Martha Graham: A Dancer's Life


Russell Freedman - 1998
    She possessed a great gift for revealing emotion through dance, expressing beliefs and telling stories in an utterly new way. Newbery Medalist Russell Freedman documents Martha Graham's life from her birth in 1894 to her final dance performance at the age of seventy-five and continued career as a choreographer until her death in 1991. Graham's own recollections as well as those of her dancers, students, friends, and lovers reveal Graham's unwavering dedication, her extraordinary sense of artistry, and the fierce intensity that left an impression on all who saw her perform. Original research based on interviews and a remarkable collection of photographs not widely reproduced give this biography a rare and unparalleled depth. Includes notes,a bibliography, and an index.

In Tune with Wedding Bells


Grace Livingston Hill - 1941
    But will he be able to do what it takes to save the two people who have so effectively brought upheaval into his well-ordered life?

American Moor


Keith Hamilton Cobb - 2020
    not necessarily in that order.Keith Hamilton Cobb embarks on a poetic exploration that examines the experience and perspective of black men in America through the metaphor of Shakespeare's character Othello, offering up a host of insights that are by turns introspective and indicting, difficult and deeply moving. American Moor is a play about race in America, but it is also a play about who gets to make art, who gets to play Shakespeare, about whose lives and perspectives matter, about actors and acting, and about the nature of unadulterated love.American Moor has been seen across America, including a successful run off-Broadway in 2019. This edition features an introduction by Professor Kim F. Hall, Barnard College.

My Life


Isadora Duncan - 1927
    Denis, Agnes de Mille, and Martha Graham.Documenting Duncan's own life as a dancer and as a woman—from her enchantment with classical music and poetry as a child in San Francisco and her intense study of classical Greek art in Athens, through the great strides she made in teaching, founding schools, performing, and collaborating with international artists, to her notorious love affairs and the tragic deaths of her own children—My Life reissued here is still as extraordinary as the woman who wrote it more than sixty years ago.

Book of Mercy


Leonard Cohen - 1984
    Now beautifully repackaged, the poems in Book of Mercy brim with praise, despair, anger, doubt and trust. Speaking from the heart of the modern world, yet in tones that resonate with an older devotional tradition, these verses give voice to our deepest, most powerful intuitions.

Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture


Philip Auslander - 1999
    This provocative book tackles some of the enduring 'sacred truths' surrounding the high cultural status of the live event.

How To Be The Greatest Improviser On Earth


Will Hines - 2016
    Become great at performing long-form improv! We skip the basics and get into advanced topics like: being truly present, being authentic, dealing with difficult performers, being actually funny (!) and the rarely discussed but essential skill of being healthy.

Into the Woods


Stephen Sondheim - 1987
    Henry III, Time

The Dream Life of Sukhanov


Olga Grushin - 2005
    A virtuoso study in betrayal and its consequences, it explores - really, colonizes - the consciousness of Anatoly Sukhanov, who many years before abandoned the precarious existence of an underground artist for the perks of a Soviet apparatchik. But, at the age of 56, his perfect life is suddenly disintegrating. Buried dreams return to haunt him. New political alignments threaten to undo him. Vaulting effortlessly from the real to the surreal and from privilege to paranoia, The Dream Life of Sukhanov is a darkly funny, demonically entertaining novel.

Gateways to Art: Understanding the Visual Arts


Debra J. Dewitte - 2011
    Short chapters can be read in any order, with new vocabulary defined on the page as it occurs. Eight “Gateways to Art” images (from around the world and all eras) support the common course goal of learning to interpret art in multiple ways and help students build on what they already know. The text is balanced and global, with over 1,000 illustrations—from around the world, and from everyday life.

The Shape of Things


Neil LaBute - 2001
    After a chance meeting at a museum, Evelyn and Adam embark on an intense relationship that causes shy and principled Adam to go to extraordinary lengths, including cosmetic surgery, and a betrayal of his best friend, to improve his appearance and character. In the process, Evelyn's subtle and insistent coaching results in a reconstruction of Adam's fundamental moral character. Only in a final and shocking exhibition does Evelyn reveal the nature of her interest in Adam, of her detached artist's perspective and sense of authority--to her, Adam is no more than "flesh.... one of the most perfect materials on earth. Natural, beautiful, and malleable." Labute's latest work is an intense and disturbing study not only of the uses of power within human relationships, but also of the ethics involved in the relationship of art and life. To what extent is an artist licensed to shape and change her medium or to alter the work of another artist? What is acceptable artistic material? At what point does creation become manipulation, and at what point does creation destroy? Or, is the new Adam, handsome and confident if heart broken, an admirable result of the most challenging artistic endeavor? The Shape of Things challenges society's most deeply entrenched ideas about art, manipulation, and love.

Reckless - Acting Edition


Craig Lucas - 1985
    She meets and joins up with Lloyd Bophtelophti, a true "original" who has changed his name to avoid alimony payments and who now lives with a paraplegic named Pootie (who also pretends to be deaf in order to get double disability). Thus begins a series of picaresque escapades involving numerous psychiatrists, a TV game show, and, eventually, an ill-fated reunion with her husband. Filled with bizarre characters and events, the play reflects the fractured lifestyles which have become the norm for so many in our tenuous times.

A Chorus Line: The Complete Book of the Musical


James Kirkwood Jr. - 1975
    It is hard to believe that over 25 years have passed since A Chorus Line first electrified a New York audience. The memories of the show's birth in 1975, not to mention those of its 15-year-life and poignant death, remain incandescent and not just because nothing so exciting has happened to the American musical since. For a generation of theater people and theatergoers, A Chorus Line was and is the touchstone that defines the glittering promise, more often realized in lengend than in reality, of the Broadway way. This impressive book contains the complete book and lyrics of one of the longest running shows in Broadway history with a preface by Samuel Freedman, an introduction by Frank Rich and lots of photos from the stage production.

Amadeus


Peter Shaffer - 1979
    Devout court composer Antonio Salieri plots against his rival, the dissolute but supremely talented Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. How far will Salieri go to achieve the fame that Mozart disregards? The 1981 Tony Award winner for Best Play. An L.A. Theatre Works full cast performance featuring: Steven Brand as Baron van Swieten James Callis as Mozart Michael Emerson as Salieri Darren Richardson as Venticello 2 Alan Shearman as Count Orsini-Rosenberg Mark Jude Sullivan as Venticello 1 Simon Templeman as Joseph II Brian Tichnell as Count Johann Kilian Von Strack Jocelyn Towne as Constanze Directed by Rosalind Ayres. Recorded in Los Angeles before a live audience at The James Bridges Theater, UCLA in September of 2016.

Margot Fonteyn


Meredith Daneman - 2004
    Carried to fame on a wave of wartime patriotism, Margot's sense of duty rather than ambition propelled her forward. Yet her gifts were such that her pre-eminence would come to eclipse the careers of subsequent generations.Ballet is a fairytale world; if Margot, like the pure and poetic heroine of Swan Lake, was a natural Odette, she would also have to contend with virtue's raw shadow-side in the guise of Constant Lambert, Roberto Arias and Rudolph Nureyev - the men who, like Von Rothbart, were to take possession of her heart.