Dance anecdotes : stories from the worlds of ballet, Broadway, the ballroom, and modern dance /
Mindy Aloff.
- viii, 272 pages ; 25 cm
Includes bibliographical references (pages 241-249) and index.
Towering figures -- Marie Taglioni -- Anna Pavlova -- Vaslav Nijinsky -- Isadora Duncan -- Martha Graham -- Margot Fonteyn -- Sir Frederick Ashton -- George Balanchine -- Of steps and their authorship -- Music makes me ... -- The rehearsal room -- Coaches and teachers -- Hands and things that can fill them -- Balletomania and other thrills -- Inspiration -- Seductions attempted, surmised, and realized -- Critical lines -- Turning points -- From stage to page -- Fauna -- Scandals -- Touring -- The theaters -- Costumes, footgear, and hair do's and don'ts -- Makeup -- Conductors -- Dancing and related theatrical professions -- Dancing the movies -- Injuries, maladies, misfortunes, and cures -- On partnering and partnerships -- A mark, a yen, a buck, or a pound -- Sets and stagecraft -- Big pictures -- Afterword : a note on anecdotes as ingredients of dance history.
"Mindy Aloff, a leading dance critic who has written for The Nation, The New Republic, and The New Yorker, has brought together here a marvelous book of stories by and about dancers - entertaining and informative anecdotes that capture the boundless variety and richness of dance as an art, a tradition, a profession, a pastime, an obsession, a reality, and, for the dancer, an ideal." "Many of the stories are amusing, but some are rueful, even sad, and a few are dark. Aloff concludes the volume with an essay about how dancing has been able to record its past, sometimes over centuries, and about how the art of the dancer, apparently as ephemeral in performance as cloud patterns, turns out, when conditions are hospitable, to be much more hardy and resilient than many people suppose." "A glorious promenade of stories that stretch a far back as classical times and as far afield as Japan, India, and Java, this superb collection will be treasured by everyone who loves dance, whether young or old."--BOOK JACKET.