- It’s finally here -
Slow Dancing
Is Easy
- It’s finally here -
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Just plain funny is all too rare in dance these days. Ara Fitzgerald’s work is not only funny, but also witty, accessible and moving. She’s a thread in an all-but-forgotten lineage of female solo performers - Lotte Goslar, Margie Beals, even Whoopi Goldberg - whose every gesture speaks decades of experience.
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Marta Renzi, Choreographer and filmmaker
About Slow Dancing Is Easy
From Why Did Sarah Bernhardt Sleep in a Coffin? to The Invisible Circus of the Present Tense, Slow Dancing Is Easy, blends humor and pathos in a genre fluid collection of short pieces that resonate with memoir, observations and fantasy chronicling one woman’s adventures over decades. Originally created for stage performance, these ‘stories in motion’ make an exuberant leap from stage to page in this offering from Still River Books that integrates text with whimsical illustrations and explores themes of life’s stages, family, community, and the magic of truth in politics and in creative practice.
This is a book for readers drawn to work that resists easy categorization as well as dance/theater, poetry aficionados and performers seeking solo material. Slow Dancing Is Easy can be read privately or encountered in public, through readings and performances that extend its life beyond
the page.
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Ara Fitzgerald’s work is quirky and profound in the same moment. I find myself laughing with abandon in one section and then quickly brought to a place of exquisite tenderness in the next.
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Rebecca Stenn, Choreographer, performer, painter,
faculty The New School
Reviews
I love this book!....whimsical and profound, Ara Fitzgerald‘s memoir captures the truth of a woman’s life as an artist coming of age in the 1960’s.
Emily Mann, Artistic Director and Resident Playwright Emerita McCarter Theatre Center, Princeton, NJ
Slow Dancing is Easy is a surprising gift, vital medicine, rich dharma, and a tweaking of my ears.
Geoff Shoun O’Keffe , Executive Director Zen Peacemakers
Ara’s voice lifts off the page in wise, precise, lyrical fits of language that will fall back into the mouths of future performers, and into the imaginations of her lucky readers, as gold.
Heather Harpham, author of Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever-After, theater artist, writing faculty, Sarah Lawrence College