Six Good Books: Recommended by dancers across Canada - Vancouver Ballet Society
By Kristen Lawson
Dance International asked dancers across Canada to recommend their favourite reads. The results cover a range of interests, from classic fiction to contemporary essays, something for everyone. Each of the books spoke to their nominators in memorable and personal ways, revealing some of the questions and concerns that are important to them, and to the culture we’re living in, at this moment in time.
Slow Spatial Reader: Chronicles of Radical Affection, Carolyn F. Strauss, editor
Sara Coffin (Halifax, Nova Scotia) recommends Slow Spatial Reader: Chronicles of Radical Affection (Valiz), a collection of essays on how we think about and engage with space. The 2021 book was compiled by Carolyn F. Strauss, director of Slow Research Lab in the Netherlands.
The collection includes works from contributors across 24 countries, coming from backgrounds as diverse as performance, sculpture, and architecture. Strauss aims to inspire a cultural shift toward slow thinking and acting, hoping it will result in new ways of caring and connecting.
Coffin was introduced to Slow Spatial Reader while working with dance dramaturge Guy Cools in her role as co-artistic director of Mocean Dance. She enjoys flipping to random essays and reading them once “to settle, focus, and arrive with my thoughts,” then again “to absorb the content and digest the tone and space it offers.” Her favourite essay is Holding Space, Together by Alessandra Pomarico with Kū Kahakalau and Kate Morales, which examines the process of becoming one of many, coming together like a hive rather than as separate beings.
Illustrated Black History: Honoring the Iconic and the Unseen by George McCalman
Kidd Pivot dancer Brandon Alley (Vancouver, British Columbia) recommends George McCalman’s Illustrated Black History: Honoring the Iconic and the Unseen (HarperOne).
Illustrated Black History features 145 original paintings of people integral to Black American history, from legends like Aretha Franklin to lesser-known names, like Guion S. Bluford, the first Black person to travel into space. McCalman recognized that Black history is treated as a secondary history in our culture and set out to change that, designing this 2022 compendium to be educational and inviting for all readers, with eye-catching portraits and short biographies of each subject.
Alley confesses he doesn’t read very often, but flips through this engaging book when he has free time at home. “It will open your eyes and your heart to icons that need to be recognized. It’s a poetic read with enlightening energy bursting from its pages.”
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Connor McLeary and Devon McLean (Edmonton, Alberta), dancers with Ballet Edmonton, each recommend a favourite novel.
A friend of McLeary’s convinced him to read John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (Penguin Books), saying it would turn him from an occasional reader to a bookworm. He found a used copy online, and asserts that the story transformed him. “It shined a light on how money can change a person for better or worse.”
The simple yet powerful storytelling and sprawling setting give the 1952 novel a mythic quality. It follows the lives of two California families destined to reenact the fates of Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel from the Book of Genesis. Driven by pride, love, jealousy, and the struggle for acceptance, the characters find themselves heading down paths leading to prosperity for some and destruction for others. Published a decade before Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the prolific American author considered East of Eden to be his magnum opus (the Penguin edition is 608 pages).
The Green Mile by Stephen King
McLean received a copy of Stephen King’s six-part thriller The Green Mile (Simon and Schuster) from a family friend. She found the 1996 novel “brings to light the shared humanity we experience across cultures and values, as well as the urgency we feel to live our most colourful lives.”
The story is narrated by an elderly prison guard recounting events that had taken place more than 30 years earlier when he presided over inmates on death row at the fictional Cold Mountain Penitentiary in Louisiana. He reflects on how his life now resembles those of the condemned men, as he awaits his own death in isolation in an assisted-living facility.
Exploring themes of racism, violence, mercy, and the supernatural, The Green Mile begins with a heinous crime and a supposedly guilty man, considered a monster even by the other prisoners awaiting execution. It won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel and the Audie Award for Fiction, before being turned into the iconic film of the same name.
Nothing Will be Different: A Memoir by Tara McGowan-Ross
Dancer and emerging choreographer Brittney Canda (Montreal, Quebec) raves about Nothing Will Be Different: A Memoir (Dundurn Press) by Tara McGowan-Ross. Canda admits she is biased, as the Mi’kmaw author is her best friend. “For me, it’s a self-portrait of a person I love, but it’s also extremely well written, hilarious, and heart-breaking.”
Nothing Will Be Different tells the story of McGowan-Ross’ journey of self-discovery that she embarks upon after finding an abnormal lump in her breast at the age of 27. She reveals the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of her life in her search for answers, feeling the need to understand her self-sabotaging choices and learn to live well before it’s too late.
The unflinching coming-of-age memoir was one of five finalists for the 2022 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, nominated for its wit, depth, and intense voice. (The winner was a scientific history of the effect of coronaviruses on society, which is hardly surprising given the ongoing pandemic.)
Feel Free by Zadie Smith
Independent dance artist Justine A. Chambers (Vancouver) says one of her favourite books is Zadie Smith’s 2018 collection of essays Feel Free (Penguin Books), a gift from her partner.
Chambers says she has felt a sense of kinship with the British author ever since reading Smith’s novel, White Teeth, published in 2000, wondering if it’s because they were born the same year, are both mixed race, and have deep connections to dance. But mostly, she thinks, it’s “the way her words propel me into sensation and considerations of empathy. There is a rhythm to her writing and an acute attention to what is felt [physically] — she prioritizes the embodied.”
Feel Free is comprised of some of Smith’s classic essays and previously unpublished works. It asks questions relevant to contemporary life, on topics such as politics, libraries, social media, and climate change. Smith’s answers are sharp yet heartfelt, exposing truths we didn’t know we knew. Feel Free won the American National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism in 2018.
