Joseph Mazo, author of Dance is a Contact Sport published on September 1st, 1976, has spent an entire performing season with the New York City Ballet Company (NYCBC). Throughout this experience, he learned and noted each and every reason dance is in fact a sport and every aspect of the art form. In this book, he takes the reader behind the scenes of his experience. In his concise writing style, he describes the exciting, high pressure life of the entire company, from the ballet students, to the Corps de Ballet, the principle of dancers, and the director of the company, “Mr. B”.  However; even though the book was interesting enough, it was often hard to read for long periods of time, and it lacked the information I initially read the book to obtain. It was more on his story, not the topic itself.

         The organization of this book definitely plays a role in my perception of the book. Dance is a Contact Sport is organized into sections, and the only problem with this is that the order in which these sections were placed were hard to follow for an eighth grader. Despite the sections being hard to follow, I found the content to be quite interesting. My personal favorite section entitled Injuries explained many mishaps that the dancers had faced, and how they affected the performance season.  For example, he explains how a lot of the injuries were the result of overworking their feet and ankles on pointe, which often led to stress fractures, or more commonly tendinitis.

        To help the reader better understand  some of the medical and ballet terminology, Mazo added a glossary at the end of the book, which even being a dancer myself was visited frequently. Just so you know, tendinitis is the inflammation (swelling) in the tendons of foot and ankle joints.  Another section that should be noticed is It Begins with Passion. In this section the author gives us the backstories of the NYCBC performance company’s dancers, and how they started and pursued their dreams of becoming professional dancers. This section was most likely included to inspire young people (not just dancers) to follow their dreams.

        I’d say this book is more for the adult audience, because for a teen it wouldn’t be necessarily interesting unless you are big on knowing every little detail of dance, and were interested in the controversy on whether or not dance should be considered a sport. Although dance is most commonly considered an art form or activity rather than a sport, Mazo wanted the reader to walk away from this book considering dancers to be athletes at the very least.