Böcker av Valerie Preston-Dunlop

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.

Uncompromising innovator, researcher,dancer and scholar, mentor and matriarchShe is a bishop's daughter with a silver-spoonchildhood and youthful traumas throughthe death of her father, wartime separationand teenage poverty. Valerie's meeting, agedsixteen, with the extraordinary HungarianRudolf Laban, guru of expressionist dance,set her on a life-long career devoted toquestioning, championing and developinghis initial insights into dance as a deeplysignificant art form for human wellbeing.Her writing exposes her battles to integratedance practice with dance scholarship in aworld set up to keep them apart.She shares the difficulties of balancing thedemands of family with professional lifeexacerbated by the catastrophic illness of herhusband John and her own experience ofmental breakdown.She describes her travels taking dance allover the globe and collecting evidence acrossEurope of Laban's leadership of German dancein the 1920s and 1930s, work that the Naziregime almost succeeded in annihilating.The book traces her support of what isnow Trinity Laban Conservatoire for Musicand Dance, from being in its first cohort ofstudents in a grubby studio in Manchester tobeing honoured as a Fellow in its Herzog andde Meuron award-winning building in SouthLondon.Valerie shares her wholehearted commitmentto whatever was on offer at difference stages ofher life from performing and choreographing,renovating a Victorian garden and runningclubs for disadvantaged people, writing booksand directing documentaries, educatingdancers and dance makers, engaging withall manner of people along the way from theleft-wing theatre director Joan Littlewood tothe establishment Archbishop of Canterburyor the astounding choreographer WilliamForsythe, while nurturing her family and embracing Quakerism.

Does a dance communicate ? What ? How ?Are all dances meaningful ?Do spectators see what a choreographer sees ?"The strands of the dance mediumlike locks of hair plait into one meaningful whole.The interlock is all."The interlock is what this book exploresfrom the choreographer and performers' perspectivewith every genre in contemporary dance theatre in mind.Written for practical people in dance, the text is organised in 32 short chapters each addressing a question on the way in which choreographers might or might not engage with their audiences in dance theatre works.The topics include an introduction to communication theory and the way in which the interlocking network between performers, movement material, sound, and performance can carry meaning. The book is written from choreographers' and performers' perspectives, with 46 dance works cited from a wide range of genres. The text is unusually presented - as closely as possible to how we speak to each other - with key words in bold type for ease of reference.Valerie Preston-Dunlop is an internationally recognisedlecturer, teacher, and author on dance.She is currently Adviser for Postgraduate Studies and Research at the Trinity Laban Centre in London.

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.

A collection of the verbal language of dance practitioners and researchers. This work presents people in dance, what they do, their movement, their sound and the space in which they work - from the standpoint of performers, choreographers, audiences and teachers.