Conversations With a Dancer

St Martin's Press, New York, 1980

In this novel collaboration, a leading modern dancer talks with a leading dance writer about dance as a lived experience and a way of life. Michael Ballard, a professional dancer for ten years, first with Alwin Nikolais and them with Murray Louis, tells us what it is like being a male dancer today, about the traiing, discipline and compulsion which brings someone to the stage, about the dancer's daily life and the business of performing in a major dance company, about rehearsals and touring, music and choreography, about the nature of dance and the heightened intensity of existence which is performing. For those who want to know the inside story of a dancer's life and art, Kitty Cunningham has crafted a book that is both spontaneous and conversational - a delight to anyone who loves dance and indispensable for the dance student and aficionado...