Life Moves: Telling tales and making people happy
By Robin J. Miller
Google “how to write a book” and you get masses of advice, mostly divided into a series of “simple,” or better yet, “amazingly simple,” steps to publishing success. Many share a similar first step — “develop a writer’s mindset” — which might be great advice, but for me, a freelance writer who already has a certain kind of writer’s mindset (known as making a living), this advice was singularly unhelpful.
After I had accepted a commission from Dance Victoria to write a history of the major forces behind contemporary dance in Victoria, British Columbia, from 1978 to 2020, I quickly realized I had no idea how I, a non-historian, was going to do it. I’d written about dance for years, but was more used to producing magazine-length features, profiles, and reviews than something as ambitious as a book.
Small City, Big Talent — published earlier this year by Suddenly Dance Theatre — needed to contain renowned locals, starting with solo artist/choreographer/teacher Lynda Raino and dancer/teacher/impresario Constantine Darling, who together and apart shaped Victoria’s modern dance world for generations, before moving on to Crystal Pite, who is still in the process of conquering the world with her startlingly original choreography. It also needed to include the organizations that have made it possible for the work of these and other significant creators to make it onto the stage and helped build what is now a sophisticated, dedicated dance audience.
My first big challenge was that I knew I couldn’t write the book in rigid chronological order — this happened, then that happened — without boring myself and the reader silly, though there are many brilliant historians writing today who certainly could. Second, I wanted to be sure that all potential readers — dance aficionados and novices, locals and non-locals alike — would be able to come along for the ride. Third, a single volume could not possibly cover the entire Victoria dance world of this period without becoming a very expensive doorstop.
When I finally decided (sounds easy; took two years) that the best route was to write the book as a series of stories, with lightly explanatory sidebars and a series of boxes for interesting digressions, along with lots of glorious photos, the dams burst and the heavens opened. Telling tales about the lives of dance artists in a book-length project is fun. I had the space to delve deep into each major figure, discovering wonderful things about their families and early lives that help illuminate the adults and artists they became. I also had space to make clear that no artist becomes great without a community to learn from, lean on, and collaborate with, and how this city and its location on the edge of the Pacific Ocean was good (or bad) for these particular artists and their dance ambitions.
I had hoped Small City, Big Talent, with its many short segments and fabulous images, would be an easy and appealing read; what I hadn’t anticipated was that so many people would love it for simply being a book. A book on dance makes people happy in a way no single article can. A book says that this ephemeral, perpetually underfunded art form is a legitimate endeavour, worthy of respect, and overdue for celebration.
