Mindy Aloff’s essays, reviews, profiles, and interviews on literature and the performing arts have appeared in many periodicals and anthologies internationally, including The New Yorker and The New York Times. The editor of several books, most recently the Agnes de Mille reader, Leaps in the Dark: Art and the World (2011), Aloff is also the author of Dance Anecdotes: Stories From the Worlds of Ballet, Broadway, the Ballroom, and Modern Dance (2006), Hippo in a Tutu: Dancing in Disney Animation (2009), and Night Lights (1979), a collection of poetry. A former fellow of the Woodrow Wilson and John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Foundations, she teaches dance criticism and history and a course for freshmen in the personal essay at Barnard College.
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Hippo in a TutuDancing in Disney AnimationEven in a traditional "princess" picture, such as the still-popular 1950 Cinderella, the scene with the most romantic magic—the Fred-and-Ginger buoyancy and sense of brimming anticipation—is not, as we would expect, Cinderella's waltz with the Prince in the ballroom. That we only get to glimpse from behind the courtiers watching it—during those moments when the dance isn't interrupted by comic business for secondary characters or by the couple themselves breaking off the dance merely to drink in each other's shadows. The accent is on their private discovery of their feelings, not on the public celebration of their newfound romance. The real dance energy, rather, surges forth in the designing, cutting, and assembly of the heroine's dress in her lonely bedroom by an exaltation of singing mice and birds: a solitary girl's fantasy. The Disney inspirational artist for Cinderella, as for many animated features of the 1950s, was the brilliant and thoughtful painter Mary Blair. Although Blair was frequently heartbroken by what she viewed as the mistranslation of her concepts in the finished films—a feeling that seems to be embodied in the moment when Cinderella's wicked stepmother and stepsisters tear her dress to shreds—throughout the picture you can still see evidence of Blair's deeply unconventional ideas of how stories can be told through synecdoche (key details made to stand for a larger whole) and emotions represented through color and shifts in proportion.Hippo in a Tutu:Dancing in Disney Animation
"Esteemed dance critic Aloff offers up a delicious and provocative pastiche of anecdotes from the world of dance . . . The stories are insightful, witty, occasionally juicy and often dark. Aloff is delightfully subjective and partial in her choices . . . This volume is destined to be bedside reading for those fond of backstage insight and intrigue." —Publishers Weekly [on Dance Anecdotes]
"In this delightful collection, Mindy Aloff redefines the notion of anecdote as topical fluff. While her book has its share of today's amusing stories, the reader will also find a range of subjects from Ancient Greece to the courts of France to Balanchine and a look, both serious and humorous, at such issues as stagefright, criticism, creativity, and backstage politics. Her selections are not only entertaining but informative." —Nancy Reynolds, Director of Research at the George Balanchine Foundation, and co-author of No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century [on Dance Anecdotes]
"Aloff, herself a fine writer and critic, has plucked the best of Agnes de Mille, one of the most vivid writers in dance, and made a bouquet of them that is as pungent as de Mille’s writing." —Alexandra Tomalonis, editor of Dance View [on Leaps in the Dark]
Selected Works
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