Beyond Isadora Bay Area Dancing 1915-1965 Review

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(More customer reviews)Isadora Duncan (b. 1877) left Oakland, CA, in 1897. Gaining fame elsewhere, she did not leave her stamp on 20th-century dance in the Bay Area. The author Harris lays out the creative, diversified matrix which the world-famous Duncan arose from. The San Francisco Bay area was not only a center for dance training and performance for local talent, but attracted top dancers on their tours. Anna Pavlova, Martha Graham, Ted Shawn, and Merce Cunningham were among the world-renowned dancers who performed in the area.
Harris--who has choreographed as well as danced, formed her own dance company, and taught at the college level--brings all these in and more in a chronological treatment of dance and dancers in the Bay area. The attention the area got in the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition offered a showcase for regional dancers. In Harris's chronology, it marks a level of creativity and performance which successive generations kept up while reflecting social changes and changing styles of dance. The innovative, libertine atmosphere of San Francisco in the counterculture 1960s led to exploration of new avenues. And in following decades, Bay area dance embraced ethnic and folk dance. Spanish, Indian, and Afro-Haitian dance were taught and performed along with classical ballet and modernism dance.
Many period photographs and posters enhance the popular history of this relatively specialized, regional topic.


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Beyond Isadora: Bay Area Dancing The Early Years, 1915 1965 documents the fascinating and little-known history of early 20th century dance in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is a history of performers, choreographers and teachers, pioneers of today's dance community. It is also women's history, since the prime movers were almost all women. This history, offered here as short biographical and chronological sketches, seeks to detail the regional development of ballet and of modern, ethnic and folk dance, from the era of Isadora Duncan, San Francisco s dance legend, who is regarded as the pioneer revolutionary and the mother of modern dance, to the mid 1960s. After Isadora, decades of dancers, dance groups and organizations carried on and refined a new American dance.A symposium with Bay Area dance leaders and a performance of 'reconstructed works' was held in 2002 to provide groundwork information. Rare public and private archival collections supplied program data and illustrative visual material. Some noted dancers here include Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, the Boyntons and Quitzows of Berkeley, Anita Peters Wright and the California Dancing Girls, Peters Wright Creative Dance, the San Francisco Dance Council and League, the Oakland Dance Association, the San Francisco Ballet, the Oakland Ballet, the Halprin-Lathrop Company, the Shawl-Anderson Dance Center and others as important but less well-known. There is a section on dance in schools and colleges and tributes to leaders of ethnic and folk dance.

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