Customer Reviews

Dancing on My Grave

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

No other autobiography I have read has ever been this powerful. I was pulled into Gelsey's heart and felt her pain. She is probably the most beautiful and amazing dancer that ever was in America. Yet she did not feel beautiful. I could relate to all of Gelsey's struggles and emotional hardships. I recommend this book to all those who enjoy autobiographies, all who enjoy ballet, and especially to those who wish to become dancers. It gives a truly realistic view into the dance world. Will become a favourite. Other books to read; Holding Onto the Air by Suzanne Farrell, The Shape of Love (which is the continuing book to Dancing on My Grave) by Gelsey Kirkland and Greg Lawrence.

Never have I picked up a book and been completely pulverized with such honesty about the dance world, a world I was part of for 12 years. I have recently reread this book for the 13th time. I can't count the number of passages where I felt exactly the same way about a director, a costumer, a choreographer. I thought I was alone with these impressions. Her words provide great comfort when I remember my own experiences.
Many of her assertions regarding the idolatry of Balanchine and Baryshnikov vs. who they might have been underneath their "genius" touches on one simple fact: they were still human, and thus, flawed. Dance, which dies instantly, is supposedly ethereal and perfectionistic. In reality, it is a punishing art, and takes much mental and emotional focus to deal with the fleeting splendor one achieves while onstage. Her unflinching honesty, revealed from the eye of the studio and not so much the stage, came from a great struggle throughout her parents' uneasy marriage, her alcoholic father, and the struggles of anorexia and drug addiction, appears in passage after passage. When you have delved through the lower depths, you find the words to articulate the feelings all these previous things have denied. It's as if all the physical anguish finally pushed the right words out to describe her experience. I'm sure she made more than a few enemies by revealing all, but in the end, we all have to live with ourselves. We may never know another person as intimately as we know ourselves. She wished to please everyone by being something other than herself. In the end, to paraphrase from her book, she found who she was by seeing what she was not. Out of all the Balanchine dancers who've written autobiographies, Gelsey's and Toni Bentley's "Winter Season" stand out. Both of these dancers seek the truth, and with this, they found themselves. An excellent, stunning read. I adore this book.

While many people view Gelsey as self absorbed and self serving, I see her as a product of a world which cast her in this role. Her demanding and alcoholic father ( a famous writer himself) always put her sister first and made Gelsey feel like the ugly duckling. It was this inner turmoil which led her to acheive what she did because her competitive spirit, and need to prove herself to her father, drove her to not only accomplish what she did but to reach the depths that she to which she plummeted. I travelled with her during the ABT tour of 1983-84 and found her to be a driven and tortured soul who, despite her air of assurance on stage, was merely a lost child without guidance. When she met Greg Lawrence her life began to take shape as both they helped to lift each other from the morass of drugs and negativity in which they were mired. The book captures, in an unglamorized version, what happened to her during this time. It is a book of redemption and ultimate triumph.

Dancing in my Grave, by Gelsey Kirkland is an amazing book. The book is about Gelsey's dancing career, and how she mangled her way through the jungle of ballet. In it are described many of the hardships that come with serious dancing. This book may not apply to people who are not into dance. Dance, when taken seriously, can bore people if they're not interested in it. However, all dancers who are even thinking of getting serious with dance should read this book.

This book portrays Gelsey Kirkland as a hero because it elaborates on her issues both mental and physical, but then it tells about her rehabilitation. A hero is someone who does something that benefits someone, not necessarily someone else. Gelsey found and helped a person in need of help, that person just so happened to be her. On page 102, `'I began to starve myself, limiting my diet to candy bars and coffee. This was the first sign of an anorexic syndrome that later would become an obsessive rule in my life.'' Gelsey, although it took her years to realize, convinced herself that she had a problem and she fixed it. To convince oneself that he/she has a problem is a very difficult thing to do. Denying it is the easy way out, or even admitting to it but not changing it is fairly easy but dedicating time to fixing a problem like that, that is what makes a hero.

Gelsey shares not only her problem of anorexia but her usage of drugs, her physical adjustments made for beauty reasons and her personal life issues. Gelsey had an older sister Johnna who was given the gift of physical beauty. Throughout the book it tells how Gelsey tried to change her physical appearance as much as possible to be beautiful like her sister. Gelsey undertook many face operations and adjustments to other areas to her body to make her look more like a prima ballerina. Gelsey grew up with a hard family life, possibly partially the cause of her problems later on in life. She shares her dependence on drugs and her fathers drinking problems as well.

Another virtue of this book is its great description of George Balanchine. Through most dancers eyes during Gelsey's time Balanchine was a god. This shows how Gelsey got close to him and started seeing things others could not see. The book tells about her partner Mikhail Baryshinkov and her partnering days with Misha and other wonderful dancers. Great views of the differences in Russian ballet and American ballet are exhibited in this book.

Dancing On My Grave is a very informational book on dancing, but at the same time it tells the story of a great adventurer and a hero who saved herself from the lies of prima ballerina beauty. This autobiography takes the reader behind the scenes of the `'making'' (training) of a perfect ballerina, and tells all of the gruesome details of love, beauty, drugs, eating disorders, and both physical and mental pain. Gelsey Kirkland worked through all of those hardships and made her mark on the ballet world. The key factor in that is that she realized that she had problems and so she was able to fix them and live through them to write Dancing On My Grave to warn others in her same position. Experience is everything, and so in the world of ballet Gelsey Kirkland is a genius.

Wow! This book was simply Amazing! The way Gelsey just opens up her heart and tells her story is beautiful! I loved how she told the truth about her partnership with Misha and showed that he wasn't the perfect man, which many have thought. Also, she brought out the true colors of Balanchine. I'm a younger dancer and had looked up to these men as gods in the ballet world, but my mind has some what changed. I could defintly re-late to her obsessiveness about the "perfect body" and becoming attached to the mirrors. I have read this book over and over and each time I learn something new. The only thing I wish is that I could have seen her perform! She is defintly my favorite dancer of all time and always will be! This is a MUST read for any dancer! Non-dancers will enjoy it too and it will give you a look in to a dancers world. The only thing is, you might have trouble with some of the ballet terms :)

As a ballet dancer, I have come to find the not-so-glamorous side of the ballet world: eating disorders plague it (and directors encourage them), dancers having multiple relationships with other dancers, and the constant pressure to always be at the top. Gelsey Kirkland seemed to have a ballet career that was glorious and fulfilling, yet with every hit of cocaine she took to keep her dancing, her life gained more emptiness and she was dying. Her personal torment is so personally and vividly revealed in this autobiography that you can actually feel her pain and loneliness as she reiterates each of her harrowing experiences. It is sad that some of her best dramatic performances were given at the lowest points in her personal life. This is one of the most stunning autobiographies I have ever read.

Gelsey Kirkland is a miracle. She lived a nightmare, but woke up, and found the courage to write about it. It was mentioned in a previous review that there was no excuse for the trouble she got in to. Maybe so, but humans, by nature are constantly facing troubles they have no excuse for. That is the courage of Gelsey. Her story is terrifying and shameful and she knows it, but it was absolutely necessary for her tell it anyway. Particularly because she recovered. That is what real art and literature is all about. It gives to the world a knowledge of human triumph over adversity, even adversity brought on by the human itself. Gelsey's vividness almost allows the reader to experience her life, in all its terror and beauty. And indeed- experience is what we learn from. So we learn along with Gelsey Kirkland, without her imposing any condescension or trying to cover herself up with glamour, what it is to be human. To make an irreversible mistake, and then reverse it. To defy the power of negativity with the human's natural power to emerge from darkness. And whatever a miracle is, this is certainly a true one.

I first read this book when I was 14 and studying dance. It had a tremendous impact on me, but now, having re-read the book at 29, I see that I either missed, overlooked or forgave a lot. Kirkland's egomania and failure to accept responsibility for her drug addiction escaped me then, and bothers me now. Three cheers for her decision to beat her demons, but I find it disturbing that she blames her choice to take drugs as a failrue by society. This was a woman, a 28 year old woman no less, who was so lacking in self esteem that she chose drugs because they were being offered by a male dancer she in whom she had an interest. The exchange happened in the home of a dear friend of Krikland's, who was nothing, if not adamant, about her displeasure of drugs being in her home. Kirkland had a choice: take the drugs and connect with potential lover, or stand by her friend, who was giving her shelter. She wrote, "His opinions mattered more than Georgina's at that moment." I guess I don't don't see how society failed Gelsey. She clearly knew what she was doing. It's an interesting (re-)read, espeically if you're at all curious about her methods for developing characters in ballet. However, I wouldn't go so far as to call it brilliant.

Kirkland gives us not only a wonderful look into her psyche but great insight into the ballet world. Her discussion of her body image problems and the turmoil they give her physically and mentally is intriguing and her stories of what it's really like to be a ballerina make the book a great read for dancer and non-dancers alike!

If I could plagiarize a life story, this would be it. From the family, to our fathers, to the teachers, to the addictions, her life in dance matched my life in dance quite eerily. I even have Gelsey's mom's birthday, I found out through reading this. This book is not rooted in idolatry for Balanchine or Baryshnikov, it tells the truth of a talented, intense, insecure woman who found her way out of the darkness to claim her gift, her voice, her artistry. Great artists are not just good or bad, they are both in equal measure. Could anyone else have the courage to leap towards fame only to come crashing down and then tell it like it really was? Kirkland is an anomaly in the dance world for her unorthodox techniques on the stage and in the classroom, but the physical articulation she achieved during her performances is amazingly surpassed by the strength, clarity, and conviction in her words. I picked this book up for the first time in 1991, only to read it again two months later. I have recently reread it for the 13th time, so comforting are her words. The layering of her descriptions and the vocabulary in which she illustrates the struggles of her life show nuance, shape, a dark ambience. This book, whether you're a dancer or not, tugs at the mind as well as the heart. Dance dies instantly after the performers leave the stage. Gelsey's words do not. Out of all the dancer's autobiographies out there, this one stands out. She struggles mightily for just the right phrase to describe the joy and the sorrow of the art she chose. The pictures you will gather upon finishing this, will show once and for all that substance is much greater than shadow, and that truth is the only thing worth holding onto in the end. She might be something of a maverick, but her contributions to ballet and teaching are illuminated brilliantly as she recounts the more sordid moments of her life without apology. No one could have described her better than herself. Read this and gasp--once again, she gives us her best. No dance collection is complete without this book.