Abstract
Twyla Tharp is one of the world's leading choreographers, working with many of the world's great ballet companies and also continuing to choreograph and direct for film and television. She was born in Portland, Indiana, but moved with her parents to Southern California when she was still a child.

From the Paper
"Twyla Tharp is one of the world's leading choreographers, working with many of the world's great ballet companies and also continuing to choreograph and direct for film and television. She was born in Portland, Indiana, but moved with her parents to Southern California when she was still a child. There, her father owned a construction firm and a Ford dealership, and her mother was a piano teacher who started Twyla on piano lessons when she was only two. Twyla began dance classes when she was only four, and within a short time she was studying every kind of dance available: ballet, tap, jazz, modern. Her mother was determined that Twyla would become accomplished in as many fields as possible, and she also had the child take baton lessons, drum lessons, violin and viola lessons, as well as classes in painting, shorthand, and French ("Biography: Twyla ..."

Abstract
This paper looks at the life and contributions of Gregory Hines, one of the most highly acclaimed choreographers, dramatic and comic actors, singers and directors of his time. It explains how his childhood and upbringing helped him develop the unique form of tap-dancing which became his trademark. The writer also mentions several of the shows that Hines was involved in.

From the Paper
"The "Pied Piper of modern tap", Gregory Hines, died of liver cancer, on August 9th, 2003, at age 57, in Los Angeles. When he died, "the shock reverberated through a number of worlds (because) he had shone in so many ways" (Jowitt). Gregory Hines was not only a superb dancer, actor, director, and choreographer, but was also a major figure in the revitalization of tap dancing in the late 20th century, in America ("Hines, Gregory"). He was "noted for his virtuosity, rhythm, and expressive style, and was credited with having modernized the form and facilitated its return to motion pictures" ("Hines, Gregory Oliver"). In his honor, the lights of Broadway were dimmed three days after his untimely death (Brennan). It was a memorial to one of the most gifted artists to have ever graced Broadway."

Tags:broadway, dance, tap

Abstract
This paper discusses the life of dancer and choreographer, Martha Graham. The paper relates her life to the description of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" of the progression and emergence of a superhuman. The paper describes Nietzsche's philosophy and discusses the various aspects of Graham's life in terms of the camel, the lion and the child that Nietzsche discusses.

Table of Contents:
The Camel--The Young Graham
The Maturing Graham--The Lion
The Graham Legacy--The Child

From the Paper
"Martha Graham lived for ninety-six years, and was increasingly criticized for her refusal to stop performing in her own dances. However, Graham's unique physicality combined with her fortitude of mind gave birth, to a unique ideal of American dance. It is hard not to think of the Superman when one hears of Graham's own attempt, like Nietzsche, to harkens back to Greek mythology with dances such as "Cave of the Heart" (1946), which contains no sentimentality or beauty, as was still expected in dance of the day, to tell the tale of a woman who slays her children. Graham was also capable of creating life-affirming works like "Appalachian Spring" (1944), one of Copeland's most famous tunes that told the story of an American pioneer wedding with primitive intensity and love of nature. (Teachout, 1998, p.3)"

Tags:primitive, intuitive, talents

Abstract
The paper examines the article "Warehouse of the Future: Software will Choreograph Tomorrow's Warehouse Work", where the author discusses how the future of warehouses will involve a highly coordinated, technical and completely efficient system. The paper explains that because technology evolves rapidly and the warehouse must stay competitive, the article stresses that a warehouse design must be flexible enough to accommodate future technologies.

From the Paper
"In describing exactly how this new warehouse will function, Graham talks about a well "choreographed" automated warehouse that will focus on "trimming fat, dumping waste and eliminating redundancy wherever it is found." Admittedly, this will mean that fewer workers will be required but, those who are employed will be "more qualified, better trained, and more motivated." The result will thereafter be the creation of more service orientated jobs in a typically manufacturing/labor intense field."

Tags:technology, efficiency, product, tracking, inventory, RFID

Abstract
This paper reviews the controversial movie 'For a Lost Soldier' based on the book by choreographer and dancer Rudi van Dantzig. According to the paper, the book is semi-autobiographical, based on the life of van Dantzig.

From the Paper
'Based on the semi-autobiographical novel of choreographer and dancer Rudi van Dantzig, Roeland Kerbosch's directorial adaptation tells the story of a gay intergenerational relationship that is bound to be both condemned and praised. Set near the end of World War II during Holland's liberation from the Nazis, Kerbosch's depiction revolves around a brief relationship between a Canadian soldier and an 11-year-old Dutch boy that becomes sexual. According to one reviewer, the film is unique "in its understanding portrayal of an intergenerational relationship that is free of exploitation" ("Film News" para 3).'

Tags:queer, cinema, intergenerational

Abstract
Vernon and Irene Castle were America's 'golden' couple--as well as the toast of Europe in the years immediately preceding World War I. Their innovative dance steps: Texas Tommy, Foxtrot, and Grizzly Bear, set to the syncopation of ragtime swept America, Britain and France. In the age of silent movies, film shorts of their dance routines were followed as avidly by teenagers in 1911 as are the television doings of pop stars today. The paper briefly describes the backgrounds of the couple and then examines their career as innovative dancers and choreographers in the years preceding the First World War and up to the death of Vernon Castle in a flying accident in February 1918.

Outline:
Introduction
Background
The Castles, Daring Dance, and Social Innovation in Pre-War America (and Europe, as well)
The Price of War
Epilogue
Works Consulted in the Preparation of this Report

From the Paper
"The Castles appeared together in The Hen-Pecks, a Broadway musical comedy in which their dance routines, set to "the music of young songwriter Irving Berlin's Alexander's Ragtime Band, [Notable Biographies]" were a regular component sketches. The caught the eye of a French theatrical agent who, in 1912, booked them for a six-month gig at the Cafe de Paris, in the city of that name. While their comedy routines received top billing, it was their dancing that caught the crowd's attention. Simply stated, the Castles appropriated black America's ragtime rhythm and social dance steps, performing them in a seemingly 'passionless and well-mannered' fashion. Susan Cook describes the Castles' approach. "Throughout their careers, the Castles responded to the discourse of dance pathology [specifically, white fears of black influence on the social attitudes of American youth] with their own carefully crafted one of propriety in which their dancing, self-described as 'modern,' was so identified by its calculated 'refinement' in opposition to the 'roughness' associated with its working-class and ethnic predecessors. They came to mark out a kind of middle ground between the informality of the working-class dance halls the constrained rigidity of the Dancing Masters [141]." (They Castles had a major impact on American middle-class acceptance of the tango. In Argentina the dance was overtly erotic. The Castles performed it in a more 'stately' manner, although of course the erotic element shimmered just beneath the surface--suitable, one might think, for a happily married couple.)"

Tags:passion, music, dance, body, gender, sexuality, modernism, war, texas, tommy, foxtrot, grizzly, bear, syncopation, ragtime

Abstract
This paper takes a look at the history of the art of ballet, as well as reviews the different types of the ballet dance and the strenuous demands that ballet makes on the dancer. This paper also covers various dance choreographers and their particular styles of dance.

From the Paper
"Classical ballet celebrates the potential harmony of the human body, the utopian ideal of collective endeavor, the possibility of the interchange between masculinity and femininity. Something of this is what has recommended ballet to the communisms of the USSR, Cuba and China. Beneath the aristocratic tat of the settings and the charming but dispensable never-never of the stories, there is an implicitly socialist vision.
Yet classical ballet must of course always come wrapped in the specifics of where and for whom it is performed, what other values and meanings it is attached to, and these are riven with contradictions. In practice, in Britain, classical ballet is, at one and the same time, elitist and popular, and woman-centered, heterosexist and part of gay male culture, universal and distinctly white. It is all of this at once.
It is selective in part because it is expensive. Not only are sets on a grand scale and not only do most of the classics require large casts, but behind all that there are the years of investment in training. "

Tags:classic, contemporary, music, movement, body, graceful, steps, tippy, toes, france, italy

Abstract
This paper examines how, since his first dance routine more than half a century ago, Paul Taylor has become one of the world's most popular and respected choreographers. His works are performed by companies throughout the globe. Taylor has created more than 150 dance pieces. It also discusses how his style is unique and how he is often seen as a distinctly American artist.

From the Paper
"As has been mentioned, central to works was the focus on the experiences of common human emotion. The works that he produces are essentially about the way that people feel and interact in relation to the social intuitions around them. The use of body language in his works includes a wide range of both physical motion and creative imagination. Most important in these works is the focus on the human condition. His style is based on the underlying basis of dance as the expression of human existence and experience."

Tags:ballet, body, language, motion, choreography

From the Paper
"Martha Graham was arguably one of the greatest artists of the American tradition. She has earned a place in the company of such luminaries as Stravinski, Picasso, Joyce and Brancusi for her creation of an entirely new art form. As her contemporaries had done within their respective genres, Graham re-examined the creative possibilities of movement, gesture, composition and theatrical symbolism to expand the expressive vocabulary of dance. Through her innovative approach, she single-handedly initiated the modern dance movement.


In the 1920s, when Graham began her career as a professional dancer, the classical ballet was the dominant artistic genre. As is the case with any classical form, the ballet was, and continues to be, a highly refined tradition that offers sublime expressions of grace and beauty. Over the 300 or so years of its..."

Abstract
The following paper discusses August Bournonville's family life, the way in which he got to be the principal for the Copenhagen Royal Theatre, as well as their ballet-master and dance teacher. It examines the way in which Bournonville took a very contrasting humanistic approach to dance he tended to focus on the beauty found in the ordinary things.

From the Paper
"His third daughter, Mathilde, was a teacher; his fourth daughter, Therese was a homemaker, and his son Edmond was a doctor with a successful practice in both Sweden and Denmark. Wilhelmine was the Bournonville's adopted daughter, who seemed to perhaps ease his guilt about his daughter whom he had abandoned so many years earlier in France. It is important to interject that Bournonville did keep in correspondence with the adoptive parents of his first-born daughter, and he even corresponded with her after she was on her own. He never revealed to her that he was her father, but he aided her economically at any chance that he had."

Tags:ballet, studio, wedlock, behavior, career, dancing, debut, singer, theatrical