Dance and the Specific Image (eBook)

The first in a trilogy of books by one of the leading figures in American dance, Dance and the Specific Image includes more than 100 improvisational structures that Daniel Nagrin created with his company, the Workgroup, and taught in dance classes and workshops throughout the United States. Robby Barnett of the Pilobolus Dance Theater called the book "a vivid and fascinating document of his thinking—more movement and performance and, of course, on his own extraordinary life in dance."

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After an extraordinary career in dance - as a performer, choreographer, and teacher - Daniel Nagrin has now written an extraordinary book. In it he explores the roots of his aesthetic philosophy, influenced by Stanislavski, Helen Tamiris, Joseph Chaikin and the Open Theatre, and his work on and off Broadway as an actor and dancer.<i>Dance and the Specific Image</i> includes over one hundred improvisational structures that Nagrin created with his new company, the Workgroup, and has taught in dance classes and workshops all over the United States. Designed primarily for dancers, many can be adapted for actors and even musicians.In the 1960s, at a time when many modern dancers were working with movement as abstraction, Nagrin turned instead toward movement as metaphor. His passionate belief that dance must speak of people led him to found the Workgroup, a small company of dancers who, in the early 1970s, devoted themselves to the practice and performance of improvisation.Nagrin invites the reader into the mind of a dancer totally absorbed in his art, one who writes with wisdom and authority about what it means to be an artist.