Dancing on the Ceiling: Stanley Donen and His Movies. - book reviews

Dance Magazine, Jan, 1997 by Harris Green

Because Serge Diaghilev's taste in artists was as astute as his taste in dancers and composers, there always seems to be a Diaghilev exhibition being held someplace. The London show at the Barbican Art Gallery [Letter from London, September 1996, page 39], is commemorated by the extensively illustrated catalog, Diaghilev: Creator of the Ballets Russes (Lund Humphries Publishers, paper, $35). This publication is a cut above most such volumes. Along with many historic photographs and fullcolor reproductions of set and costume designs for the company's seasons before World War I, there are essays about Diaghilev's less-heralded championing of the folk art, operas, and avant-garde of Russia. Contributors include Lynn Garafola, Rosamund Bartlett, and Gleb Pospelov. The distributor on these shores, the Antique Collectors, Club Ltd., can be reached at (800) 252-5231.

Several biographies of dance notables have appeared recently, but few have been as thickly textured with well-organized fact as Jennifer Dunning's Alvin Ailey: A Life in Dance (Addison-Wesley, $30). She seems to have interviewed just about everyone who had any dealing with Ailey-from his loving relatives in poverty-stricken Southeast Texas to long-suffering, protective friends in New York City - and she reports his gifts and flaws without the ideological slanting of race, politics, or the various cults of analysis. No one will need to write another biography of Ailey for some time.

It's safe to presume that political correctness played little part in the decision of the University of Oklahoma Press to publish Lili Cockerille Livingston's American Indian Ballerinas ($34.95). After all, what more fitting project could there be for the university press of the only state that has produced four world-class Native American ballerinas - Maria and Marjorie Tallchief, Rosella Hightower, and Yvonne Chouteau? Livingston pays due attention to their Indian heritage while doing justice to their artistic achievements in this chattily informal but informative book. (It will be published next month.)

One would expect Allegra Kent, who joined New York City Ballet in 1953 at age fifteen, to speak for herself, and so she does, with candor and grace, in Once a Dancer... an Autobiography (St. Martin's Press, $26.95). During the thirty years she was at NYCB, she never danced like anyone else on earth - when she deigned to appear, that is. Pregnancy, illness, and depression regularly deprived admirers of her artistry season after season. They should feel a similar blend of admiration and frustration reading this book. Everything about Kent's life was as unique as her fluid, haunting dancing. She would have had a Jewish ballet mother who converted to Christian Science after her father, "Cowboy" Cohen, deserted the family. @She would have had a father with a name like that, too.) Because her first husband, photographer and filmmaker Bert Stem, resembled "Cowboy," she wasted years trying to save a marriage that had started coming apart on the honeymoon. Her less-than-efficient solution was to get pregnant-three times before she was thirty-which devastated her career at City Ballet. Kent tells it all with a wry concision ("To unfaithfullness, Bert was now adding drug addiction") that is refreshingly free of that acrid aftertaste left by Gelsey Kirkland's gamy memoirs. The countless stretches of flawlessly recalled called dialogue will give historians pause; most readers should find Allegra Kent in print as distinctly riveting as she ever was onstage.

Stanley Donen must have found it an exasperating irony that the publication of Stephen Silverman's biography, Dancing on the Ceiling: Stanley Donen and his Movies (Knopf, $35), was initially upstaged by the death of Gene Kelly, his colleague and collaborator at MGM. They both entered show business as Broadway chorus boys before World War U, but when they appeared together in Rodgers and Hart's Pal Joey (1940) Kelly had become a star, and he never let Donen forget it after they moved on to Metro and began to codirect a fresher, looser sort of musical, such as On the Town (1948) and Singin' in the Rain (1952). It's no surprise therefore that the jacket of this book does not feature scenes from any of their joint efforts. Instead, there are photos of Fred Astaire on the front in Royal Wedding (1951 - performing the classic number that gave the book its title) and one of Audrey Hepburn on the back in Funny Face (1957) - lively fare that Donen directed himself. Silverman, the author of books on David Lean and 20th Century-Fox, knows his way around filmmaking. Along with learning about Donen's five marriages and how to pronounce his name ("Dahnen"), readers can also follow the decline of the big studios. the rise of the independents (Donen formed Grandon Productions with Cary Grant to produce Charade and Arabesque), and the death of the Hollywood musical. There's also a lot of gossip, much of it from the most stellar of reliable sources

In Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Greenwood Press, $55), Brenda Dixon Gottschild makes many stimulating points about the influence of African American culture on the arts. Thanks to her, many readers won't miss those variants on, say, the lindy hop the next time they see The Four Temperaments. They will often have to work hard for such revelations, however, Gottschild's writing can veer from the hip to the academic, a jarring clash of styles demonstrated by her title. The title for her chapter on the protean Balanchine, who never denied that he drew on dance of all sorts, is "Stripping the Emperor."