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- Next Week, Swan Lake
List of Ilustrations
The Problems of Swan Lake
Actions and Passions, Airs and Graces
The Girdle of Venus
The Achieve of, the Mastery of the Thing!
What does the "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" Mean?
Verbs of Motion
Lebedinoe Ozero by Any Other Name
Notes
Bibliography
Index
SELMA JEANNE COHEN occupies a unique place in the dance world as editor of Dance Perspectives. She is also director of the National Regional Ballet Association and the American Society for Aesthetics, and a member of the Dance Panel for the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities. Cohen is the author of Next Week, Swan Lake (Wesleyan, 1982) and she edited and completed Doris Humphrey, An Artist First: An Autobiography (Wesleyan, 1972). Most recently, she was founding editor of The International Encyclopedia of Dance (1998).
"Cohen's stimulating, perceptive, and well-written essays both conjure up the excitement of live dance performances and record dance aesthetics with accuracy, historical perspective, clarity, persuasuion, pleasure, ease, expertise, and reliability . . . High priority acquisition for both public and academic libraries"
~Choice
""A primer of dance aestheticsCohen tackles such basic issues as the nature and relationship of grace and virtuosity in dancing; the literal, expressive, and intrinsic significance of movement; and the meaning of style. She explores relevant and fascinating byways, such as the tension between the 'given' choreography and the performers transmission – and inevitable interpretation – of it to the viewer. Boldly she takes on that first, and perhaps thorniest, question concerning the most ephemeral of the arts: the very definition of 'the work.'""
~Tobi Tobias, Dance Magazine
""The issues Cohen tackles are as fundamental to the dance critic as time, space and enery are to the choreographer. How might one go about determining the 'style' of a ballet? What makes viruoso display frivolous? What, and how, does a dance represent?""
~Susan Isaacs Nisbett, Dance Critics Association News
""Cohen's stimulating, perceptive, and well-written essays both conjure up the excitement of live dance performances and record dance aesthetics with accuracy, historical perspective, clarity, persuasuion, pleasure, ease, expertise, and reliability . . . High priority acquisition for both public and academic libraries""
~Choice
""The philosophers and writers on esthetics quoted by Miss Cohen, whether they are commenting on dance or other art forms, do notalways serve the needs of a universal definition for dance. It is this awareness of the need for particularizationin dance theory that makes Miss Cohen's book so refreshing.""
~Anna Kisselgoff, The New York Times
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