Dancing with Cats - Hardcover

Burton Silver

3.89

332 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0297825305 ISBN 13: 9780297825302

Publisher: Weidenfeld-Nicolson, 1999

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Nine lives, four paws, and all the right moves. These photographs celebrate feline grace and have people and cats everywhere jumping for joy.

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Review:

With a hey diddle diddle, the creators of Why Cats Paint return with another version of feline (and human) reality. And suffice it to say that in Burton Silver and Heather Busch's hands, Kipling's cat that walked by himself has turned into a deeply codependent dervish. Their first book was a brilliant parody of artspeak--Busch's photos of creative felines matched by Silver's text. Their second, Dancing with Cats--an epic three years in the making!--juxtaposes psychological and spiritual mumbo-jumbo with the language of dance criticism. As Silver explores everything from visualization to mirroring to empathy, Busch is busy with her human-feline pairs. In one sequence, Fred, clad in tabby tights, kitty-cat body paint, and a tanga with a long black tail, leaps about the place with a slightly puzzled pussy: "I share its grace, power, and oneness with the universe. I relate to Fluff and the whole spectrum of feline physicality on a profound level--I even regard birds differently."

On the very next page, chubby Helen, sporting a tie-dyed purple gown and a deeply sworn belief in feng shui, identifies perhaps a bit too deeply with chunky, amber-eyed Boots (who looks suspiciously like "Trans-Expressionist" Bootsie from Why Cats Paint). And then there's Sue and Zoot. In one photo, the recumbent gray and peach cat raises his left paw to the sky as his ecstatic human does the same. Then Sue dons a feathery jerkin "in order to dance out some of her past traumas." It's difficult to say which is funnier, the photos or the text, as Silver catches pseudo-therapy's mixture of self-affirmation and non sequitur: "Dancing with Zoot helps Sue reenact and come to terms with the joy and sorrow of a brief but painful relationship: when she fell in love with her daughter's father while he was photographing bridges in the neighborhood." Though the two-legged models must have been prepared for this inspired silliness, one does wonder what on earth the cats made of their eurythmic adventures. Alas, until interspecies communication reaches a greater height, we can only dance amid our uncertainty! --Kerry Fried

From the Inside Flap:

While researching their groundbreaking book Why Cats Paint, Burton Silver and Heather Busch discovered another phenomenon that seemed to merit further investigation--people who dance with their cats. Or, more accurately, cats who dance with their people. All around the world today, people are rediscovering the ancient practice of cat dancing, tapping into this remarkable method of channeling feline energy.

Share the gift of feline grace, and connect with your cat on an entirely new level. Let yourself be inspired by the joyous photographs and moving testimonials in these pages. A brave leap forward in the history of human-feline relations, Dancing with Cats will have you and your cat jumping for joy--and cutting a rug--in no time.

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