Dance in Video

Prepublication Announcement 

With Dance in Video, Alexander Street Press captures dance performances from the stage and brings them directly to your computer screen through online streaming video—including 250 dance productions and documentaries by the most influential performers and companies of the 20^th century.

Dance as an art form is ephemeral—there are rarely scripts to study, no commonly used notation to analyze—making a live performance vital for study and research. Dance in Video provides the visual element necessary for appreciation and analysis. Students and researchers can at last discover and revisit great performances and learn from the dancers, choreographers, and directors who have perfected the craft.

These important performances now can become a permanent part of the curriculum. And for the first time, students and instructors can bookmark specific scenes, acts, interviews, stagings—even a single motion—and then include the links in papers and course reserves, making Dance in Video a dynamic and essential new teaching tool.

Content

From the ballets of Stravinsky to documentaries on William Forsythe and Merce Cunningham, and spanning the 1950s to today, Dance in Video offers more than 500 hours of streaming video available electronically for the first time. The collection covers ballet, tap, jazz, contemporary, experimental, and improvisational dance, as well as forerunners of the forms and the pioneers of modern concert dance.

Included are classic performances from top ballet companies; experimental works from up-and-coming dance troupes; documentaries by and about leading choreographers; videos on dance training; and other items covering a wide range of 20^th century dance styles.

Performances targeted for Dance in Video include Points in Space (Merce Cunningham Dance Company); highlights from Dance Theatre of Harlem; an Evening with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre; Strange Fish (DV8 Physical Theatre); Silence is the End of our Song (Royal Danish Ballet); Intimate Pages (Rambert Dance Company); Swansong (English National Ballet); Peter and the Wolf (The Royal Ballet School); Rainbow Round My Shoulder (Donald McKayle); and hundreds more choreographed or performed by dancers and groups including Agnes de Mille, Mark Morris, Lestor Horton, Anna Sokolow, Norman Walker Dance Company, Anthony Tudor, Jose Limon, Paul Draper, Chuck Green, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, The Kirov Ballet, the Bolshoi Ballet, National Ballet of Canada, Nederlands Dans Theater, and others.

How will you use it?

Dance in Video brings a new dimension to nearly all aspects of performance studies and production history:

·     Multiple productions of select dances, showing various interpretations, will allow for comparative analysis of choreography and style;

·     The stage works of legendary figures are together for the first time, cross searchable and available for side-by-side comparison;

·     Interviews integrated with excerpts of live performances illustrate the development of each production. For example, users can see Mark Morris discuss his work and then watch selected scenes of Morris’s choreography in action;

·     Documentary histories examine such varied subjects as the Jose Limon Technique; John Neumeier at work; Sylvie Guillem’s techniques; perspectives of two ballerinas at The Royal Ballet; Grupo Corpo; the history of tap dance; influences of ballroom dancing; and other topics.

Specially developed controlled vocabularies will enable users to browse by genre, performer, choreographer, company, and other combinable fields. The search can be as simple as a search for a person (Show every production choreographed by Maurice Bejart)—or a complex search combining, for example, search fields for subject and year (Find all examples of tap filmed in the 1980s). Identify a video, and then a click delivers the entire work for viewing over the Internet. Move back and forth within the video, replay favorite segments, bookmark and annotate playlists, and include the selections in papers or for online course reserves.

Dance in Video expands your library’s existing collection of video recordings, while minimizing the problem of damaged or lost VHS or DVD copies and saving shelf space. Beginners and advanced users alike will want to use the database for teaching, learning, and research.

Publication Details

Dance in Video is available on the Web beginning in summer of 2008, either through one-time purchase of perpetual rights or annual subscription.  The database will contain more than 500 hours of streaming video productions, including more than 250 performances and documentaries.  The service works on PCs or Macs and requires no set-up—all you need is an Internet browser.

Dance in Video is part of Alexander Street’s growing collection of online databases in music and the performing arts, including Music Online: Listening; Music Online: Reference; Theatre in Video; and Opera in Video.