I WILL DANCE

Written by Nancy Bo Flood

Illustrated by Julianna Swaney

“I want to dance, but I can hardly move.”

In “I Will Dance,” Nancy Bo Flood parts the curtain on the life of a girl who was born with cerebral palsy and expected to live “one minute, maybe two, not 10 years of minutes.” Our young narrator — succinct, soulful and sitting in a wheelchair — cannot blow out the candles on her birthday cake. “Not enough strength.” But she has a wish: She wants to dance.

Any book that opens a child’s imagination to the art of movement is something I can get behind, but “I Will Dance” does more: It puts us in this child’s chair, in her tiny yearning body and in her mind, which is mobile and alive. When she speaks, what strikes you is her brevity. It’s as if she has no time to waste on unnecessary words. She is so soft-spoken, yet so firm. It’s not that she wants to dance, it’s that she will.

Of five new children’s dance books, “I Will Dance” is the only one to move away from ballet (once the unrequited birthday wish is divulged). That’s brave; as anyone with a child knows, tutus sell. But this approach is not the only thing that sets it apart: It’s also the details. Our heroine is so smitten with dance that a poster of Martha Graham in “Appalachian Spring” hangs next to her bed. This kills me. Still, when she learns of an audition for Young Dance (a real organization devoted to dancers of all abilities), she is racked by self-doubt: “I am safe in my steel chair, stationary wheels, a motor, me.” At the studio, dancers are arranged in a circle and told to “pass the touch.” The teacher, after kicking a leg behind her in a graceful arc, bends toward the girl and touches her fingers. “Something inside me changes.” As the chain continues, we see the power and harmony that builds from dancing bodies in Julianna Swaney’s illustrations, which glide across the page lending innocence to lightness, effervescence to urgency. “I Will Dance” rides on the sensation of movement; it’s simple yet sophisticated.

B IS FOR BALLET
A Dance Alphabet
Written by John Robert Allman
Illustrated by Rachael Dean

But can a more conventional book on the world of ballet lead a child to do more than, say, wear a tutu to school? Two collaborations with American Ballet Theater try, though neither sparkles. “B Is for Ballet,” by John Robert Allman, with illustrations by Rachael Dean, takes young readers through the alphabet, starting with A for arabesque. It is full of images of Ballet Theater dancers past and present, but they look like their aspirational Bitmojis rather than the actual people. And in a career as ageist as ballet, it’s disheartening to see Alessandra Ferri, one of the greatest dramatic ballerinas of all time, relegated to the letter I, as in “ice bath” for “soothing tired, tattered feet. After promenades in pointe shoes, relaxation can’t be beat.”

…

WELCOME TO BALLET SCHOOL
Written by Ashley Bouder
Illustrated by Julia Bereciartu

In “Welcome to Ballet School,” Bouder, a principal dancer at New York City Ballet, pays homage to her former teacher, the celebrated Marcia Dale Weary. Julia Bereciartu’s illustrations capture her charmingly, from her trademark blond bangs to her sensible skirt and cardigan. The scene is the first day of class for a diverse group of young people, including Violet, Bouder’s daughter in the book and in life. During the second half of the class, Bouder shows up to teach them sections of “Sleeping Beauty.” As they work their way through ballet positions, the children are given playful facial expressions by Bereciartu: Tongues stick out when steps become complicated; hilarious frozen smiles appear when they try to balance. Through it all, “Welcome” takes ballet seriously. Bouder explains ballet terminology with diagrams that resemble those in a training manual. (My younger self would have eaten it up.) She also moves beyond steps to the heart of dancing. When Violet topples over while stretching her leg high in a grand battement, Weary tells her, “It is better to try our hardest and fall down than to not try at all.” It’s something of an inside joke. Bouder, a dancer known for her virtuosity and daring, has delivered splendid crashes at City Ballet. And the message is correct: A fall is a sign that a dancer is going for it.

Read the full list from the New York Times here.

By Nicole Duffy Robertson

10 December 2020

What makes a ballet a classic? Is it earning a permanent place in the history books, or is it being worthy of the Herculean investment of hours in the studio, the tireless work of the dancers and coaches, the resources, media and marketing machine required to bring it to life, or both? Who decides, and more importantly, what goes into that calculus? Today the re-evaluation of the Western theatrical dance canon continues as ballet and modern dance are challenged in the academy.[1] In concert dance, these questions are a matter of survival: the performed repertory consists mostly of “classics” and “new work,” and everything else tends to disappear. So, the question of what makes a dance a classic, i.e., a dance worth remembering, either by restaging or through written discourse, takes on a bigger significance.[2]

Two works by the founders of the Joffrey Ballet, Robert Joffrey’s Astarte (1967) and Gerald Arpino’s Light Rain (1981), provide a lens for exploring the question of what qualifies as a “classic,” while also addressing ideas about shifting cultural definitions of violence, taste, and timelessness. A closer look at these works may complicate our ideas of what dances should survive, be studied, and/or be performed. These ballets exist outside of conventional ballet’s classic/canonic paradigm, in part because of their sexually explicit, “anti-balletic” underpinnings.[3] First as a dancer, and now in my work as a répétiteur for the Gerald Arpino Foundation, and as a co-founder and director of New York Dance Project, I continually wrestle with these questions. Which dances to teach, pass on, and present to the public is not a trivial matter for our art form.

Each of these ballets has a different sort of existence today: Astarte is in the dance history books, and Light Rain lives onstage. One is for the most part critically respected, while the other tends to be dismissed. But there is another reason I propose that these ballets have significance beyond their roles in ballet history and performance: they provide an essential bridge from foundational “classical ballet” training (the particular methodology or school is irrelevant) to understanding and mastering key elements of the current, multi-genre contemporary dance world. In other words, these ballets persist, whether as classics or “in the canon” or not, based on their unique pedagogical value, for both dancers and audiences.

Ballet canonicity has been largely determined by success in institutional promotion and financing, coupled with plentiful support from the critical establishment. For example, Royal Ballet founder Ninette de Valois’s astute creation of a “ballet tradition” in the 1930s (with the help of Arnold Haskell’s writing)[4] and George Balanchine’s unassailable status (protected by Lincoln Kirstein, the Balanchine Trust, and the New York City Ballet) continue to survive and thrive through uninterrupted institutional support and critical writing. These two main drivers of ballet survival (the institution and critical attention) create a somewhat narrow discourse that keeps a firm grip on what gets performed, and therefore have an outsized influence on the creative direction of ballet today.

Read the full article here.