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Title: Dancing on My Grave by Gelsey Kirkland ISBN: 0-385-19964-3 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 03 September, 1986 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.15 (34 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The truth will set you free
Comment: Never have I picked up a book and been completely pulverized with such honesty about the dance world, a world I was part of for 12 years. I have recently reread this book for the 13th time. I can't count the number of passages where I felt exactly the same way about a director, a costumer, a choreographer. I thought I was alone with these impressions. Her words provide great comfort when I remember my own experiences.
Many of her assertions regarding the idolatry of Balanchine and Baryshnikov vs. who they might have been underneath their "genius" touches on one simple fact: they were still human, and thus, flawed. Dance, which dies instantly, is supposedly ethereal and perfectionistic. In reality, it is a punishing art, and takes much mental and emotional focus to deal with the fleeting splendor one achieves while onstage. Her unflinching honesty, revealed from the eye of the studio and not so much the stage, came from a great struggle throughout her parents' uneasy marriage, her alcoholic father, and the struggles of anorexia and drug addiction, appears in passage after passage. When you have delved through the lower depths, you find the words to articulate the feelings all these previous things have denied. It's as if all the physical anguish finally pushed the right words out to describe her experience. I'm sure she made more than a few enemies by revealing all, but in the end, we all have to live with ourselves. We may never know another person as intimately as we know ourselves. She wished to please everyone by being something other than herself. In the end, to paraphrase from her book, she found who she was by seeing what she was not. Out of all the Balanchine dancers who've written autobiographies, Gelsey's and Toni Bentley's "Winter Season" stand out. Both of these dancers seek the truth, and with this, they found themselves. An excellent, stunning read. I adore this book.
Rating: 5
Summary: I have now read this 13 times...
Comment: If I could plagiarize a life story, this would be it. From the family, to our fathers, to the teachers, to the addictions, her life in dance matched my life in dance quite eerily. I even have Gelsey's mom's birthday, I found out through reading this. This book is not rooted in idolatry for Balanchine or Baryshnikov, it tells the truth of a talented, intense, insecure woman who found her way out of the darkness to claim her gift, her voice, her artistry. Great artists are not just good or bad, they are both in equal measure. Could anyone else have the courage to leap towards fame only to come crashing down and then tell it like it really was? Kirkland is an anomaly in the dance world for her unorthodox techniques on the stage and in the classroom, but the physical articulation she achieved during her performances is amazingly surpassed by the strength, clarity, and conviction in her words. I picked this book up for the first time in 1991, only to read it again two months later. I have recently reread it for the 13th time, so comforting are her words. The layering of her descriptions and the vocabulary in which she illustrates the struggles of her life show nuance, shape, a dark ambience. This book, whether you're a dancer or not, tugs at the mind as well as the heart. Dance dies instantly after the performers leave the stage. Gelsey's words do not. Out of all the dancer's autobiographies out there, this one stands out. She struggles mightily for just the right phrase to describe the joy and the sorrow of the art she chose. The pictures you will gather upon finishing this, will show once and for all that substance is much greater than shadow, and that truth is the only thing worth holding onto in the end. She might be something of a maverick, but her contributions to ballet and teaching are illuminated brilliantly as she recounts the more sordid moments of her life without apology. No one could have described her better than herself. Read this and gasp--once again, she gives us her best. No dance collection is complete without this book.
Rating: 3
Summary: a horror story
Comment: When I read 'Dancing on my Grave', I felt like I was in some surreal horror movie. I was nearing the end of my recovery, but while I read the book I felt like I was being dragged back 5 years or so to when my life was hell. The writing was good and so compelling that I could not put the book down, but I was miserable for every minute of it, and depressed and drained when the book finished. Gelsey delves deeply into her self-loathing, and the problems incumbent - anorexia and drug addiction. You feel like you are inside her tortured and despairing head. It's awful. But she never really comes to any conclusion. At the end of the book, she meets a wonderful man, flies away with him and says they are going to recover together. But although she sounds hopeful, she doesn't give any direction to the reader who might be going through the same hell. She leaves you in limbo and you just have to hope desperately that it all worked out. (In real life, I don't know if this happened. Two addicts cannot recover together.) I really don't think this book is helpful to anyone who reads it, except someone completely removed from either dance or eating disorders who wanted some insight.
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Title: Holding on to the Air: An Autobiography by Suzanne Farrell, Toni Bentley ISBN: 0813025931 Publisher: University Press of Florida Pub. Date: October, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: SHAPE OF LOVE, THE by Gelsey Kirkland ISBN: 0385249187 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 01 August, 1989 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Once A Dancer : An Autobiography by Allegra Kent ISBN: 0312187505 Publisher: Griffin Trade Paperback Pub. Date: 15 April, 1998 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Winter Season: A Dancer's Journal by Toni Bentley ISBN: 0813027055 Publisher: University Press of Florida Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title:The Turning Point ASIN: 6300247163 Publisher: Twentieth Century Fox Pub. Date: 03 February, 1998 List Price(USD): $9.98 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $9.98 |
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