MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewIt’s the spark of a potential justification for yet another Graham biography, one that would situate her work more firmly in the historical context of American modernism. That’s what Baldwin’s subtitle promises...Rather than that story, though, Baldwin mainly gives us facts ... Throughout all this, Baldwin deploys what his extensive bibliography and endnotes show to be an enormous amount of research, little of it new. He buries Graham in undiscriminating heaps of it. Just about every time a new person enters her life — and it’s a long and impressive list of the influential and once-famous in American theater, music and visual art — he offers a dispiritingly formulaic capsule biography: date and place of birth, alma mater. His method is the opposite of hers: Where Graham cut down to the essentials, Baldwin amasses the tangential ... Occasionally, he corrects a fact or two that Graham (or de Mille) misremembered. But because these corrections aren’t consequential, they seem further evidence of missing judgment. When Baldwin is describing Graham dances that exist in a describable state, he sometimes achieves eloquence ... But these accounts of the dances are low on fresh insight, and what’s there is buried in the data dumps, too. As soon as the opportunity arises to discuss something other than dance — books, music — Baldwin fastens on it disproportionately, as if in relief ... Fortunately, there are eyewitnesses for him to quote. The most vivid and revealing statements in the book come from the dancers who gave their lives and bodies to Graham’s experiments, absorbing her tantrums and abuse for little to no pay, because they believed...The testimony of dancers, in fact, is one resource Baldwin could have profitably used more, especially about Graham’s technique ... As it is, Baldwin’s habit of identifying the sources of many of his plentiful quotations only in the endnotes adds to the sense of a collage of research, a paste-up job without authorial guidance as to the significance of the accumulating detail to the story the author is trying to tell ... The story under Baldwin’s story of American modernism seems to be about the costs of Martha Graham becoming Martha Graham, and the charred archive a flame leaves behind.
Mark Morris and Wesley Stace
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewMorris wrote the book with the help of the novelist Wesley Stace, but its voice is unmistakably his: direct, brash, flippant, charming, impenetrably self-assured. And funny. On just about every page, there’s an anecdote or remark to make you laugh ... At the same time, though, there is something odd about the tone, or odd for a memoir. Much of the prologue seems preoccupied with establishing what Morris isn’t interested in talking about or revealing ... It’s not that the book lacks candor...Yet amid all the dish and the this-is-how-it-works assertions, there’s not a lot of introspection or self-examination ... It’s still a good story ... the drama of this moment, like many in the book, doesn’t quite come alive ... At points of trauma — that junior-high bullying, the death of his father a few years later — [Morris] often switches from a just-the-facts account of what happened to a just-the-facts account of the dance he made about it, all trees and interesting branches and no forest ... Almost every Morris dance is a paragon of structural clarity and musical design. His memoir isn’t ... In short, the qualities that make Morris a great artist seem not to be fully engaged here. If you want a much more illuminating sense of his work and why it matters, as well as the crux of the biography, better told, with most of the best anecdotes, the book to read is still Joan Acocella’s 1993 Mark Morris. In Out Loud, there’s a sense that he’d rather be back in the studio, making dances.
