Through the Eyes of a Dancer
Selected Writings
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
Through the Eyes of a Dancer compiles the writings of noted dance critic and editor Wendy Perron. In pieces for The SoHo Weekly News, Village Voice, The New York Times, and Dance Magazine, Perron limns the larger aesthetic and theoretical shifts in the dance world since the 1960s. She surveys a wide range of styles and genres, from downtown experimental performance to ballets at the Metropolitan Opera House. In opinion pieces, interviews, reviews, brief memoirs, blog posts, and contemplations on the choreographic process, she gives readers an up-close, personalized look at dancing as an art form. Dancers, choreographers, teachers, college dance students—and anyone interested in the intersection between dance and journalism—will find Perron’s probing and insightful writings inspiring. Through the Eyes of a Dancer is a nuanced microcosm of dance’s recent globalization and modernization that also provides an opportunity for new dancers to look back on the traditions and styles that preceded their own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Former dancer and choreographer Perron's pleasurably idiosyncratic approach to dance criticism is on display in this selection spanning the '60s to the present from sources like SoHo Weekly News, Village Voice, and Dance Magazine. Perron takes readers into the avant-garde '70s with Barbara Lloyd and the improvisation group Grand Union; a 1996 concert featuring "dancers near or over the age of sixty"; and an unlikely collaboration between Mikhail Baryshnikov and the experimental choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer. Perron writes of her education at the Joffrey School and recalls working with Kenneth King and lifelong friend Sara Rudner. Writing about Martha Graham's "theatrical fury," Perron wonders of today's talent, "what female choreographer will bring us that kind of vehemence?" She weighs in on the Japanese style of Butoh with important questions about cultural appropriation, and, in a sobering essay, discusses how the 1980s AIDS epidemic affected the dance community and how HIV-positive dancers are coping today. On a controversial note, Perron talks to ballerina Sarah Lane, Natalie Portman's snubbed body double from the film Black Swan. In addition to dance, Perron covers street performers, Susan Sontag's critical theory, and about spending time with J.D Salinger. Perron's reviews describe the actions of performances so completely you will feel that you are witnessing them first-hand.
