Poet and novelist Charles Bukowski described promiscuity as "feast and feast and feast." The promiscuous person is having fun, getting away with it, and showing no signs of stopping. More often, though, promiscuity has been seen as demonic, as the sign of an uncivilised race, or as a symptom of mental disorder.Promiscuity in Western Literature capitalises on the fact that literature gives us deep and varied resources for reflecting on this controversial aspect of human beh...

'Tom was a glittering hero once more - the pet of the old, and the envy of the young...There were some that believed he would be President yet, if he escaped hanging.' In this enduring and internationally popular novel, Mark ogaincombines social satire and dime-novel sensation with a rhapsody on boyhood and on America's pre-industrial past. Tom Sawyer is resilient, enterprising, and vainglorious. In a series of adventures along the banks of the Mississippi, he usually mana...

'Tom was a glittering hero once more - the pet of the old, and the envy of the young...There were some that believed he would be President yet, if he escaped hanging.' In this enduring and internationally popular novel, Mark ogaincombines social satire and dime-novel sensation with a rhapsody on boyhood and on America's pre-industrial past. Tom Sawyer is resilient, enterprising, and vainglorious. In a series of adventures along the banks of the Mississippi, he usually mana...

Designed for students, scholars and general readers with an interest in dance and queer history, A Queer History of the Ballet focuses on how, as makers and as audiences, queer men and women have helped to develop many of the texts, images, and legends of ballet.Presenting a series of historical case studies, the book explores the ways in which, from the nineteenth century into the twentieth, ballet has been a means of conjuring homosexuality – of enabling some degree of e...

You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", but that ain't no matter. So begins, in characteristic fashion, one of the greatest American novels. Narrated by a poor, illiterate white boy living in America's deep South before the Civil War, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the story of Huck's escape from his brutal father and the relationship that grows between him and Jim, the slave who is fleeing from an ev...

Daria Klimentová's sizzling chemistry with Russian dancer Vadim Muntagirov, who is nearly 20 years her junior, has reignited the prima ballerina's career - and marks a metamorphosis after her Black Swan-style torments depicted in BBC Four's Agony and Ecstasy, the gripping documentary series aired last year. There has been a metamorphosis since the 'old ballerina' allowed herself to be browbeaten by domineering choreographer Derek Deane, and Daria and Vadim are being applauded as the new Fo...

Ballet: From the First Pli; to Mastery is designed as a complement to a beginning student's ballet training. The book opens with a brief description of the benefits of ballet training to young dancers, and then introduces fundamentals and precepts of the technique. Clear photographs show exactly how to execute each movement. Then an eight-year course is presented, taking the student from age 5 or 6 through the teen years, outlining exactly what is to be taught and how it is to be performed...

This is the story of the National Ballet of Canada – the people, the determination, and how at sixty it is still creating new work while still representing the classics.Passion to Dance is the story of the National Ballet of Canada – the people who dreamt the company into existence, the determination needed to keep it afloat, the bumps on the road to its success, and above all, its passion for dance as a living, evolving art form.From catch-as-catch-can beginnings ...

Pina Bausch’s work has had tremendous impact across the spectrum of late twentieth-century performance practice, helping to redefine the possibilities of what both dance and theater can be. This edited collection presents a compendium of source material and contextual essays that examine Pina Bausch's history, practice and legacy, and the development of Tanztheater as a new form, with sections including:Dance and theatre roots and connections;

Peter Wright has been a dancer, choreographer, teacher, producer and director in the theatre as well as in television for over 70 years.In Wrights & Wrongs, Peter offers his often surprising views of today's dance world, lessons learned – and yet to learn – from a lifetime's experience of ballet, commercial theatre and television.Peter started his career in wartime, with the Kurt Jooss company. He has worked with such greats as Pina Bausch, Margot Fonteyn, Rudolf N...

Butch Queens Up in Pumpsexamines Ballroom culture, in which inner-city LGBT individuals dress, dance, and vogue to compete for prizes and trophies. Participants are affiliated with a house, an alternative family structure typically named after haute couture designers and providing support to this diverse community. Marlon M. Bailey’s rich first-person performance ethnography of the Ballroom scene in Detroit examines Ballroom as a queer cultural formation that upsets dominant notio...

Natalia Osipova: Becoming a Swan is an intimate portrait of the work of a ballet superstar, and the story told in pictures of how she prepares for the most iconic role in all of ballet. Features over 150 black and white images of Osipova behind the scenes and on stage, including unique glimpses taken from the wings at Covent Garden. Andrej Uspenski has used his exclusive vantage point as a First Artist with The Royal Ballet, to produce a moving photographic tribute to the most exciting pri...