Richie Cunningham on Happy Days offered fame, joy, and opportunity—but also invited stress and bullying. For Clint, a fast start on such programs as Gentle Ben and Star Trek petered out in adolescence, with some tough consequences and lessons. <p><p> With the perspective of time and success—Ron as a filmmaker, producer, and Hollywood A-lister, Clint as a busy character actor—the Howard brothers delve deep into an upbringing that seemed normal to them yet was anything but. Their Midwestern parents, Rance and Jean, moved to California to pursue their own showbiz dreams. But it was their young sons who found steady employment as actors. Rance put aside his ego and ambition to become Ron and Clint’s teacher, sage, and moral compass. Jean became their loving protector—sometimes over-protector—from the snares and traps of Hollywood. <p><p> By turns confessional, nostalgic, heartwarming, and harrowing, THE BOYS is a dual narrative that lifts the lid on the Howard brothers’ closely held lives. It’s the journey of a tight four-person family unit that held fast in an unforgiving business and of two brothers who survived “child-actor syndrome” to become fulfilled adults.
Dancing Out of Bali
by Richard Attenborough John Coast"It is Bali felt, understood, loved, communicated...Coast has a kind of word magic." --New York Herald TribuneThis book tells of a young Englishman, fresh out of a Japanese prison camp, and his Javanese wife, and how they leave Indonesia for the footlights of Broadway. This is a story of life, music, and dancing in Bali, with all the charm of the Balinese people. Dancing out of Bali is a truly remarkable personal adventure story for all readers, especially dance lovers.
Dancing Out of Bali
by John Coast Richard Attenborough"If you know where to look, you can still discover and recognize what it was that intoxicating John Coast fifty years ago." -Sir David AttenboroughThis book is one of the great classics about Bali, now with dozens of illustrations and photographs.Dancing out of Bali is a fascinating personal account of a young Englishman who settled in a small house in Bali in the midst of the political turmoil that griped post-war Indonesia. There, he immersed himself in Balinese culture and made ambitious plans to bring a troupe of Balinese dancers and musicians to Europe and America. The book relates John Coast's daring and remarkable adventure that took him from revolution in Indonesia to the footlights of London and Broadway. Within a few weeks, the troupe had captured the hearts of audiences. Here are photographs of Bali and stories of the performer's magic island and of the enchanting dancers, including the beautiful 12-year-old Ni Gusti Raka. She became a star overnight and delighted audiences everywhere during the troupe's triumphant tour.It is also a story of Balinese culture and life in Bali-following the devastating Japanese occupation-of music and dancing in Bali, of many of the island's great performing dancers and musicians,
Dancing Out of Bali
by John Coast Richard Attenborough"It is Bali felt, understood, loved, communicated...Coast has a kind of word magic." --New York Herald TribuneThis book tells of a young Englishman, fresh out of a Japanese prison camp, and his Javanese wife, and how they leave Indonesia for the footlights of Broadway. This is a story of life, music, and dancing in Bali, with all the charm of the Balinese people. Dancing out of Bali is a truly remarkable personal adventure story for all readers, especially dance lovers.
The Funniest One in Room: The Lives and Legends of Del Close
by Kim Howard JohnsonContaining recollections from more than 80 of the comedic giant's closest friends and colleagues, this absorbing biography explores Del Close's old haunts, his sensational past, and the reality behind the tales he told so often. From traveling with a carnival and hanging out with a pre-Scientology L. Ron Hubbard to riding with the Merry Pranksters and using a coven of witches to help him kick a lifelong cocaine habit, Close led an incredibly rich life--one whose absurdity proved great fodder for improv theater. Astute and compassionate, Close influenced improvisational theater's greatest comedic talents of the last 50 years--Nichols and May, Lenny Bruce, Bill Murray, Chris Farley, Tina Fey--and coached the witty masterminds behind such comedic institutions as Second City, Saturday Night Live, Groundlings, and the Upright Citizen's Brigade.
Golden Slippers
by Lee WyndhamThrough the mist before her eyes Maggie saw Kirk Sherwood, the only boy she had dated in high school. He had said good-bye the night before, not wanting to intrude on the last-minute family farewells. Maggie suddenly realized that never again --no matter what happened --even if she flopped dismally in her dancing career--would anything be the same for her in Spring Valley. She stared at the concrete ribbon of highway spinning out ahead, beckoning them toward New York.
A Manual of Counterpoint Based on Sixteenth-Century Practice
by David D. BoydenSince counterpoint is the art of combining 2 or more melodies, this book discusses the contours of melodies in relation to other ones.
Richard Scarry's Rabbit and His Friends (Little Golden Book)
by Richard ScarryA classic Little Golden Book about a sweet and unusual creature, written and illustrated by Richard Scarry in 1953, is back in print!When Rabbit finds an egg, he assumes it belongs to Hen, until it hatches. Out of the egg comes an adorable roly-poly animal with webbed feet and a beak like Duck, a tail and fur coat like Beaver, and a shy dispostion like Squirrel. This funny story about a platypus who becomes friends with everyone was written and illustrated by Richard Scarry in 1953. It is now back in print in the Little Golden Book line. Perfect for Easter baskets, baby showers, and year-round fun, this book is sure to become a family storytime favorite!
The Bell Family
by Noel StreatfeildIf you love Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes, you’ll adore The Bell Family.'Well, little people, what's the news?’Meet the big, happy Bell family who live in the vicarage at St Marks.Father is a reverend; Mother is as kind as kind can be. Then there's all the children – practical Paul, dancing Jane, mischievous Ginnie, and finally the baby of the family, Angus, whose ambition is to own a private zoo (he has already begun with his six boxes of caterpillars). And not forgetting Esau, a surefire competitor for the most beautiful dog in Britain.Follow their eventful lives from tense auditions to birthday treats; from troubled times to hilarious escapades. The perfect Christmas gift for ballet-loving children.Includes exclusive material: In the Backstory you can find out which one of the Bell children you most resemble!