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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.

Advanced Labanotation issue 10: Body Variations.

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.

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.

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

A comprehensive manual for writing movement in Labanotation when the body is not supported on the feet. Not only does it analyse in great detail how one can get up from lying, lie down from standing, roll from sitting on to the knees, etc., and how these movements are notated, but it also offers a complete survey of the Labanotation rules about distance, timing, systems of reference, weight distribution, and floor contact that apply to Labanotation as a whole and underlie any writing of 'floorwork'.

What is dance notation, why is it needed, how did it start, are there many systems, and who uses them? This book answers these and many more questions, and gives a fascinating insight into no less than 35 dance notation systems.

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

A historian's task is a voyage of discovery, and in these personal reminiscences Ivor Guest allows the reader to share the romance of recreating times past. Since his first published article appeared in the 1940s he has vastly expanded and enriched our knowledge of ballet in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through more than a score of books, many of them definitive works, that are a rare blend of scrupulous scholarship and readability.The story of his involvement in the world of ballet is a romance in itself. When he was drawn to the study of ballet history, comparatively little serious research had been done, and he found himself working in virtually virgin soil - the fulfillment of an historian's dream. The Paris Opera, with its library and archives, became his mecca, where he returned year after year to unearth the material on which were based his classic chronicles of the French ballet. In time his pre-eminence was to be recognised when he - an Englishman - was commissioned to write the official history of the Paris Opera Ballet.For him all this was a labour of love - almost in a literal sense, for as he reconstructed the lives of long-dead ballerinas through his patient research and deductive sleuthing, he fell under their spell like a man in love. His biographies are written with an easy style that conceals the toil that went into them, but in this book he tells of his quests for characters who were often maddeningly elusive, such as his 'first love', Fanny Cerrito. The account of his search for the date of her death is told with a touch of fine comedy, and culminates in the discovery of her descendants.These 'Adventures' are concerned mainly with Ivor Guest's work as a writer, but this is by no means the whole story. He played a crucial part in the creation of Frederick Ashton's 'La Fille mal gardée', discovering the early scores from which the music for this evergreen ballet was adapted, and his marriage to Ann Hutchinson led him up new paths as they combined their talents, hers as a specialist in dance notation, to recreate several choreographic gems from the past, including Fanny Elssler's famous Cachucha.And, to emphasise that his life is not all spent at his desk or in dusty archives, he tells the story of his involvement with the Royal Academy of Dance, as Chairman of its Executive Committee from 1969, when it was on the verge of bankruptcy, to the 1980s when it was riding high as the largest and most vital association of ballet teachers in the world.These reminiscences illuminate an aspect of the dance world that seldom comes into the limelight, yet is of great importance for its cultural significance. Scholars and writers who lift the curtain on the past work quietly in the background. This book tells the story of one of them, who in the field of dance scholarship is internationally recognised for his work.

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.

Ivor Guest's biography brings Fanny Elssler's performances vividly to life. Many unpublished stories of her life, with a wealth of detail through eye-witness accounts. She was one of the most brilliant stars of the Romantic Ballet.

The authorised biography of Robert Cohan, distinguished choreographer. This book is based on extensive interviews with Cohan, his family, friends and colleagues. Drawing together his life in dance, it provides the first in depth study of this seminal figure in the dance world.

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.

This is the first source text on this issue of Labanotation since it was introduced into the system in 1979. It shows the application of design drawing and the use of shape in pantomime gestures, in the handling of props and in choreography such as 'The Green Table' by Kurt Jooss.

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.

Articulates the dynamic with which a practitioner based research has grown, is growing, and is applied, integrating the three concepts: the interaction of spectator and performer in performative dance, discussed through a dance specific (or choreological) perspective which has developed out of and beyond the seminal research of Laban.

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.

This title provides specific details on a range of aspects of movement. These include finer intermediate directions, greater variations in writing paths of gestures and paths across the floor, defined intermediate distances, and specific minor movements

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.

"Sequential Movements" shows how to write a successive movement in Labanotation, a movement that flows from one part of the body to another in succession, passing from joint to joint, or from vertebra.