Dictionary of the Performing Arts

Music, dance, acting, film, television, and other creative endeavors--each develops its own jargon to communicate within the field. There's plenty of overlap in this terminology, 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 short or medium-length explanations 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 to any variety of live performance. Including terms from circus, vaudeville, opera, classical Greek and Asian theater, 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're 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