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Notes for the New Year

My favorite books of 2024 offer dance history from the artist’s point of view. Perhaps there is nothing too unusual about this, and yet, something about this trend feels special as we step with trepidation into the first days of 2025. Their pages are filled with lessons in disruption, epistolary inspiration, and creative approaches to the archives of our art. In short, they are all task-oriented scores, seemingly filled with notes from an artistic staff that has been watching our performance and has ideas for how we can improve in the new year.

From left: Thelma Biracree, Betty Macdonald, and Evelyn Sabin in Martha Graham’s “Danse Languide,” from Deb Jowitt's biography on Martha Graham, Errand into the Maze.

2024 began with Deborah Jowitt’s brilliant biography of Martha Graham, Errand into the Maze, published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Of the books I mention here, this one tilts the most toward traditional biography, but there is nothing staid about it. Jowitt’s conspiratorial tone with the reader makes you feel as if you are backstage or on tour and her ability to speculate chisels contours into the parts of the Graham mythology that have been worn too smooth. But best of all is her sharp eye and commentary on the development and details of Graham’s dances. In Errand you may not read every letter sent to Graham or get lost in her sensational personal dramas, but through Jowitt’s decades-long expertise as a performer, choreographer, and dance writer, you will feel an urgency and a new resonance in Graham’s well known and lesser-known repertoire. You might even make flag several works to look at again, or for the first time, in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. (Lucky for us, the Martha Graham Dance Company will also be showcasing Graham’s psychodramas or “Dances of the Mind,” in April at The Joyce Theater and on tour throughout the year.)

Another major highlight was a pair of books from Duke University Press analyzing and featuring the diverse writings of Jill Johnston: Jill Johnston in Motion, written by dance historian and theorist Clare Croft, and its companion The Essential Jill Johnston Reader, edited by Croft, with writing from different phases of Johnston’s life in one volume for the first time. In the dance world, many of us may be familiar with Johnston’s incredibly idiosyncratic, and witty, dance criticism for the Village Voice that captured the spirit and ethos of postmodern dance and performance, most notably Judson Dance Theater. 

But she was also a lesbian feminist. Have you read her writings on “coming out”? I hadn’t until Croft put them together with her dance writing, travel writing, and other personal essays. And the reverse is true: Croft points to how obituaries of Johnston either left out or minimized the impact of her dance writing. Through the synthesizing project of the Reader and the analysis of Johnston’s multi-faceted persona and writings in Jill Johnston in Motion, Croft has given us the gift of Johnston’s full radical power while also giving Johnston her due, putting her in context with her more famous peers like Susan Sontag and Audre Lorde. Jill Johnston in Motion also has a creative structure that lets Croft, and her research process, enter the narrative, as well as letters from many of Johnston’s Village Voice readers. Gaps in the archives are felt, and filled, with these individual experiences.

If you, like me, have found yourself taking some solace in the Albert Camus quote that inevitably makes the rounds on social media after heartbreaking elections—“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion,” from his 1942 essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”—these books are here to let you know that Johnston is your gal. Let’s make a collective note to start sharing her work as widely as this quote this year. 

Dance Theatre of Harlem in “Swan Lake,” from Karen Valby's The Swans of Harlem.

Dance Theatre of Harlem in “Swan Lake,” from Karen Valby's The Swans of Harlem.

Likewise, Karen Valby’s The Swans of Harlem, from Pantheon, reclaims the histories of five pioneering Black ballerinas, weaving their personal stories with the founding of Dance Theatre of Harlem. This three-act book dives into the questions of how and why Misty Copeland became a household name while the names of the Black ballerinas who came before, one of whom also graced the covers of magazines, were so swiftly forgotten. 

And while Valby is a white journalist, in Act Two of the book, the voices of these Black artists are centered, in their own words: Lydia Abarca-Mitchell, Gayle McKinney-Griffith, Sheila Rohan, Marcia Sells, and Karlya Shelton-Benjamin. They speak of what the reality of living their dreams was like in the early days of DTH, their families and second careers, and the dear friends and partners lost to AIDS. The book is both a celebration and a corrective. It ends with the revelation of another name, Cleo Quitman—a founding member of the New York Negro Ballet Company in the late 1950s—and an invitation to discover other such lost dance histories. Note: start with Quitman and keep going.

My year ended with Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study, edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Annie-B Parson and co-published with Big Dance Theater and Wesleyan University Press. In this kaleidoscopic collection of 12 dance histories, bound simply as discreet and colorful booklets from 12 different authors—all practicing choreographers—the perspectives multiply.  From DeFrantz’s short-story-like “The Future Histories of Black Dance,” to mayfield brooks’s fable “What Came before the Heartbreak,” and Mariana Valencia’s fragmented and footnoted prose poem “Dear Reader,” the compilation includes divergent voices mining their personal and artistic experiences. A month could be spent with each one, following the unique combination of dance styles, artists, and works cited within them. I was enthralled with how Bebe Miller recounts her early education in art through her mother’s deft navigation of New York City in “This Is How Dancing Happens,” and happy to get off my butt, walk over to a mirror, and decipher Javier Stell-Frésquez’s “Storming with Two-Spirits.” 

Eiko Otake’s “Letters,” to “those who have danced and died,” reduced me to tears several times. They include Dore Hoyer (whom she never met), Kazuo Ohno (her “sensei”), Vaslav Nijinsky’s daughter Kyra (a friend), Mura Dehn (who made the film The Spirit Moves : A History of Black Social Dance on Film 1900-1986 and left it to Otake, who in turn gave it to the NYPL for the Performing Arts), and Anna Halprin (mentor and colleague). Each letter is layered with references to world history, dance practices, and performances that have flowed into Otake’s body through her connection to these individuals of influence, mini biographies colored by such a singular force. On the last page, Otake nests a letter within her letter to share an email Halprin sent after the 2016 election. Consider it the ultimate note for 2025:

 THE “MOURNING” AFTER THE ELECTION SCORE

     * ENTER,  SAY HELLO

     * FIND A SPOT,  CRASH

     * PICK YOURSELF UP,  BRUSH YOURSELF OFF

     * PRAY

     * MOVE FORWARD

     

     Peace,

     Anna

Candice Thompson

Candice Thompson has been working in and around live art for over two decades. She was a dancer with Milwaukee Ballet before moving into costume design, movement education and direction, editing and arts writing. She attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, graduated from St. Mary’s College LEAP Program, and later received an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University. She has written extensively about dance for publications like Andscape, The Brooklyn Rail, Dance Magazine, and ArtsATL, in addition to being editorial director for DIYdancer, a project-based media company she co-founded.

comments

Karen

Wonderful! Thanks for this reminder for my book list. You make me want to read them all, most especially Jill Johnston.

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