Edited by Lynn Garafola. Unfinished at the time of his death in 1972 but preserved at the dance collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the memoir finally sees the light of day under the auspices of the Society of Dance History Scholars, with Lynn Garafola as editor. It is not a poem or a play or a novel you can read, not a piece of music you can sing or play or listen to, not a sculpture or a painting, not even a drawing or a sketch.
Dance is just itself, fancy people prancing around, people enjoying themselves.
He was fascinated by Spanish jotas, Mexican jarabes and Indian bailes. Costumed in great splendor and breathtaking colors, the bullfighters evoke an age that knew how to enhance the appearance of a man. Gallant and heroic, the bullfighter was being consecrated and set apart, performing an ancient ritual drama that would cleanse and purge us, its spectators, a man with symbolic powers, graces and prerogatives. When his mother was told she could have no more children and died in illness while pregnant, he confronted his father, ''a broken man, sobbing like a child, and . . . Why do you cry, I asked.