A Game For Dancers

Filled with dance games that the whole classroom or family can play and learn from, this book collects noncompetitive activities that reward children for their involvement, encourage them to use their imagination, and show them how to express their feelings without using words. Illustrations.

The first in-depth study of the modern dance world of the 1940s and 1950s

Grade level: k, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, p, e, i, t.

The first in-depth study of the modern dance world of the 1940s and 1950s A Game for Dancers examines the difficulties American modern dancers faced as the Cold War took hold and the genre became institutionalized after its pioneering phase. It draws on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu to explore the interconnections between art and politics while paying close attention to modern dance's ambivalent relationship to the market. At the heart of the book is an inquiry into modernism itself, and how dancers struggled with modernist ideas of abstraction and autonomy while rarely questioning them. Crucial, too, is the issue of embodiment, which appeared to answer modernist skepticism of representation and aid modern dance's elusive pursuit of independence. Subjects include modernist dance theory, the emergence of new constituencies including African-American choreographers, and the work of Merce Cunningham and Alwin Nikolais, whose objectivism was declared a new modern dance vanguard in the 1950s.

The Ghost Dance religion that swept through the Plains Indian tribes in the early 1890s was embraced wholeheartedly by the Pawnees. It was a message of hope to a people devastated by the attacks of enemy tribes, the encroachment of white settlers, and the outbreak of epidemics. For the Pawnees, who were looking to the U.S. government and trying unsuccessfully to farm their land, the Ghost Dance movement promised salvation: a restoration of the Indian dead, the buffalo, and the old times. Alexander Lesser shows how the Ghost Dance brought about a partial revival of traditional Pawnee culture and its dances and songs. The ancient guessing hand game, remembered best by a tribe starved for the joy of play, became an important part of the Ghost Dance ritual. What had been a gambling game, a representation of warfare played by men, was transformed into a sacred game played by both sexes as an expression of faith or ?good fortune.? Lesser surveys the history of the Pawnee Indians and their relations with the federal government and describes in detail the Ghost Dance hand games that ?were the chief intellectual product of Pawnee culture? from the onset of the messianic movement to the original publication of this book in 1933. Citing such authorities as James Mooney and Stewart Culin, Lesser produced an enduring classic, now introduced by Alice Beck Kehoe, a professor of anthropology at Marquette University and the author of The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization.

Introduces Capoeira, a combination of play, martial arts and dance, as practiced in the United States and Brazil, as well as its colorful roots in the African slave culture of Brazil and its history.

Frank was a monster who wanted to dance. So he put on his hat, and his shoes made in France... and opened a jar and put ants in his pants! So begins this monstrously funny, deliciously disgusting, horrifyingly hilarious story of a monster who follows his dream. Keith Graves' wacky illustrations and laugh-out-loud text will tickle the funny bone and leave readers clamoring for an encore.