The Nikolais/Louis dance technique : a philosophy and method of modern dance / by Alwin Nikolais & Murray Louis.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nikolais, Alwin.

Contributor:

Louis, Murray.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Modern dance.

Modern dance--Philosophy.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (393 pages) : illustrations.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York : Routledge, 2005.

Summary:

Annotation In this study, Nyla Ali Khan focuses on the representation of South Asian life in works by four contemporary Anglophone writers: V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Anita Desai. Concentrating on the intertwined topics of nationalism, transnationalism, and fundamentalism, Khan offers a critical dialogue between these works and the contemporary history they encounter, using history to interrogate fiction and using fiction to think through historical issues. In doing so, Khan argues that in the mixed, heterogeneous space of transnationalism, cultural and linguistic authenticity is a pipe dream. The binary structures created by the colonial encounter undergo a process of dialectical interplay in which each culture or language makes incursions into the other. Some of these structures are as follows: black-white, primitive-savage, self-other, silent-articulate, rational ruler and irrational ruled. These categories generate a dichotomy that creates the perception that a people have of themselves and their political and social relationships. Their recognition of this dialogic interplay of community and place becomes the basis for strategies that enable transnational and postcolonial writers to revise dogmatic categories. Despite all their differences, the works of these authors delineate the asymmetrical relations of colonialism and the aftermath of this phenomenon as it is manifested across the globe in this day and age. Khan shows, for instance, how Naipaul articulates a sensibility created by multilayered identities and the remapping of old imperial landscapes, in the process suggesting a new dynamic of power relations in which politics and selfhood, empire and psychology, prove to be profoundly interrelated; how Rushdie encourages a nationalist self-imagining and a rewriting of history that incorporates significant cultural, religious, and linguistic differences into our sense of identity; how Ghosh is critical of the putative cultural and religious necessity to forge a unified nationalist identity, arguing that no single theory sufficiently frames the multiple inheritances of present diasporic subjectivities; and how Desai seeks to imagine a responsible form of artistic, social, and political agency.

Contents:

Biography of Alwin Nikolais

Biography of Murray Louis

Introduction

SECTION I Definitions

Basic Dance

Vision of a New Technique

Decentralization

Grain

Gravity and Verticality

The Psyche

Stasis

Dynamics and Energies

Sensory Perception

Movement Range

Three Conditions of Energy

SECTION II Creating: Improvisation and Composition

Defining Improvisation

Gestalt

Nature and Art

The Language of Criticism

Composition

SECTION III The Class Manual

Introduction to the Classes

The Body as an Instrument

The Dimensional Concept

Alignment

The Stretches

Up and Down-Vertical-The Plié

Across the Floor

Week 1: Locomotion and Dimensions

Week 2: Isolating Body Parts (Isolations)

Week 3: Body Parts (Continued)

Week 4: Levels

Week 5: The Joints and Joint Action

Week 6: Rotary Action

Week 7: Grain and Density

Week 8: Gravity and Upward Willpower

Week 9: Swing, Centripetal, and Centrifugal Momentum

Week 10: Undercurves

Week 11: Overcurves and Mirror Action

Major Principles of Dance (The Big Four)

Week 12: Space: Volume and Peripheral

Week 13: Time

Week 14: Shape

Motion

Week 15: Motion

Week 16: Abstraction

Week 17: Review Technique

Week 18: Realism to Abstraction

Week 19: Diagonals

Week 20: Circles

Week 21: Falls

Week 22: Suspension Points

Week 23: Percussion and Prop Extension

Week 24: Lyricism

Adjuncts to Choreographic and Performing Skills

Week 25: The Showing: Performance

Consonance and Summation

A Brief Review.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-315-53876-8

1-134-95580-4

1-134-95573-1

9781315538761

OCLC:

950463819

Publisher Number:

9780415970198