This list is subjective; it reflects my taste as well as that of the writers represented here. It is not in any particular order. Please feel free to comment below or suggest your favorite dance book of the year. Btw, sometimes a books is released too late in the season for me to catch up, in which case I try to consider it the following year…. Enjoy.

 

Edges of Ailey (exhibition catalog)
Edited by Adrienne Edwards; contributions by Horace D. Ballard, Harmony Bench, Kate Elswit, Aimee Meredith Cox, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Malik Gaines, Jasmine Johnson, Joshua Lubin-Levy, Uri McMillan, Ariel Osterweis, J. Wortham, CJ Salapare, Kyle Abraham, Claire Bishop, Masazumi Chaya, Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Jennifer Homans, Judith Jamison, Sylvia Waters, Jamila Wignot, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar.
Whitney Museum of American Art, distributed by Yale University Press
Reviewed by Robert Johnson

Though it threatens to up-end the coffee table, the catalog of the Edges of Ailey exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art is a handsome volume that every fan of the late choreographer and his Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater will be proud to own. Looking gold-plated in its foil dust jacket, this tome also contains a plethora of gorgeous illustrations. It supplements the checklist of the exhibition with exciting dance images not displayed at the Whitney, with commissioned essays, a list of Ailey’s own choreographies, an annotated chronology (up to 2014), and a rollcall of company dancers through 1989.

Editor and curator Adrienne Edwards and a team of researchers have plunged into the company’s archives and have retrieved amazing documents that illuminate the choreographer’s dreams, his personal struggles, and his success. Yet the magnitude of Ailey’s achievement becomes apparent, when we realize that this scholarship still falls short. Neither the exhibition nor the catalog provides a comprehensive account of the AAADT’s repertoire. While complaining that dance critics have not always recognized this repertory’s worth, the curators themselves slight the dances at the heart of this enterprise. Strangely, the catalog also fails to acknowledge the AAADT’s achievements after the founder’s death. Do not search the chronology for subsequent milestones like the opening of the company’s state-of-the-art home, or the premiere of Ronald K. Brown’s Grace.

Edges of Ailey also illustrates the curious position of American artists and intellectuals in a democratic culture that prioritizes material success. Our intellectuals and the public regard each other with mutual disdain. In his foreword to the catalog, Whitney Museum director Scott Rothkopf acknowledges that AAADT’s “broad popular appeal” delayed the troupe’s recognition by high-brow institutions like the Whitney. Does this elitism explain why the current exhibition sidesteps the dances?

Status anxiety erupts spectacularly in the catalog’s use of language. While the exhibition’s text panels address the public lucidly in English and Spanish, readers will find most of the catalog essays written in the hieratic style of a caste of scholar-priests. Don’t forget to bring your Phd decoder ring! Among the best of these essayists, Ariel Osterweis analyzes Ulysses Dove’s ballet Episodes. Intensity underscores the value of each passing moment in Episodes, where the dancers’ virtuosity suggests bravado and defiance in the midst of AIDS. In an affecting memoir, dancer Aimee Meredith Cox describes her personal growth, finding her identity in the abstraction of Ailey’s Streams.

Evidently, the Great Man theory of history is out of fashion; so, Edges of Ailey portrays the choreographer through the filter of Black and Queer society. Yet Ailey’s colleagues recall him as a hero. Pursuing what he described in his notes as a “romantic vision,” and cannily attuned to the taste of the American public, this exceptional artist embraced a life of risk and sacrifice to bring Black bodies and Black culture into the mainstream. He carried hundreds of his fellow artists on his broad shoulders. Now the museum crowd wants to hitch a ride, he’ll carry them, too. Mr. Ailey can carry them all.

 

Jill Johnston in Motion: Dance, Writing, and Lesbian Life
By Clare Croft
Duke University Press

The Essential Jill Johnston Reader
By Jill Johnston, edited by Clare Croft
Duke University Press

Reviewed by Elizabeth Zimmer

These are just such good books; I am boggled by them.

Born in 1929, Jill Johnston was the oldest of the phalanx of female dance writers who turned the field into a matriarchy beginning in the 1960s. Clare Croft, a professor at the University of Michigan, has clearly fallen in love with both Johnston and what she meant to the feminism of the period. Her two recent books document the story of a transformation, of an era Johnston spent in a “bewilderness,” recording and communicating the ripest work of the “dance boom” now behind us, and strategies for living as an “out” lesbian.

As a youngster Johnston, born out of wedlock as a result of an affair her mother had at sea, was sequestered in Queens with her grandmother while her embarrassed mom worked as a nurse in Manhattan. She began dancing in college and came to New York City to study with José Limón, but a broken foot diverted her into writing, first for Martha Graham’s collaborator Louis Horst and then originating dance coverage at the city’s fledgling alternative weekly, the Village Voice.

I basically owe Johnston my career; she carved a niche for dance at the Voice that Deborah Jowitt filled when Johnston moved on to writing about her own life and the political moment. I inherited the editorship of Jowitt and other Voice dance writers at the death of Burt Supree. Johnston’s observation in a 1970 Voice column, quoted on page 35 of The Essential Jill Johnston Reader, shaped my decision to enter the field: “…I never actually realized that dancing is the only organized cultural institution in which women are preeminent; nor that the reason for this is rooted in attitudes toward the dance as a frivolous entertainment in which a lady is encouraged to exhibit her charms, her grace and deportment, her bodily attributes, her seductive powers, in the formally sanctioned theatre of a man’s license for approved general voyeurism.” This sentence comes at the top of a column that occupies more than three entire pages in the Reader, and consists of one paragraph.

Johnston was as enraptured with contemporary art and artists (and poetry: a whole section of Jill Johnston in Motion is devoted to her identification with the work of surrealist Guillaume Apollinaire) as she was with dance. Croft compares her place in American culture with that of Susan Sontag, who was much more circumspect about her sexuality than Johnston.

Anyone who dances, thinks about dance, or writes about dance should read Croft’s book, and simultaneously take to bed the Reader, a collection of Johnston’s legendary pieces. As well as containing in full most of the work that Croft can only reference in JJinM, it has a 31-page appendix listing everything Johnston published from 1957 until 2007, including eleven books and hundreds of articles in places like Louis Horst’s Dance Observer, ARTnews (as many as 18 reviews a month!), Art in America, and the American Poetry Review. Johnston wrote during the golden age of print journalism, when it was possible to earn a decent living with your pen. A literary star who once described herself as “an asteroid,” she was also a political pioneer, a feminist annealed in the ferment of the ’60s and ’70s. Her prose, like her body, was in constant motion; she paid attention to the size and shape of sentences and paragraphs, and her ideas galloped down the page. She’d visit you and hang from the rafters in your loft, interrupt a boring speech by jumping into your pool. At every level, she made news.

 

Errand Into the Maze: The Life and Works of Martha Graham
By Deborah Jowitt
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux
Reviewed by Ellen Graff

In this exciting and evocative new biography, Deborah Jowitt takes us into the maze of Martha Graham’s world. She begins with the earliest influences of family and continues through her experiences with Denishawn, performances in the Greenwich Village Follies, early experiments at the Eastman School, and her first independent choreography. She chronicles the arc of Graham’s choreography, beginning with works inspired by American themes such as American Document and Appalachian Spring, the turn towards literary themes with Deaths and Entrances and Letter to the World, the Greek cycle with dances such as Night Journey, Cave of the Heart, and the epic Clytemnestra, and finally her own role as a creator in the playful Maple Leaf Rag.

Her descriptions reveal a deep understanding of the richness of Graham’s movement, in its force, in its evocation of feeling, and its connections to memory. Describing Letter to the World, she writes, it was “the first dance in which Graham tried to portray in a group work the inner landscape of her protagonist, the first time her heroine relived events or sensations in memory.” With Letter to the World, she continues, “Graham experimented with mingling past and present, the real and the imagined, and [Emily] Dickinson and herself as dedicated artists.” Jowitt has time for humor, too, as she recounts Graham playing Miss Hush on the radio show “Truth and Consequences” and being lampooned in an illustration for a 1934 issue of Vanity Fair.

Errand into the Maze takes the reader on a journey through the cultural landscape of the twentieth century as Graham explored the depths of her own creativity. Through Jowitt’s clear and insightful writing, we come to understand Graham as a force within a wider cultural world, influenced by changing constructs at the same time that she is instrumental in creating change.

Note: Ellen Graff, a former Graham dancer and author of Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928-1942, once danced with Deborah Jowitt in a work by Pearl Lang. In the 1980s, Graff was a student of Jowitt’s in NYU’s Department of Performance Studies.

 

The Swans of Harlem
By Karen Valby
Pantheon Books
Reviewed by djassi daCosta johnson

In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s novel about the ways that racism has colored the Black experience, he writes “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.” The new book, The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History, is one of the many recent attempts to make visible the unsung accomplishments of Black artists within American culture.

In 2020, writer Karen Valby became privy to a gathering of five Black women in Harlem who began meeting weekly as the 152nd Street Black Ballet Legacy Council. Prompted by the pandemic and the Great Uprisings following the killing of George Floyd, they gathered to remember, share, and celebrate their lives as unsung pioneers in the ballet world.

The women— Lydia Abarca, Gayle McKinney-Griffith, Sheila Rohan, Marcia Sells, and Karlya Shelton-Benjamin—were founding members of the Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH), the groundbreaking company co-founded by Arthur Mitchell in 1969 as a haven for Black ballet dancers. Grateful for the roads they paved but frustrated by the labeling of Misty Copeland as the “first Black principal ballerina,” they came together to resurrect their stories and ensure that future internet searches for Black ballet dancers would include their accomplishments.

These women have collectively accomplished an epic number of firsts. Abarca, who shone in Balanchine’s Bugaku and Jerome Robbins’ Afternoon of a Faun, was the first Black ballerina to grace the cover of Dance Magazine. Sells was the youngest founding member in the company at 15; after DTH she earned her BA at Barnard, obtained a law degree, and was recently the first chief diversity officer for the Metropolitan Opera. At the age of 17, Shelton-Benjamin was the first Black dancer to represent the United States in the Prix de Lausanne. McKinney-Griffith, an admired lead in Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco and Louis Johnson’s Forces of Rhythm, became the first ballet mistress for DTH. (Sadly, she passed away a few months before the book was published.) Rohan was a mother of three when she was accepted into the company, a fact she kept secret from Arthur Mitchell for a whole year before he found out, telling her, “If I’d known you had mouths at home to feed, I would’ve paid you more!”

Valby respects each of the women’s achievements while uplifting their friendship and sisterhood. We get to feel their pride in being part of a movement larger than themselves, while not sugarcoating the difficulties faced, including the misogyny and verbal abuse under Mitchell that is characteristic of the patriarchal ballet tradition.

Swans lifts the veil of invisibility in a way that makes us ask, “How many more stories have gone untold and undervalued?” The author, along with the Swans, has given birth to an engaging read that brings long overdue attention to these pioneering Black ballerinas.

 

Behind the Screen: Tap Dance, Race, and Invisibility During Hollywood’s Golden Age
By Brynn W. Shiovitz
Oxford University Press
Reviewed by Elizabeth Zimmer

On her book-signing tour, Brynn Shiovitz lectured on the book’s nominal subject, “a theory of covert minstrelsy.” But her actual subject is racism in American popular culture, from the earliest days of sound films until the mid-1950s. A small proportion of her material actually engages tap dancing, mostly revolving around Bill Robinson, who managed never to don blackface.

Shiovitz anatomizes the phenomenon of blackface as it migrated from the stage to the screen and from live performance to animated cartoons. She points out that the original “minstrels” were white men in blackface. Black people, often forced to “black up” by theatrical promoters, got into it to make money. She shows how blackface is associated with a kind of nostalgia that denigrates African Americans.

The author grew up tap dancing, studied at NYU and UCLA, and teaches in Southern California. She spent years screening 230 films to demonstrate the way that Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire coasted to fame, replacing the true Black masters of the Africanist esthetic. Also under her microscope are brownface, yellowface, redface, and Jewface, all strategies Hollywood used to “other” immigrant groups (as well as Native Americans). The denigrating aspects of blackface, which reduced an entire group of people to caricature, slipped under the radar of the Hayes Code of 1930, which was supposed to regulate the moral tone of popular entertainment.

The Catholic Church, the engine behind the Code, aka Motion Picture Production Code, demonized Black art forms like jazz and swing. This allowed white people to rip off the Africanist esthetic while Blacks were often deprived of credit, even when they appeared onscreen. Jazz music was painted as a slippery slide in the direction of sin. Blacks incarnated these things, were “tricksters,” and needed to be kept separate from white wives and daughters.

Both the visual and the sonic—and the animated as well as the “real”—were environments to be carefully monitored for implications of racial mixing. As Shiovitz notes, this rendered whites “the celebrated ventriloquists of an Africanist esthetic,” providing American audiences with a “close but safe encounter with the Other.” It also suppressed any representation of gayness (“pansy flavor”) and much female sexuality, but gave a pass to figures like Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor, Jewish men who accrued fortunes and fame pretending to be Black.

Dance and film scholars and others awake to the damage of racism will find much value here. Those of us who escaped graduate school before the theory bomb exploded might find the proportion of her analysis devoted to tap dance a bit wanting, but younger readers might appreciate her deep dive into Bugs Bunny’s “techno-dialogic feats for the animated bestiary.” Animation technology, she asserts, replaces blackface in live action films of the early ’40s: “Much of what the [Hays] Code deemed unacceptable in live action film for the censors was excused when the representation was not ‘real.’” Shiovitz’s flaying of the racist content of American popular art forms in the 1930s and ’40s will change the way these works are viewed in the next millennium.

A longer version of this review appeared in 2023 here.

 

Simone Forti: Improvising a Life
By Ann Cooper Albright
Wesleyan University Press (discount code Q301 for 30% off)
Reviewed by Wendy Perron

This “review” is based on my endorsement blurb on the back of the book:
Simone Forti is a pioneering dance improvisor who crosses genres in ways that have opened up new possibilities. Ann Cooper Albright brings her own poetic insights to her subject in this beautifully written book, giving a deep sense of the deceptively simple, shape-shifting artist. It’s also a celebration of the kind of category-defying dance artists that abounded in the 1960s. The author has witnessed many Forti performances around the country, and she has quoted from Forti’s essential writings as well as from other sources (including my own essay). The reading experience is a contemplation that connects mind, body, and spirit. Many revelations, small and large, await the reader.

 

Pilobolus: A Story of Dance and Life
By Robert Pranzatelli
University Press of Florida
Reviewed by Robert Johnson

Dartmouth College, where Pilobolus debuted in 1971, was an unlikely birthplace for a dance company. Yet the unsettling spirit of the 1960s had infiltrated the Great North Woods. The radical times, as much as the place, enabled three youngsters in Alison Chase’s dance composition class—initially Moses (Robert) Pendleton, Stephen Johnson, and Jonathan Wolken—to pursue a wayward artistic vision. If Martha Graham’s dancers are the acrobats of God, then Pilobolus’ are the children of a peculiarly American Eden.

Robert Pranzatelli tells this tale well in Pilobolus: A Story of Dance and Life. At times, this author’s allegiance to the company gets in the way of objectivity, and he seems unaware of Pilobolus’ relation to the rest of the dance world. Yet he has made excellent use of unpublished material and has conducted many interviews enabling the artists to share their perspectives.

Given Pilobolus’ collective decision-making, the narrative often revolves around the dueling personalities who left their imprint on the work and left emotional bruises on each other. Yet Pranzatelli also describes those wonderful creations Alraune, Shizen, Pseudopodia, Untitled, and Day Two. A wise editor might have advised the author to cut the fan-boy passages and write more about the choreography.

Though he gamely signs up for movement workshops, Pranzatelli isn’t really a “dance person,” so it would be difficult for him to explain why Pilobolus ever felt the need to prove its pure-dance credentials with Sweet Purgatory (1991). He does not seem to appreciate that collaborating with Butoh artist Takuya Muramatsu is qualitatively different from collaborating with commercial choreographer/filmmaker Trish Sie; and Pranzatelli doesn’t see how the company’s technological experiments dovetail with larger trends. Enchanted by the company’s calendar art, he finds its essence in “wit and physical sensuality,” not in movement or design.

More happily, sparked by Pendleton’s idea that the history of Pilobolus is the history of America, Pranzatelli emphasizes the role of 1960s counterculture in shaping the company’s aesthetic. We read of free love, encounter groups, and “buttery baked soy logs.” Waving fields of marijuana plants give way to teddy bears stuffed with sacramental vegetables, and the dancers frolic naked in the rain. More could be made of the parallels between these hijinks and the tradition of American utopianism. The estrangement of the company’s founders is the fate of Hawthorne’s fictional Blithedale colony with bare asses.

What happened next is cautionary. Within a single lifetime, the America of “Alice’s Restaurant” gave way to the America of The Big Short, and Pilobolus seems to have become greedy. Techno-chic and vapid commercialism threatened to supplant the heroic, human-centered art of the early years. Yet the company’s core values were not so easy to discard. Pilobolus failed when it tried to sell out; and, since then, as executive and co-artistic director Renée Jaworski says, the troupe has been obliged to consider “where to hold onto…the quaintness of not being part of a giant, corporate entity.”

 

Five Ballets from Paris and St. Petersburg
By Doug Fullington and Marian Smith
Oxford University Press
Reviewed by Mindy Aloff

Before “less is more” took hold as the mantra for art in the twentieth century, there was the goes-without-saying assumption that, as in Nature, more is more. The spectacles of nineteenth-century ballet, especially in France and Russia (whose ballet traditions were developed under strong French influences, imported by French choreographers going back to Jules Perrot, in the early 1850s) were built on this elemental basis.

In addition to actual body-to-body and brain-to-brain transmission of a ballet’s identity, the indispensable aide-memoires that made it possible for one or two individuals to transplant, say, Giselle’s medieval Germanic world onto the post-Romantic imperial theater of the tsar—and for régisseurs in ensuing decades to preserve at least enough of the work to maintain the just use of the title as new casts and crews came in—were written languages of notation. It is the contention of the authors of this astounding volume—a treasury of research, observation, and reasoning—that those languages not only can be read today in archival documents but must be for anyone who seeks to comprehend what made nineteenth-century ballet both magnetically popular and great art. This book—well-spoken, logically structured, gracious, and most experienced—will function as the sherpa for readers who even contemplate learning how to read and compare Stepanov’s notation against Justamant’s notebooks and then apply what they have learned to current productions of nineteenth-century ballets.

The five examples, all once choreographed in whole or in part by Marius Petipa—the Frenchman whose legacy overwhelms the story of ballet in Russia—are Giselle (on whose history Smith is considered to be an authority), Paquita, Le Corsaire, La Bayadère, and Raymonda. Fullington, mentored by Smith during his doctoral work at the University of Oregon, is a practiced reader of Stepanov notation. He and Smith collaborated with Peter Boal on Pacific Northwest’s Ballet’s historically informed production of Giselle and on PNB’s upcoming new production of The Sleeping Beauty. Fullington has also collaborated with Alexei Ratmansky on productions of the other four ballets, all recorded in Stepanov.

In the course of Five Ballets, Fullington and Smith make passionate cases for bringing back pantomime, character dancing, minor characters, faster tempos, and the tiny beaten and skimming steps those tempos once served, and, most of all, stage recreations of Nature in all its haunting and mysterious guises. Their book also acknowledges aspects of nineteenth-century productions they would prefer not to restore—racism, anti-Semitism, mocking of the aged. It’s a surprise to discover that August Bournonville—Petipa’s great contemporary in Denmark—is not even mentioned in the index, since his ballets—also spectacular and bursting with petit allegro, character dancing and so forth—appear to have evaded some of the more disagreeable aspects of ballet in the nineteenth century. The subject of another volume, perhaps?

 

Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study
Edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Annie-B Parsons
Wesleyan University Press
Reviewed by Morgan Griffin

They say, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” but forgive me, because before I have even unpacked this set of books I already love them: a collection of pastel booklets, with contrast colored string binding, parceled together by a thick bright turquoise rubber band. The introduction by Thomas F. DeFrantz outlines the proposal at hand, which he introduces as seemingly impossible. “After all,” he writes, “We make dances that vanish even as they materialize.” How to collectively decide what histories and stories matter most? How to write down something that is indescribable, maybe even forgotten?

In the following short stories, thirteen choreographers, dancers, movers, humans outline their versions of “dance history.” Each takes a different approach and form, yet almost all arrive at very similar conclusions. DeFranz describes a futuristic world, where dance and human connection live only via virtual platforms. Ogemdi Ude writes exclusively of her relationship with majorettes. Mayfield Brooks tells a fable about the beginning of time, and the early connections between plants, animals and humans as it relates to dance. Creating a kind of Lord of the Rings of dance, Annie-B. Parsons shares a pictorial chronicle of her dance history. Keith Hennessy’s account broke my heart and simultaneously healed it. Bebe Miller writes on personal moments in time that have shaped her, while struggling with how to “remember remembering.” I find each little book captivating, in both its writing and its form. The words and images are like choreography, and as a reader my eyes and fingers move in a dance across the pages. I find myself clutching my heart, nodding my head, exclaiming out loud…dancing.

Despite their differences, there are many ideas that recur throughout the series: dance as ritual, dance since the beginning of time, the dance of nature, the idea of memory, lists of choreographers who inspired each author (many overlapping), the importance of human contact, human gathering, community, and the passing down of dance through embodied practice. The most striking similarity perhaps is the inability to capture the history of dance at all. Maura Nguyên Donohue writes that “The struggle with writing a dance history is a struggle with time.” And there seem to be even more struggles to follow. Who decides what is important? Andros Zins-Browne rightfully claims that dance histories are inevitably more about the authors who write them, than the dances themselves. How can you write the unwritable? After seeing an influential performance, Okwui Okpokwasili writes, “I can’t find a single word for what I am witnessing or what is happening in my body.” How can you capture a history that is ever evolving? History is now. Similarly, “dancing is living.” And so the task at hand remains beautifully impossible. These small pastel books are more like love letters to dance, to our dancestors, to our dance community, to the never-ending struggle, to the magic, to the impossibilities, to the now. Dance history remains indeterminable. Memory is fleeting and fickle. Dance is extremely personal. Dance is inherently universal. Dance is impossibly indescribable. And yet dance is forever.

 

Books received or announced

Body Impossible: Desmond Richardson and the Politics of Virtuosity
By Ariel Osterweis
Oxford University Press
Body Impossible theorizes the concept of virtuosity and queer Black masculinities in contemporary dance through a study of the career of dancer Desmond Richardson.

The Simonson Legacy
By Jeanne Donohue
BookBaby
A coffee table biography of Lynn Simonson, creator of Simonson technique, which incorporates somatic practice in the teaching of jazz dance.

Meredith Monk: Calling (exhibition catalog)
Edited by Anna Schneider, Beatrix Ruf, Peter Sciscioli, Haus der Kunst, München, Hartwig Art Foundation.
Essays about the work of national treasure Meredith Monk. Contributors include Hilton Als, Bonnie Marranca, Meredith Monk, Louise Steinman, Björk, Carla Blank, Theo Bleckmann, Ping Chong, Ellen Fisher, Katie Geissinger, Ann Hamilton, Lanny Harrison, Pico Iyer, Joan Jonas, Alex Katz, John R. Killacky, Ralph Lemon, Bobby McFerrin, Bruce Nauman, Shirin Neshat, Ishmael Reed, Alex Ross, Peter Sciscioli, Anne Waldman, and John Zorn
Hatje Cantz

Dancing the Afrofuture: Hula, Hip-Hop, and the Dunham Legacy
By Halifu Osumare
University of Florida Press
Osumare’s earlier memoir, Dancing in Blackness, was chosen as the lead book in our Notable Dance Books of 2018. About the current book, Library Journal says this: “Osumare gives readers a deeply personal look into her world as a dancer, choreographer, scholar, professor, activist, and all-around powerhouse. . . . Part self-reflection and part love song to Dunham, this book is a triumphant look at a dancer’s second act as a scholar.”

Artists on Creative Administration: A Workbook from National Center for Choreography
Edited by Tony Lockyer
University of Akron Press

Core Connections: Cairo Belly Dance in the Revolution’s Aftermath
By Christine M. Sahin
Oxford University Press
“Investigates marginalized women’s corporeality as a complex site of power as it takes readers through a diverse dance landscape spanning from Nile cruising tourist boats to Pyramid Street cabarets.”

Balanchine and Me: Be Relevant, Not Reverent
By Peter Martins
Academica Press

Fraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria
By Shayna M. Silverstein
Wesleyan University Press
From the back of the book: “The author shows how dabke dance music embodies the fraught dynamics of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationhood in an authoritarian state.”

Kinethic California: Dancing Funk & Disco Era Kinships
By Naomi Macalalad Bragin
University of Michigan Press
From the website: “Explores the making of black social and vernacular dance in the 1970s, precursor to today’s global hip hop/streetdance culture.”

Performing the Greek Crisis: Navigating National Identity in the Age of Austerity
By Natalie Zervou
University of Michigan Press
Quoting Ann Cooper Albright: “The beginning focus on the ‘body in crisis’ is a powerful entry point into a discussion of contemporary Greek dance, a topic that warrants more exposure within an international context.”

Like this December 18, 2024 Wendy PerronFeatured Leave a comment

The lavish, dreamlike vision of Shen Wei graced the David Koch Theater last weekend. Co-produced by the China Arts and Entertainment Group (CAEG) and American Dance Festival, Dongpo: Life in Poems melds Shen Wei’s swirling choreography, spectacularly multileveled sets, and otherworldly costumes into a magical experience.

The show loosely depicts the journey of Song Dynasty poet Dongpo (1037–1101) in six acts. It’s a lifelong journey, filled with wonder and sorrow—but no wars, no famine. This was a journey of peace, of honoring nature, and of self-reflection. Like Dongpo, Shen Wei is an artist of multiple roles: choreographer, painter, playwright, director, and poet. Throughout the many changes of mood and scene, Shen Wei has sustained a visual experience of exquisite beauty.

I offer here, not a review, but notes on some of the elements that contributed to the aesthetic wonder.

The journey: It began with a sole figure, perched high up behind a scrim of a sketch of bamboo. Facing to the right, he walks slowly, setting out on a journey. We see a map that is crisscrossed many times, presumably to the places Dongpo traveled to. After many dreamlike adventures, it ends the same way, with the man having moved only a little further toward his destination.

Telling the story: Lead dancer Su Peng appears in a circle of light, also high up. With his skin painted white, he seems to absorb light as his arms and spine move in circular pathways…a lunar being calling out his story. With mesmerizing fluidity, Su Peng is telling the story and being the story at the same time.

The illusions: The dancers are sometimes lifted into the stratosphere of the stage space. At one point, nine men in three rows stage left and nine women in a circle stage right appear as glowing blue paintings floating in the air. Even when they start moving, it seems like they may be films and not people. But they are indeed alive, which is only discernible when the men step ultra-slowly across the space to infiltrate the women’s circle. This kind of illusion is, of course, accomplished by the lighting designer, Xiao Lihe, who has studied with Jennifer Tipton!

 

The music: The performance alternated between a recording of Western-sounding orchestral music composed by Chen Qigang, and a live Guqin player, Zhao Xiaoxia. The traditional Guqin is a seven-stringed plucked instrument that sounds a bit like a dulcimer. In one scene, an operatic voice lets loose, veering toward a Meredith Monk–style looping and ricocheting.

The 23 dancers: Members of China Oriental Performing Arts group and Meishan Song and Dance Theatre, the dancers all have a formality that enabled them to guide us on this ceremonial journey. They executed Shen Wei’s choreography of whipping circles and extended lines with great flourish while keeping a sense of being close to nature. Su Peng commanded the stage with every gesture. I learned later that these dancers have never done contemporary dance before!

The costumes. Some of the costumes had a magnificent sculptural quality. In Act IV, a series of moving sculptures trudge onto the stage…large indecipherable statues in pale pastels. Each sculpture turned out to be two entwined people wearing voluminous skirts. This was a slow march of otherworldly figures.

Another aspect of the costumes: In Act I, the men and women wore the same red unitards, and later they wore the same blue tunics over burgundy leotard and tights. Considering the highly gendered presentation of most Chinese Classical Dance—and most ballet and modern dance too—this decision was refreshing.

The humor. To break with the ceremonial quality, a series of wheeled devices crossed from stage right to stage left: first a kind of rickshaw, then a bicycle, then a scooter, and finally a skateboard. Later, one person whizzed down a skateboard ramp. A little history of wheels in two minutes!

The tangled cloud: In a clever animation, a hand quickly drew brush-strokes, first in one color ink, then another. What looked at first like Chinese letters turned into a cluster of tightly intersecting curved lines. In the next scene, this little tangle became a cloud overhead that slowly passed from stage right to stage left before disappearing.

The poetry. Shen Wei chose a few fragments of Dongpo’s thousands of poems to appear on the scrim. They seemed to be mostly about time passing and an affinity with nature. I caught these lines:
• “A new fire to brew fresh tea will set our minds at peace.”
• “Even if we met you might not know me so frayed; my face is covered with dust; my hair is grayed.”
• “May all of us far apart be blessed with longevity, So that we can forever share the moon’s beauty.”

Looking ahead: With the magnificent Dongpo: Life in Poems still in my mind’s eye, I look forward to re-seeing Shen Wei’s signature piece Map (2006), as part of Spring Dances at Juilliard. Very different from Dongpo, Map has casual costumes and all the dancing on one level. But the intricate phrases and patterns accumulate a certain force over forty-five minutes. For a special pleasure, the Juilliard orchestra will play the accompaniment, Steve Reich’s Desert Music, live.

 

 

 

 

 

Like this March 26, 2024 Wendy PerronFeatured Leave a comment

Happy New Year. I like the number 2024. It almost looks like 2+2=4. Common sense. Hopefully there will be more of that, all around, this year than last year.

In dance, numbers matter. I’m thinking of two choreographers whose brilliant use of numbers are very different: George Balanchine and Trisha Brown. What prompted me to notice this was two recent events: The latest issue of Dance Index, and the creation of Trisha Brown Company’s Vimeo page. In the first, Jed Perl mentions Balanchine’s use of numbers as an inspiration for some of Arlene Croce’s writings featured in that issue. The second has posted several pieces and excerpts of excerpts that illuminate Trisha Brown’s math.

For both choreographers, the math helps the audience make sense of the work, and it helps the dancers stay connected to the other people onstage.

In Balanchine’s Stravinsky Violin Concerto (1972) each of the 4 soloists introduces themselves with an entourage of 4 dancers. Each star has their own constellation—or backup group. Four tight groups of 4, and one spread-out group of 4 (the leads). The 4 leads break into 2 and 2, one exquisitely modernist duet after the other. The corps of 16 (8 women and 8 men) breaks into 4 groups of 4, or 8 couples. They never all do the same steps until right near the end, and then, suddenly, for the very last position, they all break into couples—just to remind you that you’ve been watching 10 x 2 = 20 people.

In La Valse (1951), naturally the unit changes to 3. (After all, it’s a waltz.) It starts with 3 women in elegant Karinska gowns. Later a man partners 3 women at once (shades of Apollo). The corps of 24 is sometimes divided into trios, and of course the timing is in 3/4. And the woman in white is caught in a triangle between her lover and the death figure.

Balanchine famously said, If you don’t like the dancing, you can close your eyes and listen to the music. Well I say, If you don’t like the dancing, you can keep your eyes open and count the math.

For Trisha Brown, the Accumulation series is not only about numbers, but also about how we learn. We go back to the beginning each time and add something new. Trisha made her first Accumulation in 1971. She stands in silence and begins her 1st move, extending her right thumb outward, just like a hitch-hiking gesture. After a while, she adds the 2nd move, which is both thumbs extending outward. With the thumbs constantly going, she intersperses a dropped arm, a sinking hip, a head turn. Since she repeats each addition a few times, whenever the new move comes, you notice it. (Click on Accumulation on the Vimeo page.)

Brown’s Group Primary Accumulation (not yet posted on the Vimeo page) is a more explicit counting dance, structured like “The 12 Days of Christmas.” In it, 4 women gradually accumulate 30 moves while lying down, not even seeing each other until movement # 13. In order to stay together, they have to feel the group rhythm as they are counting. Their concentration is intense, which makes the audience concentrate too. When we are counting along with the dancers, we’re involved in a physical memory game.

In Glacial Decoy (1979), 2 women perform together for a while. Then a 3rd enters from the side, joining them in near unison, then a 4th, creating the illusion that there are even more dancers extending laterally, beyond the wings. It’s hard to count the dancers because they keep drifting in and out. Meanwhile there are definitely 4 frames of Robert Rauschenberg’s photographic images upstage that keep changing. Whereas the number of dancers is destabilized, the number of frames, even as the images shift to the next frame, is stable. (Click on an excerpt of Decoy on the Vimeo page.)

Watching these math-rich ballets, you can meditate on the numbers. I feel that our arithmetic brain is stimulated simultaneously with the art brain. They require a multi-layered alertness from us.

Both Balanchine and Brown have made many ballets rich in math. I invite you to enter your own favorite numbers dances, from either of them or any other choreographer, in the Comments below.

 

2 people like this January 3, 2024 Wendy PerronFeatured 1

I wrote this ten years ago, on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Now, for the 60th year, I am updating it.

Like a lot of people today, I am thinking about the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. For me, that fateful day ended up affirming my commitment to dance.

While in high school, I was taking the Advanced Teenage Class every Friday at the Martha Graham Center for Contemporary Dance. I lived in Ridgewood, New Jersey, so, right after school I would hop on the bus to Port Authority, get on the subway, and arrive at the Graham studio on East 63rd Street in time for the 4:30 class.

That Friday, earlier in the day, our whole high school heard, over the P.A. system, that Kennedy had been shot. And a few minutes later, another announcement: He was dead. I don’t remember the immediate reaction in the classroom, but when I went into the girls’ room, everyone in there was crying. We really let it out. Ridgewood was a heavily Republican town, but plenty of us admired Kennedy.

Whatever was happening in the world, it was a Friday and that was my day to take class at the Graham school. (My after-school schedule included Mondays and Tuesdays at the Joffrey school, and Wednesdays and Thursdays at Irine Fokine School of Ballet right there in Ridgewood.) I wondered if our class would actually happen, considering the national pandemonium. But I didn’t know what else to do with myself, so I took the bus as usual. When I got to the studio, there were only about six of us there. Would David Wood, our teacher, show up? When David entered the studio, we stood up—as was the custom at the school—then sat down on the floor to begin. In his strong, deep, kind voice, David said, “I know this is difficult, that a great tragedy has occurred. But we are dancers, and what we do is dance.” And with that, we began the bounces on the count of One.

 

 

 

 

 

Like this November 23, 2023 Wendy PerronFeatured Leave a comment

This year I decided to post this column early enough to anticipate Thanksgiving—a fitting way to remind us to be thankful for dance and dance books. Starting with last year’s list, I’ve invited several other writers to contribute, and they’ve brought some recommendations too. After our twelve chosen books, you’ll find an additional list of nine that have been announced. I am sure they will make as good gifts (for others or for yourself) as the ones we are calling notable. Feel free to make a comment about our faves or add your own.

 

The Boy from Kyiv: Alexei Ratmansky’s Life in Ballet
By Marina Harss
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Reviewed by Mindy Aloff

What a wonderful book: A biography and an autobiography at once. It provides a wide window on the thinking process of a great dancemaker. It braids the story of the choreographer’s life with vivid accounts of his dances in prose that practically turns the pages by itself. And, swiftly and efficiently, it positions the subject’s Soviet training and Bolshoi experiences in the context of ballet in Europe and the U.S. during the late twentieth century. One sees the theatrical foundation for Ratmansky’s aesthetics from childhood and then, as he matures, his reach and aesthetic risk-taking that help his artistry to flourish.

“A phrase choreographed by Ratmansky contains more ideas than entire ballets by other choreographers,” author Marina Harss writes. “Multiple stories unfold at once. . . .This profusion of ideas is just as evident in the way Ratmansky modulates the steps. He is a product of many traditions; he melds them into one, shaping them through the filter of his imagination.”

Paragraph by paragraph, The Boy from Kyiv provides evidence for those sweeping statements. (Disclosure: Engaged by Harss as a reader of an earlier draft, I had the privilege of seeing how attentive she was to the drive of her storytelling.) She reveals nuances of Ratmansky’s character, showing him in awkward jams as well as in streamlined triumphs; she delineates some of the steep learning curves he had yet to master on becoming director of the Bolshoi Ballet. One concerns his efforts to explain to the dancers how to “be themselves” without smiling broadly when performing George Balanchine’s work; another concerns the Machiavellian power games that Ratmansky was forced to play with such old hands as the retired Soviet choreographer Yuri Grigorovich.

Harss deeply responds to Ratmansky’s aesthetic sensibility and she clearly cares about him and his family. The trust they share has resulted in a magical balance in the writing between her streaming chronicle of his life and her accounts of the ballets. She has elected to complete this book while Ratmansky, now 55, is in his prime. (Her meticulous chronology of works at the back, including the many ballets he has made for American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet, is complete through the choreographer’s impassioned yet deliberately disunified Wartime Elegy, given its 2022 premiere by Pacific Northwest Ballet.) His art is still opening more doors than it is closing. At this point, he has the satisfaction of having explored his intense curiosity about Soviet ballets of the 1930s, the music of Shostakovich, and the original productions of many of Marius Petipa’s masterpieces. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—the country where Ratmansky’s and his wife’s families reside—has prompted him to redefine elements of his identity. The events of history have forced him to remain young in the sense of ready to move at the drop of a hat in unplanned directions. As Harss writes, where that road will lead him, not even he knows.

 

The Wind at My Back: Resilience, Grace, and Other Gifts from My Mentor, Raven Wilkinson
By Misty Copeland with Susan Fales-Hill
Hachette Book Group
Reviewed by Wendy Perron

This is an inspiring story of a relationship between a younger and older ballerina. In 2010, when watching a DVD documentary, Misty discovered the first African American ballerina to dance with a major ballet company. With awe and gratitude, she learned that Raven Wilkinson had been a lyrical Black ballerina with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in the 1950s. Together with her agent, Gilda Squires, they tracked her down, finding that she lived only blocks away from Copeland’s home. Squires arranged for a public conversation at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the first of many conversations over the next seven years.

Misty was moved by the grace with which Raven encountered racism while touring the South, where the Ku Klux Klan was still on the rampage. “Raven understood…how racism traps everyone in a no-win situation, bringing out the worst in all of us. Her response was always to rise to her best self. She was the embodiment of ‘Be the change you want to see in the world.’” In appreciation of Raven, Misty articulates the difference between then and now: “She belonged to a generation that led with proof of excellence first and identity second.”

In her gentle yet firm way, Wilkinson challenged Copeland to take her talents further. One of the most moving moments is when Wilkinson said to her, “Every time you step on that stage, I’ll be the wind at your back.” The book details the months and years when Raven fulfilled that promise. She encouraged, listened, soothed, pushed, explained, reminisced, and shared moments of laughter. More than all that, she demonstrated how to be, how to exist with dignity in this racist world. What comes across is how vulnerable Misty felt, how much she needed the example of Raven. She puts Raven’s lessons into these words: “Soar above the hate. Lose yourself in the music and the steps, which will live on long after bigotry has died. Defeat hatred with beauty.”

 

Capoeria Connections: A Memoir in Motion
By Katya Wesolowski
University of Florida Press
Reviewed by Lori Brungard

The circle is a powerful symbol in African diasporic culture. Given Capoeria’s roots in Africa, it makes sense that circularity plays a key role in Katya Wesolowski’s Capoeria Connections: A Memoir in Motion. The primary vehicle for capoeria play is the circular formation of the roda. Circularity is lived as reciprocity. Various forms of give and take happen within the roda: the call and response between musicians and dancers, the capoeristas’ alternating attack and defense moves, and the African resonance that imbues the ever modernizing movement. Wesolowski invites the reader into the roda:

“The game has begun: with bodies close and low we trace arcs and circles above and around each other. . . I manage to catch myself on my arms and rise from the floor with a straight kick from the ground and then propel myself into a handstand. [My partner-opponent] enters with a scissor movement on the floor, and I touch my knees to my chest and slide under her legs on the floor careful to avoid an attack.”

The improvised interaction between two sparring capoeristas is almost like a moving yin yang symbol, as each one reacts to the other’s move by filling in the negative space (interestingly, a defensive move in capoeira is called a negativa). This complementarity is expressed in a larger sense by Capoeria’s repurposing of traditional African movement as resistance, in its original form as self-defense by enslaved Africans. But it did not rest there.

While Wesolowski does investigate Capoeira’s roots, she focuses more on the evolution of the form as it shifted from “its reputation as a marginal, violent, and delinquent activity” to folkloric staging and community building. In its representation of Brazilian pride with an international following, capoeira became a means of escaping poverty for its mestres (masters). She traces this trajectory through a similarly circular structure of chapters that starts in her hometown of Berkeley, CA, moves to Brazil, Africa, Europe, and circles back again to Africa, finally to return to the U.S. to her current home of Durham, NC. In the process, she interrogates her own positionality as a white woman in a form that was originally performed by Black males, finding connections despite these differences.

Wesolowski leads with a warm invitation to join her in convivencia, a Portuguese term connoting “connection, coexistence, and companionship.” Her story always returns to her relationships within various capoeira communities. Her writing is a dialogue with the reader: she calls and requests a response. It erupts from an inner necessity…from legs to limbs then directly to the page, taking us along for the ride, with all its bumps and beauty.

 

Chita, A Memoir
By Chita Rivera, with Patrick Pacheco
Harper One
Reviewed by Sandra Kurtz

We live in a first-person world right now—from the intense revelations of reality television through the never-ending scroll of social media posts, we are saturated with “I.” Chita Rivera, who combines a thrilling theatrical dynamism with the precision of ballet onstage, tells many stories about her life in her self-titled memoir, but she also gives us an up-close view of her times as well. And those times include some of the most innovative and significant developments in American musical theater. Her eye-witness account of a time that still affects what we see in the theater today is a roll call of artists and events from the 1950s to the present.

Rivera tells her story in a mostly chronological fashion, starting with her early life in Washington, DC, when her mother put the ultra-active girl in dance classes to keep her occupied. From there, a scholarship to the School of American Ballet took her to New York and launched her on the path to her career on Broadway.

Her first real job, as a chorus girl in the touring cast of Call Me Madam, sets her on a pathway full of other firsts, including the original Anita in West Side Story, the original Velma in Chicago, and the original Aurora in Kiss of the Spiderwoman. The highlights are quite high—Leonard Bernstein taught her to sing, and Gwen Verdon encouraged her to aim beyond the chorus—but Rivera’s narration of her dancing life brims over with names from all parts of the business. She performed in musical reviews with Bea Arthur and James Garner, learned to bump and grind from choreographer Peter Gennaro, and helped Dick Van Dyke learn to dance soft shoe for Bye Bye Birdie.

Rivera’s story of her personal life overlaps with her theater work—colleagues become friends, and friends become something more. She meets husband Tony Mordente in the cast of West Side Story—their daughter Lisa follows them into the theater. Her relationship with Sammy Davis, Jr. grew from their work in Mr. Wonderful.

She rarely has something negative to say about a person or an experience. She touches gently on racial stereotypes when she discusses her time at SAB (“Ballet at that time was an almost exclusively white world.”) Although she acknowledges that Jerome Robbins had a reputation for being harsh in rehearsal, “he was never that way with me.” More often, any frustration is softened by humor, like her quoting the song from Forbidden Broadway, commenting on how she is frequently mistaken for Rita Moreno: “Chita Rivera is not Rita, Rita Moreno is not Chita, Chita is Chita and not Rita, I would prefer you forgot Rita!”

Chita, A Memoir is a generous retrospective on a full life in the theater from someone who seems to have been everywhere and known everyone.

 

Banishing Orientalism: Dancing between Exotic and Familiar
By Phil Chan with Michele Chase
Yellow Peril Press, Brooklyn, NY
Available at Amazon.
Reviewed by Weichen Cui

Banishing Orientalism follows Phil Chan’s first book, Final Bow for Yellowface, published in 2020, and the launch of the pledge platform of the same name, cofounded with Georgina Pazcoguin. Continuing the discussion of Asian stereotypes in ballet, Banishing Orientalism elaborates on the tensions between the “Kingdom of Shades—Full of Ghosts of Ballets Past” and today’s increasingly diverse world.

Edward Said coined the word Orientalism in the 1970s to criticize the Western way to dominate, restructure, and have authority over the Orient. In Chan’s view, “Orientalism in ballet is not just a stylistic device/genre, but rather an integral aspect of what defines classical ballet itself.” Orientalism has fueled innovations in ballet technique, music, and spectacle—the ultimate fantasyland. It also serves as a safe space to transgress taboos, reinforcing Western moral superiority over the heathen mysticism of the barbarians.

Ballet’s Orientalism legitimizes empire-building, colonialism, and slavery onstage. The ridiculous plots, such as opium fantasies and irrational love and sacrifice, along with the portrayal of exotic archetypes like Pirates, Slaves, Geishas, Sultans, and Harem Girls, had given rise to a shared sense of symbols. These messages, rooted in distortion and bias, had been passed down, from Petipa on. By setting white European culture as the default, ballet perpetuates a fantasy that excludes or misrepresents people from other cultures. In today’s globalized and diverse society, such a path will inevitably lead to the decline of ballet.

“How can I be a participant in an art form that’s obviously not by or for people like me? These days why should an art form that excludes people like me be considered ‘high art’ for an entire society?” These poignant questions reveal the vulnerability and confusion experienced by non-White ballet enthusiasts. In response, Chan objects to culturally demeaning representations; he advocates for a reimagining of ballet that is more relevant to today’s diverse audience. For example, by asking, “What else could it be?”, for their 2021 version of Balanchine’s The Nutcracker, Pacific Northwest Ballet replaced the Fu Manchu-style caricature with leaping crickets, a symbol of luck with playfulness.

In order to create an “art for all of us,” Chan feels it’s essential to address institutional inequity, pigeonholing and tokenism. As examples of cross-cultural experiments that more or less evade those failings, he offers Maurice Béjart’s study of khatak in India to Sylvia Guillem and Akram Khan’s collaboration Sacred Monsters (2006).

The book probes power dynamics and cultural dominance in ballet’s history and present. (As a ballet lover, I yearn for its continued progress because it fosters cross-cultural dialogues.) As Chan advocates, by fostering respect and curiosity, ballet can transcend the boundaries of our individual experiences and connect with those who are different from us.

 

Illusions of Camelot, A Memoir by Peter Boal
Beaufort Books
Reviewed by Wendy Perron

This memoir is mostly about the shy, tender, young Peter Boal, the privilege (living in a huge house, live-in caretaker, country clubs) that fails to make the family happy, and his father’s alcoholism that poisons all relationships. Boal is a natural storyteller; his elegant prose is full of insights and humor. His narrative, however, includes only a precious few dance stories, which may cause dancer/readers to yearn for more. His audition for the School of American Ballet elicits belly laughs. His description of the popular teacher Stanley Williams deepens our understanding of ballet—and of Boal’s love of the art form. His description of the meditative, healing space of daily ballet class is stirring.

Working with Jerome Robbins on Balanchine’s Prodigal Son and Robbins’s Moves is a highlight. Unlike the usual stories about how demanding and unreasonable the great choreographer was, Boal shows sensitivity toward Robbins and his effect on dancers. About Jerry’s coaching, Peter writes, “His words, however gruff and prodding, pushed me into finding my voice as an artist.”

The day that Peter gave his last performance in the SAB Workshop and his first performance as an apprentice with New York City Ballet happened to be the day the world learned that Balanchine had died. This coincidence sparked Boal’s memories of Balanchine, including a visit to him in the hospital when he was still a student.

Boal’s closeness to the tragic AIDS epidemic and his yearning for a relationship with his downward-spiraling father are deeply touching. He has a gift for leaving the reader with quiet joy and pain at the same time. (Disclosure: I’ve choreographed two solos for Peter and encouraged him in his writing.) Illusions of Camelot is a gentle story with unflinching detours into the epidemics of AIDS and alcoholism—dark streaks threading through this poetic reminiscence.

 

Teaching What You Want to Learn: A Guidebook for Dance and Movement Teachers
By Bill Evans
Routledge
Reviewed by Janis Brenner

The widely respected dancer/teacher/choreographer Bill Evans has written a thoughtful, thorough, and wonderfully readable book. In Teaching What You Want to Learn, Evans journeys through his five decades of pedagogical research and practice. He also writes that the galvanizing moment in our country over the murder of George Floyd was a catalyst for reflection of his own ways of contributing to the world.

With a foreword by Selene B. Carter, the book has ten chapters with titles like “Language,” “Guidelines and Strategies,” and “Converting Theory into Action.” The chapters are divided into smaller modules such as “Remind Yourself That You Love to Teach,” “Embrace Evolving Values,” and “Never Work Harder Than Your Students.” These clear and concise modules add up to 94 different explorations. In addition, each essay is accompanied by a small box entitled “For Your Consideration,” where he asks us artist-teachers questions to contemplate: “When are you at your best as a teacher? Please relate how a teacher, mentor, or colleague, who believed in you at a crucial juncture… helped you understand yourself better and/or achieve success. How have you served in a similar role for someone else?”

Evans is a master teacher of Laban/Bartenieff Movement Fundamentals (L/BMS) and is founder of both the Somatic Dance Conference and Performance Festival and the Evans Somatic Dance Institute, headquartered in Washington state. The entire book is infused with this lineage and its applications to understanding a wide range of movement experience.

For long-time, seasoned dance teachers, some of his simple statements may seem obvious, but they are gems for the younger generations and good reminders for those of us who may need a dose of someone else’s perspectives besides our own! Evans also credits mentors and colleagues who have been of significance in the development of his practice—an important lesson for upcoming teachers and choreographers to remember “from whence you came.”

In later chapters, Evans delves deeply into “Anatomical Imagery,” including diagrams of specific body parts and functions, for instance, “Open-Chain Pelvic-Femoral Rhythm/Thigh Lifts and Leg Swings.” The final chapter, written by Bill’s spouse Don Halquist, explores Howard Gardner’s “Theory of Multiple Intelligences” through a movement-based lens.

As a long-time teacher of improvisation and composition, originally through the pedagogical theories of Alwin Nikolais/Murray Louis and Hanya Holm, I was surprised that the Nikolais heritage is never mentioned in relation to L/BMS, its origins and its direct connection to Laban/Wigman. However, I found that Teaching What You Want To Learn is a valuable guide into the creative side of dance education.

 

Dancing Black, Dancing White: Rock ‘n’ Roll, Race, & Youth Culture of the 1950s & Early 1960s
By Julie Malnig
Oxford University Press
Reviewed by Martha Ullman West

Julie Malnig, author of Dancing Till Dawn: A Century of Exhibition Ballroom Dance, has considerable expertise in exhibition ballroom dance as an expression of American history and culture and the place it holds in American society.  That knowledge informs Dancing Black, Dancing White, which explores the many teen television dance shows that proliferated in the two decades following World War II, the best-known of them being the American Bandstand. These programs featured exhibition ballroom, or social dancing, for a mass audience, white and Black. Malnig devotes a chapter titled “Movin’ and Groovin” to four Black teen shows, broadcast in the South. Like everything else in that period, the shows were segregated. But not for musicians. The groups performing on American Bandstand, for example, where the dancing teens were white, were often Black, and they sold a lot of recordings of such artists of color as James Brown, the Temptations, Chubby Checker, and Aretha Franklin. White musicians who owed much of their their fandom to these shows include Elvis Presley, and, following their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, the Beatles.

Racial segregation is just one lens through which Malnig, Professor of Dance and Theatre Studies at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU, examines these programs. Others include capitalism, social conformity, the country’s attitudes toward teenage girls, and dancing itself in mid-century America. Her many sources include books written by Thomas DeFrantz, Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, and LeRoi Jones. Malnig’s interviews with the young dancers who appeared on these shows—and some who were excluded—and her descriptions of the shows themselves, offer the most compelling evidence for her thesis.

She points out that John Waters’ 1988 film Hairspray is one of several films and musicals that reimagine the TV teen shows, carrying them into the future.

(For more on John Waters’ 1988 film Hairspray, check it out on YouTube. The heroine, performed by overweight Ricki Lake, whose dancing is fantastic, is shunned by all but a few. One character is subjected to electric shock “deprogramming” by her bible-thumping, dance-hating parents; this is satire that can make your stomach churn.)

In the chapter called “Rock ‘n’ Roll and the Africanist Aesthetic” Malnig concentrates on Black dance, its origins, and its popularity with white kids. They loved doing the Madison, which is rooted in the plantation ring shout, as is the Big Apple, popular with adults in the 1920s.

Malnig’s descriptions of these “rock ‘n’ roll” dances also serve to illuminate the work that current choreographers like Caleb Teicher are doing now, specifically his terrific “Swing Out” show and its blending of tap, swing and the Lindy Hop.

But, as short as it is (220 pp) Dancing Black needed some pruning of repetitions and was so sloppily copyedited and proofread there are errors on almost every page. Nevertheless, those pages contain an enormous amount of valuable information about these shows, the dances themselves, and the context in which they were aired.

 

Movement at the Still Point: An Ode to Dance
Photographs by Mark Mann
Rizzoli
Reviewed by Wendy Perron

These striking photos, covering 142 dance artists who are diverse in genre, gender, age, and race, are all shot in black and white, lending a timeless quality. Many of the dancers are presented with a portrait shot as well as a full, luscious body shot, pairing intimacy with theatricality. You can spend hours, days, leafing through this book, savoring the images of dancers you know and getting a glimpse of dancers you don’t know.

The Irving Penn–inspired backdrop lends a rich, grainy texture, inviting a sense of visual depth. Mark Mann’s camera captures the sumptuous strength of Rena Butler, the drama of Terese Capucilli, the bejeweled mystery of Soraya Lundy, the breathy lift of Jonatan Luján, the jauntiness of Ephraim Sykes, and the playfulness of Miki Orihara and Stephen Pier as a couple. I especially appreciate the inclusion of dancers who are no longer young like Desmond Richardson, Michael Trusnovec, Janet Charleston, and Jodi Melnick. The portrait of Gus Solomons is so haunting that it made me wonder: Did he know he was nearing death? The last shot, with Sondra Lee and Carmen de Lavallade, makes reaching one’s 90s look like a fabulous time of life.

 

Remembering a Dance: Parts of Some Sextets, 1965/2019
By Yvonne Rainer, Emily Coates, and Nick Mauss
Published by Performa
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and Lenz Press,
Reviewed by Wendy Perron

This book was so exciting to me that I jumped the gun and wrote about it here.

 

 

 

 

Chino and the Dance of the Butterfly: A Memoir
By Dana Tai Soon Burgess
University of New Mexico Press
Review by Lisa Traiger

The early chapters of Washington, DC–based dancer, choreographer, and now author Dana Tai Soon Burgess’s life reveal the ingredients—a love of movement, an inquisitive mind, immersion in art and reading, and determination—that have shaped his productive dance career. His company, now in its 30th year, has toured the world for the U.S. State Department and recently was invited to serve as a Kennedy Center Social Impact Community Partner.

The son of visual artists—his mother, a Korean American; his father of German and Irish stock—Burgess grew up Santa Fe, New Mexico. An outsider, he wrestled with his visible Asian identity, humble family circumstances, and sexual identity. Bullied and lonely as a child, he created a rich internal life. Art—painting, weaving, sculpture, sketching—along with movement became significant avenues for young Burgess to translate, and ultimately transform, his world.

As a freshman at University of New Mexico, he wandered into an old gymnasium and observed a jazz dance class in progress. He later wrote, “My meandering had delivered me my destiny, a secular temple where dancers were tempered into competitive, professional-level performers.” He set his course to dance.

With determination and serendipity, he forged a path encountering significant figures along the way. Among them, sculptor/Martha Graham set designer Isamu Noguchi was in his parents’ art circle, while he was briefly an errand boy for an aging Rudolf Nureyev during a tour stop. Burgess collected an oral history from mid-century modern dancer Eleanor King and connected with Hamburg Ballet’s John Neumeier on choreography. And he immersed himself in researching and resuscitating the contributions of Japanese-American choreographer Michio Ito.

Burgess’s vivid descriptions of movement, as he re-shaped his karate-trained body, provide insight into his choreographic proclivities, which entwine balletic linearity with modern dance techniques. In Washington, DC, he built a company reflecting his Asian American and multi-hyphenate identities, which became his calling card on State Department tours worldwide. He also collaborated with visual artists and became the first choreographer in residence at one of the Smithsonian museums.

Lauded as the “poet laureate of Washington dance,” with this account Burgess proves himself as graceful on the page as he and his dancers are onstage. This self-portrait of an artist is penned with perceptive self-insight and evocative, lyrical language, painting a vivid picture of his journey to dance.

 

Why Dance Matters
By Mindy Aloff
Yale University Press
Reviewed by Martha Ullman West

Why Dance Matters is part of Yale University Press’s publication series “Why X Matters”. These are highly idiosyncratic, deeply personal, book-length essays about why a subject—poetry, architecture, composer etc. matters to the author.

Mindy Aloff has put a lifetime of experience of watching dance, writing about it, teaching its history, and editing the articles and books of other writers into why dance matters to her and to the world at large. Densely researched and conversationally written, it’s an excellent read for both those who know little and for those who live and breathe this art form as professionals in the field.

The seven chapters of this compact survey of dancing all over the world—as cultural expression, theatrical art, religious ritual, the kind you do and the kind you watch—are replete with all kinds of references, reflecting Aloff’s obsessive delving into all things dancing, including music, visual arts, and film. These are invariably interesting, but what really fascinates me is how she connects various forms of locomotion and dancing. Chapter One, e.g., “Child’s Play”, begins with an analysis of the book’s sole photograph, taken c.1940 by Helen Levitt, of young kids, one white, one Black, dancing in a Harlem street.

From here Aloff moves to her Philadelphia childhood, when as a 5-year-old she was placed in a class taught by a refugee from Nazi Germany and told to “be” a snowman: “snowfolks are round, roly-poly I figured; and so I lay down and rolled around on the floor.”  This memory leads her to the “Snow scene” and a discussion of ballet, the form that matters to her the most, especially as choreographed, modernized, and made relevant in the last century by George Balanchine.

That said, she does pay attention to modern dancers and choreographers Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham; the uncategorizable Merce Cunningham; Paul Taylor; and post modernists Trisha Brown, Twyla Tharp, and David Gordon; tap dancers Honi Coles, Brenda Bufalino and Jane Goldberg connecting them all in interesting ways, drawing on the reviews of their work by other critics, her own interviews with some—specifically with Gordon, whom she talked with not long before he died, and obviously a lifetime of watching, writing and thinking about their work.

Dance matters, she concludes, because it connects: movement with music, dancers with each other, dancers with the audience, and audience members with dancers. About the last, she cites of all things Jewish philosopher Martin Buber’s book I and Thou, sending me to my underlined copy to see if that made sense, which it did.

(Disclosure: Aloff and I have been colleagues and friends since the late seventies, when she was editing Portland’s Encore Magazine and writing incisive, historically based dance reviews for Willamette Week, the city’s alternative paper. She includes material from my own book, Todd Bolender, Janet Reed and the Making of American Ballet [see Notable Books of 2021], which she edited.)

 

 

Books Received or Announced

Behind the Screen: Tap Dance, Race, and Invisibility During Hollywood’s Golden Age
By Brynn W. Shiovitz
Oxford University Press

Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity
By Ryan Donovan
Oxford University Press

Astaire by Numbers: Time and the Straight White Male Dancer
By Todd Decker
Oxford University Press

Dance Works: Stories of Creative Collaborations
By Allison Orr
Foreword by Liz Lerman
Wesleyan University Press

Ed Watson: A Different Dance
By Sarah Crompton
Prestel Publishing

Shaping Dance Canons: Criticism, Aesthetics, and Equity
By Kate Mattingly
University Press of Florida

The Color of Dance: A Celebration of Diversity and Inclusion in the World of Ballet
By Takiyah Wallace-McMillian, founder of Brown Girls Do Ballet
Hachette Book Group

New York City Ballet
Choreography & Couture
By Mark Happel
Photography by Pari Dukovic
Foreword by Sarah Jessica Parker
Rizzoli

You the Choreographer: Creating and Crafting Dance
By Vladimir Angelov
Routledge

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Like this November 10, 2023 Wendy PerronFeatured Leave a comment

I will never forget Rudy Perez performing Countdown in 1968. If the word “riveting” did not exist, it would have to be invented for that performance. Sitting in a chair, his feet rooted to the ground, his focus unwavering, he took a super slow-motion drag on a cigarette. He slowly stood up, and without breaking his tempo, streaked his cheeks with green paint. Were they tears? Were they war paint? The recorded music of the “Songs of the Auvergne” transported us to a faraway place. Rudy was perhaps remembering something beautiful that arrested his everyday action. Countdown was also an example of radical juxtaposition, a term I didn’t know then, which describes a dada-esque collision of opposites that forces the viewer to create their own cogency. (It was a term Yvonne Rainer borrowed from Susan Sontag.) His work also had a whiff of satisfying absurdism. Of course Rudy never used such terms to describe his choices.

The place where I saw Countdown was the old Dance Theater Workshop, which was Jeff Duncan’s living space on West 20th Street. Later, in the fall of 1969, also at DTW, I was showing a solo of mine to Jeff Duncan for a program of what is now Fresh Tracks. Rudy had just finished rehearsing and decided to hang out and watch my solo. A few weeks later, I ran into Rudy in a local supermarket on the Upper West Side, and he invited me to join his tiny company. Having been knocked out by Countdown, I said Yes. I danced with him for a year, enjoying performing with the magnificent Barbara Roan, the delightful Anthony La Giglia, and being challenged by Rudy’s sturdy movement and uncompromising vision.

In 2019, the Stephen Petronio Company revived Rudy’s Coverage, a solo he made during the time I was dancing with him. When Siobhan Burke wrote an advance article for the New York Times, she asked me to describe what was unique about Rudy’s work. She quoted me describing his approach: “He had this instinct for what would work next to each other. We’d be doing something rigid and stiff, then suddenly we’d be bending down and picking flowers in a dreamlike slow motion…There was something very sure and magical about what he did onstage.”

Although Rudy was a strong and energetic dancer, he did not have what was considered a dancer’s body. He told me that he realized he’d have to make his own work if he wanted to dance. This, I think was a strength: He created his own aesthetics.

When Don McDonagh’s book The Rise and Fall and Rise of Modern Dance came out in 1970, I was excited because he highlighted dance artists from Judson and DTW—people I had danced with—as the ones who were raising modern dance up again in the Sixties. In his chapter on Rudy, he described the choreographer’s “vibrant stillness.” He also wrote that Rudy was “the most emotively charged dance maker of his generation, but his emotionalism is strictly controlled and measured out in carefully placed spurts of movement.” The elements of his choreography were “meticulous workmanship, unusual juxtapositions of visual and aural material, and a weighty intensity.”

Rudy was the first person I heard talk about Judson Dance Theater. He had attended some of Robert Dunn’s workshops and had participated in Judson concerts from day one. Judson became a huge topic of interest to me. Just hearing the name Judson helped me trace where Rudy got his exquisite simplicity from. When I started teaching at Bennington in 1978, I wanted to expose my students to the experimental spirit of Judson. I created a multi-year project called the Bennington College Judson Project, part of which is archived at the NY Public Library for the Performing Arts. (I also gave a “Dance Historian Is In” presentation on it. If you’re interested, the recording is viewable at the Library.)

Although Rudy is not often mentioned when Judson is discussed, he is one of the few of that collective who went on to have a multi-decade career in dance. (Others were the obvious names of Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, David Gordon.) I’m glad he found his niche in Los Angeles, but he drifted away from New York consciousness. Our loss was L.A.’s gain. Marcia B. Siegel called him “one of the quiet experimenters in whose hands I think the future of dance will rest.” At least two of his students there went on to create their own dance worlds: Victor Quijada of RubberbandDance and Chris Yon, now at Appalachian State University.

In an article in the June 1971 issue of Dance Magazine, Rudy explained his process: “My work begins as a col­lection of images, but when it is finished it must be a whole, loose parts of exper­ience making up a whole. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, trying to fit things together so that when it’s finished, it’s complete.”

Thank you, Rudy, for your completely remarkable work.

And thanks to Sarah Vox Swenson for setting up the memorial page of the website devoted to him.

 

1 person likes this October 2, 2023 Wendy PerronFeatured 1