Looking at Some Favorite Books
Dance Movement Therapy: A Healing Art is a revised edition by Fran J. Levy (NDA/AAHPERD). Dance therapists don't often find much information available to them, but this book fills that void. This history is rich and life-altering. Dance movement Therapists such as Alma Hawkins (a former professor of mine), Trudi Schoop and others are profiled first. Levy continues her chronicles of the development of this therapy, taking it from 1960 through 1972, wrapping these two historical units with discussions comparing and contrasting the similarities and differences among the first therapists and the East and West Coast approaches. Unit III will be the meat of the book for many as Levy covers work with children (including the sexually abused and autistic), adults (the elderly, those with multiple personalities and in psychiatric care) - all well-documented. She closes with the expansion and future of dance movement therapy into the areas of the developmentally disabled, the media, the corporate world and families. Dance educators and therapists in traditional fields should add this to their library.
Bios and more
Vaganova by Vera Krasovskaya (University Press of Florida, www.upf.com) introduces readers to the legendary Agrippina Vaganova, the Master Teacher who created a syllabus and method for teaching classical ballet that has become the basis and the standard for Russian training. It is a treat and a treasure to meet her, learn of her work as a student in the Imperial Ballet School, performances under Marius Petipa, survivor of the Revolution (reduced to performing in variety shows), then employment as a teacher to the first-year students at what was her former Imperial Ballet School. Never a beautiful or brilliant dancer, Vaganova found her place in the dance world as a teacher. And the rest is hist-ory--a very rich and entertaining one that Krasovskaya has preserved for us.
Reminiscences of a Dancing Man: A Photographic Journey of a Life in Dance by Bill Evans (National Dance Association), is an enviable, polished scrapbook of Evans' life from childhood classes to a rich and fulfilling career as a teacher, a choreographer with companies and colleges, a performer and an artistic director. If you have known him, you'll cherish this book. If you did not, you may go looking for him after reading this exuberant book.
By With To and From (University Press of Florida, www.upf.com) is a Lincoln Kirstein reader edited by teacher, writer and editor Nicholas Jenkins. Kirstein is best known in the ballet world for his collaboration with George Balanchine as co-founder of the School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet. Dance historians and students will recognize his name from his "Dance: A Short History of Classical Theatrical Dancing." In between are his eloquent writings on Balanchine, ballet, Cartier-Bresson, diary excerpts, poems and comments on Stravinsky, Hemingway, Monroe (as in Marilyn), Diaghilev and other artists from a rich time in history. "The death of someone who has given you intense pleasure, even if you never met, amounts almost to the death of a friend." He was speaking of Monroe's death, but those words also describe how you will feel reading this book and seeing the world through Kirstein's eyes.
Winter Season by Toni Bentley (University Press of Florida, www.upf.com) is a paperback reissue of a book about her work in the New York City Ballet. Every dancer, teacher and student will be moved by her revelations at the young age of twenty-two, when she felt her life and pursuit of her art was at a dangerous standstill. "Most women have two important men in their lives--their father and their lover. We have three. Mr. Balanchine is our leader, our president, our mother, our father, our friend, our guide, our mentor, our destiny.....As an apprentice one hears that he needs to see only one demi-lie, and he knows how you dance, how you live, who you are and what your future is." Don't expect to read this just once, or over several days or weeks. Once you begin this riveting look at this dancer's life, you won't be able to put it down.