I'm still spending most of my reading time with Mindy Aloff's magisterial anthology "Dance in America." The volume spans three centuries and includes work by our most important dance critics along side poets (yes!), choreographers, literary figures, and dancers. While I'm learning a lot about dance and writing from the contributors, there's also much to be learned about putting together an anthology and writing head notes, those helpful guides that orient readers to the work that follows. Here's a remarkable sentence from Aloff's brilliant introduction to Susan Sontag's essay "On Dance and Dance Writing."
Novelist by ambition, essayist by temperament, filmmaker and playwright by will, public intellectual by circumstance, political activist by moral imperative, bisexual by nature, high-school graduate at fifteen, wife at seventeen, college grad (Phi Beta Kappa) at eighteen, mother at nineteen, acclaimed for her courage, damned for her arrogance: Susan Sontag's life was so full, and her friendships and love affairs around the world were so plentiful, that one wouldn't thing she'd have enjoyed much leisure to follow a demanding art form as theatrical dance.
Sontag's essay is wonderful, of course, but it's Aloff's sentence that has stayed with me. Doesn't it make you want to keep reading?
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