|
Book of the week
| When Joy Womack was an adolescent ballet student, she’d practice for hours at the ballet barre and then go home to watch the Russian greats: Osipova, Baryshnikov and Nureyev.
As they danced with gravity-defying grace on the small television screen in her childhood bedroom half a world away, Joy whispered to herself, “This is who I want to be. This is what I want to do.”
Womack would learn, when she joined the Bolshoi Academy as a student and then aspired to join the Bolshoi Ballet company, that Russia treated ballet with such a reverence and respect that the art was synonymous with the nation’s national identity.
Joy Womack’s memoir, “Behind the Red Velvet Curtain,” written with MPR’s own Elizabeth Shockman, unveils the story of the physical suffering, the emotional endurance and the dawning awareness that to dance on Russia’s most celebrated stages, talent will not be enough.
— Kerri Miller, MPR News |
|
|
|
|
|
