Books About Dance

[kyriacarlisle]

I need to do some catching up on dance and dance history (the classic "librarian two books ahead of likely reference questions" approach). I'm especially interested in ballet and modern, though if there's a magnificent book about another dance form, I'm very glad to know about that, too.

Much though I loved them as a child, I'm not really looking for books like A Very Young Dancer or Life at the Royal Ballet School (although if you happen to be looking for a graphic novel about ballet, try Siena Cherson Siegel & Mark Siegel, To Dance). I'm also not so very interested in hagiography - in my usual field, I'd think of this as the ten zillion coffee table books about Maria Callas. On the other hand, if the photographs are simply too revelatory to pass up....

I'm reading Apollo's Angels now. I've already read Dance to the Piper, Winter Season, Off Balance, and Behind the Scenes at the Boston Ballet.

Comments

[anne]

Dance history, my first fandom! I haven't been keeping up with it, so just off the top of my head...

Ivor Guest wrote several books on 19th century ballet; the title I can think of is _Fanny Elssler_, but I know he also did surveys of the Romantic ballet in England and France. (Unless the French book was about the Second Empire; I'm pretty sure I learned about the sad death of Emma Livry from him.)

Deborah Jowitt, _Time and the Dancing Image_, read it in grad school, adored it. (but grad school was ~15 yrs ago?)

I forget the author of the next one: _Dance is a Contact Sport_, is the title; sports(?) journalist embedded in the NYCB for a year in the '70s.

Solomon Volkov interviewed Balanchine; I don't know what the English title is, but the French one is _Conversations avec George Balanchine_.

Arlene Croce, dance critic for the New Yorker, has a couple of collections out.

Wendy Hilton wrote the definitive modern book on French Baroque dance: _Dance of Court and Theater_. (Unless it's been supplanted since she died, but I kind of doubt it. It's the kind of work "magisterial" was invented to describe.)

Autobiographies are hit and miss, of course. I loved Roland Petit's _J'ai dansé sur les flots_, and I think I heard he'd written a second one, but I haven't seen it. Paul Taylor, _Private Domain_. Oh, Margot Fonteyn wrote hers, but it's nothing like de Mille's _Speak to Me, Dance with Me_. I haven't read _Dance to the Piper_, embarrassingly enough!

Most of my tap history came from videos and word of mouth, not books, but I can poke around the Internet and see if I can remember titles. The only one I'm sure of is _No Maps on My Taps_, which is mesmerizing.

Um, yeah. I do go on, don't I? If I think of anything else, I'll let you know....

[kyriacarlisle]

Thank you, thank you, thank you. These all look great, and will save me from wandering around the shelves and shelves of coffee table books - not that those don't have their place, but sometimes one needs a little more argument. Or any argument at all.

And having to practice my French won't do me any harm, either.

I'm selfishly interested in the Hilton; the 17th and 18th centuries are closer to my time period, but I'd probably better head for the later books first: the faculty concentrate on Diaghilev-and-after.

Autobiographies are hard: not only do they (usually) have to conform to the genre's structure (childhood, adolescence, first love, adversity, success, tragedy, more success, acceptance...), they're also so often squirm-inducingly unaware.

Thanks again!

[anne]

Please let me know if you want French translations; that's my thing. (Well, technically I'm a medievalist, but I started learning French because I was such a bunhead, and then I just kind of mutated.)

If you want Ballets Russes stuff, the University of Texas at Austin has the Harry Random Humanities Research Collection (or Center, now, I think), which has a fair few Ballets Russes costumes--like almost all the ones from the original production of Le Sacre du Printemps. I don't know what else they have--ephemera, certainly, and possibly also notes, designs, etc. The Bernard Taper bio of Balanchine might be a starting point for Ballets Russes stuff, though IIRC it's a bit hagiographic.

Good luck, and let me know if I can help. I have lots of random facts rattling around in my head, and might be able to save you some time.