Clancy Sigal, 90

Clancy Sigal, Novelist Whose Life Was a Tale in Itself, Dies at 90
by Sam Roberts, The New York Times, July 21, 2017

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E. R. Braithwaite,104

E. R. Braithwaite, Author of ‘To Sir, With Love,’ Dies at 104

by Sewell Chan, The New York Times, December 13, 2016

Pat Conroy, 70

Pat Conroy, Author of ‘The Prince of Tides’ and ‘The Great Santini,’ Dies at 70
by William Grimes, The New York Times, March 5, 2016

Sierra Leone-born ballerina Michaela DePrince featured in Glamour

Michaela DePrince
(photo: Alique for GLAMOUR)

BALLERINA MICHAELA DEPRINCE 

ON ACHIEVING HER DREAMS

GLAMOUR, August 2015

I Was Orphan Number 27:
Ballerina Michaela DePrince's Inspiring Story

by Erika Hayasaki

Michaela DePrince lost her family as a girl in Sierra Leone during the brutal civil war; now she’s a world-class ballerina, her triumph soon to be a Hollywood movie, Taking Flight. But her biggest goal? To inspire young girls through working with the Girl Scouts and War Child, a group that helps children in conflict zones. DePrince shares her journey in Glamour’s August issue, on national newsstands now and available digitally at glamour.com/app.

Charles Champlin, 88

Charles Champlin, Critic and Memoirist, Dies at 88
by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, November 18, 2014

Maya Angelou, 86 [UPDATE]

Legendary author Maya Angelou dies
by Faith Karimi, CNN, May 28, 2014

Maya Angelou, Lyrical Witness of the Jim Crow South, Dies at 86
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, May 28, 2014

Dance chose me: choreographer Stephen Petronio writes his life

Above: choreographer and Aries, Stephen Petronio
Below: Stephen Petronio Company dances
I Drink the Air Before Me (2010)
(photos by Sarah Silver)

Confessions of A Motion Addict
by Stephen Petronio (self-published, 2014; 288 pp.)
ISBN-13: 9781492736547

reviewed by Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

I should not have been surprised to learn that Stephen Petronio self-published his memoir, Confessions of A Motion Addict. While the dramatic arc of this world-famous artist's life and career--not to mention the literally boldfaced names he can and does drop, sometimes scandalously--should make any publisher salivate, I can't imagine Petronio having much patience for any middleman or woman dictating how he should tell his own story. The book, all 288 pages of it, is Petronio, through and through. As Spike Lee would say, it's his joint.

The first sixty or so pages, dense and filling, plunge readers deep into childhood and teenage history: richly remembered Italian-American feasts, furtive sexual experiments, rollercoaster drug experiments, precocious insights into the personalities orbiting him, scary dreams, passion, restlessness and, always, a sense of outsider status. By page 67, his artistic fate is sealed when Contact Improvisation makes a serious pass at this newbie Hampshire College student. He subsequently forgets all about taking pre-med. "Inner motor" revved up, mind blown....

I look down my body, and I realize...it's there. I have a body and it is mine. I have a body and do not understand its power or potential or the invisible stories pressing at my skin. I desperately want to move.

Next up? Judson Dance Theater's Steve Paxton, a guest artist at Hampshire. "I am the bastard child of Steve Paxton and Trisha Brown," Petronio will tell us later on, citing his two greatest influences. Brown is, after all, the woman for whom he harnessed up and walked down the wall of a 14th Century French monastery (Man Walking Down the Side of a Building), a feat he repeated a few years ago at the Whitney Museum.

But there's still a lot of getting there until he's there. Petronio takes us along on an adventurous hitchhiking trip through Canada and the West Coast. The young man, exposed to the rigors of nature and the unpredictability of the human animal--enjoyed unexpected kindness of strangers along the way, the occasional minor bummer and one hugely, hugely major one. He's headstrong and lucky and an Aries, and maybe only an Aries would attempt this type of trip in this type of way--"Like all good Aries, I must try to try on every possible lifestyle as my next incarnation"--and get through intact.

Petronio made it through a lot of stuff intact--personal losses, the early years of the AIDS crisis, displacement, along with a lot of other artists, from a gentrifying SoHo, 9/11, a sex-and-drugs lifestyle that could make a rock star look like a rank amateur.

You see the dancer leap and bound, defy gravity and press the boundaries of human movement possibility, yet the mechanics and sensations of these efforts are for the most part concealed. In the mainstream forms of dance, artists often paint a smile over the top of Herculean efforts, but their soul is gritting and grimacing for dear life. The dancer has come to represent the ethereal, outside the law of physics, but we live on the earth and the pull of gravity is definitive. We work with it, attempt to defy it, and yes, we eat real food, pant, smoke, drink, eliminate, copulate, get married, divorced, addicted and healed. We are human. We sometimes break. And it all hurts at some point or another. And we all do something to deal with that pain. Some more than others.

He has chosen to reveal the pull of gravity and the mechanics of living, to conceal nothing, whether it be a personal lapse or a controversial opinion. And with it all, his story provides the kind of energetic rush one comes to expect from his work on the stage.

Learn more about Confessions of A Motion Addict here.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Ballerina Misty Copeland's memoir coming in March

A Singular Ballerina’s Multiple Paths
Misty Copeland Prepares for Release of Her Memoir
by Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times, February 21, 2014

An ordinary acrobat's extraordinary tale

I've just finished Duncan Wall's The Ordinary Acrobat (Random House, 2013), which interweaves two engrossing narratives: the often elusive history of circus and this young American's sojourn to France to explore contemporary circus as an increasingly enamored student, scholar and advocate. (Wall currently serves as National Director of Circus Now, the American advocacy organization, and teaches circus history and criticism at the National Circus School of Montreal.) While some of Wall's swings between past and present, personal and historical, might dizzy a few readers, I hung on for the whole vicarious, mental ride, coming away with a thirst for seeing more contemporary/interdisciplinary--and even traditional--circus and turning my skills as an arts writer to this stimulating challenge. If you think you know everything that circus is and can be--Ringling Bros. over here; Cirque du Soleil over there--this book will give you a peek at unexpected possibilities and may inspire you to search out more. Good stories, good ideas, good company.

And on Thursday, October 24 (6pm), meet Duncan Wall at Brooklyn Academy of Music's Fisher Hillman Studio for a talk on the rise of contemporary circus and the state of the art today. This event is presented as part of BAM's Next Wave Festival in conjunction with the American premiere of Hans was Heiri by Swiss circus innovators, Zimmerman & de Perrot.

For complete information and tickets for Wall's talk, click here.

BAM Fisher Hillman Studio
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Eric Fischl: Bad boy in retrospect

 

Bad Boy–My Life On & Off the Canvas

by Eric Fischl and Michael Stone

(Random House, 2013)

ISBN: 978-0-7704-3557-8

reviewed by Deborah Feller

News and Views, DeborahFeller.com

August 25, 2013

Feelings lodged in my subconscious were driving my work toward a form of expressiveness that was raw and graphic and troubling–and sometimes cathartic…images would pop out that were increasingly recognizable both as people and things, avatars of my buried past. -- Eric Fischl

Click to read the review.

A Chinese poet's memoir of imprisonment and torture

Captivity as a Mirror of Society
Liao Yiwu’s ‘For a Song and a Hundred Songs’
by Larry Rohter, The New York Times, July 2, 2013

Questlove: the man and his music

The Big Man Under the Afro, and His Music

Questlove Publishes His Memoir, ‘Mo’ Meta Blues’

by Dwight Garner, The New York Times, June 25, 2013

Susan Rethorst: A Choreographic Mind

I've just finished reading essays by a dancemaker who, while pressing words to fine use, celebrates quiet, visceral intuition over verbal, intellectual modes of being that are usually more highly prized. Susan Rethorst's A Choreographic Mind: Autobodygraphical Writings (Teatterikorkeakoulu: Kinesis 2, 2012) takes her readers deep into the sensibilities of an artist who chooses to embrace "not knowing, not quite controlling," honoring what her body tells her and what the dances she makes tell her, too.

The book presents two strands for us to follow: Rethorst's life-altering experiences in youth and her application of personal transformation to creative process. In a custody dispute, her father kidnapped her and her brother Johnny when they were quite young. Two years later, he kidnapped the boy again and, this time, she would not see Johnny until he was 21. I get the impression that while Rethorst must relate this disturbing history--which left her, into adulthood, disinclined to speak but inclined to watch people intently and read the subtle currents and language of bodies--she does so only to set the stage for a calm exploration of how dances are made, how they reveal and present themselves and how they might best be perceived by maker and witness alike.

Rethorst's discussions could benefit fellow choreographers; clearly, she hopes to share her ideas with young artists who frequently stumble over treacherous piles of shoulds and shouldn'ts--what this favored artist does, what that prominent critic appears to reject or champion, what Teacher says is the right thing to do, what's trendy among peers or presenters this season. To these artists, she offers her trust in the unconscious, the body, the ongoing conversation with the dance itself.

The mainstream dance critic, picking up this book, will feel his/her ears burn:

Basically, they tell you what they want to see, and how the piece before them does, or does not, answer to that. It is rare to hear people try to cut through their own taste to try to examine what the dance maker is doing with the form.

Elsewhere, she writes,

What it, the dance, is doing is a door to see what it is valuing, what its goals are, how it functions. Talk about dance is too often, in my opinion, full of implied lack, and the lacks reveal what the particular talker desires to get out of dance.

For someone who grew up not caring to talk much--and, in this and in Rethorst's talent for intuitive perception of people, spaces and things, I strongly identify with her--she certainly enlivens these pages with an impressive, persuasive voice. But, she advises, "don't take my word for it." (Word. There's that word, again....) Yes, your mileage may vary at times, but the journey will take you places you could never anticipate.

Order this book online.

Your next read: Jeanette Winterson

This book sounds fantastic!

Jeanette Winterson’s ‘Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?’
by Dwight Garner, The New York Times, March 8, 2012

The young Gil Scott-Heron

From this Sunday's New York Times Magazine "Lives" column, a reflection on youth from “The Last Holiday,” the posthumous memoir of Gil Scott-Heron (Grove Press)

Pieces of a (Very Young) Man
by Gil Scott-Heron, The New York Times, December 30, 2011

Sondheim on what makes a good critic

For me, a good critic is a good writer. A good critic is someone who recognises and acknowledges the artist's intentions and the work's aspirations, and judges the work by them, not by what his own objectives would have been. A good critic is so impassioned about his subject that he can persuade you to attend something you'd never have imagined going to. A good critic is an entertaining read. A good critic is hard to find.

--  Stephen Sondheim, from Look, I Made a Hat (Virgin Books, 2011)

And see:

Stephen Sondheim: who needs critics?
Good reviews can be as harmful as bad ones, says Stephen Sondheim. In an extract from his new book, he reflects on a life of prizes, putdowns – and the joy of songs sung in Sanskrit
The Guardian, November 20, 2011

Archiving "Dance in America"

Merrill Brockway’s ‘Dance in America’ for New Generation
by Julie Bloom, The New York Times, September 16, 2011

About Larsson...and Gabrielsson

Remembering Stieg Larsson
review of Eva Gabrielsson's There Are Things I Want You to Know’ About Stieg Larsson and Me
by David Carr, The New York Times, July 8, 2011

NBA win for Patti Smith

Patti Smith Wins National Book Award for Memoir
by Julie Bosman, The New York Times, November 17, 2010

Book review: Feiffer's memories

'Backing Into Forward - A Memoir' by Jules Feiffer

by David Carr, The New York Times, March 18, 2010