Don't dance for the audience. Dance for yourself. The basis for a lavish new drama series from Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, Fosse is the definitive book on one of Broadway's and Hollywood's most complex and dynamic icons. The only person ever to win Oscar, Emmy and Tony awards in the same year, Bob Fosse revolutionised almost every facet of American entertainment. A ground-breaking dancer, choreographer, and theatre and film director, his innumerable achievements include Cabaret , All That Jazz and Chicago , one of the longest-running Broadway musicals ever. Yet his offstage life was equally dramatic, marked by deep psychological wounds and insatiable appetites. In this richly detailed and beautifully written biography, Sam Wasson draws on a wealth of unpublished material and over 300 interviews with Fosse's family, friends, enemies, lovers and collaborators, many of them speaking publicly about Fosse for the first time. Fosse is a book bursting with energy and style, pleasure and pain - much like the man himself.

"Born into a family of successful playwrights and producers, Agnes de Mille was determined to be an actress. Then one day she witnessed the Russian ballet dancer Anna Pavlova, and her life was altered forever. Hypnotized by Pavlova's beauty, in that moment she dedicated herself to dance. Her memoir records with light-hearted humor and wisdom not only the difficulties she faced - the resistance of her parents, the sacrifices of her training - but also the frontier atmosphere of early Hollywood, as well as New York and London during the Depression. "This is the story of an American dancer," writes Agnes de Mille, "a spoiled egocentric wealthy girl, who learned with difficulty to become a worker, to set and meet standards, to brace a Victorian sensibility to contemporary roughhousing, and who, with happy good fortune, participated by the side of great colleagues in a renaissance of the most ancient and magical of all the arts.""--

In this memoir, dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer traces her personal and artistic coming of age. Feelings Are Facts (the title comes from a dictum by Rainer's one-time psychotherapist) uses diary entries, letters, program notes, excerpts from film scripts, snapshots, and film frame enlargements to present a vivid portrait of an extraordinary artist and woman in postwar America. Rainer tells of a California childhood in which she was farmed out by her parents to foster families and orphanages, of sexual and intellectual initiations in San Francisco and Berkeley, and of artistic discoveries and accomplishments in the New York City dance world. Rainer studied with Martha Graham (and heard Graham declare, "when you accept yourself as a woman, you will have turn-out"--that is, achieve proper ballet position) and Merce Cunningham in the late 1950s and early 1960s, cofounded the Judson Dance Theater in 1962 (dancing with Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, David Gordon, and Lucinda Childs), hobnobbed with New York artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Morris (her lover and partner for several years), and Yoko Ono, and became involved with feminist and anti-war causes in the 1970s and 1980s. Rainer writes about how she constructed her dances--including The Mind Is a Muscle and its famous section, Trio A, as well as the recent After Many a Summer Dies the Swan--and about turning from dance to film and back to dance. And she writes about meeting her longtime partner Martha Gever and discovering the pleasures of domestic life. The mosaic-like construction of Feelings Are Facts recalls the composition-by-juxtaposition of Rainer's work in film and dance, displaying prismatic variations from what she calls her "reckless past" for our amazement and appreciation.

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