Dance Imagery for Technique and Performance - 2nd Edition

Renowned master teacher Eric Franklin has thoroughly updated his classic text, Dance Imagery for Technique and Performance, providing dancers and dance educators with a deep understanding of how they can use imagery to improve their dancing and artistic expression in class and in performance.

These features are new to this edition:

•Two chapters include background, history, theory, and uses of imagery.

•294 exercises offer dancers and dance educators greater opportunities to experience how imagery can enhance technique and performance.

•133 illustrations facilitate the use of imagery to improve technique, artistic expression, and performance.

•Four exercises taught by Franklin and available on HK’s website help dancers with essential rest and relaxation techniques.

Franklin provides hundreds of imagery exercises to refine improvisation, technique, and choreography. The 295 illustrations cover the major topics in the book, showing exercises to use in technique, artistic expression, and performance. In addition, Franklin supplies imagery exercises that can restore and regenerate the body through massage, touch, and stretching. And he offers guidance in using imagery to convey information about a dancer’s steps and to clarify the intent and content of movement.

This new edition of Dance Imagery for Technique and Performance can be used with Franklin’s Dynamic Alignment Through Imagery, Second Edition, or on its own. Either way, readers will learn how to combine technical expertise with imagery skills to enrich their performance, and they will discover methods they can use to explore how imagery connects with dance improvisation and technique.

Dance Imagery for Technique and Performance uses improvisation exercises to help readers investigate new inner landscapes to create and communicate various movement qualities, provides guidelines for applying imagery in the dance class, and helps dancers expand their repertoire of expressiveness in technique and performance across ballet, modern, and contemporary dance.

This expanded edition of Dance Imagery for Technique and Performance supplies imagery tools for enhancing or preparing for performance, and it introduces the importance of imagery in dancing and teaching dance. Franklin’s method of using imagery in dance is displayed throughout this lavishly illustrated book, and the research from scientific and dance literature that supports Franklin’s method is detailed.

The text, exercises, and illustrations make this book a practical resource for dancers and dance educators alike.

Eric Franklin is director and founder of the Institute for Franklin Method in Wetzikon, Switzerland. He has more than 35 years of experience as a dancer and choreographer, and he has shared imagery techniques in his teaching since 1986.

Franklin has taught extensively throughout the United States and Europe at the Julliard School in New York, Royal Ballet School in London, Danish Ballet in Copenhagen, Dance Academy of Rome, and Institute for Psychomotor Therapy in Zurich. He was also a guest lecturer at the University of Vienna. He has provided training to Olympic and world-champion athletes and professional dance troupes such as Cirque du Soleil and the Forum de Dance in Monte Carlo. Franklin earned a BFA from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and a BS from the University of Zurich. He has been on the faculty of the American Dance Festival since 1991.

Franklin is coauthor of the best-selling book Breakdance, which received a New York City Public Library Prize in 1984, and author of 100 Ideen für Beweglichkeit and Dance Imagery for Technique and Performance (both books about imagery in dance and movement). He is a member of the International Association for Dance Medicine and Science.

Franklin lives near Zurich, Switzerland.

The Franklin method has proved invaluable to our students at the Juilliard School in New York City for the past several years. Learning how to use mental imagery and functional anatomy for dance augments our training program beautifully because it is clear, precise, and useful in every way for any dancer. The students have found it revelatory!

Lawrence Rhodes--Director of the Dance Division, The Juilliard School