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Title: Dancing on My Grave: An Autobiography by Gelsey Kirkland, Greg Lawrence ISBN: 0-425-13500-4 Publisher: Berkley Pub Group Pub. Date: July, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.15 (34 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: This touched my heart
Comment: No other autobiography I have read has ever been this powerful. I was pulled into Gelsey's heart and felt her pain. She is probably the most beautiful and amazing dancer that ever was in America. Yet she did not feel beautiful. I could relate to all of Gelsey's struggles and emotional hardships. I recommend this book to all those who enjoy autobiographies, all who enjoy ballet, and especially to those who wish to become dancers. It gives a truly realistic view into the dance world. Will become a favourite. Other books to read; Holding Onto the Air by Suzanne Farrell, The Shape of Love (which is the continuing book to Dancing on My Grave) by Gelsey Kirkland and Greg Lawrence.
Rating: 5
Summary: Dancing on my Grave review
Comment: This book written brilliantly by Gelsey Kirkland and Greg Lawrence is positively a book that I would recommend to all dancers like myself as well as anyone that is intregued by the effects of the dance world. In this book Gelsey takes us through a journey of chaos and problems. When you read this book you travel through the abusive effects of drugs as well as more dancer prone problems like eating disorders and self-image. You also see the beutiful side of the ballet world and it helps you relize how much work ballet dancers put into their passion and how little they get out of it. Gelsey and Greg did a great job at showing the reader dancer or not how hard and sometimes impossible the dance world can be. Over all in my humble opinion I think that this one is a keeper.
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.
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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: 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: Once A Dancer : An Autobiography by Allegra Kent ISBN: 0312187505 Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin 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:Suzanne Farrell - Elusive Muse ASIN: B00005KA78 Publisher: Winstar Home Entertainment Pub. Date: 10 July, 2001 List Price(USD): $24.98 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $22.48 |
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