Married to Dance...a story that's an intimate part of the wild and dangerous - yet sweet - turns of the 20th century itself. Events in it might call the bluff of an ambitious writer of action-adventure fiction, but the story is true, and its focus is fiercely sharp. A pair of ballet dancers trained in the grandly classical Russian tradition rise toward glory in their own land only to find out first-hand what occupation and exile really mean. First the Nazis seize their country, then the Communists claim it for their own. Throughout the political mayhem, the two dancers keep performing. They dance through war-ravaged Europe, and often in leading roles of major avant-garde productions - Carmina Burana and Abraxas, two of the better-known of the many. They literally dance through bombings and occupations. They survive despite the hardships and a catastrophic illness they try to keep secret. After emigrating to America they take menial jobs to get by, but through will and through passion they keep dancing. Once again the dramatic brightness of publicity starts shining their way, then by coincidence (and trickery, too) they get drawn to a small, North Texas city whose sense of culture is as powerful and uneven as its people and landscape. There they not only endure what they are told will be a cultural desert that will destroy them, but they thrive as they raise the quality and quantity of art in the place to such heights that they become legendary. The story of Irina Kladivova and Frank Karhanek Pal, Married to Dance makes rich use of its subjects' own colorfully dramatic senses of language. Photographs and information from numerous public and private sources spanning a tortuous yet oddly lyrical 80-year period support the narration. Included, too, is a chronology of works the Pals performed or helped produce between the 1930s and their retirement in 1988, in addition to a listing of the dancers in the prize-winning Wichita Falls Ballet Theatre, since its founding in 1963, and ballet board officers whose efforts sustained the Pals' work.
來源: Google Book