Grace Under Pressure

A critic and writer on dance for well over twenty years, Barbara Newman has gone in search of teachers and coaches, directors, choreographers and stagers - former dancers who had turned the focus of their own experience on others - to explain the state of ballet today. Among leaders of the dance world the author interviewed were Suki Schorer, Helgi Tomasson, Mark Morris, Violette Verdy and 14 other artists whose work she knew and respected, most of them active outside of New York and London. Newman is not interested in dance as an aesthetic abstraction, and the people who answered her questions were not speaking theoretically. On the contrary, her speculation and their responses bring an elusive subject down to earth, illuminating a process that reaches back in history and forward to today, though its dreams are of a world no one can imagine.