A01=Deborah Jowitt
Author_Deborah Jowitt
award-winning writer
ballet
biographies of american artists
Category=ATQ
Category=DNB
Category=DNBF
Category=JBSF1
choreographer
dance
dance biography
dance criticism
dance history
dancer
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
feminist biography
feminist figures
george balanchine
icon
isamu noguchi
legend
martha graham dance company
mikhail baryshnikov
modern art
modern dance
modernism
sweeping
the village voice
vivid
women's history
Product details
- ISBN 9781250321794
- Weight: 572g
- Dimensions: 150 x 227mm
- Publication Date: 17 Mar 2025
- Publisher: St Martin's Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Over her sweeping career, she founded what is now the oldest dance company in the country and produced nearly two hundred ballets, many of them masterpieces. And along the way, she engaged with the major debates, events, and ideas of the twentieth century, creating works that cut to the core of the human experience. Time magazine’s “Dancer of the Century,” and the first dancer and choreographer to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Graham was a visionary artistic force and an international cultural figure: hers was the iconic face of what came to be known as modern dance.
From the renowned dance writer and former longtime critic for The Village Voice Deborah Jowitt, Errand into the Maze draws on more than a decade of firsthand research to deliver the definitive portrait of this titan. Beginning with Graham’s childhood in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and her early studies at the Denishawn School; weaving in her offstage adventures, including her relationship with her dancer and muse Erick Hawkins; and chronicling her retirement from dancing at age seventy-five and her remarkably productive final years, this elegant, empathetic biography portrays the artist in all her passionate complexity. Most important, Jowitt places Graham’s creations at the heart of her story. Her works, brimming with raw intensity, are intimately linked with their creator, who played the heroine in almost all that she choreographed: Joan of Arc, Jocasta, Clytemnestra, and Judith, among others. In this volume, Graham is center stage once more, and Jowitt casts a brilliant spotlight on her life and work.
Deborah Jowitt was the principal dance critic at The Village Voice for more than four decades, and her work has appeared in The New York Times and Dance Magazine, among other outlets. Her previous books include the biography Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance; the essay collection Time and the Dancing Image; and the critical works Dance Beat and The Dance in Mind. A former Guggenheim fellow, she has lectured and conducted workshops worldwide and taught in the Dance Department of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts for forty years. Her recent writings can be found on her ArtsJournal blog, DanceBeat.
