TT: Good old days

A new friend of mine who dances for a living wrote the other day to tell me that she’s just been cast as the Woman With the Purse in Jerome Robbins’ Fancy Free, the wonderful 1943 sailor-suit ballet that made stars out of Robbins and Leonard Bernstein, who wrote the delicious and irresistible score. Her e-mail reminded me of how rarely I get to dance performances these days. The publication in 2004 of All in the Dances, my brief life of George Balanchine, turned out in the short run to be an end rather than a beginning: more than a year has gone by since I last saw New York City Ballet, and even longer since my most recent visit to the Paul Taylor Dance Company, both of which used to be central to my hectic life as a peripatetic aesthete. Alas, I’m good for only so many nights out each week, and now that I’m a full-time drama critic and part-time opera librettist, I’ve been forced to put dance on the shelf, at least for the time being.
Hence it is with a mixture of nostalgia and wistfulness that I announce the publication of Robert Gottlieb’s Reading Dance: A Gathering of Memoirs, Reportage, Criticism, Profiles, Interviews, and Some Uncategorizable Extras, a thirteen-hundred-page anthology whose subtitle is impeccably accurate. Reading Dance contains pieces about Balanchine, Robbins, Frederick Ashton, Fred Astaire, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Serge Diaghilev, Isadora Duncan, Suzanne Farrell, Martha Graham, Gelsey Kirkland, Mark Morris, Vaslav Nijinsky, Rudolf Nureyev, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp and dozens of other key figures in dance. The list of contributors includes Joan Acocella, Mindy Aloff, Cecil Beaton, Cyril Beaumont, Max Beerbohm, Toni Bentley, Holly Brubach, Richard Buckle, Clement Crisp, Arlene Croce, Edwin Denby, Janet Flanner, Lynn Garafola, Robert Greskovic, B.H. Haggin, Deborah Jowitt, Allegra Kent, Lincoln Kirstein, Alistair Macaulay, George Jean Nathan, Jean Renoir, Marcia Siegel, Paul Taylor, Tobi Tobias, Kenneth Tynan, David Vaughan, and my old friend Anita Finkel, whose premature and untimely death robbed the world of dance of one of its most passionate commentators.
I am represented in Reading Dance by “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” an essay about Merce Cunningham that was originally published in Anita’s New Dance Review in 1994 and reprinted a decade later in A Terry Teachout Reader. Revisiting that half-remembered piece filled me with memories of the heady years when it was common for me to attend three or four ballet and modern dance performances a week. Back then my first encounters with Balanchine, Cunningham, and Taylor were still hitting me with the force of revelation, and I felt the urgent need to write as often as I could about the life-changing things that I was seeing–and feeling.
Needless to say, my life has changed greatly since then, but I still love dance with all my heart, and I’m glad that Bob Gottlieb has gone to so much trouble to tell me what I’ve been missing. I’ll be back, Bob, I promise!