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 [...]

Serious Business

Lecoq, Jacques
Theatre of Movement and Gesture
London: Methuen Drama, 2003
As a dance student in London I fell in love with European dance theater—a hybrid of dance, music, text, and themes so poetic and personal they could only have come from individual experience (I assumed improvisation from the performers) rather than the mind of a single choreographer. [...]

Investigating Technique

Bales, Melanie & Rebecca Nettl-Fiol (eds.)
The Body Eclectic: Evolving Practices in Dance Training
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008
Disclaimer: I firmly believe inquiry into the body to be the most noble of lifetime studies and that the process of learning a physical technique is a brilliant way to get to the heart of your investigations. At [...]

The More You Know, the Better You Can Imagine

Tharp, Twyla
The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life: A Practical Guide
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006
“Memories are slippery, like butter, “ a fifth-grader announced at PS 116 in Manhattan. He was reflecting on Hilary Easton’s dance theater piece, It’s All True. As Lincoln Center Institute teaching artists we are endeavoring to layer [...]

A Study in Contrasts

Jones, Bill T.
Elizabeth Zimmer and Susan Quasha, eds.
Body Against Body: The Dance and Other Collaborations of Bill T. Jones & Arnie Zane
Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1989
Dance is often a study in contrasts: finding rhythm in silence, movement defined by stillness, the literal body creating an abstract narrative. The book Body Against Body: The Dance [...]

Dance for the Camera

Mitoma, Judy, Elizabeth Zimmer, and Dale Ann Stieber, eds.
Envisioning Dance on Film and Video
New York: Routledge, 2002
This saying made the rounds on the Internet a few years back: ballet dancers defy gravity, jazz dancers make friends with it, and modern dancers dance like they are mad at the floor. It’s a truism I could giggle [...]

Stock Comedy

Lust, Annette Bercut
From the Greek Mimes to Marcel Marceau and Beyond: Mimes, Actors, Pierrots, and Clowns: A Chronicle of the Many Visages of Mime in the Theater.
Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003
In 2006, my dance company was commissioned to choreograph and perform Stravinsky’s opera ballet Pulcinella. I had some hazy memory of commedia dell’arte stock characters [...]

Last Night on Earth

Jones, Bill T.
Last Night on Earth
New York: Pantheon, 1995
I love Bill T. Jones.
I am dazzled by his technique, his vision, his personal power as it radiates through his regal demeanor. And his talking. I love to hear that man talk. Language pours out of him as words and movement, making literal the phrase “poetic [...]

Dancing on the Shoulders of Giants

Foulkes, Julia L.
Modern Bodies: Dance and American Modernism from Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002
I am regularly asked what kind of dance I “do.” Without missing a beat, I always say I am a modern dancer. It sounds good, but doesn’t actually define the genre for the average Joe-the-Plumber. [...]