From Blog Director Jill Randall:

I enjoyed Rebecca Stenn's recent post on the blog about her new book A Life in Dance: A Practical Guide. I read the piece and then quickly purchased my own copy on amazon.com. It was my "vacation read" last week, and I loved sitting down and experiencing it through my week away.

This book is multi-functional and versatile – I enjoyed it as a 41 year old dancer, 20 years into my career, reading the essays and personal stories. I also highly recommend this book as a required reading in a Senior Seminar Course. It also is ideal for any dancer in their first 5 years post-college. Congratulations to Rebecca Stenn and Fran Kirmser for crafting such a versatile book.

A Life in Dance covers many much-needed topics, questions, and discussions about career paths, career changes, performing, teaching, raising a family, and much more. I think my three favorite essays include:

• "Teaching in the Schools, Kindergarten through Twelfth Grade: Jody Gottfried Arnhold" by Rebecca Stenn
• "Families and Dancing (Motherhood)" by Ellis Wood
• "Ballet and Life After Ballet: Heather Watts" by Rebecca Stenn

The book is a combination of first-person essays and interviews shaped into essays. I like that they all are "bite sized" pieces, with an average length of 4 pages.

To use the book in a college course, here are a few potential options:

• Require the students to read the entire 200-page book over the course of the semester. Ask students to create an ongoing Word Doc, where they write a 2-4 sentence response after each essay. What resonated for you? What did you learn? What inspired you? If you do this assignment on a Google Doc instead, professors can then "comment" on each student's writing to begin a dialogue.
• Parse out the book over the course of the semester, such as assigning 10 pages of reading a week or maybe 3 essays a week. Each Friday, lead a brief discussion about the readings.
• If requiring the whole book over the course of the semester, require that students do a 10-minute internet search after each reading to follow up about each artist. Who is this artist? Do they have a website? Youtube videos? Can you still see this artist perform or take classes with them? Ask students to document their findings in a Word Doc as well.

I personally thank Rebecca Stenn and Fran Kirmser for their time and dedication to create this book – a much needed addition in the field. 

Last – for other dancers interested in publishing….this book is a great example of self-publishing through amazon.com's platform CreateSpace. It is a simple design and a paperback book, and it serves as a model example for other dancers to take the brave leap to contribute to the field and to publish. Find out more about CreateSpace Publishing here.

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