Out Loud

for every dance: black character shoes for Spanish class and big silver tap shoes with jingles. She'd taught herself a lot of the classic repertoire on the piano. Her daughter taught also, and there was a devoted husband, Ted, who did odd jobs and drove people around.

She seemed old to me because I was young (she was fifty-two when we met, older than my mother), and we were friendly in that intergenerational way. Though flamboyant, she was old-fashioned, big on manners like a strict mother who makes her children wear neckties to church. Above all else, however, she needed to keep her students, so she couldn't afford to be one of those vicious ninety-year-old classical ballet teachers from Russia, the kind you can't ever get rid of. There aren't a lot of the crazy ones left anyway, because you can't touch the students anymore, let alone hit them with your walking stick.

She taught all over Seattle in satellite studios, church halls, and so on, but her own studio-Verla Flowers Dance Arts, where she taught hula, tap, and "toe dancing" (as people used to call dancing on pointe)-was north of the zoo in the Greenwood area. At my very first lesson, a private lesson, we learned a well-known flamenco solo form called a farruca, traditionally performed only by men, a dance of intense footwork and quick steps. I learned a couple of phrases a week. I still know most of them, and thirty-five years later, some of that very first dance made it into my own dance Four Saints in Three Acts, to music by Virgil Thomson.

Verla's Spanish dancing lessons, every Saturday for an hour and a half, were so exhilarating, so much fun, that I couldn't stop practicing on my own time. I'd do a move forever until I got it down. Immediately, I was a full-on committed perfectionist, purely because I was doing something I really liked. Verla saw something in me right away and quickly picked me out. I was new, I was eager, and I was a boy. Basically it was pretty much free-and it often is if you'

provocative. . .  A fascinating memoir that will engage anyone interested in dance, movement, or the creative process." Booklist

The absorbing story of an uncompromising genius of the dance, as revelatory and intense as his extraordinary choreography.   Salman Rushdie
 
Out Loud is a golden opportunity to get inside the mind of one of the great musicians of our time and also into the history and progress of modern dance itself.    Isaac Mizrahi

Out Loud is the story of a brilliant, complex artist, a keen observer and interpreter of the world around him, guided by one constant purpose: to create dance. This hard-to-put-down book illuminates the mind of an irreducible visionary and the art form that shaped him. Yo-Yo Ma