Product Description
This volume is produced from digital images created through the University of Michigan University LibraryÕs preservation reformatting program. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from Journal of Southern History, published by Southern Historical Association on February 1, 2010. The length of the article is 1027 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The Hayloft Gang: The Story of the National Barn Dance.(Book review)
Author: Jocelyn Neal
Publication: Journal of Southern History (Magazine/Journal)
Date: February 1, 2010
Publisher: Southern Historical Association
Volume: 76Issue: 1Page: 190(3)

Article Type: Book review

Distributed by Gale, a part of Cengage Learning ... Read more

Product Description
His legendary shows included Fiddler on the Roof, The King and I, West Side Story, Gypsy, and Funny Girl. His celebrity colleagues included Barbra Streisand, Bette Davis, Stephen Sondheim, Natalie Wood, Ethel Merman, and Montgomery Clift. His private demons included sexual and religious conflicts, scandalous betrayals during the McCarthy hearings, and an insane drive for perfection that bordered on the sadistic.

Based on hundreds of interviews with his closest friends and enemies, this groundbreaking biography of "nightmare genius" (Tony Walton) Jerome Robbins, provides the first complete portrait of the man and the artist. It's a harrowing, heartbreaking, and candid look at life backstage.

"Comprehensive and lively." (Publishers Weekly)

"Contains plenty of dish." (The Wall Street Journal) ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

A Musical Legend
Jerome Robbins accomplished more in his lifetime thanmany other Broadway icons.He wrote, choreographed, danced ,and directed many musicals and ballets. He was at times very nastyand demanding of the cast he worked with. He also had lots of friend. This book chronicles his childhood through to his death.The author spends time detailing both the ballet part of Robbins life and the Broadway part. Unless you are a dancer, the Broadway life is much more interesting. There are loads of interesting facts in this book. For instance ,Mary Martin was considered for the lead in Funny Girl !!!Jerome Robbins life was fascinating. His story is easy to read and really holds your interest. Advice, skim the ballet sections.

Exhausting
I basically enjoyed the book, but I wish it had been about a hundred pages shorter.I would have preferred a book that really focused on the Broadway career.I have very little interest in ballet and a lot of the book was about ballet.It assumes the dancers mentioned are household words, but aside from Villella, Nureyev, Baryshnikov, Suzanne Farrell and a couple of others, I had no idea who these people were and what they said was not particularly interesting.This is an ambitious book and I admire its ambition, but Robbins was a part of many worlds and in order to do all these worlds justice the whole is diluted.It could have been several books - one dealing with his early life and Jewish heritage, another dealing with his sexual nature, another with his Broadway career, another with his career in dance, and yet another dealing with his early flirtation with and later repudiation of Communism.This book tries to cover all the bases and ends up being exhausting.As I said the ballet part didn't really interest me and it took up most of the last half of the book.As a result I found the last hundred pages really tough going.But I did learn a lot that interested me, like how Robbins wanted John Latouche and Arthur Laurents to write the lyrics and book for ON THE TOWN.Bernstein wanted Comden and Green....

Interesting Oral History
Greg Lawrence is less an author than a complier of an oral history of the life of Jerome Robbins in Dance With Demons.This is by no means a true biography but it does fill a certain need until that volume is written.It gives almost everybody Jerome Robbins met in his life a chance to speak, sometimes briefly and sometimes at length, about working with or knowing him.No aspect of his life is left untouched.This book is almost less about Jerome Robbins as a person than it is about the ways in which he touched people.All the nastiness is there but also all the good things people had to say about him.There is nothing defintive about this book but it makes for a fascinating read and is a testament to power of this difficult genius.

Tedious and vulgar
Very little to do with dance, this book is mostly personalities and scandal.The not-very-subtle subtext is Robbins' homosexuality, and its relation to the HUAC affair. Strictly for celebrity hounds.

Thorough, gossipy, undefinitive -- maybe unnecessary
Despite, or because of, its inclusion of hundreds of interviews, much of Greg Lawrence's biography amounts to uncorroborated hearsay. Given the backbiting and jealous atmosphere of the theatre world, a more rigorous biographer would have carefully weighed and vetted the reliability of the sources. Lawrence apparently was not given access to Robbins' own papers and therefore the man himself is decidedly absent from these pages, as has been pointed out by reviews in The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and elsewehere. It's gossipy and full of facts and opinions, but curiously empty.

Another customer reviewer here compares Lawrence's book with Christine Conrad's compendium of photographs and Robbins quotes (Jerome Robbins,That Broadway Man, That Ballet Man), to Lawrence's benefit. Seems to me you get a stronger sense of Robbins the man AND the artist from Conrad's book, even though it doesn't pretend to be a biography.

I've read that two other full-scale biographies are in the works whose authors have been allowed to see Robbins's archives; hopefully they will provide a deeper and more balanced view of the man. If anyone still cares. ... Read more

Product Description
Renaissance and Cavalier Dance, English Country Dances.This Cd/Book set contains music and instruction for 10English Country Dances from the late Renaissance and early Baroque period.Taken from the Playford manuscript, the dances in this set are quite popular with the dancers at many Renaissance fairs and with the members of the Societyfor Creative Anachronisms. The dances are easy to learn, the CD contains both a slow or learning version besides an "at tempo" version of the tunes.So the student or teacher can learn and teach from the slower version. The CD, of course, may be programmed to play just the faster versions for balls, parties and revels. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from American Jewish History, published by American Jewish Historical Society on March 1, 2001. The length of the article is 1068 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Converging Movements: Modern Dance and Jewish Culture at the 92nd Street Y.(Review)
Author: Naima Prevots
Publication: American Jewish History (Refereed)
Date: March 1, 2001
Publisher: American Jewish Historical Society
Volume: 89Issue: 1Page: 156

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from Journal of Southern History, published by Southern Historical Association on May 1, 2008. The length of the article is 774 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The Dance of Freedom: Texas African Americans during Reconstruction.(Book review)
Author: Carl H. Moneyhon
Publication: Journal of Southern History (Magazine/Journal)
Date: May 1, 2008
Publisher: Southern Historical Association
Volume: 74Issue: 2Page: 478(2)

Article Type: Book review

Distributed by Gale, a part of Cengage Learning ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from American Jewish History, published by American Jewish Historical Society on June 1, 2000. The length of the article is 8832 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Angels "Rewolt!": Jewish Women in Modern Dance in the 1930s.
Author: Julia L. Foulkes
Publication: American Jewish History (Refereed)
Date: June 1, 2000
Publisher: American Jewish Historical Society
Volume: 88Issue: 2Page: 233

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description
In 10th Century Cordoba, where Moslems, Jews, and Christians lived in creative splendor under the Omayyad Caliphs, al-Kiran dreamed of dancing with Kristien, a Nubian slave-princess and high priestess of the School of Isis, the black Madonna and Magdalen. This book is a multifaceted tale of spiritual awakening, romance, adventure, and political intrigue set against the backdrop of Andalusian Spain, during the height of Moorish culture and creativity ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Cryptic and Unusual
Did people in the 10th Century Moorish Spain really talk primarily in riddles while spinning in circles like a dancer?I bought this book to learn more about the Sufi faith while enjoying a good novel.While the setting and underlying messages of unity and tolerance are always a plus, the story jumps around too much without explanation and is clouded by endless verses of silly and irrelevant ancient songs that could only be made relevant by someone desperately willing to make the pieces fit at any cost.Buy the works of Rumi instead.

This book is a feast, an unending cornucopia of wisdom.
THE DANCE OF CREATED LIGHTS, A Sufi Tale,
by Jay Bremyer (New Falcon Publications, 1996)

Jay Bremyer, attorney, sacred
journeyor, mystic, and writer, explores, in
The Dance of Created lights, A Sufi Tale,
events and circumstances during the 10th
century in Spain, in a region known as
Andalusia.

He writes, in this novel, of a
historically accurate time when "many of
the greatest Islamic, Jewish, and Christian
philosophers, physicians, scientists,
theologians, and mystics which the world has
ever known lived and worked in al-Andalus."

To say this is an action novel would
be true.To say it involves delicious
eroticism and exotic, lush poetry would be
correct.To say it describes in highly
evocative prose the nature of the mysteries
behind every major Western religion would be
accurate.

Likewise, it is correct to say the
book teaches of the riches of cooperative
collaboration between religions and
philosophies and the dangers of
fundamentalism, not to mention the absurd
risks incurred when politics gets involved in
the mix.But none of these truths can in part
or in their sum adequately get around the
transformative work this book becomes in the
experiencing and reading of it.

I expected a good read, but came away
from the book so stunned at the complex truths
present within, I was unable to begin this
review for many days, until my thoughts
became more coherent.The tale is simple
enough--a serious philosophical student is
paired with a beautiful priestess to perform
a magical celebration dance.

His journey in the preparation of this
initiatory dance, set against a backdrop of
religious and political intrigue, trails
through multiple esoteric trainings to a
heart-smile deep-breathing finish.

But for those with any knowledge or
taste for the Western mysteries, be they
alchemical, Celtic, Egyptian, Kabbalah,
Gnostic, Sufi, or many others, this book is
a feast, an unending cornucopia of wisdom,
laid out for any with right eyes to see.
There are few pages which do not shout for a
second read, for more savoring and more study.

--By Jan Thatcher Adams
Whole Health Editor of The Edge,
Exploring the Evolution of Consciousness

(Excerpted from"Transformation is quite
likely in Bremyer's `The Dance of Created
Lights,'" which appeared in the November,
1996 issue of The Edge.)

... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Remarkable and Practical
"Colonial Social Dancing for Children is a complete instructor's handbook for teaching children the basic steps and figures of country dancing, American's most popular social dance during the time of George Washington."

Trade paperback, 108 pp, illustrations throughout.

Originally devised for children in the 4th through 6th grades, it has since been used with pre-school children and middle school children. "The beginning lessons are designed for short, non-voluntary situations and take into consideration the strong negative feelings many children in these grades have towards dancing with -- and touching -- members of the opposite sex. The method of teaching described in the book is designed to provide a maximum of dancing with a minimum of 'lecture.'"

"The program is based on practical experience and is presented so that the students will progress from steps" to executing complete dances. Written music is provided for all the dances and sources of recorded music are provided."

"There are 4 dances in this collection that are noted exactly as written in the 18th century." Additionally, there are 8 dances which have been simplified from their 18th century forms. The remaining 3 dances are original.

This book also has some enrichment material: some period illustrations, descriptions of the Minuet and the Virginia Reel (a later dance), period advertisements, historical notes, and a bibliography. ... Read more