Once A Dancer: An Autobiography - Softcover

Kent, Allegra

4.03

339 ratings by Goodreads

9780312187507: Once A Dancer: An Autobiography

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312187505 ISBN 13: 9780312187507

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 1998

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Allegra Kent joined the New York City Ballet at the age of fifteen and, only two years later, inspired Balanchine's unforgettable The Unanswered Question. Beautiful, sensuous, and mysterious, she quickly became an essential Balanchine dancer-and the story of her personal life is as dramatic as they story of her rise to fame. Her account of a bizarre childhood, a magnificent if curious dance career, a charged, complicated domestic life with photographer Bert Stern, and a never-ending struggle with emotional, physical, and financial pressures is fascinating-as are her portraits of the other great dance figures who punctuated her life, from Balanchine to Baryshnikov.

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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 pli� from a jet�.

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

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