This is THE resource for any topic relating to dance. The articles are written by the experts in each field and recommendations for further research/bibliographies accompany each one. The breadth and depth of topics makes the encyclopedia useful to novices and scholars alike. Unfortunately, the price tag is hefty, but this is such an excellent resource that if you can't afford your own set, at least try to talk your local library into purchasing it.

Susan Au's history of ballet & modern dance is intelligent and authoritative. Where other narrative treatments often choose details seemingly randomly, Susan Au builds the narrative from the details she proffers. Nor does she lapse into odd anecdotes often found in other narrative treatments. This book corrects some errors that have been perpetuated in earlier encyclopedic volumes. I wish she had included a short section on antiquity, as I believe that some of the inspiration for and concepts in "classical" ballet and in early modern dance derive from the rediscovery of antiquity -- but this is just quibbling. If you are going to teach 19th and 20th century Western dance history, this is a reliable way to go.

I use this book in my ballet history course and it's a very good book for that purpose, that is, for a basic overview on the history of dance. You won't find many details on special subjects, such as specific ballets, but it's great if you want to understand the developement of ballet through the ages and know something about the people who put their marks on the ballet. Lot's of colour photgraphs. Au's use of words is sometimes a bit complicated, at least for someone who doesn't have English for a first language. But a great book.

Like most of the new artistic modes at the beginning of the twentieth century, modern dance took the established norms prevalent at the time and broke them into pieces. Yet over the years, modern dance itself became fragmented and could not be recognized as the unified form of balletic opposition it had once been. Not only did modern dance change, but people's ideas about what modern was also changed. This book consists of seven different third generation modern dance choreographers describing their seven different beliefs of what modern dance really is. From Anna Sokolow's ideas of rebellion to Alwin Nikolais' ideas of abstraction, these written testaments to the lives of the some of the most innovative and important choreographers of the century allow us to see what lies behind dance and to gain insight into what modern dance was, is, and can be.