Dictionary of the Performing Arts - Softcover

Music, dance, acting, film, television, and other creative endeavours each develop their own jargon to communicate within the field. There is plenty of overlap in this terminology, just as there is in performers and composers, and this often creates a confusing mess when artists try to work together. The Dictionary of the Performing Arts aims to help professionals, students and critics understand each other by providing comprehensive, cross-discipline definitions of thousands of performance-related terms. Each word is followed by a short or medium-length explanation of its meaning as used by different performers and technicians. "Fade", for example, has related but different meanings to people working in audio, lighting and motion pictures, while a "stage manager" is the same in any variety of live performance. Including terms from circus, vaudeville, opera, classical Greek and Asian theatre, the Dictionary covers vast tracts of artistic territory--not many reference works contain extensive definitions of both "pas de deux" and "heavy metal" (though the latter curiously refers to Jimi Hendrix as one of its "greatest exponents"). Whether you are a scholar or a showboat, the Dictionary of the Performing Arts will come in handy when you need to make sense of the language of creation. --Rob Lightner

The Dictionary of the Performing Arts combines all performing arts disciplines into one volume.