Vital Grace: The Black Male Dancer
Since its inception, photography has had a love affair with dance. Continuous Replay is a carefully assembled survey of the photographic work of Arnie Zane, the late avant-garde choreographer and cofounder, with Bill T. Jones, of the American Dance Asylum and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. Zane was a prolific and inventive photographer and incorporated this art into his choreography and performances until his death at the age of 39 in 1988. The book goes beyond the typical monograph and employs Zane's own choreographic techniques to engage the reader, including repeated, accumulating combinations of images and the juxtaposition of narrative text throughout. Zane's photographs are at once lovely, explicit, and challenging. Green, director of the UC-Riverside/California Museum of Photography, presents the imagesAranging from frank nude studies of torsos to staged tableauxAin the combinations Zane himself intended. Also included are essays about Zane and Jones's choreography. The result is an intriguing and important overview not only of Zane's photography but also of the contribution the Jones/Zane collaboration made to contemporary dance. Vital Grace, a collaboration between dancer/choreographer Cyrus and photographer Savio, is an exploration and celebration of black male dancers. The approximately 190 color photographs, mostly of dancers executing Cyrus's choreography along with some close-ups and portraits, are crisp, beautiful, energetic, and stylish. In their introductions, both Cyrus and Savio state a desire to capture the joy and individuality of the performers in a non-stereotypical way, and generally they succeed; the photographs literally leap off the page. Commentary by such dance artists as Geoffrey Holder, Gregory Hines, and Bill T. Jones further enhance this eloquent testimony to the vibrant presence of black men in modern American dance. Each of these books informs the other and would make a welcome addition to larger public libraries.ADebora Miller, MinneapolisCopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.