Dancing spirit

Judith Jamison is, in every sense, a towering figure. Her commanding physical presence and extraordinary technique have made her not only a superstar of American dance and an innovator in her field, but also an inspiration to African Americans, to women, and to people of all origins around the world. Last November, Doubleday published Dancing Spirit, this remarkable woman's autobiography. Now, with Anchor's paperback publication, an even wider audience can trace the steps of her career: her early years in Philadelphia, where she began studying dance at the age of six, her discovery by Agnes de Mille; years of frustration and struggle in a field that favored petite, fair, White women; her legendary collaboration with Alvin Ailey; her work on Broadway in the musical, Sophisticated Ladies; the formation of her own company, the Jamison Project, and her retum to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater as artistic director after its founder's death in 1989. Dancing Spirit contains vivid portraits of many artists Jamison has worked with including Agnes de Mille, Alvin Ailey, Jessye Norman, Geoffrey Holder, Carmen de Lavallade, and Mikhail Baryshnikov, to name only a few. And Jamison talks frankly about the price exacted by a dancer's nomadic life--rootlessness, fleeting relationships, the obsession with physical beauty. Illustrated with sixty photographs, Dancing Spirit is a candid and immediate self-portrait of a unique American artist whose work has left an indelible mark on the world of dance.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.