Afterglow

Dance is a paradoxical art: eloquent yet wordless, immediate yet timeless, impelling yet surpassingly graceful, reliant on equal measures of bodily prowess and spiritual transcendence. It is also an art that needs a stage, given how poorly it translates into other forms. Films fail to record the fervency of live performance. Books are even more disadvantaged; generally, descriptions of dancing serve to affirm dance’s founding truth that no power is greater than the power of silence.

As a rule, popular dance books gravitate toward matters of more certifiable interest. Gelsey Kirkland’s “Dancing on My Grave” included crowd-pleasers like drugs, anorexia and having sex with Baryshnikov, while Suzanne Farrell’s “Holding Onto the Air” included not having sex with Balanchine. An alternate path with a more purist bent is the picture book, which offers photographs augmented with a bit of text. This tradition is followed in two recent dance books to fine effect, while two others prove that it is no sure-fire formula.

A book to be recommended is “Dance,” a slender volume for children with text by Bill T. Jones and photographs by Susan Kuklin. Jones is a gifted, idiosyncratic dancer who knows how to use his glorious physicality and the richness of his African American culture. His best works reverberate with poetic rawness; others drift into the mannered self-consciousness that is modern dance’s most common downside.

A few years ago, Jones began working with children who suffer from cancer, creating with them dances he gathered into a project that he called “Still / Here,” a title with distinct resonance for Jones, who is HIV-positive. Children coax from Jones a sweetness and a special radiance that suffuse this trifle of a book, which is, nonetheless, a charming trifle. Designed to prompt children toward an awareness of their bodies and the delights of movement, it features photographs of Jones in simple dance-like postures and a text of precisely 114 words that make the wonder of dance palpable. “When I am dancing,” Jones writes, “I am everywhere and I am hardly there.” Ultimately, “Dance” demonstrates that nothing is more profound than simplicity.

A less felicitous effort comes from the photographer Lois Greenfield, whose “Airborne” presents 90 photographs of dancers in a none-too-aesthetic exercise in form as content. Here are page upon page of acrobatic, sculpted bodies doing acrobatic, sculpted things, apparently because Greenfield has her Hasselblad trained on them and because they can.

“Airborne’s” handful of successful photographs make reference to dance or dance history, especially those of the Canadian modern dancer Margie Gillis in a long, flowing dress, which evokes the renowned picture of a similarly clad Martha Graham with one imperious leg held aloft in a penche arabesque. I also like the shot of the divine Desmond Richardson in an intricate and dignified Eastern pose that recalls the Golden Idol of “La Bayadere.” Elsewhere, Greenfield’s own attempts to impart significance can be silly. A picture of the Eliot Feld dancer Buffy Miller dangling from the barre in a full split is, a helpful note by Greenfield reads, “a literal choreographic moment.” Believe me, it isn’t.

Far better, though still flawed, is “At the Ballet.” Here, the fine photographs of Sandra Lee and Thomas Hunt are presented in an attractive volume that traces five years at San Francisco Ballet, a company that demonstrates how very good a company can be without being great. This is a problem for this lovingly made book, which can be only as good as the ingredients it has to work with. A few artists possess genuine onstage presence, in particular Benjamin Pierce, Yuri Possohkov and Eric Hoisington. Otherwise, the book and the company are lacking in those strangely haunted, possessed and pliant creatures who can imbue a dance stage or a photograph with fire, with feeling, with meaning.

To that point, a more rewarding venture is “Tributes,” a celebration of the 50th anniversary of New York City Ballet, one of the two world-class companies in North America, the other being American Ballet Theater. Since the death of its guiding genius, George Balanchine, in 1983, the company has endured more than its share of criticism, much of it unfair, most of it directed against Peter Martins, himself a fine, continually developing choreographer and Balanchine’s chosen successor. This book, a homage to City Ballet, tells another story, in the process affirming City Ballet’s singular and significant relation to the culture.

Balanchine’s inspired neoclassicism made City Ballet the company of choice for intellectuals. Such stature gives rise to pretensions that can be discerned in “Tributes’ ” foreword, which declares that the book draws upon the experiences of “important” writers and artists. These individuals were selected for their connection to the company--which, I must add, was rather tenuous in some cases. Yet this approach has yielded a lovely book, with its lush paper, sophisticated layout, acute reproductions and brief, insightful essays.

Baryshnikov and Martins expound on Balanchine; Robert Lowell offers a poem to a ballerina; Susan Sontag describes City Ballet’s founder, Lincoln Kirstein, as “fecklessly visionary”; Robert Craft praises Stravinsky; W.H. Auden analyzes “The Nutcracker.” There are reproductions of the poster Roy Lichtenstein created for the company’s 1988 American Music Festival and of the Joseph Cornell box made for that most ethereal of ballerinas, Allegra Kent, which features the face of a sylph who, like Kent herself, seems both somber and tender.

Those who follow ballet have watched it devolve into a marginalized art since the “ballet boom,” started by Fontaine and Nureyev, ended nearly two decades ago. “Tributes” vaults ballet out of the margins and reveals it for what it is: an art that has everything to show and much to give, an art that nourishes other arts, even as it is fed by them.