Ballet

Ballet /ˈbæleɪ/ (French: [balɛ]) is a type of performance dance that originated in the Italian Renaissance courts of the 15th century and later developed into a concert dance form in France and Russia. It has since become a widespread, highly technical form of dance with its own vocabulary based on French terminology. It has been globally influential and has defined the foundational techniques used in many other dance genres. Becoming a ballet dancer requires years of training. Ballet has been taught in various schools around the world, which have historically incorporated their own cultures to evolve the art.

Ballet may also refer to a ballet dance work, which consists of the choreography and music for a ballet production. A well-known example of this is The Nutcracker, a two-act ballet that was originally choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov with a music score by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Ballets are choreographed and performed by trained artists. Many classical ballets are performed with classical music accompaniment and use elaborate costumes and staging, though there are exceptions to this. Most notably, American choreographer George Balanchine is known for his plotless neoclassical ballets which are often performed in simple leotards and tights without scenery.

Ballet (music)

Ballet as a music form progressed from simply a complement to dance, to a concrete compositional form that often had as much value as the dance that went along with it. The dance form, originating in France during the 17th century, began as a theatrical dance. It was not until the 19th century that ballet gained status as a “classical” form. In ballet, the terms ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’ are chronologically reversed from musical usage. Thus, the 19th century classical period in ballet coincided with the 19th century Romantic era in Music. Ballet music composers from the 17th–19th centuries, including the likes of Jean-Baptiste Lully and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, were predominantly in France and Russia. Yet with the increased international notoriety seen in Tchaikovsky’s lifetime, ballet music composition and ballet in general spread across the western world.

History

Until about the second half of the 19th century the role of music in ballet was secondary, with the main emphasis on dance, while music was simply a compilation of danceable tunes. Writing "ballet music" used to be a job for musical craftsmen, rather than for masters. For example, critics of the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky mentioned his writing of ballet music as something demeaning.

Cloud (music)

In music a cloud is a sound mass consisting of statistical clouds of microsounds and characterized first by the set of elements used in the texture, secondly density, including rhythmic and pitch density . Clouds may include ambiguity of rhythmic foreground and background or rhythmic hierarchy.

Examples include:

Clouds are created and used often in granular synthesis. Musical clouds exist on the "meso" or formal time scale. Clouds allow for the interpentration of sound masses first described by Edgard Varèse including smooth mutation (through crossfade), disintegration, and coalescence.

Curtis Roads suggests a taxonomy of cloud morphology based on atmospheric clouds: cumulus, stratocumulus, stratus, nimbostratus, and cirrus; as well as nebulae: dark or glowing, amorphus or ring-shaped, and constantly evolving.

Cloud (dancer)

Daniel "Cloud" Campos (born May 6, 1983) is an award-winning Los Angeles-based dancer, director, and occasional actor raised in San Diego, California and Orlando, Florida.

Early life

Cloud started dancing as a b-boy when he was 11. He learned breaking from his oldest brother Kevin "Deft-1" Campos who is also a b-boy. He spent his early life in San Diego then moved to Florida when he was 12. During his time in Florida he toured with High Voltage extreme acrobatics dance team and became a member of Skill Methodz b-boy crew, which was founded in 1995 in Tampa under the name B-Boy Connection. He described what his b-boy name means in an 2011 interview with KoreanRoc.com:

Dance career

After moving to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the dance industry, he booked two tours with Madonna; first in 2004 on her Re-Invention World Tour and again in 2006 on her Confessions Tour. He also performed in the stage show Groovaloos. In 2009, he won first place with his crew Skill Methodz at the UK B-Boy Championships. Later the same year, he competed at Red Bull BC One and appeared in Shakira's music video "Did It Again" as the principal male dancer. In 2010, he appeared in the online series The LXD as The Illister and played the antagonist, Kid Darkness, in the film Step Up 3D. In 2011, he served as one of ten choreographers for Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour.

Cloud, California

Cloud is a former settlement in Kings County, California. It was located 35 miles (56 km) southwest of Lemoore.

A post office operated at Cloud from 1913 to 1921.

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