dance book – Page 2

Book Review: Titian | Metamorphosis: Art Music Dance

September 18, 2013 by 4dancers

by Emily Kate Long

What do an industrial robot, a Renaissance master, and an astronaut have in common? Last year, all three made appearances in London’s National Gallery and the Royal Opera House as part of a project titled Metamorphosis: Titian 2012. The commemorative hardback book Titian | Metamorphosis: Art Music Dance immortalizes the Royal Ballet-National Gallery collaboration in 180-plus pages of thought-provoking interviews and stunning photographs. The book gives us insight into some enduring tensions in art and dance: that between past and present, power and vulnerability, narration and abstraction, and technology and tradition.

This volume is itself a work of art, edited by Dr Minna Moore Ede, Assistant Curator of Renaissance Paintings at the National Gallery. Photographs by Gautier Deblonde, Johan Persson, and Andrej Uspenski decorate every page. Ede’s conversations with three contemporary British artists (Mark Wallinger, Conrad Shawcross, and Chris Ofili) make up the text in Titian | Metamorphosis. Together, the text and images reveal the project’s progress from nascence to maturity in a vivid and uncluttered package.

Each artist was commissioned to create work for the National Gallery, and was separately teamed up with a composer and choreographers to design a ballet. Wallinger created the ballet Trespass with composer Mark-Anthony Turnage and choreographers Alastair Marriott and Christopher Wheeldon. Shawcross’s Machina featured music by Nico Muhly and choreography by Wayne McGregor and Kim Brandstrup. Ofili’s designs for Diana and Acteon set the stage for choreography by Liam Scarlett, Will Tuckett, and Jonathan Watkins. Composer Jonathan Dove and librettist Alastair Middleton rounded out Ofili’s team. [Read more…]

Book Review: Balanchine: Russian-American Ballet Master Emeritus

July 26, 2013 by 4dancers

by Emily Kate Long

In Balanchine: Russian-American Ballet Master Emeritus, Reine Duell Bethany gives young adults (dancers and nondancers alike) a highly readable, thought-provoking, and inspiring biography of the twentieth-century choreographer. Over ten chapters, Bethany walks the reader thoughtfully through Balanchine’s early life in Russia, his work for Diaghilev, and his eventual establishment in the US as the head of New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet. The author traces Balanchine’s personal history and relationships, his development as a choreographer, and his work and personality as a businessman and international cultural ambassador. Throughout, adequate yet succinct historical, cultural, and social context is provided, making Ballet Master Emeritus as useful and appealing to young people interested in history or politics as ballet. For creative types, Reine Duell Bethany’s poignant, inspiring writing reinforces the importance of such qualities as faith, sacrifice, integrity, courage, and dedication in the pursuit of artistic goals.

Balanchine: Russian-American Ballet Master Emeritus would make a valuable addition to the young dancer’s library. It captures the subject in a way that is both revealing and sensitive, while placing George Balanchine and New York City Ballet in a landscape beyond the self-contained.

Balanchine: Russian-American Ballet Master Emeritus

Reine Duell Bethany, 193 pages

Book Review: Dancing In Time

June 19, 2013 by 4dancers

by Emily Kate Long

Anyone who has ever had to trust will be able to relate to Violet Rightmire’s romance Dancing In Time. Her characters are engaging, her dialogue is colorful, and the plot flows smoothly. This novel is a quick read at 182 pages and has enough suspense to keep the pages turning chapter after chapter. Though frequently predictable, Dancing In Time is highly satisfying.

It all starts when Hadleigh Brent, an introverted dancer in her mid-twenties, is coaxed by her outgoing friend Jann into catching the attention of a tall, dark, and handsome stranger at the lunch counter. Both driven and hindered by their baggage and complex backgrounds, Hadleigh and Doctor Collins fight time and doubt in an effort to make things work. For much of the story, our main characters are faced with nothing to act on but faith (or doubt) and love, and seeing them potentially at their worst makes them endearing.

The insider/outsider conflict inherent in the dance world (and addressed in most works of fiction that deal with ballet) gets an interesting and effective twist in Rightmire’s novel. There’s a huge amount of risk involved in letting another person into one’s own private world, and Dancing In Time illustrates that with remarkable tenderness. Besides that, it’s a good old clean love story. I rate it PG and thumbs-up.

Dancing in Time, Violet Rightmire (Debra Webb Rogers)

The Wild Rose Press, 2008

Book Review: Facts and Fancies, Essays Written Mostly For Fun

May 20, 2013 by 4dancers

by Emily Kate Long

Fact and Fancies, Essays Written Mostly for Fun

Paul Taylor with foreword by Robert Gottleib, introduction by Susanne Carbonneau

Delphinuim, 2013

165 pages

Paul Taylor’s writing is packed with wit and quirk. The pieces in this collection range from poetically reverent to ridiculously ironic, often within the span of just a few lines.

Taylor celebrates and satirizes indiscriminately: Martha Graham, the “Creative Process,” members of the press, himself, the institutions of Ballet and Modern Dance…the list of victims and heroes goes on.

As author and as subject matter, Taylor gives us many versions of himself: benevolent dictator, escapist (“My edges seriously frayed, I needed a quiet place to mend.”), keen observer, crafter of aliases, poet, satirist of self and others (His characters Dr Tacet and Sheriff O’Houlihan are foil and mirror), and, at times, cynic. Bewilderingly, or maybe not so, he asserts: “Ideally, my work would be anonymous.”

He tackles the very concepts of art and creativity as borrowing exercises. As his highbrow alter-ego Dr George H Tacet, Ph.D., Taylor gives himself a talking-to for his “shameless pirating of dance steps,” then in his own voice he asserts that “the whole world is one big, glorious grab-bag,” and “we don’t really own anything.” The episode titled “In the Marcel Proust Suite of L’Hotel Continental” is both a jab as the pervasiveness of American culture and an allusion to all art as pastiche. (And besides all that, the whole essay is sublimely, perfectly absurd.) He tears mercilessly into classical ballet, and writes that a fictitious colony of bees “…have all but mastered a simplified version of Pavlova’s ‘Dying Swan’ and as soon as they get the snake arms right they should be able to dance the whole routine in toe shoes!”

Taylor’s younger self also falls under his microscope. The ironic and heartfelt “Two Bozos Seen Through Glass” is titled as much for the past and present Taylor as for the two modern dance students auditioning on his rain-soaked patio.

Truly good art, whether written or performed, is made best by the creators who are not afraid to show up and be vulnerable, to borrow, to laugh at themselves…and to occasionally be “stark naked,” as Taylor says of his solo in Aureole. Facts and Fancies is one of those good works, and well worth adding to every creative person’s library.

Footage of Aureole danced by the Royal Danish Ballet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0q-ztXxdG_o

Esplanade danced by PTDC: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyGWsGl7Ezo

Commentary on the Taylor documentary Dancemaker: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs3B-Bzo_HM

Dancemaker on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/danceconsortium/videos?query=dancemaker

Lovely 80^th Birthday tributes to Taylor: http://ptdc.org/artists-dances/paul-taylor/80th-birthday-tributes/

Book Review: Dancing Between The Ears

May 14, 2013 by 4dancers

by Emily Kate Long

I had high expectations just reading the title of Debra Webb Rogers’ Dancing Between the Ears: accessing a dancer’s mind is the key to unlocking the potential of the body. Aimed at students, teachers, and professional dancers, this book does not disappoint. Over one hundred pages of ideas and images are organized into chapters for alignment, work at the barre, port de bras, turns, jumps, and traveling steps.

The value of Dancing Between the Ears can be summed up in a line from Rogers’ introduction: “For experienced students or professional dancers, the most important thing in dance class is not to learn new steps, but to discover new ways of thinking about the old ones.” This book contains many familiar images, and plenty I had never encountered. Some of my favorites included visualizing the vertebrae as jelly sandwiches and trying to keep all the jelly from squeezing out, imagining the legs as two opposite barbershop poles or two opposite tornadoes, floating the arms on imaginary water to keep them buoyant and supple, and running up a pretend ramp or runway on the takeoff for large jumps.

As an experienced teacher and former professional dancer, Debra Webb Rogers would know: Practice makes permanent! Sometimes all it takes to break an old habit is to practice a new way of thinking. Students and teachers all learn differently and think differently about their bodies in motion. Dancing Between the Ears offers a rich variety of images in multiple iterations—there is something for every kind of thinker in this work.

by Emily Kate Long

Balanchine: Russian-American Ballet Master Emeritus

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