Customer comments on this selection.
 Filling in the Gaps
I am already so happy with this book, and I am only halfway through. Although Nicholas has some gaps in her experiential knowledge of American dance history, she has gone the extra mile to link the dancers at Dartington to the American, Indian, and Central European dance concerns of the times (1900s-1940s) in such a way that dance history teachers will no longer be able to see the events during that period as isolated occurences.
Dartington was both an incubator and a crossroads point for what was a period of extreme evolution, a forty year pendulum swing between dance as community-building, art-making creative process and as highly defined technically-challenging expressive mythos. At Dartington, performative practices, choreographic principles, technique class content, dance education, and community dance were all discussed, argued over, and perhaps, most startling in our times, attended to by none other than the Elmhirsts themselves.
Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst were certainly fascinating characters and their story is compelling in its own right. But the fact they created a place for sustainable agriculture and art, for Gaia and Terpsichore, is an idea that can resonate deeply today, as we all seek solutions, personal and technological, to the climate change crisis and resource-soaking wars.
There have been other such moments in dance history: Ascona, Hellerau, Black Mountain College, Judson. The common experience of artists responding to the world at the same time they create deep communal connections and develop new ways of making art is a primary narrative. What happened at Dartington is a huge part of that narrative. Thanks to Larraine Nicholas for pulling the facts together, opening the door into a time and place of powerful intersections, and writing so clearly and with careful attention about the most timely of issues: artists creating community in challenging moments.
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