Marcia B. Siegel – författare

"What is strikingly new about Miss Siegel's achievement is that she goes beyond the usual kind of historical reassessment...She performs on behalf of this most evanescent of the arts an act of significant recovery. By tracking down - often in rare stage revivals, on film or on videotape - as many of the works by major creators of the last half century as survive, and by describing them ...in a manner that combines accuracy and imagination, she has enriched our knowledge of the past and added immeasurably, to our resent stock of critical resources." (Dale Harris, New York Times Book Review). "Siegel has a gut feeling for dance and a razor-sharp intelligence about it. It's an irresistible combination." (Margaret Pierpont, Dance Magazine). "After you've seen and felt dance this deeply--even vicariously--your way of looking at dance will never be the same." (William Albright, Houston Post). "She sees, acutely, with her muscles as well as her eyes. She thinks about dance as much as she experiences it...This is dance choreography reconstituted. Dances leap off the page...The ability to do that is extraordinary." (Jean Bunke, Des Moines Sunday Register)."The sections in which she describes the dances themselves make up the bulk of the book and they are profoundly illuminating...These descriptions represent an amazing literary, as well as critical, accomplishment, for they are both accurate and resonant, both objective and enlightening, both formal and personal." (Laura Shapiro, The Real Paper). "Siegel draws on her years of experience as a working dance critic, a profession she has helped to shape, and brings to a range of American dance a sense of honesty and a mind that wants to understand the antecedents of what is currently in vogue as the dance explosion." (Iris M. Fanger, The Christian Science Monitor).

For more than five decades, Twyla Tharp has been a phenomenon in American dance, a choreographer who not only broke the rules but refused to repeat her own successes. Tharp has made movies, television specials, and nearly one hundred riveting dance works. Her dance show Movin' Out ran on Broadway for three years and won Tharp a Tony award for Best Choreography.Howling Near Heaven is the only in-depth study of Twyla Tharp's unique, restless creativity. This second edition features a new forward that brings the account of Tharp's work up to date and discusses how dance and dance-making in the United States have changed in recent years. This is the story of a choreographer who refused to be pigeonholed and the dancers who accompanied her as she sped across the frontiers of dance.

In The Tail of the Dragon, Marcia B. Siegel and Nathaniel Tileston track the evolution of new dance in New York during the rich and crucial transitional period from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. Siegel, one of America’s most important dance critics, and Tileston, an accomplished dance photographer, focus on the choreographers who were propelled into rebellion against conventional modern dance by the Judson Dance Theater and other countercultural movements born of the 1960s. This collection of Siegel’s writing, compiled from reviews in Soho Weekly News and New York Magazine, as well as from longer essays and notebook pieces, forms an insightful commentary--occasionally wry, always perceptive-on the absorption of a radical art form by the mainstream. From minimalism, improvisation, street dancing, body awareness, and “poor theater” experimental strategies, these young rebels identified and adopted personal styles of movement and dancemaking; from that, they turned gradually to tamer, more accessible work, marked by virtuosic dancing, proscenium-ready repertoires, and touring companies. Included in this story are the principal players in the “postmodernist” dance movement-Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp, Trisha Brown, David Gordon-now well known internationally as leaders of dance in the 1990s. Siegel also looks at artists who worked steadily but less visibly, influential ones who drifted out of dance, and unknowns who have gained prominence. The dances described here are formal and outlandish, scruffy and beautiful, endearingly fallible and icily perfect. In rightfully celebrating the importance of dances long forgotten, The Tail of the Dragon produces a vibrant portrait of a generation of dance.

In The Tail of the Dragon, Marcia B. Siegel and Nathaniel Tileston track the evolution of new dance in New York during the rich and crucial transitional period from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. Siegel, one of America’s most important dance critics, and Tileston, an accomplished dance photographer, focus on the choreographers who were propelled into rebellion against conventional modern dance by the Judson Dance Theater and other countercultural movements born of the 1960s. This collection of Siegel’s writing, compiled from reviews in Soho Weekly News and New York Magazine, as well as from longer essays and notebook pieces, forms an insightful commentary--occasionally wry, always perceptive-on the absorption of a radical art form by the mainstream. From minimalism, improvisation, street dancing, body awareness, and “poor theater” experimental strategies, these young rebels identified and adopted personal styles of movement and dancemaking; from that, they turned gradually to tamer, more accessible work, marked by virtuosic dancing, proscenium-ready repertoires, and touring companies. Included in this story are the principal players in the “postmodernist” dance movement-Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp, Trisha Brown, David Gordon-now well known internationally as leaders of dance in the 1990s. Siegel also looks at artists who worked steadily but less visibly, influential ones who drifted out of dance, and unknowns who have gained prominence. The dances described here are formal and outlandish, scruffy and beautiful, endearingly fallible and icily perfect. In rightfully celebrating the importance of dances long forgotten, The Tail of the Dragon produces a vibrant portrait of a generation of dance.

Now available in paperback, Days on Earth--originally published in 1988 (Yale University Press)--traces the dance career and artistic development of one of the founders of American modern dance. In this biography of dance pioneer Doris Humphrey, Marcia B. Siegel follows Humphrey's career from her days with the Denishawn Company (among fellos students like Martha Graham) to her creative partnership with Charles Weidman to her tenure as artistic director of protÉgÉ JosÉ Limon's dance company. Siegel's reconsideration and description of Humphrey's dances, including many that are no longer performed, sheds important light on this pathbreaking dancer/choreographer.