Getting to Know the Dancer Within

Eichenbaum, Rose.
The Dancer Within: Intimate Conversations with Great Dancers
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008

In every performance talk-back I’ve witnessed, participated in, or facilitated, any audience of any age wants to know the same things: (1) How old were you when you started to dance? (2) How old are you now? (3) Are any of you married to each other? While there are infinite variations on these questions, the audience seems to need to get them out of the way before they can move on to deeper aesthetic inquiry.

I used to find it astonishing—“all those workshops on points in space and this is what they want to know,” I’d find myself thinking—and then I found that I, too, wanted to know if Dancer A of Sean Curren’s company learned to flip like that at her mother’s dance studio in Topeka. I began to relax into the dancer’s role as interpreter of the choreographic vision, with personal history past and present a worthy starting point for discussion. Then I started to learn the names of the dancers in the company as faithfully as I learned the choreographer’s and composer’s. It seemed disrespectful not too.

In The Dancer Within, Intimate Conversations with Great Dancers, Rose Eichenbaum eloquently addresses those deceptively innocuous questions with photographic portraits and intimate conversations. Intimate conversations is the perfect phrase to describe both the portraits and the interviews. They are revelatory, poetically pragmatic explorations of great dancer’s dancing lives. Rose says: “This book is my dance, my choreography, my homage to dancers” (x). Her homage is elegant, stylish, and personalized while still getting to the essence of each dancer’s story, in five pages or less.

The black-and-white portraits were all created expressly for this project, as were the interviews. The succinct articles seem to have equal weight with the photos. A little time in each is spent setting the stage for the photo shoot or the interview. Then, in both the photo and the text, the essence of what that dancer is all about shines through.

For instance, a super-smiley woman doing what could be described as a cheer-leading jump in 1980s style underwear and short tank top caught my eye. I didn’t recognize her name, Marine Jahan; then learned that I wasn’t supposed too. But having watched Flashdance a zillion times when I was a teenager (I even own a VHS copy), I realized I should have recognized her body.

When Flashdance premiered, there was no screen credit for the real dancer—French-born Jahan—allowing the public to think that Jennifer Beals (the non-dancing actress who starred in the film) had performed her own dance numbers. “I waited to see my name come up on screen, but it never appeared. And when I saw that the dog in the film got credit and not me, I was heart-broken” (198). You can find out how this chapter of Jahan’s story ends, as well as how she moved into being a soloist, started dancing, came to America, at what age she stopped dancing, and why. And who she married. It is an absorbing arrow right into the heart of her dancing life: short, sharp, and revealing.

The Dancer Within offers you this stab of insight 39 more times with dancers as famous as Baryshnikov, or as famous-within-their-own-circles as Eiko and Koma (Japanese Butoh artists). Eichenbaum shows no agenda in terms of dance form or age—the primary requirement for inclusion seems to be that you are universally considered to be excellent at your job. Irish dancer Jean Butler was performing all over the world with the Irish band The Chieftains at the age of 17, then was one of the stars of the innovative Riverdance; Bill Evans is a noted postmodern educator, choreographer, and performer, Mr. Wiggles (Steffan Clemente) is an L.A. hip-hop artist, all three are the stars of their own story, lovingly framed by Eichenbaum.

As a teaching tool, The Dancer Within provides answers, or at least a lot of viewpoints, on what the life of a dancer is like. These dancers universally talk about what brought them to dance and at what age, their teachers, their choreographers, the “inner critic,” illness, injury, mental health, their dance form, the limits of excelling at only one dance form, performance rituals, the financial life of a dancer, aging, and quitting (not necessarily in that order). They also talk about their passion for dance and the life they have had in it. The overall effect is as galvanizing as looking at Barrie Chase, in her early 70s, high-kicking a perfectly long leg sky high on a California beach (9). Sign me up.

Click here to watch Rose Eichenbaum speak about the book for DanceChannelTV.

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