Dance and the Specific Image: Improvisation

Description

After a career in dance as a performer, choreographer, and teacher - Daniel Nagrin has now written this 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 a dancer. "Dance and the Specific Image" includes over 100 improvisational structures that Nagrin created with his 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 musicians. In the 1960s, at a time when many modern dancers were working with movement as abstraction, Nagrin turned instead towards movement as metaphor. His passionate belief that dance must be about something led him to found Workgroup, a small company of dancers who, in the early 1970s, devoted themselves to the practice and performance of improvisation. "Dance and the Specific Image" is designed to be read by the general reader interested in dance history and philosophy as well as by students and teachers who may benefit from the techniques he describes. Nagrin invites the reader into the mind of a dancer totally absorbed in his art.