What is strikingly new about Miss Siegel's achievement is that she goes beyond the usual kind of historical reassessment. . . . She performs on behalf of this most evanescent of the arts an act of significant recovery. By tracking down--often in rare stage revivals, on film or on videotape--as many of the works by major creators of the last half century as survive, and by describing them . . . in a manner that combines accuracy and imagination, she has enriched our knowledge of the past and added immeasurably, to our resent stock of critical resources."--Dale Harris, New York Times Book Review "Siegel has a gut feeling for dance and a razor-sharp intelligence about it. It's an irresistible combination."--Margaret Pierpont, Dance Magazine "After you've seen and felt dance this deeply--even vicariously--your way of looking at dance will never be the same."--William Albright, Houston Post She sees, acutely, with her muscles as well as her eyes. She thinks about dance as much as she experiences it. . . . This is dance choreography reconstituted. Dances leap off the page. . . . The ability to do that is extraordinary."--Jean Bunke, Des Moines Sunday Register "The sections in which she describes the dances themselves make up the bulk of the book and they are profoundly illuminating. . . . These descriptions represent an amazing literary, as well as critical, accomplishment, for they are both accurate and resonant, both objective and enlightening, both formal and personal."--Laura Shapiro, The Real Paper "Siegel draws on her years of experience as a working dance critic, a profession she has helped to shape, and brings to a range of American dance a sense of honesty and a mind that wants to understand the antecedents of what is currently in vogue as the dance explosion."--Iris M. Fanger, The Christian Science Monitor
Winner of the Selma Jeanne Cohen Memorial Prize (2010) In this stunning new collection of reviews and essays, dance critic Marcia B. Siegel grapples with the floating identity of ballet, as well as particular ballets, and with the expanding environment of spectacle in which ballet competes for an audience. Drawn from a wide variety of published sources, these writings concentrate on canonical works of ballet and how the performances of these works have been changing in significant ways. Siegel writes with a keen awareness of the history and mythology that surround particular works, while remaining attentive to the new ways in which a work is interpreted and re-presented by contemporary choreographers and dancers. Through her readable and provocative writings, Siegel offers critical insight into performances of the past twenty-five years to give us a new understanding of ballet in performance. The volume includes over one hundred pieces on a variety of ballet topics, from specific dances and dancers to companies and choreographers, ranging from Swan Lake and The Nutcracker to Nijinsky, Balanchine, Tharp, and Morris to the Bolshoi, the Joffrey, the Miami City Ballet, the Boston Ballet, to name just a few. Ebook Edition Note: All images have been redacted.
For more than four decades, Twyla Tharp has been a phenomenon in American dance, a choreographer who not only broke the rules but refused to repeat her own successes. At the conclusion of Howling Near Heaven, Marcia Siegel writes about the thrill of watching Tharp choreograph in 1991: "Tharp's movement can be planned or spontaneous, personal, funny, hard as hell, precise enough to look thrown away. She doesn't so much invent or create it, she prepares for it. Crusty, driven, demanding, and admiring, she hurls challenges at the dancers. Brave, virtuosic, and cheerful, they volley back what she gives them and more. She watches them. They watch her. It's the most subtle form of competition and cooperation, a process so intuitive, so intimate, that no one can say whose dance it is in the end, and none of the parties to that dance can be removed without endangering its identity. The same is true for all theatrical dance making, all over the world, only most of it isn't so inspired or obsessed." Starting in the rebellious 1960s, Tharp tried her creative wings on minimalism, pedestrianism, and Dada, then abandoned both the avant-garde and the established modern dance. She thrilled a new audience with her witty version of jazz in Eight Jelly Rolls, then merged her dancers with the Joffrey Ballet for the sensational Deuce Coupe, to the music of the Beach Boys. She explored the classical world in Push Comes to Shove, for the American Ballet Theater and the celebrated Russian virtuoso Mikhail Baryshnikov. For her touring company in the 1970s and 1980s, an unprecedented fusion of modern dancers and ballet dancers, she created a superb repertory that included the theatrical full-length work The Catherine Wheel, the ballroom duets Nine Sinatra Songs, and the company showcase Baker's Dozen. Tharp has made movies, television specials, and nearly one hundred riveting dance works. Movin' Out, the dance show that reflected on the Vietnam era using the music of Billy Joel, ran on Broadway for three years and won Tharp a Tony award for Best Choreography. Howling Near Heaven is the first in-depth study of Twyla Tharp's unique, restless creativity, the story of a choreographer who refused to be pigeonholed and the dancers who accompanied her as she sped across the frontiers of dance.
Now available in paperback, Days on Earth--originally published in 1988 (Yale University Press)--traces the dance career and artistic development of one of the founders of American modern dance. In this biography of dance pioneer Doris Humphrey, Marcia B. Siegel follows Humphrey's career from her days with the Denishawn Company (among fellos students like Martha Graham) to her creative partnership with Charles Weidman to her tenure as artistic director of protégé José Limon's dance company. Siegel's reconsideration and description of Humphrey's dances, including many that are no longer performed, sheds important light on this pathbreaking dancer/choreographer.
What is strikingly new about Miss Siegel's achievement is that she goes beyond the usual kind of historical reassessment. . . . She performs on behalf of this most evanescent of the arts an act of significant recovery. By tracking down--often in rare stage revivals, on film or on videotape--as many of the works by major creators of the last half century as survive, and by describing them . . . in a manner that combines accuracy and imagination, she has enriched our knowledge of the past and added immeasurably, to our resent stock of critical resources."--Dale Harris, New York Times Book Review "Siegel has a gut feeling for dance and a razor-sharp intelligence about it. It's an irresistible combination."--Margaret Pierpont, Dance Magazine "After you've seen and felt dance this deeply--even vicariously--your way of looking at dance will never be the same."--William Albright, Houston Post She sees, acutely, with her muscles as well as her eyes. She thinks about dance as much as she experiences it. . . . This is dance choreography reconstituted. Dances leap off the page. . . . The ability to do that is extraordinary."--Jean Bunke, Des Moines Sunday Register "The sections in which she describes the dances themselves make up the bulk of the book and they are profoundly illuminating. . . . These descriptions represent an amazing literary, as well as critical, accomplishment, for they are both accurate and resonant, both objective and enlightening, both formal and personal."--Laura Shapiro, The Real Paper "Siegel draws on her years of experience as a working dance critic, a profession she has helped to shape, and brings to a range of American dance a sense of honesty and a mind that wants to understand the antecedents of what is currently in vogue as the dance explosion."--Iris M. Fanger, The Christian Science Monitor
Now available in paperback, Days on Earth--originally published in 1988 (Yale University Press)--traces the dance career and artistic development of one of the founders of American modern dance. In this biography of dance pioneer Doris Humphrey, Marcia B. Siegel follows Humphrey's career from her days with the Denishawn Company (among fellos students like Martha Graham) to her creative partnership with Charles Weidman to her tenure as artistic director of protégé José Limon's dance company. Siegel's reconsideration and description of Humphrey's dances, including many that are no longer performed, sheds important light on this pathbreaking dancer/choreographer.
For more than four decades, Twyla Tharp has been a phenomenon in American dance, a choreographer who not only broke the rules but refused to repeat her own successes. At the conclusion of Howling Near Heaven, Marcia Siegel writes about the thrill of watching Tharp choreograph in 1991: "Tharp's movement can be planned or spontaneous, personal, funny, hard as hell, precise enough to look thrown away. She doesn't so much invent or create it, she prepares for it. Crusty, driven, demanding, and admiring, she hurls challenges at the dancers. Brave, virtuosic, and cheerful, they volley back what she gives them and more. She watches them. They watch her. It's the most subtle form of competition and cooperation, a process so intuitive, so intimate, that no one can say whose dance it is in the end, and none of the parties to that dance can be removed without endangering its identity. The same is true for all theatrical dance making, all over the world, only most of it isn't so inspired or obsessed." Starting in the rebellious 1960s, Tharp tried her creative wings on minimalism, pedestrianism, and Dada, then abandoned both the avant-garde and the established modern dance. She thrilled a new audience with her witty version of jazz in Eight Jelly Rolls, then merged her dancers with the Joffrey Ballet for the sensational Deuce Coupe, to the music of the Beach Boys. She explored the classical world in Push Comes to Shove, for the American Ballet Theater and the celebrated Russian virtuoso Mikhail Baryshnikov. For her touring company in the 1970s and 1980s, an unprecedented fusion of modern dancers and ballet dancers, she created a superb repertory that included the theatrical full-length work The Catherine Wheel, the ballroom duets Nine Sinatra Songs, and the company showcase Baker's Dozen. Tharp has made movies, television specials, and nearly one hundred riveting dance works. Movin' Out, the dance show that reflected on the Vietnam era using the music of Billy Joel, ran on Broadway for three years and won Tharp a Tony award for Best Choreography. Howling Near Heaven is the first in-depth study of Twyla Tharp's unique, restless creativity, the story of a choreographer who refused to be pigeonholed and the dancers who accompanied her as she sped across the frontiers of dance.
In The Tail of the Dragon, Marcia B. Siegel and Nathaniel Tileston track the evolution of new dance in New York during the rich and crucial transitional period from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. Siegel, one of America's most important dance critics, and Tileston, an accomplished dance photographer, focus on the choreographers who were propelled into rebellion against conventional modern dance by the Judson Dance Theater and other countercultural movements born of the 1960s. This collection of Siegel's writing, compiled from reviews in Soho Weekly News and New York Magazine, as well as from longer essays and notebook pieces, forms an insightful commentary--occasionally wry, always perceptive--on the absorption of a radical art form by the mainstream. From minimalism, improvisation, street dancing, body awareness, and "poor theater" experimental strategies, these young rebels identified and adopted personal styles of movement and dancemaking; from that, they turned gradually to tamer, more accessible work, marked by virtuosic dancing, proscenium-ready repertoires, and touring companies. Included in this story are the principal players in the "postmodernist" dance movement--Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp, Trisha Brown, David Gordon--now well known internationally as leaders of dance in the 1990s. Siegel also looks at artists who worked steadily but less visibly, influential ones who drifted out of dance, and unknowns who have gained prominence. The dances described here are formal and outlandish, scruffy and beautiful, endearingly fallible and icily perfect. In rightfully celebrating the importance of dances long forgotten, The Tail of the Dragon produces a vibrant portrait of a generation of dance.
Winner of the Selma Jeanne Cohen Memorial Prize (2010) In this stunning new collection of reviews and essays, dance critic Marcia B. Siegel grapples with the floating identity of ballet, as well as particular ballets, and with the expanding environment of spectacle in which ballet competes for an audience. Drawn from a wide variety of published sources, these writings concentrate on canonical works of ballet and how the performances of these works have been changing in significant ways. Siegel writes with a keen awareness of the history and mythology that surround particular works, while remaining attentive to the new ways in which a work is interpreted and re-presented by contemporary choreographers and dancers. Through her readable and provocative writings, Siegel offers critical insight into performances of the past twenty-five years to give us a new understanding of ballet in performance. The volume includes over one hundred pieces on a variety of ballet topics, from specific dances and dancers to companies and choreographers, ranging from Swan Lake and The Nutcracker to Nijinsky, Balanchine, Tharp, and Morris to the Bolshoi, the Joffrey, the Miami City Ballet, the Boston Ballet, to name just a few. Ebook Edition Note: All images have been redacted.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.