Dance
For many years Whistlestop Bookshop has been a strong supporter of the Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet, from its original genius-dreamer Marcia Dale Weary to the dazzling and dynamic institution that it is today. Cumberland County is now home to several studios of dance, and we welcome and support all of them. I particularly admire dance for a counter-intuitive reality: it is a bookish art even as it abstracts beauty and grace from physics and human movement. Great writing about dance surrounded it from the beginning, great photography is drawn to it, and artwork for both adults and children celebrates it. We welcome dancers throughout the year, we welcome their brave and heroic families, and we welcome the opportunity to stock wonderful books about the art.
Swan Dive: The Making of a Rogue Ballerina
Swan Dive: The Making of a Rogue Ballerina
"A page-turner." —The New York Times
Award-winning New York City Ballet soloist Georgina Pazcoguin, aka the Rogue Ballerina, gives readers a backstage tour of the real world of elite ballet—the gritty, hilarious, sometimes shocking truth you don’t see from the orchestra circle.
In this love letter to the art of dance and the sport that has been her livelihood, NYCB’s first Asian American female soloist Georgina Pazcoguin lays bare her unfiltered story of leaving small-town Pennsylvania for New York City and training amid the unique demands of being a hybrid professional athlete/artist, all before finishing high school. She pitches us into the fascinating, whirling shoes of dancers in one of the most revered ballet companies in the world with an unapologetic sense of humor about the cutthroat, survival-of-the-fittest mentality at NYCB. Some swan dives are literal: even in the ballet, there are plenty of face-plants, backstage fights, late-night parties, and raucous company bonding sessions.
Rocked by scandal in the wake of the #MeToo movement, NYCB sits at an inflection point, inching toward progress in a strictly traditional culture, and Pazcoguin doesn’t shy away from ballet’s dark side. She continues to be one of the few dancers openly speaking up against the sexual harassment, mental abuse, and racism that in the past went unrecognized or was tacitly accepted as par for the course—all of which she has painfully experienced firsthand.
Tying together Pazcoguin’s fight for equality in the ballet with her infectious and deeply moving passion for her craft, Swan Dive is a page-turning, one-of-a-kind account that guarantees you'll never view a ballerina or a ballet the same way again.