A Life in Dance: Back to School Book Recommendations
Collage by Kate Purdum
As September cools into fall and the academic calendar resumes its merry buzzing, it’s time for breezy summer reading to morph into something more serious. These three books — one memoir, one creative guidebook, and one historical account — each portray the risks and rewards of making a life in the arts.
Once A Dancer, Allegra Kent (1996)
Allegra Kent’s memoir captures the unrestrained emotion, technical fluidity, and spark of mischief with which she danced as a New York City Ballet ballerina under George Balanchine. In fizzing prose, she chronicles her tumultuous upbringing, her balletic ascendancy, and the steep cliff following her career’s peak. With honesty and self-deprecation, she assesses her foundational wounds, eventual triumphs, and the many road bumps along the way with humor and wit. Her journey from a haphazard upbringing across California, Texas, and Florida to one of the brightest stars of twentieth century American ballet proves that there is no required origin that goes into forging a great artist. As Kent reaffirms chapter after chapter, the most important thing is to find the passion that gives you structure in a painfully absurd world.
The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp (2003)
There is no one-size-fits-all way to hone a creative practice, legendary choreographer Twyla Tharp knows, but the tools and exercises she offers in her artistic self-help book, The Creative Habit, are flexible enough to be universally applicable. The book journeys from point A to point B of a hypothetical creative process. Along the way, Tharp offers anecdotes and tips from her own varied and historic career and those of her friends and inspirations, interspersed with exercises put to the reader: questionnaires, instructions, and suggestions to reconnect with childhood artistic impulses, sharpen one’s memory, and determine a productive workflow for each day. Tharp provides road signs to harness one’s creativity in consistent, productive, and satisfying ways.
The Swans of Harlem, Karen Valby (2024)
The Swans of Harlem, Karen Valby’s account of the five forgotten Black ballerinas who broke barriers in the original company of Dance Theatre of Harlem, is a reconstruction of an overlooked trove of dance history. Misty Copeland, hailed by many over the last decade as the first Black American prima ballerina, stands on the shoulders of Lydia Abarca, Gayle McKinney-Griffith, Sheila Rohan, Karlya Shelton and Marcia Sells, the five “swans” whose lives and careers Valby chronicles. Choreographer and dancer Arthur Mitchell (New York City Ballet’s first Black dancer) founded Dance Theatre of Harlem in 1969, on the heels of the civil rights movement, as the first Black classical ballet company. Brought together by Mitchell as members of the company, these women would form a sisterhood, revived in 2020 in an effort to restore their legacy to its rightful place in the canon of classical ballet.
While unrelated on the surface, these three books prove that anyone with passion can forge a creative life for themselves, with the right resources. From the tales and tools in these books, a reader can gain not only a deeper awareness of dance history, but the inspiration and courage to one day become a part of that history.