The Best Folk Dance eBooks of All Time

Tarantella, a genre of Southern Italian folk music and dance, is an international phenomenon--seen and heard in popular festivals, performed across the Italian diaspora, even adapted for New Age spiritual practices. The boom in popularity has diversified tarantella in practice while setting it within a host of new, unexpected contexts. Incoronata Inserra ventures into the history, global circulation, and recontextualization of this fascinating genre.

Examining tarantella's changing image and role among Italians and Italian Americans, Inserra illuminates how factors like tourism, translation, and world music venues have shifted the ethics of place embedded in the tarantella cultural tradition. Once rural, religious, and rooted, tarantella now thrives in settings urban, secular, migrant, and ethnic. Inserra reveals how the genre's changing dynamics contribute to reimagining Southern Italian identity. At the same time, they translate tarantella into a different kind of performance that serves new social and cultural groups and purposes. Indeed, as Inserra shows, tarantella's global growth promotes a reassessment of gender relations in the Italian South and helps create space for Italian and Italian-American women to reclaim gendered aspects of the genre.

Moshe Itzhak-Halevy (Moshiko), born in 1932, is one of Israel's most talented and versatile folk dance choreographers."Dancing Against The Flow" is Moshiko's personal and professional story, written by his own hand; the life story of a man whose early circumstances and many pitfalls not only threatened the promise of success, but challenged him to give up his dreams. His talent and optimism ultimately led to the fulfillment of his dreams and his success both in Israel and around the world.

In detail, and in an honest and forthright manner, he describes this path, his personal history, his encounters, and the people he met who influenced him. This book is a unique autobiography that provides an insider's perspective on the world of Israeli folk dance both in Israel and in the US, from its early years until today through the lens of Moshiko's remarkable life and career. Moshiko has created more than 260 Israeli folk dances since 1959. He is an award-winning dance choreographer. He has been a professional dancer with the Inbal Dance Company and a character dancer with The Ballet Company of Mia Arbatova, and he has created his own ensemble, HaPa'amonim Company. In addition, he has written the music, played the instruments, and sung his own songs to many of his Israeli folk dance creations.Through the years he has not only taught technique and choreography to his students, but also learned with them and from them. He has evolved, mellowed, and shared his talent and wisdom with dancers from many cultures.To this day Israeli folk dances fill Moshiko's life with dance, choreography, writing and composing. Moshiko is one of the most respected and popular creators in the field of Israeli folk dance, a field that continues to evolve on a daily basis, and he continues to bestow his love and talent upon the general public with tremendous energy.

Reflecting the breadth and diversity of dance in the Asia–Pacific region, this volume provides an in-depth and comprehensive study of Taiwan’s dance history. Taiwan is home to several indigenous tribes with unique rituals and folk dance traditions, with an array of eclectic influences including martial arts and Peking Opera from China, and dance forms such as contemporary, neo-classical, post-modern, jazz, ballroom, and hip-hop from the West. Dance in Taiwan, led by pioneers such as choreographers Liu Feng-shueh and Lin Hwai-min, continues to have a strong presence in both performance and educational arenas.

In 1973, Lin Hwai-min created Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, the country’s internationally acclaimed modern dance company, and simultaneously produced a generation of dancers not only trained in modern dance and ballet, but also in Chinese aesthetics and history, tai-chi and meditation. Including the voices of dance professionals, scholars and critics, this collection of articles highlights the emerging trends and challenges faced by dance in Taiwan. It examines the history, creative development, education, training, and above all, the hybrid practices that give Taiwanese dance a unique identity, making it central to the renaissance of Asian contemporary dance. In describing how the intersections of dance cultures are marked by exchanges, research and pedagogy, it shows the way choreographers, performers, associated artists and companies of the region choose to imaginatively invent, blend, fuse, select and morph the multiple influences, revitalising and preserving cultural heritage while oscillating between tradition and change.