The Shapes of Change: Images of American Dance by Marcia B. Siegel. 1979. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 386 pp., illustrated, bibliography. $15.00

Abstract

What is strikingly new about Miss Siegel's achievement is that she goes beyond the usual kind of historical reassessment...She performs on behalf of this most evanescent of the arts an act of significant recovery. By tracking down - often in rare stage revivals, on film or on videotape - as many of the works by major creators of the last half century as survive, and by describing them ...in a manner that combines accuracy and imagination, she has enriched our knowledge of the past and added immeasurably, to our resent stock of critical resources. (Dale Harris, New York Times Book Review). Siegel has a gut feeling for dance and a razor-sharp intelligence about it. It's an irresistible combination. (Margaret Pierpont, Dance Magazine). After you've seen and felt dance this deeply--even vicariously--your way of looking at dance will never be the same. (William Albright, Houston Post). sees, acutely, with her muscles as well as her eyes. She thinks about dance as much as she experiences it...This is dance choreography reconstituted. Dances leap off the page...The ability to do that is extraordinary. (Jean Bunke, Des Moines Sunday Register). sections in which she describes the dances themselves make up the bulk of the book and they are profoundly illuminating...These descriptions represent an amazing literary, as well as critical, accomplishment, for they are both accurate and resonant, both objective and enlightening, both formal and personal. (Laura Shapiro, The Real Paper). Siegel draws on her years of experience as a working dance critic, a profession she has helped to shape, and brings to a range of American dance a sense of honesty and a mind that wants to understand the antecedents of what is currently in vogue as the dance explosion. (Iris M. Fanger, The Christian Science Monitor).

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