Infinite Steps: Thirty-Three Dancers and Their Lives in Ballet

by Gavin Larsen, Gene Schiavone

200 pages, Paperback

Expected publication March 17, 2026

About the author

Gavin Larsen, born and raised in New York City, received her professional dance training at the School of American Ballet, the Pacific Northwest Ballet School and the New York School of Ballet. In 1992, Ms. Larsen joined Pacific Northwest Ballet under the direction of Kent Stowell and Francia Russell, leaving the company in 1999 to join the Alberta Ballet, directed by Mikko Nissinen. In 2002, she performed with the Suzanne Farrell Ballet as a soloist at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. After briefly working as a freelance artist, in 2003 Ms. Larsen was invited to join Oregon Ballet Theatre as a principal dancer by then artistic director Christopher Stowell.
Over the course of her career, Ms. Larsen danced prominent roles in ballets by George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, James Kudelka, Christopher Wheeldon, Paul Taylor, Yuri Possokhov, Kent Stowell and Christopher Stowell, among many others, and originated roles in numerous ballets. She retired from full-time performing in 2010 to focus on teaching, coaching and writing about dance, while continuing to pursue unique artistic opportunities. She was a founding member of Incoroporamento, a collaborative trio combining dance, poetry, and music, in 2010, producing several performances to critical acclaim.
Ms. Larsen has taught and coached widely across the country and has been a guest teacher for schools in Japan and Canada.
Since 2010, she has been a regular contributor for Pointe, Dance Teacher, and Dance Spirit magazines. Her writing has appeared in The Dancing Times, Dance/USA’s online journal In the Green Room, Oregon ArtsWatch, and Artslandia as well as the literary journals the Threepenny Review, Maine Review, Sunlight Press, Page & Spine, and KYSO Flash. In 2015 she was honored with a fellowship to the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, NM, to pursue her work as a writer. She lives in Asheville, NC.

Reviews

[Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

This gorgeous book includes phenomenal photographs of the world's most prolific ballet dancers, along with brief interviews with each commenting on their history with and feelings towards ballet. The different approches and various backgrounds lend color to what is already a colorful volume of ballet photographs. A great coffee table book for balletomanes. Thanks to Edelweiss Plus for the eARC.