The Shapes of Change: Images of American Dance

by Marcia B. Siegel

"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

Genres: Nonfiction

412 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1979

About the author

The author is a resident of New York, where she is a dance critic for for New York Magazine and the Hudson Review. She also teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. She received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship to work on her book, The Shapes of Change.