A long-winded, year-by-year chronicle of 20 years in modern dance.
A diary of the author’s two decades with Merce Cunningham’s company.
Brown first encountered Cunningham’s cutting-edge choreography while taking a two-day master class given during his 1951 cross-country tour with composer John Cage. She was living in Denver with her husband, a composer in the modern style of Schoenberg and Webern. Though she’d studied dance since age three and danced throughout her time at Wheaton College, she wasn’t sure that was what she wanted to do professionally. But the newlyweds were inspired by Cage, who had studied with Schoenberg, and Cunningham, a former Martha Graham dancer. They decided to move to New York and try their bohemian luck. Brown began to take classes with Cunningham, whose choreography she describes as “spare, intractable, yet classical.” The first work she learned was the seminal Suite by Chance, set to Cage’s “chance experiments” in music. Although there was no money to speak of, Cunningham invited a small core of dancers to join him in the summer of 1953 at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College, where a fledgling company was born. Brown toured all over the world with Cunningham, and critical reviews spread about their controversial “chance dances.” Painter Robert Rauschenberg, then struggling like the rest of them, became smitten with Cunningham’s work and contributed to the production of more than 20 dances before leaving the company in 1964. The next few years were lean ones, but Brown and others maintained a remarkable commitment to Cunningham’s vision. Notables in the world of dance, art, music and letters walk casually through the pages of this story, although the author never grows sentimental or self-absorbed. Readers looking for gossip won’t find much here—Brown worships her hero.
A long-winded, year-by-year chronicle of 20 years in modern dance.Pub Date: March 21, 2007
ISBN: 0-394-40191-3
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
