Frankie Manning: Ambassador of Lindy Hop
by Frankie Manning
from Temple University Press
Widely known as the creator of the air-step in Lindy Hop, a choreographer and Tony award winner, Frankie Manning recalls how his first tentative steps as a teenager at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom eventually led him to a career as chief choreographer and lead dancer for Whitey's Lindy Hoppers, who appeared on Broadway stages, Hollywood films, and stages around the world. He brings the Swing Era to life with recollections of the headliners as well as the dozens of uncelebrated dancers who helped to make the Lindy an international sensation.
With collaborator, Cynthia Millman, Manning traces the evolution of swing dancing from those early days in Harlem through the post-War War II period until it was eclipsed by rock and roll, then disco. Never one to sit on the sidelines, Manning ended his 35-year hiatus from dancing during the early years of the swing revival, and he has been performing and teaching ever since. This wonderful memoir will be a revelation to the new generations of Lindy Hoppers as well as dance historians.
Martha Graham: A Dancer's Life
by Russell Freedman
from Clarion Books
Martha Graham (1894-1991) referred to her dancers as "acrobats of God," but in truth it was she who seemed divinely inspired. Graham was a dancer, choreographer, and teacher for more than 70 years, and during that time she changed the landscape of dance forever. An unlikely candidate for a dance diva, she was shorter and more muscular than the principal ballet dancers of her time and she didn't start dancing until age 22--a flower long past her bloom in the eyes of most choreographers. Nonetheless, Graham managed to turn the dance world on its tutu with her innovative approach to movement and teaching and her clear understanding that feelings are not always graceful, but always intense.
Russell Freedman, who won the Newbery Medal in 1988 for Lincoln: A Photobiography and Newbery Honors for The Wright Brothers: How They Invented the Airplane (1992) and Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery (1994), has once again crafted a beautiful, intriguing biography. He traces Graham's remarkable life from a childhood filled with imaginative play, to her decision to attend dance school instead of college, through her departure from the Broadway Follies to pursue her own dance style, and onward through her late life, when she continued teaching and creating distinctive performance pieces. The fascinating biography is complemented by exquisite black-and-white photographs that reveal Graham's sense of beauty and her remarkable ability to translate pure, raw emotions into expressive movement. Freedman's lovely tribute makes us fully believe Graham when she says, "I did not choose to be a dancer, I was chosen." (Young Adult/Adult) --Brangien Davis
Martha Graham, the American dancer, teacher, and choreographer, revolutionized the world of modern dance. She possessed a great gift for revealing emotion through dance, expressing beliefs and telling stories in an utterly new way. Newbery Medalist Russell Freedman documents Martha Graham's life from her birth in 1894 to her final dance performance at the age of seventy-five and continued career as a choreographer until her death in 1991. Graham's own recollections as well as those of her dancers, students, friends, and lovers reveal Graham's unwavering dedication, her extraordinary sense of artistry, and the fierce intensity that left an impression on all who saw her perform. Original research based on interviews and a remarkable collection of photographs not widely reproduced give this biography a rare and unparalleled depth. Includes notes,a bibliography, and an index.
Savion!: My Life in Tap
by Savion Glover
from HarperCollins
Born to save tap
Fuh-duh-BAP! Fuh-duh-duh-BAP! A new language, a new sound. Savion Glover has redefined tap dancing, and it can never be the same again. He speaks to the world with a power and ease that has stunned and captivated millions. This exciting biography captures that essence--often in Glover's own voice--and treats readers to an inside look at his work while also providing a brief yet compelling history of tap dancing. Reverberating with the rhythm of a unique musical language, the book includes more than 50 photographs and features an eye-catching two-color design.
Foreword by Gregory HinesFuh-duh-BAP! Fuh-duh-duh-BAP! A new language, a new sound. Savion Glover has redefined tap dancing, and it can never be the same again. He speaks to the world with a power and ease that has stunned and captivated millions. This exciting biography captures that essence--often in Glover's own voice--and treats readers to an inside look at his work while also providing a brief yet compelling history of tap dancing. Reverberating with the rhythm of a unique musical language, the book includes over fifty photographs and features an eye-catching two-color design. All ages.
"He's the greatest tap dancer to ever lace up a pair of Capezios or any other tap shoes."-- Gregory Hines in the Foreword to Savion: My Life in Tap
2001 Best Books for Young Adults (ALA)
Foreword by Gregory HinesFuh-duh-BAP! Fuh-duh-duh-BAP! A new language, a new sound. Savion Glover has redefined tap dancing, and it can never be the same again. He speaks to the world with a power and ease that has stunned and captivated millions. This exciting biography captures that essence--often in Glover's own voice--and treats readers to an inside look at his work while also providing a brief yet compelling history of tap dancing. Reverberating with the rhythm of a unique musical language, the book includes over fifty photographs and features an eye-catching two-color design. All ages.
"He's the greatest tap dancer to ever lace up a pair of Capezios or any other tap shoes."--Gregory Hines in the Foreword to Savion: My Life in Tap
Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (October Books)
by Carrie Lambert-Beatty
from The MIT Press
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.
Jose! Born to Dance: The Story of Jose Limon (Tomas Rivera Mexican-American Children's Book Award (Awards))
by Susanna Reich
from Simon & Schuster/Paula Wiseman Books
José was a boy with a song in his heart and a dance in his step. Born in Mexico in 1908, he came into the world kicking like a steer, and grew up to love to draw, play the piano, and dream. José's dreaming took him to faraway places. He dreamed of bullfighters and the sounds of the cancan dancers that he saw with his father. Dance lit a fire in José's soul.
With his heart to guide him, José left his family and went to New York to dance. He learned to flow and float and fly through space with steps like a Mexican breeze. When José danced, his spirit soared. From New York to lands afar, José Limón became known as the man who gave the world his own kind of dance.
¡OLÉ! ¡OLÉ! ¡OLÉ!
Susanna Reich's lyrical text and Raúl Colón's shimmering artwork tell the story of a boy who was determined to make a difference in the world, and did. José! Born to Dance will inspire picture book readers to follow their hearts and live their dreams.
Blood Memory: An autobiography
Masters of Movement: Portraits of America's Great Choreographers
by Rose Eichenbaum
from Smithsonian
Dramatically candid conversations about the creative life with 59 leading American choreographers.
"Eichenbaum's firsthand knowledge of dance, her passion for dancing and the people who do it, and her appreciation of the minutiae of lives, both everyday and Olympian, all combine to open windows onto the soul of dance and the lives of those who helped to define and shape the art in the 20th century."—Jennifer Dunning, dance critic, New York Times
Where does the impulse to create originate? What is the choreographer's responsibility to the dancers, the audience, the self? These are just a few of the probing questions that Rose Eichenbaum asks some of America's most celebrated choreographers in her quest to understand the secrets of creativity. A collection of photographic portraits and vignettes based on intimate conversations, Masters of Movement is a rare journey into the world of dance. Whether through her lens—David Parsons, in a business suit, standing on the branch of a Central Park tree; Anna Halprin lying naked at the base of a giant California redwood—or through the revelations from her thoughtful interviews, Eichenbaum captures the essential character of her subjects, who have confided the experiences and emotions that have driven their creativity and defined their styles. 118 duotones.
Martha Graham: The Evolution of Her Dance Theory and Training, revised edition
by MARIAN HOROSKO
from University Press of Florida
Yvonne Rainer: The Mind is a Muscle (One Work)
by Catherine Wood
from Afterall Books
"It is my overall concern to reveal people as they are engaged in various kinds of activities--alone, with each other, with objects--and to weight the quality of the human body towards that of objects and away from the super-stylization of the dancer."
--Yvonne Rainer, STATEMENT accompanying The Mind is a Muscle, 1968
In 1968, toward the end of a decade that witnessed civil rights protests, the escalation of the war in Vietnam, and an expanded notion of artistic practice (epitomized by "Happenings"), Yvonne Rainer presented her evening-length work, The Mind is a Muscle. A choreographed, multipart performance for seven dancers, interspersed with film and text, this major work was built upon a backbone of variations on Rainer's dance solo, Trio A. In this extended illustrated essay exploring The Mind is a Muscle, Catherine Wood examines the political and media context in which Rainer chose to use the dance-theatre situation as her medium and analyzes Rainer's radical approach to image-making in live form.
Rainer's work has been linked strongly with minimalist sculpture: she compared the neutral, specific qualities of those objects to her own "work-like" or "task-like," "ordinary" dance, and she collaborated early on with Robert Morris. But The Mind is a Muscle manifests an agitated and contradictory relationship to the idea of "work" in the context of an affluent, postwar America. Wood describes the way the choreography of The Mind is a Muscle proposed a new lexicon of movement that stripped away the gestural conventions of dance or theater narrative in an attempt to present the human subject on her own terms while at the same time manipulating the seductiveness of the image, increasingly being harnessed by capitalism. Rainer's legacy persists through her decision to allow the Trio A from The Mind is a Muscle as a "multiple," distributed by being taught to many dancers and non-dancers, proposing, Wood argues, for the art object as code.
Choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater in 1962. Her autobiography, Feelings are Facts, was published by The MIT Press in 2006.
All His Jazz: The Life And Death Of Bob Fosse
by Martin Gottfried
from Da Capo Press
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