Dancers Books

Fred Astaire (Icons of America)

Joseph Epstein

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Joseph Epstein’s Fred Astaire investigates the great dancer’s magical talent, taking up the story of his life, his personality, his work habits, his modest pretensions, and above all his accomplishments. Written with the wit and grace the subject deserves, Fred Astaire provides a remarkable portrait of this extraordinary artist and how he came to embody for Americans a fantasy of easy elegance and, paradoxically, of democratic aristocracy.

Tracing Astaire’s life from his birth in Omaha to his death in his late eighties in Hollywood, the book discusses his early days with his talented and outspoken sister Adele, his gifts as a singer (Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Jerome Kern all delighted in composing for Astaire), and his many movie dance partners, among them Cyd Charisse, Rita Hayworth, Eleanor Powell, and Betty Hutton. A key chapter of the book is devoted to Astaire’s somewhat unwilling partnership with Ginger Rogers, the woman with whom he danced most dazzlingly. What emerges from these pages is a fascinating view of an American era, seen through the accomplishments of Fred Astaire, an unassuming but uncompromising performer who transformed entertainment into art and gave America a new yet enduring standard for style.

Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper

Diablo Cody

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 86 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

She was just a typist, why not be a stripper? 1 out of 5 stars.
4 of 6 people found this review helpful.

"A copy typist by day in Minnesota, Cody was hardly a likely candidate for entering an amateur stripping contest."

Why is that so unlikely? A "copy typist" is just someone that types documents from handwritten notes. Quick google search reveals they make between $7 and $12 a hour. Is it any wonder she turned to stripping for easy money?

I think the title's misleading and it's not a shock that someone making such a low income would become a stripper. Now if she was a successful doctor or lawyer then I would say it's unlikely, but a typist becoming a stripper isn't a stretch.

Editorial Review:

Decreed by David Letterman (tongue in cheek) on CBS TV’s The Late Show to be the pick of “Dave’s Book Club 2006,” Candy Girl is the story of a young writer who dared to bare it all as a stripper. At the age of twenty-four, Diablo Cody decided there had to be more to life than typing copy at an ad agency. She soon managed to find inspiration from a most unlikely source— amateur night at the seedy Skyway Lounge. While she doesn’t take home the prize that night, Diablo discovers to her surprise the act of stripping is an absolute thrill.

This is Diablo’s captivating fish-out-of-water story of her yearlong walk on the wild side, from quiet gentlemen’s clubs to multilevel sex palaces and glassed-in peep shows. In witty prose she gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at this industry through a writer’s keen eye, chronicling her descent into the skin trade and the effect it had on her self-image and her relationship with her now husband.

Mao's Last Dancer

Li Cunxin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Life across different worlds 4 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

Li Cunxin has had a somewhat different life. He was almost doomed to obscurity like the vast majority of people in this world, living the life of a poor peasant in rural China, but for a stroke of luck when his teacher suggested him as a potential ballet student. This changed his life from one type of hardship to another with markedly different challenges, but one which left him lonely, confused about the dogma he had so wholeheartedly embraced and geographically isolated from his family.

It is interesting to read as the young man goes from blind adoration of Chairman Mao and all the things that come with Communism, to a dawning awakening that the West is not the den of inequity that he has been led to believe. But is is the latter half of the book that has led me to offer 4 stars instead of 5 - I felt it was a little rushed, especially his well publicised defection, and efforts to settle in the west and raise a family. I guess we in the West are more interested in his early struggling years, but the challenges he faced as an adult are nonetheless fascinating.

There is no doubt that this is a sincere and amazing story. It is written with a wry humour that makes the tales of wrenching poverty readable (I have no desire to ever taste dried yams!), and gives us an interesting insight into how difficult life was in China under Communism. Mr Li seems a happy and settled man now with a lovely family - I would say he has had a fair fight to get there.

Editorial Review:

From a desperately poor village in northeast China, at age eleven, Li Cunxin was chosen by Madame Mao's cultural delegates to be taken from his rural home and brought to Beijing, where he would study ballet. In 1979, the young dancer arrived in Texas as part of a cultural exchange, only to fall in love with America-and with an American woman. Two years later, through a series of events worthy of the most exciting cloak-and-dagger fiction, he defected to the United States, where he quickly became known as one of the greatest ballet dancers in the world. This is his story, told in his own inimitable voice.

Gypsy: Memoirs of America's Most Celebrated Stripper

Gypsy Rose Lee

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Gypsy Rose Lee’s memoir became a New York Times bestseller in 1957, inspiring the 1959 hit musical, two movies, and three revivals. Now a fourth, directed by Arthur Laurents and starring Patti LuPone, is lighting up New York, winning top Broadway theatre awards, including three 2008 Tony Awards, as well as raves from critics and audiences:

“No matter how long you live, you’ll never see a more exciting production.” —Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal

“Watch out, New York! This GYPSY is a wallop-packing show of raw power.” —Ben Brantley, The New York Times

“Not your ordinary theater experience. This is the best production of the best damn musical ever.” —Liz Smith, Syndicated Columnist

The memoir, which Gypsy began as a series of pieces for The New Yorker, contains photographs and newspaper clippings from her personal scrapbooks and an afterword by her son, Erik Lee Preminger. At turns touching and hilarious, Gypsy describes her childhood trouping across 1920s America through her rise to stardom as The Queen of Burlesque in 1930s New York—where gin came in bathtubs, gangsters were celebrities, and Walter Winchell was king.

Gypsy’s story features outrageous characters—among them Broadway’s funny girl, Fanny Brice, who schooled Gypsy in how to be a star; gangster Waxy Gordon, who fixed her teeth; and her indomitable mother, Rose, who lived by her own version of the Golden Rule: “Do unto others … before they do you.”

Steps in Time: An Autobiography

Fred Astaire

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

One of the foremost entertainers of the twentieth century—singer, actor, choreographer, and, of course, the most dazzling "hoofer" in the history of motion pictures—Fred Astaire was the epitome of charm, grace, and suave sophistication, with a style all his own and a complete disregard for the laws of gravity. Steps in Time is Astaire's story in his own words, a memoir as beguiling, exuberant, and enthralling as the great artist himself, the man ballet legends George Balanchine and Rudolf Nureyev cited as, hands down, the century's greatest dancer.

From his debut in vaudeville at age six through his remarkable career as the star of many of the most popular Hollywood musicals ever captured on celluloid, Steps in Time celebrates the golden age of entertainment and its royalty, as seen through the eyes of the era's affable and adored prince. Illustrated with more than forty rare photographs from the author's personal collection, here is Astaire in all his debonair glory—his life, his times, his movies, and, above all, his magical screen appearances and enduring friendship with the most beloved of all his dancing partners, Ginger Rogers.

Nureyev: The Life (Vintage)

Julie Kavanagh

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Rudolf Nureyev, one of the most iconic dancers of the twentieth century, had it all: beauty, genius, charm, passion, and sex appeal. No other dancer of our time has generated the same excitement, for both men and women, on or off the stage.

In this superb biography, Julie Kavanagh deftly brings us through the professional and personal milestones of Nureyev's life and career: his education at the Kirov school in Leningrad; his controversial defection from the USSR in 1961; his long-time affair with the Danish dancer Erik Bruhn; his legendary partnership with Margot Fonteyn at the Royal Ballet in London. We see his fiery collaborations with almost all the major living choreographers including Ashton, Balanchine, Robbins, Graham, and Taylor. And we see Nureyev as he reinvigorated the Paris Ballet Opera in the early 1980s before his death from AIDS complications in 1993. Nureyev: The Life is the most intimate, revealing, and dramatic picture we have ever had of this dazzling, complex figure.

Holding On to the Air: An Autobiography

Suzanne Farrell, Toni Bentley

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

One of the more interesting dancer autobiographies 5 out of 5 stars.
29 of 31 people found this review helpful.

Suzanne Farrell was often regarded as Balanchine's ultimate "muse", although she was neither the first nor really the last. Balanchine in the 1960s became obsessed with this willowy, mysterious dancer, and choreographed many ballets for her. Their personal relationship was much gossiped about. But Balanchine was married (to another "muse", Tanaquiel le Clerg), and Farrell was a staunch Catholic. Eventually, she married another dancer, and left the New York City Ballet. When she returned 5 years later, Balanchine's personal obsession was over. They worked professionally till his death but it seems as if Balanchine never became emotionally invested in her again. Farrell for her part loftily insists that the relationship was consummated through "dance" and not the traditional way. One wonders if it was this remoteness and unattainability that made Balanchine so hurt when Farrell married and left the company.
Farrell's book is a moving personal story, and I'm too young to have seen her dance but surviving videoclips make it easy to understand Balanchine's obsession. She was indeed a beautiful, electrifying dancer. However, like a lot of singer autobiographies, Farrell can't help but sound a bit self-centered. She was isolated at the NYCB due to resentment from the other dancers, but it seems impossible that she'd remain so completely oblivious to the company's other members. Thus, 1960s mainstays of the NYCB like Edward Villela, Patricia McBride, Karin von Arnoldigen, that all figure so prominently in any chronology of the NYCB, are completely absent in Farrells story. From someone reading her book you'd think Balanchine choreographed solely for her, that she was the only important ballerina in his life, and that the company essentially revolved around her. This is not a criticism, but it's something to keep in mind when reading the book. I'd suggest also getting a biography of Balanchine, to keep this in perspective.
To Farrell's credit, she never self-aggrandizes or vilifies anyone. She admits Balanchine could be selfish and smothering, but overall she treats him very sensitively. She is also fair about her mother, a typical stage-mom. Overall, this is one of the best autobiographies of a dacner that I've read. Its candid and personal. However, like most autobiographies I wouldnt read it as an entirely accurate history of ballet either.
As an interesting footnote, Farrell's frequent stage partner and new NYCB dancermaster Peter Martins fired Farrell from teaching at the NYCB after a blowup in the late 1990s. In a preview of the book Farrell mentions the firing.
Farrell's co-writer was Toni Bentley, who's also written a fascinating personal account of being a NYCB dancer.

Editorial Review:

Suzanne Farrell, world-renowned ballerina, was one of George Balanchine's most celebrated muses and remains a legendary figure in the ballet world. This memoir, first published in 1990 and reissued with a new preface by the author, recounts Farrell's transformation from a young girl in Ohio dreaming of greatness to the realization of that dream on stages all over the world. One third of her repertory of more than 100 ballets were composed expressly for her by such notable choreographers as Balanchine, Jermome Robbins and Maurice Bejart. In her memoir, Farrell recalls career, professional and personal attachments, and their attendant controversies with a frankness and common sense.

Dancing on My Grave

Gelsey Kirkland, Greg Lawrence

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 39 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

for those who enjoy books about dancers 3 out of 5 stars.
2 of 5 people found this review helpful.

I've read this book twice before buying and I find that it's good the first time, but great the second time and so forth. The reason I bought it was not because of gelsey the dancer, but her as the person. My roommate and I call her crazy girl, but in a strange way you can relate through her craziness as she continues to bash on everyone around her. She calls her father a few things, Mr. B a perv who is trying to create an image unable to last by the human body, Ms. Farrell as the mold that everyone needs to copy, misha the horriable boyfriend, and so forth.
As I said I found this book enjoyable and liked it better then the second. Even though crazy girl becomes a ballet teacher. She found peace in herself and lost the craziness that i loved. I'm glad to her as the person found it, but I as the reader miss listening to her rant about the injustice of the dance world.

Editorial Review:

The shattering story of a dream which became a heartbreaking nightmare for one of America's most famous ballerinas, Gelsey Kirkland, who chronicles her brilliant start as a dancer with George Balanchine, her legendary partnership with Mikhail Baryshnikov, her agonizing descent into drugs, and her struggles to rise again.

Isadora Duncan: A Graphic Biography

Sabrina Jones, Paul Buhle

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Editorial Review:

Myth and controversy still swirl around the dramatic figure of Isadora Duncan. The pioneering modern dancer emerged from provincial nineteenth-century America to captivate the cultural capitals of Europe, reinvent dance as a fine art, and leave a trail of scandals in her wake. From her unconventional California girlhood to her tragic death on the French Riviera fifty years later, Duncan’s journey was an uncompromising quest for truth, beauty, and freedom. Here Duncan’s art and ideas come vividly to life. Each page is a unique dance of words and images, reflecting Duncan’s courage, passion, and idealism in a way sure to inspire another generation of admirers.

Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (October Books)

Carrie Lambert-Beatty

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Editorial Review:

In her dance and performances of the 1960s, Yvonne Rainer famously transformed the performing body—stripped it of special techniques and star status, traded its costumes and leotards for T-shirts and sneakers, and asked it to haul mattresses or recite texts rather than leap or spin. Without discounting these innovations, Carrie Lambert-Beatty argues in Being Watched that the crucial site of Rainer's interventions in the 1960s was less the body of the performer than the eye of the viewer—or rather, the body as offered to the eye. Rainer's art, Lambert-Beatty writes, is structured by a peculiar tension between the body and its display.

Through close readings of Rainer's works of the 1960s—from the often-discussed dance Trio A to lesser-known Vietnam war-era protest dances—Lambert-Beatty explores how these performances embodied what Rainer called "the seeing difficulty." (As Rainer said: "Dance is hard to see.") Viewed from this perspective, Rainer's work becomes a bridge between key episodes in postwar art. Lambert-Beatty shows how Rainer's art (and related performance work in Happenings, Fluxus, and Judson Dance Theater) connects with the transformation of the subject-object relation in minimalism and with emerging feminist discourse on the political implications of the objectifying gaze. In a spectacle-soaked era, moreover, when images of war played nightly on the television news, Rainer's work engaged the habits of viewing formed in mass-media America, linking avant-garde art and the wider culture of the 1960s. Rainer is significant, argues Lambert-Beatty, not only as a choreographer but as a sculptor of spectatorship.