George Jackson

Book: "No Fixed Points. Dance in the 20th Century."
by Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick
Yale University Press, 2003
and recently reprinted

This book hits readers like a space rock, all 907 pages of it. Its authors, Nancy Reynolds and the late Malcolm McCormack (1927 - 2018) were dancers and have proven themselves to be scholars. My only real objection to the current edition is the difficulty of holding such a thick book in one's hands or even resting it

Book: "Todd Bolender, Janet Reed, and the Making of American Ballet"
by Martha Ullman
West University Press of Florida, 2021
388 pages with black/white photos

The noisiest individual about nationality in dance in the America of the 20th Century was Lincoln Kirstein - sponsor, writer, would-be patriot. Never mind that the choreographer he admired the most, George Balanchine, was from Russia by way of Serge Diaghilev's international Ballets Russes. Kirstein advocated against what he considered the "superficial" Americanism

Book: Francis Cunningham 
5 Continents Editions ($55)
March 18, 2021

A magic moment sometimes at a performance is when the curtains have parted but nothing yet has happened. One's awareness is acutely that of the stage space. The dancers, if already present, are about to be in motion - which differs  from standing still.  Many of Francis Cunningham's paintings and drawings give me the feeling that what is depicted is a theater's stage when things are

Balanchine Variations, by Nancy Goldner
University Press of Florida, 2008 & 2021

Books are selling in this era of the coronavirus quarantine, and University Press of Florida has republished critic Nancy Goldner's 2008 "Balanchine Variations" in which she admires, analyzes and annotates 20 ballets by George Balanchine (1904 - 1983), a  colossus among choreographers. Included in the works discussed are two of Balanchine's earliest surviving ones and also some of his last.

Goldner uses description from her memories of

"Balanchine's Mozartiana - The Making of a Masterpiece"
by Robert Maiorano and Valerie Brooks
Freundlich Books, New York, 1985

Not new, this book about the making of a ballet remains an important item of danced literature. Its principal author, Robert Maiorano, was a dancer with New York City Ballet for 15 years, beginning in 1961. For the company's Tchaikovsky Festival in 1981, Maiorano asked Balanchine's permission to attend rehearsals for his announced new "Mozartiana" that would be premiered at

“Naked Truth – Viennese Modernism and the Body”
by Alys X. George
University of Chicago Press, 2020

Look carefully at the picture on the cover of this book. It shows a naked woman dancing. Her face is turned away so that only part of her profile appears. Her torso seems somewhat flattened, like that of an ancient Egyptian image. The arms and hands are held lightly away from  the body’s center of gravity. The lines of the long legs

"Out Loud, a Memoir"
by Mark Morris and Wesley Stace
Penguin Press, New York, 2019

This book is a cross between an autobiography by dancer, choreographer, dance company director and opera stager Morris and a biography of Morris by novelist and recording artist Stace. I am fairly familiar with Morris's work but had not before encountered any of Stace's. The writing took place when Morris (born 29 August 1956) was 62 years old - mature but, presumably, not at career's