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New books from Laura Jacobs, Toni Bentley


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As to whether it was okay for Balanchine to go to a strip club -- well, I agree with you that there are sins far, far worse.  On the other hand, I admit that I suffer an inward wince.

Are these the makings of a 'Musagete, part II' ballet by Boris Eifman?

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Well, I finished Toni Bentley's book, "The Surrender." It's only 208 pages, with short chapters and lots of white space. Nevertheless, somewhere around page 100, it began to seem interminable. The last two pages are devoted to acknowledgements, ending with thanks to "all of my beloved and delightful advisers who offered wonderful suggestions..." There follows a list of over 35 people (I kept losing count). Perhaps some of these delightful advisers are to blame for a few of the book's problems. It can't make up its mind whether it's pornography, pure and simple (not so pure, actually); a "Daddy Dearest" confessional; an advice column in Penthouse; an atheist's search for God in a most unlikely place; an anti-marriage tract, and who knows what else. The book would be ideal for excerpting on T-shirts ("I don't trust love...But I trust lust completely"), but most of the sentiments are unprintable here.

Though the prose is frequently overwrought to the point of "insanity" -- one of the author's favorite words -- there are brief, rare flashes of Toni Bentley, the wonderful writer about ballet. She mentions nobody by name, but being Farrell Fan, I got choked up by this passage near the beginning of the book: "I became a professional dancer at age seventeen and began performing in public eight times a week. It was then that I started crossing myself before going onstage. I had seen the best dancer in the world do this, and I thought perhaps this was her secret."

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i find it impossible to know what on earth it might be OK to say about all this. so i will restrict myself to expressing admiration for those of you (above) who have managed to make some appropriately witty remarks and give us a laugh.

out of curiosity about the 'subgenre' referred to in this thread, i did buy and read 'the memoirs of catherine m' (or similar title) and didn't find it erotic at all. i guess 'eroticism' is...maybe...highly personal? i really don't know...

i DO know that i have a young (23 yr old) friend who worked as a 'skimpy' barmaid, and i've also met two women who worked as strippers, all of whom DID find their work empowering.

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just read one of the reviews, and came across this, which i hope you will appreciate being shared:

And what would Mr. B. make of her new work?

"Ah ha ha ha," Ms. Bentley said. "Gosh—that’s a tough one. I think he would be amused. I think he would be amused, and perhaps happy that he’s dead."

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Here's another version, from the New York Times:

"Inevitably, she has wondered what Mr. B would have made of 'The Surrender.' ' I think it would have amused him,' she said. 'My greatest flaw as a dancer was timidity. I was less than I might have been because I was too shy and modest. And I like to think that Mr. B would say: 'Now look at what she's done. She didn't dance that way for me.'"

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thank you so much for the welcome, alexandra. i just love this site.

this topic is what a friend of mine would refer to as "a gnarly one".

i posted (above) before i went to bed last night, and have just got up, with a few more personal thoughts. this is a hard post to make in a rush, but i can't spare the time to be too careful about how i phrase it, so i will just leap in and hope for the best (as bentley has done!) i will TRY to keep it brief.

when i was young, i needed to become a ballerina.

i have often thought about the psychological underpinnings of that need.

bentley refers to the psychology of her childhood, as partial explanation for her fascination with her new sexual choice.

almost a year ago, i discovered nightclubs. when i was young, i was a bunhead, and too serious, and also too frightened, to be interested in such venues.

my new life has been immensely liberating and pleasurable - and is a large part of the reason that i have not been here, at this website.

i 'discovered' that, for me, much of the desire and buzz that i associated with dance and with stage performance, can still be had, in a 'safer' way, via the nightclub dance floor. this was an unexpected, welcome and exciting revelation for me.

i felt: it's the SAME thing - the involvement in music, the love of movement, the permission to dress up and adorn myself with lace and colour and fanciful/exposing clothing, and jewellery. and the opportunity to be admired. i LOVE it.

there is more to say on this, but frankly it is quite a strain writing it - and i am pressed for time today, so i will leave my OWN self-disclosure at this point, and maybe say more later.

hope this concept - of the parallels between nightclub theatricality and that of the stage - is of interest...

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Hey, it's all showbiz. :)

Grace, let me add my “welcome back” to Alexandra’s. You can’t really argue about personal experience. If someone says she feels empowered, well, that’s how she feels and there’s no disputing that. However, we live in a culture that puts women’s bodies on display for many different reasons, and that encourages women to seek approval from others on the basis of personal looks and appeal. Young girls grow up wanting to be actresses, models, and, yes, ballerinas – women who get on stage or in front of a camera to be, among other things, admired for their looks. Naturally, women feel better when they receive, or believe they are receiving, the assurance that they are beautiful and desirable. (Yes, I know, the same cultural pressure affects men, too. But not in the same way or with the same acuteness.) Entire industries – cosmetics, fashion, and I can’t leave out the plastic surgeons – exist to cater to and enforce this cultural imperative.

Now, this is certainly better than wearing a chador and having armed men beat you on the street for exposing your ankles. I trust, however, that that isn’t the standard we’re going by. I think that the foregoing may be one reason why people sense this connection between getting on stage to perform a ballet and getting on stage to take off your clothes, and do sometimes rather more than that, in front of men who have paid for the privilege of looking. I'd say that the former is more "empowering" -- I do loathe that word -- than the latter.

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Grace, let me add my “welcome back” to Alexandra’s.
And mine to Alexandra's and dirac's!

I think that the foregoing may be one reason why people sense this connection between getting on stage to perform a ballet and getting on stage to take off your clothes . . .  I'd say that the former is more "empowering"  -- I do loathe that word -- than the latter.

Well, yes and no. The level of mastery demanded to dance ballet professionally is surely harder to achieve. But I seem to remember at least one passage in Winter Season that bemoans the anonymity (in Toni's eyes) of the corps dancer. If you believe (however falsely) that as the third girl in the second row, no one ever notices You, then, yes, you probably feel more empowered when you have the stage to yourself.

I suspect, however, that the empowerment Toni felt as a stripper involved other, more primal feelings and a more direct connection with her audience. A deeply visceral thing.

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i was worried that i had killed off this topic, by focusing on just one aspect of it. it seems to me that we have skirted around:

- the jacobs book, en passant

- the bentley bookS plural

- bentley: an ex-dancer who is now a writer

- balanchine's attitude to women

- performance as empowerment

- sexual psychology

- exhibitionism, for want of a better word...

- and probably a few other things.

frankly i am just glad that i am not alexandra, having to worry what someone might write in this thread NEXT! :)

thank you so much, carbro and dirac, for the welcomes. i missed you, too! it's lovely, after being away for so long - a year - to find that the community i have always appreciated is still here.

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Grace, you needn't have worried about killing off this thread -- it seems immortal. Inspired by your list of subjects skirted (I'm glad you're back, too) I went back to the beginning and was surprised to see the thread is over two years old. It originally had reference to Toni Bentley's previous book and to a novel by Laura Jacobs which is now remaindered and available at a bargain price by clicking on the Amazon banner. The title of that novel, incidentally, "Women About Town," sounds like something rejected in favor of "Sex and the City."

At any rate, the subject of Balanchine's attitude to women has always interested me, along with women's attitudes to Balanchine. It seems highly unusual to me that someone married four or five times (depending on whether you count Danilova) should have remained on good terms with all those exes, not to mention his various "muses." How'd he do it?

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I’ve wondered about that myself, Farrell Fan. There were professional reasons involved, in that the wives and exes were all in the same company and had to work around one another. But in the accounts that we have from the women involved, there’s also an apparent lack of the marital/sexual jealousy that is common in breakups. Not that there was no jealousy or resentment whatsoever, but all parties concerned seem to have understood the nature of Balanchine’s need to go from one muse to another. And of course Balanchine said that his wives left him, not vice versa, indicating a high level of dissatisfaction. I get the impression that many of them just weren’t that intensely in love with him, or let us say the love wasn’t of the kind that sets one woman against another, or causes long term anger at the man when the relationship is over.

There’s a passage in Suzanne Farrell’s autobiography where she mentions that Tanaquil Le Clercq and Diana Adams would invite her to play cards after Balanchine began to single her out and her isolation in the company grew. Farrell says it was very kind of them, and of course it was, but in another sense you could see it as initiating her into the membership of a very select sorority.

I haven’t read Laura Jacobs’ book yet but I do plan to get around to it. I enjoy reading her stuff in The New Criterion and although I have nothing special against John Rockwell it would have been nice if she had got Kisselgoff’s chair at the Times, and then I could read her dance criticism on an almost daily basis.

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I recently read Winter Season and am now (very slowly) reading Holding on to the Air. Both are fascinating books. One of the amazing things about Winter Season is how, contrary to one's expectations of a book written by a corps dancer, it actually adds to the mystery and glamour of the ballet experience.

In that context, Holding on to the Air is also a very intriguing book as a collaboration between a very non-introspective Suzanne Farrell and the very introspective Toni Bentley who virtually deified SF in Winter Season. I think the combination works very well. At the end of the day, althugh the end product is clearly not 100% Suzanne Farrell, I think it's a much more interesting book than 100% Suzanne Farrell book would be.

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thanks farrell fan. it's good to BE back, too.

like you, i hadn't realised this was an old thread.

i had never thought about the topic raised just above - about balanchine's wives and/or muses getting along with each other - so that is yet another interesting matter to have been raised in this thread.

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I was mildly suprised to find The Surrender reviewed in Entertainment Weekly.

The reviewer refers to Toni Bentley as "pretentious former ballerina Toni Bentley" and "a little nuts, too" but goes on to call the book "comparatively stylish and amusing."

And then lo and behold EW reviews George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker by

Robert Gottlieb and All In The Dances by Terry Teachout. It ranks the former the "more satifying of the two" and gives it an A. Of Teachout's book it "ardently examines his ballets as modern art, persuasively ranking Balanchine alongside Henri Matisse and Igor Stravinsky in innovation and achievement."

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After reading The Surrender two things come to mind. First, it should have been a long essay in a magazine rather than a book. As Farrell Fan mentioned it just goes on and on, encounter after encounter melding into a mind numbing blur. Second, and this relates to the first, apparently whoever edited this book was on a mental vacation at the time. The subject matter is obviously very personal, intense and passionate for Toni Bentley to write about. I think what happened was her emotions were so intensely engaged by this subject , that she tends to overdo it, her internal filter was turned off so carried along on a tidal wave she tends to write about things that perhaps were better left unsaid. Things that make you put the book down and shake your head in disbelief. This book needed a strong dispassionate editor to cut out that stuff. It not only doesn't add anything to the story it actually stops it dead with all the momentum of a train wreck.

I didn't completely dislike the book, there were a few one liners that had me laughing out loud and the passage where she describes the obsessive love she felt for her pointe shoes had a stark beauty. But I consider The Surrender a tiny blip on the radar screen of a talented author.

Something I wonder about , how will I feel when reading Ms. Bentley's next book, a bio. of Lincoln Kirstein? Instead of getting caught up in the story will I keep picturing in my mind "Toni Bentley=Sodomy?" She had to have known on the verge of publishing The Surrender that she might turn off some longtime admirerers and readers of hers. Yet she published it anyway. I tend to think she is saying that the ballet is a big part of me, but this is a part of me too. And she is betting that her audience is smart and tolerant enough to accept it. That's either a little nuts or hugely couragous. Or maybe a little of both. Although I didn't like the book the REBEL in me applauds the fact that such an established author took the chance to publish it in such a politically correct time. I'll keep the faith and eagerly await her next book.

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perky, thanks for your interesting comments. THIS caught my eye immediately:-

...the obsessive love she felt for her pointe shoes...
as only yesterday i was trying to explain - to a young dancer's mother - the intense and lasting rapture i felt, for a turquoise satin i saw in a shop window, which i wanted my first tutu to be made of.

and the same feeling for my first pair of pointe shoes - the smell, the feel of the satin, the walk up the stairs at the ballet boutique on the occasion of my first shoe fitting...only those who have felt these things could possibly understand. and even the aura of magic that i STILL feel, when i think of these old memories... :blush:

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a highly entertaining link, kfw. some quotes:

...when she writes of “the joy that lies on the other side of convention, where risk is real and rapture resides,” one feels that she is like a little girl riding her bicycle with her hands outspread, saying, “Look at me, mummy,” in the knowledge that her mother will be appalled and terrified, and will probably scream.

- - -

The next literary erotic memoir will have to tackle a sexual activity considerably less tame than mere sodomy ... How about necrophilia, then? ... Goodness knows what will be the sexual experience extolled in the next erotic memoir after the necrophiliac one, but I have great faith in Man’s inventive capacities, especially where the hope of quick sales is concerned.

- - -

She writes: “I once loved a man so much that I no longer existed—all Him, no Me.” She continues: “Now I love myself just enough that no man exists—all Me, no Them.” In other words, she is incapable of a relationship with another human being. Either she is an object herself, or the man becomes an object; and her motto in dealing with others is “Annihilate that ye be not annihilated.”

Any form of mutuality is impossible for her, any warmth of feeling, any sympathy for another. She continues in this chilling opening passage (no pun intended): “They [the men] used to be God, and I used to be a figment of my own imagination; now men are figments of my imagination. Same game, different positions. I don’t know how to play any other way. Someone must be on top, someone on bottom.” In other words, relations between men and women, as conceived by her, are nothing but a zero-sum power game.

- - -

The blurb states that this is an intimate memoir, but it is as intimate as Yankee Stadium.  ... there should always be things that cannot be said in polite company. This is not prudery: it is prudence, for only thus can the most valuable of human experiences be preserved.

i really don't know. i am not expressing an opinion, just pointing the way to any interesting piece of thinking and writing.
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I was looking through Bentley's website and came across this article she wrote for Allure magazine (I'm not sure if it's a separate article entirely, or an excerpt from the book): Paris Blue

It might answer some people's questions about why Balanchine would visit the Crazy Horse. Another person mentioned in the article who occasionally visits the place: Darci Kistler.

Choreographer George Balanchine was a longtime fan of the Crazy Horse. "It's wonderful the way in which they dress the body, in which they cover it with lights," he said. "I find that interesting." He advised his own stage managers to take a good long look at Bernardin's various stage effects -- especially the lighting -- and invited dancers from the Crazy Horse to watch his own company when it performed at the nearby Théâtre des Champs-Elysées.

The interest of a classical artist like Balanchine in the craft of Bernardin's strip goes to the heart of the anomaly of the Crazy Horse. Both Balanchine and Bernardin perfected, in their own way, an image of woman -- desirable but unobtainable, tantalizing yet unknowable, and almost ruthlessly independent. For both, what was finally important was what is not seen, but what is merely suggested.

The article also explains how at this strip club, any interaction between performers and audience members are strictly forbidden.

Perhaps the people who frequent the Crazy Horse see it more as a posh hangout (tickets are pricey) rather than a mere place where guys can get horny.

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kfw, Iwasn't actually planning to say this, but since you mention it I must admit to being sort of stunned when I read that.  I guess it may be "empowering" to some women to have the happy opportunity to strip for money in front of a gaggle of leering or indifferent men, but I don't think that I would find the experience that inspiring, speaking for myself. It is true that many women in our society have had to exploit their physical appeal in one way or another in order to get ahead, or just survive -- but that hardly indicates an expression of feminine power, rather the reverse, I should think.  (Although it does offer a potential new slogan for feminists -- ''Girls -- you don't have to head a Fortune 500 company or run for the Senate to be empowered.  Just strip naked for a bunch of tipsy salesmen!")

I was actually sorry to read that about Balanchine -- unless he was going to check for any novel theatrical effects, which I doubt.  Richard Feynman, not a man noted for feminist sentiments, used to visit one regularly, too.

CONCERNING A NEW BOOK - THE HISTORY OF BEAUTY @ AN OBSERVATION ON EMPOWERMENT -DELETED - BY DRBACC Edited by drbacc
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