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This is a charming reminiscence and career survey of a very American ballerina who had the great fortune of good timing in the development of professional American ballet companies, and who also had the perspicacity to make good choices for herself.

The almost coffee table sized volume was on display at the Edison Walthall lobby during the June 2002 USA International Ballet Competition with strategically placed order cards. I made use of one and my copy and my return to San Francisco neatly coincided.

Janie Parker cheerfully acknowledges her debt to her mother for many of the details of her narrative, and Dee Parker-Davies provides them with equal cheer. One of the endearing parts of the book is the detailed appendices. They cover Janie’s participation in the Ruth Mitchell Company, Atlanta; The National Music Camp, Interlocken, Michigan; the North Carolina School for the Arts; The Ballet de Grand Theatre du Geneve and Houston Ballet, giving years plus the colleagues or instructors and the positions attained by her colleagues. In addition to notes on the ballets Janie danced, sections deal with dance history, costumes, practices like autographs, classes and some explanations of ballet vocabulary. Photographs, snaps or formal, many of them small and used to separate discussions of different topics, are frequent.

For those unfamiliar with Janie’s name, Parker was the first American gold medallist at the U.S.A. International Ballet Competition in Jackson in the year 1982. It also was the year that Houston Ballet made quite a sweep with its medallists, along with artistic director Ben Stevenson winning the choreographic prize for one of the pieces he set on Janie and her partner William Pizzuto. That same year the Jackson organizers contracted to make a documentary on the Competition To Dance For Gold with Jacques d’Amboise as the narrator.

Europeans with long memories will recall that Parker danced under Patricia Neary’s direction in ballet ensemble in Geneva, Switzerland, before Parker opted to join Houston Ballet under Ben Stevenson’s direction. Thanks to the éclat garnered at Jackson and Ben Stevenson’s reputation, Parker enjoyed extensive exposure and a fair amount of guesting during her Houston career before retiring in 1996.. It was well deserved; she personified the quotation used as the basis for the book’s title:

The art of dancing is for generous hearts that love it And for gentle spirits that have a heaven-sent inclination for it.

Guglielmo Ebreo (William the Jew)
Treatise on the Art of Dancing, 1463.

Parker was an incandescent dancer, a lift to the spirit. In this unpretentious account I make just one criticism regarding her account, which concerned the winners in the 1982 Jackson Competition. While Parker was justifiably proud in relating the sweep made by Houston artists, including Chinese-native Li Cun Xin, there was one senior silver medallist not mentioned in the text: Alexei Zuberia of Venezuela. I wrote on the Competition for two Houston publications and found the omission startling. Dare I suggest the lapse was parochial by the authors? Otherwise it is a wonderful record of a time, a place and a dancer in expanding professional dance life of the United States.