Holiday gift ideas: Dance Magazine staffers have been perusing the latest goodies this year. Look over these recommendations to find the perfect gift for your dance lover - dance-related books reviewed briefly - Bibliography

Dance Magazine, Nov, 2002

OTHER ANIMALS: DRAWINGS AND JOURNALS

by Merce Cunningham with additional text by David Vaughan. New York: Aperture. 2002. 96 pages, illustrations. $30. ISBN: 0-89381-946-8.

This elegantly produced peek inside the great choreographer's notebooks, kept over a twenty-eight-year period, offers very a personal bestiary and sundry diary entries that illuminate the pleasures, quandaries, and daily vexations of a lifetime devoted to rearranging space and confounding expectations. Consider it a two-way fiftieth anniversary gift.--Allan Ulrich

STRAVINSKY & BALANCHINE: A JOURNEY OF INVENTION

by Charles M. Joseph. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2002. 440 pages, illustrations. $40. ISBN: 0-300087-12-8.

Joseph, a Skidmore College music professor and the author of Stravinsky Inside Out, has created a scrupulously annotated history of one of the twentieth century's great artistic collaborations. Dotted with black-and-white photos, costume sketches, copies of Stravinsky scores, and anecdotes from designers and dancers the book chronicles this creative partnership from the Diaghilev-era Ballets Russes through the flowering of New York City Ballet. Despite their differences, Joseph notes, Balanchine and Stravinsky well understood one another's art, and shared both a love of Russian culture and a classically ordered vision of time and space. Readers with a technical understanding of music will get more from the book, although ballet buffs are treated to several engaging firsthand accounts of working with the collaborators--such as Alicia Markova's mind-boggling admission that by age 14, she had learned Stravinsky's scores by ear.--Heather Wisner

MODERN BODIES: DANCE & AMERICAN MODERNISM FROM GRAHAM TO ALLEY

by Julia L. Foulkes. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 2002. 272 pages, illustrations. $49.95. ISBN: 0-807826-98-7. 256 pages paper. $18.95. ISBN: 0-807853-67-4.

An author and history teacher at The New School in New York City, Julia Foulkes takes a decidedly scholarly look (with forty pages of notes and a twenty-page bibliography) at the beginnings of modern dance. She places into the social and political context of the 1930s and 1940s the work of Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn, Charles Weidman, Helen Tamiris, Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Alvin Alley, and of course, Martha Graham. These choreographers both shocked and titillated audiences with their perspectives on sexuality, gender, race, and class.

Foulkes makes the claim that the competing interests of three distinct groups--white women, gay men, and African Americans--greatly defined the form we now know as modern dance. Photos aren't a major part of this book, but there are some wonderful black-and-white performance shots plus a few informal scenes, like noontime sunbathing of Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers at Jacob's Pillow, and Doris Humphrey with Bennington Summer School of Dance students. --Karen Hildebrand

MUSIC FOR CREATIVE DANCE, VOLUMES I-IV

by Eric Chappelle. Seattle, WA: Ravenna Ventures, Inc. 1993, 1994, 1998, 2000 respectively. Four compact discs, each with a booklet, "Creative Dance Ideas," by Anne Green Gilbert. $17 each. RVCD 9301, RVCD 9401, RVCD 9801, RVCD 9901.

My love of dance blossomed when I was very young. I would clamber all over the living room furniture to the emotive melodies in Walter Carlos's Switched-On Bach. Eric Chappelle, music director of the Creative Dance Center in Seattle, has created four CDs that would have been perfect for me and still do appeal to my adult self He composed the sixteen to twenty-one songs on each disc to inspire movement through interplay between styles, tempos, rhythms, and tonalities. I can see these being wonderful tools for dance teachers, especially since the included booklets list specific ideas for moving to each piece. Though there's a clear youth-education feel to the song titles and descriptions, the music is pleasant enough to stand outside the classroom. I really like the catchy tune "Bee Beat" (Volume II), and that song is by no means the only infectious one of the bunch. Putting the music to the test, I did my morning stretches to these CDs a few days in a row, letting the tunes suggest ways of moving. It was enjoyable indeed, but I did stay off the furniture.--Daniel Ari

I SEE AMERICA DANCING: SELECTED READINGS, 1685-2000. Edited by Maureen Needham. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. 2002. 248 pages, paper, illustrations. $18.95. ISBN: 0-252069-99-4.

Did the twist signal the end of Western civilization? Of course not, writer Marshall Fishwick rightfully asserts in his 1962 Saturday Review essay "The Twist: Brave New Whirl"; nor did his era's jitterbug or his father's Charleston. Fishwick's point, that dance--however maligned or misunderstood--reflects, rather than destroys, the culture that produces it, echoes throughout the book. Needham has chosen essays that give American dance context. Whether it's Thomas Falkner's dire warning that social dance ruins good Christian girls, in "From the Ballroom to Hell" (1894); Yvonne Ranier's own description of her politically charged Flag Dance (1970); or an Associated Press story about the first high school dance held in an Ozarks town in 1988, this is lively and informative reading.--Heather Wisner