"Life Stories: profiles from the New Yorker"

[fiefoe]

"Isadora" (Isadora Duncan) / Janet Flanner (1927)

    This was written late in the dancer's career, and she was likened to 'one of those beautiful battered pagan tombs that still line the Sacred Road'. The writing takes on the subject's Attic grandeur, but the weary disdain for this 'plain and tasteless Republic' whose people 'to whom inspiration was exhilarating, useless and unbecoming', must be largely the writer's own.

    Direct quotes:

• She once gave a house party that started in Paris, gathered force in Venice and culminated weeks later on a houseboat on the Nile.
• Herself grand, she could inspire grandeur in others, a tragic and tiring gift.
• Isador has had a fancy for facts.
• She is too expansive for personal salvation. She has had friends. What she needed was an entire government. She had checkbooks. Her scope called for a national treasury.
  

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"The Soloist" (Mikhail Baryshnikov) / Joan Acocella (1998)

    This sentence illustrates the title well: 'the things he now sees in dance - the exaltation, the self-discovery - are easier to find if one is not lifting another dancer at the same time'. I first watched "White Nights" more than ten years ago, but the writer's insight still rings true to me.

    Other observations that touch me: 'the hidden meaning of ballet, and of classicism - that experience has order, that life can be understood'; 'a point in classical art where aesthetics meet morals - where beauty, by appearing plain and natural, gives us hope that we, too, can be beautiful'.