Dance Across the USA

Jonathan Givens has undertaken a most ambitious project before writing Dance Across the USA, traveling through all the states of the country and inviting selected dancers for photo shoots. The book, a trade paperback edition, is beautiful. Givens photographed one or several dancers in a dance pose in local National Parks, grasslands, preserves, parkways, or monuments, and the photos are striking with backgrounds of spectacular scenery. It took ninety days of traveling, mostly by a minibus, and plenty of advanced preparations, including paying for expensive permits. For each new location (and he has fifty-six) he added a brief text along with location information and historic, geographic, and personal notes, but the main subjects are the dancers, mostly young girls and young women. The captions provide the location, name, and age of the dancer. Occasional quotes add another interest to this volume. But Givens would’ve been better to concentrate on quality instead of quantity. With well over one-hundred photos, and many dancers in rather similar poses, it frankly becomes a little boring to page through his book. Still, this is a nice coffee table book.