Dancing

Comprehensive, thought-provoking, and beautiful to look at, Dancing illuminates the many roles of dance in selected cultures around the world. Using new research from the fields of dance history and anthropology, as well as interviews and his own travels throughout the dance world, Gerald Jonas weaves together descriptions of dance traditions from six continents. Here are clear explanations of the history and aesthetics of Western ballet, kabuki and bugaku in Japan, the court dances of Ghana's Asante people, kathakali and bharata natyam in India, as well as a history of 20th-century dance crazes, the development of modern dance, and an explanation of the cultural forces fusing African and Western dance traditions that resulted in the social dances familiar to most Americans today.