Once a Dancer...An Autobiography - Hardcover

Kent, Allegra

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312150512 ISBN 13: 9780312150518

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1997

Synopsis

A memoir of the ballet dancer, tracing her childhood, dance career, and marriage to photographer Bert Stern, includes portraits of dance figures in her life

About this title

Review

This unusual, fascinating, and at times almost surreal autobiography chronicles the life of Allegra Kent, one of the most famous--and notorious--of Balanchine's prima ballerinas. The most blatantly erotic of Balanchine ballets were written for her pliant and chilly dance method. This book has it all: art, dance, infidelity, sexual intrigue, histrionics, eccentric outbursts, nose jobs, philosophy, and Krishnamurti. Entirely entertaining and intriguing for both dance enthusiasts and those who don't know a plié from a jeté.

Book Description

Autobiography of one of Balanchine's finest ballerinas

 

"What a witty, evocative writer Ms. Kent is!"--New York Times

 

"A daffy and unexpectedly poignant autobiography. . . . [Kent] repossesses as a writer the unpredictable charm of her dancing. She is zanily elegant . . . frequently stranded, broke, desperate, abused, or abandoned, yet well served by a fey kind of gumption."--Kirkus Reviews

 

"In [Balanchine's] garden of unearthly delights, Allegra Kent as the most enchanting bloom of all. . . . Through Kent's own wise and courageous recollections . . . we see her unique spirit and almost see again her glorious dancing."--Vanity Fair

 

"[Kent's] writing is as varied, lucid, and troubling as her dancing. . . . To ask whether she knows how much she has inadvertently told us is merely to frame one more time the terms of her peculiar mystery."--Wall Street Journal

 

"As distinctly riveting as she ever was on stage."--Dance Magazine

 

"Kent, one feels, has never known quite where or who she is. . . . Born Iris Cohen in 1937, she had an early life that was the crazy kind you might find in the fiction of Flannery O'Connor. . . . [She writes,] '[Mr. B.] saw in me the psychological raw materials that could be molded and remolded into images of sensuality--unrealized and restrained, but there, just under the surface. The star inside the sapphire.' This is not only a convincing analysis of a difficult concept, it is beautiful writing."--Washington Post

 

Edition details

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0312150512
• ISBN 13: 9780312150518
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 340