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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Winter Season A Dancer's Journal by Toni Bentley Winter Season: A Dancer's Journal by Toni Bentley. Toni Bentley was born in Perth, Australia of an Australian father, a biologist, and British mother, a lawyer. Leaving Perth at age two, she lived in Bristol, England for four years prior to emigrating to the United States. She took her first ballet class at age four in England and then entered the School of American Ballet, the official school of New York City Ballet, at age ten and studied there for seven years. At seventeen she was invited to join George Balanchine's New York City Ballet and danced there for ten years. She is the author of five books -- all named Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times. Her first, Winter Season, A Dancer's Journal , was published when she was twenty-two and is a diary of her life as a young dancer in the New York City Ballet under Balanchine's tenure. Several years later a hip injury ended her career on the stage. She went on the write Holding On to the Air: the Autobiography of Suzanne Farrell (co-authored with Farrell), Costumes by Karinska , about Balanchine's great Russian costume designer, Sisters of Salome , a cultural history of the femme fatale and origins of modern striptease, and The Surrender, An Erotic Memoir , the story of an obsessive love affair. The Surrender was named one of the 100 Notable Books of the year by the New York Times, and one of the Best Books of the Year by Publishers Weekly. It has been translated into eighteen languages and was a bestseller in Brazil, Spain, Italy, and France. She has written essays and reviews for The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, Playboy, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, BookForum, Vogue, Allure, Arts & Antiques, Smithsonian, Ballet Review, Dance Magazine, CR Fashionbook, and the Daily Beast among others. She has given talks at Harvard University, Cambridge University, the Oscar Wilde Society in London, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, the University of North Florida, the Philoctetes Society in New York, and at THiNK 2013, in Goa, India. In 2010 her story "The Bad Lion," originally published in the The New York Review of Books, was selected for "Best American Essays 2010" by editor Christopher Hitchens. A one-woman play adaptation of "The Surrender" -- in Spanish (La rendición) -- starring the Swiss-German actress Isabelle Stoffel, had its world premiere in Madrid at the Microteatro Por Dinero in January 2012 and was then produced by the Spanish National Theatre (Centro Dramático Nacional) in January 2013 at the historic Teatro María Guerrero in Madrid playing alongside a production of Federico Garcia Lorca's "Yerma." The play had its English-language world premiere at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2013 and was invited to New York City for a one-month season at the Clurman Theatre in January 2014. The play has since toured Spain and South America and had its German-language premiere in Switzerland and Germany in 2014. She is a Guggenheim Fellow. Winter Season: A Dancer's Journal by Toni Bentley. BIBLIOTHÈQUE(S) Revue de l’association des bibliothécaires de france. Toni Bentley, Ma Reddition (The Surrender), trad. Isabelle D. Phillipe, La Musardine, coll. “Lectures amoureuses”, 2007, 256 p. Reviewed in BIBLIOTHÈQUE(S) By Philippe Levreaud, editor-in-chief, Bibiliothèque(s) December 2008. (Translated by Rakesh Satyal from the French) If a thought proves its worth by a test of the real; if the real takes no other form but by way of reflection; if, finally, writing – art – is what allows all existence, in the strictest sense, to find its completion and make of that completion an experience of liberty; then Toni Bentley’s book, which responds to all of these demands, will be in turn, for those who discover it, an occasion for a true literary experience. The author, who was chosen by Balanchine to dance for ten years at the New York City Ballet, has already published four books on her art, of which one, WINTER SEASON: A DANCER’S JOURNAL, was translated by École des loisirs in 1983. Dance was for her a school of demands and an experience of suffering and of mixed beauty – premises for the fundamental erotic syllogism that is the unique subject of this book: sodomy revealed as the supreme path to transcendence. In riotous language that delivers precisely, with aphoristic economy and mischievous familiarity, a language of absolute frankness, the author has written a masterpiece that, in narrating the venture as closely as possible, searching under its seemingly trivial appearance, could be like the modern-day Kierkegaard of EITHER/OR, from which came the DIARY OF A SEDUCER: the asshole would be a shortcut by which one accomplishes directly a jumping of the aesthetic hurdle (“vaginas for babies; assholes for art”) to the religious stage (“How to detach oneself,” she says in conclusion, “from the best thing that one has ever known for the hope of something better? By a foolish and illogical leap of faith.”) Far from Bataille, where sexuality is often nothing but a game of theory, the metaphysical is made here, piece by piece, physical. All of the confrontations of the soul and body are keys to the lock, for anal sex is the place where truths switch: it is open to dialecticians, in love with truth to the point of renouncing their magic tool for paradox (“is anal sex still sex?”), who, ecstasy revealed, know that it is still necessary, like the “knight of faith” of the great Dane, to reconcile with the world and return to their affairs. Once again, it’s the language that says it all. Biting irony, its relentless rigor heightened by the crudest words, makes this book, pure and biting, one by a philosopher-artist of which Nietzsche would have dreamed, one who creates by experiencing. WINTER SEASON: A Dancer's Journal. Bentley's diary of her 1980-81 season in the corps at the New York City Ballet--a season during which she has to decide whether to keep on dancing or pursue real life. ""In the New York City Ballet I am one of seventy girls like me. Outside I'm one of seventy in the whole world--I need that kind of appreciation for my uniqueness."" So sometimes Bentley is inspired to dance--despite the horrors of toe shoes, obsessive dieting, low pay. Also inspiring: ""Mr. B,"" of course, whose personal aura of genius is enough to stifle almost every attempt at dancer unionizing (""What would have happened if Van Gogh's brushes one day had refused to be manipulated because they wanted better living conditions?""); the snowflake beauty of the Nutcracker; or the glorious dancing of Suzanne Farrell (""frankly I cannot put any words on paper to describe her magnificence""). But at other times Bentley feels despair because ""we dance, we don't live. I am starved for people, life, thoughts, conversation, alternatives to my NYCB world. I can see no way, no way at all, to be a woman and dance."" (An unhappy backstage romance--with a star--is also included, but in rather arch, third-person form: ""Isabelle was as innocent as the princess in a fairy tale."") Finally, then, Bentley decides to take a leave of absence. only to return to make a new, full commitment to dancing: ""Joy is a gift, and I will not look for a price tag."" A rather mild, humorless identity-crisis overall--far less engaging than the one in Joan Brady's similar The Unmaking of a Dancer (p. 312)--but City Ballet fans will want to share the backstage peeks at Martins, Watts, Farrell et al., and some amusing corps-de-ballet mishaps. Winter Season: A Dancer's Journal. Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Diary of a NY City Ballet dancer, one season at the top as a dancer but in the middle in NY. To dance is one thing to live is another - good. Bentley's association with the New York City Ballet began when she was accepted by the affiliated School of American Ballet at the age of eleven. Seven years later, she became a member of the company. In the fall of 1980, as the winter season opened, she found herself facing an emotional crisis: her dancing was not going well. At 22 she felt that her life had lost direction. To try to make something of her experience, on paper if not on stage, she began to keep a journal, describing her day-to-day activities and looking back on her past. The result is perhaps the closest that most of us will ever come to knowing what it feels like to be a dancer, on stage and off. It also offers memorable glimpses of some notable members of the City ballet, with, at the center, the man whose vision they all served--George Balanchine. WINTER SEASON: A Dancer's Journal. Bentley's diary of her 1980-81 season in the corps at the New York City Ballet--a season during which she has to decide whether to keep on dancing or pursue real life. ""In the New York City Ballet I am one of seventy girls like me. Outside I'm one of seventy in the whole world--I need that kind of appreciation for my uniqueness."" So sometimes Bentley is inspired to dance--despite the horrors of toe shoes, obsessive dieting, low pay.

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