Todd Bolender -- dancer, choreographer, director, and teacher -- had a long, productive and fascinating life, making an indelible stamp on American ballet, which he helped to create, and carrying that message abroad, primarily to Germany and Turkey.
So did Janet Reed, a contemporary and friend of Bolender, who came from a little town in Oregon, was founding prima ballerina of the San Francisco Opera Ballet, and became an instrument for all the major choreographers of her day -- Jerome Robbins, Anthony Tudor, George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, and Eugene Loring among them.
Each of their stories -– personal and professional -- would make fascinating reading, but I’ll pass on writing their biographies, in favor of a book about the role they played in the development of ballet as an American art form. The reason? These days commercial publishers have little interest in biographies of dancers -- and possibly anyone else -- with primary focus on the subjects' activities as artists. Biographies from the last decade of Margot Fonteyn, Isadora Duncan, Jerome Robbins, and Rudolph Nureyev are all more concerned with their lives in and out of the sack than in the studio and on the stage. That, of course, sells books, but such pandering to American prurience cheapens the art form as well as its practitioners.
You might think Isadora Duncan’s pioneering of American modern dance would be the linchpin of a book about her life. But no, right out of the gate Peter Kurth, author of Isadora, A Sensational Life, published in 2001, says she wasn’t a dancer, because she declined to identify herself as one. Duncan had good reason to call herself an artist rather than a dancer: In 19th-century America, dancers (also actresses) were regarded as no better than sluts. She needed access to the drawing rooms of the rich in order to fund her dancing.
Kurth’s previous books were about Nicholas and Alexandra, the last of the tsars, and Anastasia, and Kurth's research in Russia for those books led him to Duncan, who was a tremendous influence on Russian ballet, particularly Fokine, and she was a huge supporter of the 1917 Revolution. Kurth also wrote about Dorothy Thompson, the radical journalist who bravely hissed at a Nazi rally in New York in 1938. Dancing however is not one of Kurth's specialties, and while he is a lively writer who did a tremendous amount of research on Isadora, he somehow manages to minimize what was most important about her.
So what is important about a dancer’s life? Surely it is what English ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn, for example, accomplished on stage and how she, among others, put British ballet on the international map, following the Second World War. And let’s not minimize the artistic influence she had on her young dancing partner Rudolf Nureyev, after his much touted “leap to freedom” at Le Bourget airport in June of 1961.
Meredith Daneman’s 2004 biography, the only one we have of Fonteyn, alas pinpoints the dish and not the dancing, in a misplaced effort to humanize Fonteyn. Admittedly, Fonteyn, in her autobiography and countless news interviews, promoted a well-honed public image of prim dedication and dutifulness, not only to ballet, but to her unspeakable Panamanian husband, rendered paraplegic by a would-be assassin, not for political reasons, but for sleeping with the man’s wife. That portrait certainly needed revision.
Daneman, an Australian who danced with the Australian Ballet and has published a number of young adult novels, knows well the world of the ballet and certainly produced a page-turner of a biography, without, however, conveying exactly what made Fonteyn so special as an artist. Writing about Duncan’s scandalous life, Kurtz at least has the excuse of knowing little about dance. But Daneman, who seems to have spoken with everyone who ever knew Fonteyn on and off stage, and had access to Fonteyn’s mother’s unpublished memoir of her famous daughter, fails to inform the reader of what made Fonteyn such an entrancing performer and the muse of England’s greatest ballet choreographer, Sir Frederick Ashton, in spite of feet he once unkindly pointed out looked like pats of butter.
The book, in fact, is one long invasion of Fonteyn’s well-guarded privacy and full of exclamatory rather than explicatory writing, like a teenage girl’s diary. Of course Nureyev’s arrival on her scene made Fonteyn as public a figure as he was, but isn’t the magic they made together on stage enough, without speculations about whether or not their extraordinary bedroom pas de deux in Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet was repeated post-performance in the dressing room or boudoir?
And then there is Nureyev. His leap to freedom was for sexual reasons, not artistic ones, as has been well documented in the gutter press as well as in a number of biographies, the most recent of which, Julie Kavanagh’s Nureyev: A Life, was published last fall. Again, an author has had access to materials no one else had seen, including some film footage recently aired on a public broadcasting special. I’ve not yet read this version of Nureyev’s flamboyant life, but I have read Kavanagh’s biography of Ashton, in which she relates his sexuality -- he was homosexual -- seemingly to every ballet step he invented, and every piece he choreographed. Kavanagh, like Daneman, is a former dancer, who left the stage for journalism, and, judging from the Ashton book, can tell a well-paced story. Describing what occurs on stage at the ballet is something else again, however, and for that we must on the whole look to the people who are dance writers by profession.
Deborah Jowitt is one of the best, and it shows in her biography of Jerome Robbins, published in 2004 and subtitled His Life, His Theater and His Dance. Readers of Jowitt’s earlier books, not to mention her columns in The Village Voice, where she has been staff dance critic for many years, know of her ability to put the reader in the theater with her and she certainly does that here. Hers is one of four Robbins’ biographies published since his death in 1998 -– in reverse order, Amanda Vaill’s Somewhere, Greg Lawrence’s Dance with Demons in 2001, and Jerome Robbins: That Broadway Man, the last focusing on his stellar Broadway career, illustrated with many photographs and including excerpts from diaries and letters.
Robbins left an archive so extensive -- Jowitt, who was given access by the Robbins estate, as were Vaill and Lawrence, said at a Dance Critics Association conference that there was no way any single person could get through all of it -- that there is certainly room for more than one book about the man Bolender called the greatest American choreographer. Again, it becomes a matter of emphasis. Jowitt, like all the Robbins biographers, deals with such thorny issues as his infamous naming of names to the House Un-American Activities Committee, his sexual ambivalence, and the nasty way he treated dancers. But she does so only to the degree that they affected his work. What he was like as a dancer, what made his choreography so important, what it felt like to watch such significant works as "Fancy Free," "The Cage," "Dances at a Gathering" and "Afternoon of a Faun" -– these are what interests Jowitt, not his affair with Montgomery Clift and dancer Nora Kaye. They don’t, mind you, go unmentioned, but they are secondary to the man’s art.
That is also true of Marcia Siegel’s 2006 Howling Near Heaven: Twyla Tharp and the Reinvention of Modern Dance, which, as the subtitle clearly states, the author never intended to be a biography of the hard-driven choreographer. You can’t win, however: Reviewers complained that the facts (never mind the gossip) of Tharp’s life are barely mentioned, serving only as background to a meticulous and brilliant analysis of the choreographer’s work. In Tharp’s autobiography, Push Comes to Shove, readers will find dish aplenty; Siegel, sensibly, saw no reason to repeat it in her book except to the degree that it influenced the dances Tharp made. The reader of Howling Near Heaven comes away with detailed knowledge of what is most important about Tharp and her work -- and it’s still, by the way, a good read.