This summer, whether you’re reading for personal enjoyment or starting to build a syllabus for the fall, check out these nine new titles. The books below offer career advice, fascinating life stories, and fresh takes on dance history.
Careers in Dance
Four new books support the field with information about career paths, skill building, wellness, and work environments.
Living the Dream: Building a Sustainable Career in the Performing Arts, by Kirstin Chávez and Johnathon Pape, is a practical yet reflective book. Use it as a textbook in a senior seminar or recommend it to a fledgling professional dancer in your life. The topics range from considering your own mission, vision, and brand to thinking about finances and budgets.
Whether stage management is a new or potential role for you or you want to deepen your production skills for your own company, The Dance and Opera Stage Manager’s Toolkit is a valuable book to add to your collection. Authors Susan Fenty Studham and Michele Kay crafted a comprehensive book to dive into the world of stage management, with templates and numerous examples from the field. A skilled stage manager can make the magic happen onstage and can take care of the whole team.
More and more, the dance field is discussing self-care, wellness, and mental health. Lisa D. Long’s Mindful Rigor: Holistic Training to Enhance Dance Performance brings the topic of mindfulness further into the dance realm. The book includes QR codes for audio files of exercises. Long explores internal dialogue, managing anxiety, and the topic of presence, among other big ideas that can benefit dancers.
The Dancer’s Handbook: A Practical Guide to Reimagining Dance, Body, and Society by OFEN Co-Arts, by Gala Moody and Michael Carter, is a deep dive into current working conditions. It addresses many timely topics in the field, including contracts, capitalism, consent, psychological safety, voice, and rest. The authors note that this is an exciting time in the dance world, with great potential to shift our work culture.
Memoirs
Three new memoirs open up the worlds of professional artists for inspiration and connection.
Whether you grab the new hardback edition or enjoy the audiobook, Becoming Spectacular: The Rhythm of Resilience from the First African American Rockette shares the story of Jennifer Jones, who became a Rockette in 1987, breaking a 63-year color barrier. In this memoir, Jones offers her experience with the Rockettes, discussing the barriers she faced and the resilience she needed, while also providing an illuminated window into the world of one of the most iconic dance organizations in the U.S. Becoming Spectacular is the second book about Jones; equally important is the picture book that came out in 2023.
Moving through Life: Essential Lessons of Dance is both Naomi Goldberg Haas’ story and a resource of exercises to explore. Haas writes about her extensive career, including working with a chronic illness. She is a performer, choreographer, and teacher, now known in the world of “creative aging.” Over the years, she developed the Movement Speaks curriculum for her nonprofit, Dances for a Variable Population. Moving through Life offers detailed descriptions of the exercises, which are for dancers of all ages and abilities.
Behind the Red Curtain: An American Ballerina in Russia, by Joy Womack, as told to Elizabeth Shockman, took shape over the course of more than a decade as Shockman, a journalist, interviewed Womack, the first American ballerina to join the Bolshoi Ballet, about her journey from the U.S. to Russia. The book chronicles Womack’s path and gives behind-the-scenes glimpses of her life in Russia, including competition and corruption, up to 2022, when the war with Ukraine began.
Dance History
Books on dance history and dance studies inspire us to look back to honor our dance ancestors and to note the changes in the art form through the decades. Through words and format, these two books in particular can make dance history come alive and become easily accessible for readers.
Susan Manning is a prolific writer and a leader in the field of dance studies. Dancing on the Fault Lines of History: Selected Essays shares 12 of her essays, including one that is now 40 years old, plus a few published for the first time here. As a complete set, the pieces become a journey of exploring dance history over the decades. The book uses keywords to group the essays: “gender and sexuality,” “whiteness and Blackness,” and “nationality and globalization”. In addition, through the Creative Commons, you can access and read the entire book online, free of charge.
Dance critic Sara Veale also offers a fresh take on modern-dance history, spotlighting nine key women and their places in the creation of the form in Wild Grace: The Untamed Women of Modern Dance. Starting with Isadora Duncan and concluding with Pearl Lang, Veale explores the power of these women dancing in their own creative works. She also places them within the greater context of the world around them, including exploring cultural movements like feminism and women’s rights. An additional wonderful detail is that the book is available in audiobook format—a rarity for dance history books.
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