Janice Ross

Be warned… Romance is not at the heart of Damaged Girls. This series revolves around contemporary issues in families and relationships.Steven Briggs is thirty-five, gorgeous and partially successful as an auto shop owner-wannabe. He loves women – young women to be exact. Moreover, he is not above manipulating any situation to have the women he wants. Independent twenty year old Jillian McConnell was once lucky to be a part of his world. Since Stevie was the only man to ever shatter her rough exterior, he knows that she would always keep coming back for more. But Jillian is only good enough some of the time. When the sensual Jessica Rodney comes of age, Stevie is enthralled. He shuns the older part time model, for the time being. But is Jessica's liveliness enough to sustain Stevie? Or will he keep turning back to the sensible relationship of his past, since he can always make Jillian believe that she should readily be a willing participant in this triangle. Damaged Girls is a complicated novel about the choices and outcomes, associated with the mistakes we make over time.

A Family & Relationship Series

Damaged Girls I

Everyone has heard of George Balanchine. Few outside Russia know of Leonid Yakobson, Balanchine’s contemporary, who remained in Lenin’s Russia and survived censorship during the darkest days of Stalin. Like Shostakovich, Yakobson suffered for his art and yet managed to create a singular body of revolutionary dances that spoke to the Soviet condition. His work was often considered so culturally explosive that it was described as “like a bomb going off.” Based on untapped archival collections of photographs, films, and writings about Yakobson’s work in Moscow and St. Petersburg for the Bolshoi and Kirov ballets, as well as interviews with former dancers, family, and audience members, this illuminating and beautifully written biography brings to life a hidden history of artistic resistance in the USSR through this brave artist, who struggled against officially sanctioned anti-Semitism while offering a vista of hope.

Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russia

Like a Bomb Going Off

Anna Halprin pioneered what became known as "postmodern dance," creating work that was key to unlocking the door to experimentation in theater, music, Happenings, and performance art. This first comprehensive biography examines Halprin’s fascinating life in the context of American culture—in particular popular culture and the West Coast as a center of artistic experimentation from the Beats through the Hippies. Janice Ross chronicles Halprin’s long, remarkable career, beginning with the dancer’s grandparents—who escaped Eastern European pogroms and came to the United States at the turn of the last century—and ending with the present day, when Halprin continues to defy boundaries between artistic genres as well as between participants and observers. As she follows Halprin’s development from youth into old age, Ross describes in engrossing detail the artist’s roles as dancer, choreographer, performance theorist, community leader, cancer survivor, healer, wife, and mother. Halprin’s friends and acquaintances include a number of artists who charted the course of postmodern performance. Among her students were Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, Meredith Monk, and Robert Morris. Ross brings to life the vital sense of experimentation during this period. She also illuminates the work of Anna Halprin’s husband, the important landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, in the context of his wife’s environmental dance work. Using Halprin’s dance practices and works as her focus, Ross explores the effects of danced stories on the bodies who perform them. The result is an innovative consideration of how experience becomes performance as well as a masterful account of an extraordinary life.

Experience as Dance

Anna Halprin

John Beardsley

Randy Gragg

Lawrence Halprin, the influential landscape architect of the post WWII generation, and his creation of the striking plazas of the Portland Open Space Sequence.

Lawrence and Anna Halprin and the Reinvention of Public Space

Where the Revolution Began

Moving Lessons is an insightful and sophisticated look at the origins and influence of dance in American universities, focusing on Margaret H'Doubler, who established the first university courses and the first degree program in dance (at the University of Wisconsin). Dance educator and historian Janice Ross shows that H'Doubler (1889–1982) was both emblematic of her time and an innovator who made deep imprints in American culture. An authentic "New Woman," H'Doubler emerged from a sheltered female Victorian world to take action in the public sphere. She changed the way Americans thought, not just about female physicality but also about higher education for women. Ross brings together many discourses—from dance history, pedagogical theory, women's history, feminist theory, American history, and the history of the body—in intelligent, exciting, and illuminating ways and adds a new chapter to each of them. She shows how H'Doubler, like Isadora Duncan and other modern dancers, helped to raise dance in the eyes of the middle class from its despised status as lower-class entertainment and "dangerous" social interaction to a serious enterprise. Taking a nuanced critical approach to the history of women's bodies and their representations, Moving Lessons fills a very large gap in the history of dance education.

Margaret H'Doubler and the Beginning of Dance in American Education

Moving Lessons

Everyone has heard of George Balanchine. Few outside Russia know of Leonid Yakobson, Balanchine's contemporary, who remained in Lenin's Russia and survived censorship during the darkest days of Stalin. Like Shostakovich, Yakobson suffered for his art and yet managed to create a singular body of revolutionary dances that spoke to the Soviet condition. His work was often considered so culturally explosive that it was described as like a bomb going off.” Based on untapped archival collections of photographs, films, and writings about Yakobson's work in Moscow and St. Petersburg for the Bolshoi and Kirov ballets, as well as interviews with former dancers, family, and audience members, this illuminating and beautifully written biography brings to life a hidden history of artistic resistance in the USSR through this brave artist, who struggled against officially sanctioned anti-Semitism while offering a vista of hope.

FIRE BETWEEN US Book Description Isaiah Five years ago, I fell for Asha Walker. But she carries emotional baggage so deep that I haven't been able to get anywhere near her heart. So instead, I've locked away the urges and focused on being what she needed at the time: a good friend. I've moved on but can't help but wonder if (and when) my luck will ever change. I'm just not sure of how much more my heart can take... Asha Isaiah Turner is the perfect kind of guy for me, if only I wasn't so emotionally unavailable. As I try to be just friends, the universe steps in and forces us to own up to the hidden feelings. But life is never that easy. Bad choices and dark secrets filter in to shatter the only real happiness either of us has ever known. And we are forced into circumstances neither is prepared to take on, though we must; otherwise, love might be lost. Forever . . .

Fire Between Us

This comprehensive biography examines Halprin's fascinating life in the context of American culture - in particular popular culture and the West Coast as a center of artistic experimentation from the Beats through the Hippies to the present.

Honoring the seventy-fifth anniversary of one of the world's leading ballet companies, a beautiful retrospective traces the history of the San Francisco Ballet, America's oldest company, with intimate portraits of its dancers and behind-the-scenes contributors, accompanied by a DVD capturing the innovative dance pioneers at work.

San Francisco Ballet at Seventy-Five

Rebecca Schneider

Susan Manning

A collaboration between well-established and rising scholars, Futures of Dance Studies suggests multiple directions for new research in the field. Essays address dance in a wider range of contexts--onstage, on screen, in the studio, and on the street--and deploy methods from diverse disciplines. Engaging African American and African diasporic studies, Latinx and Latin American studies, gender and sexuality studies, and Asian American and Asian studies, this anthology demonstrates the relevance of dance analysis to adjacent fields"--

Janice Ross

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