Reading Dance: A Gathering of Memoirs, Reportage, Criticism, Profiles, Interviews and Some Uncategorizable Extras

Robert Gottlieb’s immense sampling of the dance literature–by far the largest such project ever attempted–is both inclusive, to the extent that inclusivity is possible when dealing with so vast a field, and personal: the result of decades of reading.

It limits itself of material within the experience of today’s general readers, avoiding, for instance, academic historical writing and treatises on technique, its earliest subjects are those nineteenth-century works and choreographers that still...