Ear Training for the Body - A Dancer's Guide to Music Katherine Teck

A wonderful instructional book on how dancers can use, learn, interpret and explore music... without having to become a musician first! Lots of techniques and exercises that can be easily applied. Wonderful for expanding your expression and interpretation skills!

Dance Imagery Eric Franklin

A guide to combining technical expertise with imagery skills, providing dancers, teachers, and choreographers with some 500 imagery exercises designed to improve dance technique, artistic expression, and performance.

Dance, Sex and Gender - Signs of Identity, Dominance, Defiance, and Desire Judith Lunne Hanna

This book is not specific to Mid-Eastern dancing (although we are mentioned), but it is excellent reading for teachers and anyone interested in refining their ability to communicate from the stage. It deals with the symbolic and literal communications made by the dancer, their cultural context and subtext. Great Book!

Dynamic Alignment Through Imagery Eric Franklin

Booknews: Shows how to use imaging techniques to improve posture and alignment and release tension, offering exercises illustrated with black and white drawings and photos. Discusses the origins and uses of imagery, explains the biomechanical and anatomical principles behind complex imagery, and presents anatomical imagery exercises for specific regions of the body, for breathing, and for sculpting and improving alignment in various positions. For dancers, teachers, performance artists, and movement specialists.

The Six Questions: Acting Technique for Dance Performance  Daniel Nagrin

I haven't seen this book yet, but I use Lots of acting technique in my dancing. The six questions format is an excellent tool for finding and presenting a more complete and emotional performance.

The Creative Fire: Myths and Stories About the Cycles of Creativity (Cassettes) Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Kypris: Written and recorded by the author of Women who Run With the Wolves. I bought these tapes a few months ago when I was at an all-time creative low, and they helped me tremendously. Mostly they are stories that talk about the nature of creativity (and you can listen to them in your car!). There are two main lessons that I remember from these tapes that I'd like to share:

1. Creativity is a cyclic process--there will be highs and lows.

2. Creativity is like *excretion*, you have to do it every day or it builds up and becomes toxic.

The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity also Paperback Julia Cameron, Mark Bryan

Reflections on the Artist's Way (Cassettes)

The Artist's Way Morning Pages Journal: A Companion Volume to the Artist's Way

Robyn: A wonderful book for anyone who is feeling burnout. This is a gentle workbook for bringing artists (of all genres, whether acknowledged or unacknowledged) back to the point of feeling passion for their work, and helps the reader discover her secret dream.

I worked through this book and it was fun, enlightening, and really helpful during a rough spot.

Amazon.com: With the basic principle that creative expression is the natural direction of life, Julia Cameron and Mark Bryan lead you through a comprehensive twelve-week program to recover your creativity from a variety of blocks, including limiting beliefs, fear, self-sabotage, jealousy, guilt, addictions, and other inhibiting forces, replacing them with artistic confidence and productivity.

This book links creativity to spirituality by showing how to connect with the creative energies of the universe, and has, in the four years since its publication, spawned a remarkable number of support groups for artists dedicated to practicing the exercises it contains. Julia Cameron presents an exciting method for artists to recover their creativity from limiting beliefs, self-sabotage, inattention, fear, jealousy, guilt, addictions, and other forces that inhibit the creative process.

The Vein of Gold: A Journey to Your Creative Heart Julia Cameron

Booklist: Cameron's mind-freeing exercises are the basis for many a workshop and writers' group, and the wisdom she has gained through teaching has inspired her to develop new and even more probing techniques for liberating what she believes is our innate creativity. Cameron characterizes her teachings as "a process of creative individuation and emergence," or, to use that dreadful New Age phrase, of freeing the inner child.

This companion to the best-selling The Artist's Way contains essays on the creative process and more than one hundred imaginative exercises that help readers reach new spiritual heights and expand their creativity.

This is an ambitious set of exercises, and it will take you some time to do them, but the reward is there if you follow it through...