Download or read book Ballet s Magic Kingdom written by A. L. Volynskiĭ and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-12-01 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Akim Volynsky was a Russian literary critic, journalist, and art historian who became Saint Petersburgs liveliest and most prolific ballet critic in the early part of the twentieth century. This book, the first English edition of his provocative and influential writings, provides a striking look at life inside the world of Russian ballet at a crucial era in its history. Stanley J. Rabinowitz selects and translates forty of Volynskys articlesvivid, eyewitness accounts that sparkle with details about the careers and personalities of such dance luminaries as Anna Pavlova, Mikhail Fokine, Tamara Karsavina, and George Balanchine, at that time a young dancer in the Maryinsky company whose keen musical sense and creative interpretive power Volynsky was one of the first to recognize. Rabinowitz also translates Volynskys magnum opus, The Book of Exaltations, an elaborate meditation on classical dance technique that is at once a primer and an ideological treatise. Throughout his writings, Rabinowitz argues in his critical introduction, which sets Volynskys life and work against the backdrop of the principal intellectual currents of his time, Volynsky emphasizes the spiritual and ethereal qualities of ballet.
Download or read book Apollo s Angels written by Jennifer Homans and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-11-02 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY For more than four hundred years, the art of ballet has stood at the center of Western civilization. Its traditions serve as a record of our past. Lavishly illustrated and beautifully told, Apollo’s Angels—the first cultural history of ballet ever written—is a groundbreaking work. From ballet’s origins in the Renaissance and the codification of its basic steps and positions under France’s Louis XIV (himself an avid dancer), the art form wound its way through the courts of Europe, from Paris and Milan to Vienna and St. Petersburg. In the twentieth century, émigré dancers taught their art to a generation in the United States and in Western Europe, setting off a new and radical transformation of dance. Jennifer Homans, a historian, critic, and former professional ballerina, wields a knowledge of dance born of dedicated practice. Her admiration and love for the ballet, as Entertainment Weekly notes, brings “a dancer’s grace and sure-footed agility to the page.”
Download or read book The Fascist Turn in the Dance of Serge Lifar written by Mark Franko and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-24 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ukrainian dancer and choreographer Serge Lifar (1905-86) is recognized both as the modernizer of French ballet in the twentieth century and as the keeper of the flame of the classical tradition upon which the glory of French ballet was founded. Having migrated to France from Russia in 1923 to join Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, Lifar was appointed star dancer and ballet director at the Paris Opéra in 1930. Despite being rather unpopular with the French press at the start of his appointment, Lifar came to dominate the Parisian dance scene-through his publications as well as his dancing and choreography-until the end of the Second World War, reaching the height of his fame under the German occupation of Paris (1940-44). Rumors of his collaborationism having remained inconclusive throughout the postwar era, Lifar retired in 1958. This book not only reassesses Lifar's career, both aesthetically and politically, but also provides a broader reevaluation of the situation of dance-specifically balletic neoclassicism-in the first half of the twentieth century. The Fascist Turn in the Dance of Serge Lifar is the first book not only to discuss the resistance to Lifar in the French press at the start of his much-mythologized career, but also the first to present substantial evidence of Lifar's collaborationism and relate it to his artistic profile during the preceding decade. In examining the political significance of the critical discussion of Lifar's body and technique, author Mark Franko provides the ground upon which to understand the narcissistic and heroic images of Lifar in the 1930s as prefiguring the role he would play in the occupation. Through extensive archival research into unpublished documents of the era, police reports, the transcript of his postwar trial and rarely cited newspaper columns Lifar wrote, Franko reconstructs the dancer's political activities, political convictions, and political ambitions during the Occupation.
Download or read book The Encyclopedia of World Ballet written by Mary Ellen Snodgrass and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-06-08 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the centuries, ballet has had a rich and ever-evolving role in the humanities. Renowned choreographers, composers, and performers have contributed to this unique art form, staging enduring works of beauty. Significant productions by major companies embrace innovations and adaptations, enabling ballet to thrive and delight audiences all over the globe. In The Encyclopedia of World Ballet,Mary Ellen Snodgrass surveys the emergence of ballet from ancient Asian models to the present, providing overviews of rhythmic movement as a subject of art, photography, and cinema. Entries in this volume reveal the nature and purpose of ballet, detailing specifics about leaders in classic design and style, influential costumers and companies, and trends in technique, partnering, variation, and liturgical execution. This reference covers: Choreographers Composers Costumers Dance companies Dancers Productions Set designers Techniques Terminology Among the principal figures included here are Alvin Ailey, Afrasiyab Badalbeyli, George Balanchine, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Pierre Beauchamp, Sergei Diaghilev, Agnes DeMille, Nacho Duato, Isadora Duncan, Boris Eifman, Mats Ek, Erté, Martha Graham, Inigo Jones, Louis XIV, Amalia Hernández Navarro, Rudolf Nureyev, Marius Petipa, Jerome Robbins, Twyla Tharp, and Agrippina Vaganova. This work also features dance companies from the Americas, Australia, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Korea, New Zealand, Russia, South Africa, and Vietnam. Productions include such universal narrative favorites as Coppélia, The Nutcracker, The Sleeping Beauty, Scheherazade, Firebird, and Swan Lake. Featuring a chronology that identifies key events and figures, this volume highlights significant developments in stage presentations over the centuries. The Encyclopedia of World Ballet will serve general readers, dance instructors, and enthusiasts from middle school through college as well as professional coaches and performers, troupe directors, journalists, and historians of the arts.
Download or read book Favorite Animated Ballets written by and published by In the Hands of a Child. This book was released on with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Rosa and the Magic Moonstone written by Darcey Bussell and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2009 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rosa is confident about passing her first ballet exam, but right in the middle of her test she is whisked away to Enchantia. The King's magic moonstone has broken and all of the ballets are muddled up! Will Rosa be able to put things right?
Download or read book Delphie and the Glass Slippers Magic Ballerina Book 4 written by Darcey Bussell and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2012-09-21 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prima Ballerina Darcey Bussell takes you on a captivating journey to a faraway land of ballet and magic, the wonderful world of Enchantia! The fourth of sparkly new series for all young girls who dream of being a ballerina, or simply love to dance!
Download or read book Delphie and the Birthday Show Magic Ballerina Book 6 written by Darcey Bussell and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2012-09-21 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prima Ballerina Darcey Bussell takes you on a captivating journey to a faraway land of ballet and magic, the wonderful world of Enchantia! The sixth of sparkly new series for all young girls who dream of being a ballerina, or simply love to dance!
Download or read book Reading Dance written by Robert Gottlieb and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2008-11-04 with total page 1362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Gottlieb’s immense sampling of the dance literature–by far the largest such project ever attempted–is both inclusive, to the extent that inclusivity is possible when dealing with so vast a field, and personal: the result of decades of reading. It limits itself of material within the experience of today’s general readers, avoiding, for instance, academic historical writing and treatises on technique, its earliest subjects are those nineteenth-century works and choreographers that still resonate with dance lovers today: Giselle, The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake; Bournonville and Petipa. And, as Gottlieb writes in his introduction, “The twentieth century focuses to a large extent on the achievements and personalities that dominated it–from Pavlova and Nijinsky and Diaghilev to Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham, from Ashton and Balanchine and Robbins to Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor and Twyla Tharp, from Fonteyn and Farrell and Gelsey Kirkland (“the Judy Garland of Ballet”) to Nureyev and Baryshnikov and Astaire–as well as the critical and reportorial voices, past and present, that carry the most conviction.” In structuring his anthology, Gottlieb explains, he has “tried to help the reader along by arranging its two hundred-plus entries into a coherent groups.” Apart from the sections on major personalities and important critics, there are sections devoted to interviews (Tamara Toumanova, Antoinette Sibley, Mark Morris); profiles (Lincoln Kirstein, Bob Fosse, Olga Spessivtseva); teachers; accounts of the birth of important works from Petrouchka to Apollo to Push Comes to Shove; and the movies (from Arlene Croce and Alastair Macauley on Fred Astaire to director Michael Powell on the making of The Red Shoes). Here are the voices of Cecil Beaton and Irene Castle, Ninette de Valois and Bronislava Nijinska, Maya Plisetskaya and Allegra Kent, Serge Lifar and José Limón, Alicia Markova and Natalia Makarova, Ruth St. Denis and Michel Fokine, Susan Sontag and Jean Renoir. Plus a group of obscure, even eccentric extras, including an account of Pavlova going shopping in London and recipes from Tanaquil LeClerq’s cookbook.” With its huge range of content accompanied by the anthologist’s incisive running commentary, Reading Dance will be a source of pleasure and instruction for anyone who loves dance.
Download or read book Finding Balanchine s Lost Ballets written by Elizabeth Kattner and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since George Balanchine arrived on the American dance scene in 1933, his revolutionary, fleet-footed repertoire has been immortalized in the ballet canon. Yet most of the works he created in Russia as a budding choreographer have been lost to history—until now. In the first book to focus exclusively on Balanchine’s Russian ballets, Elizabeth Kattner offers new insights into the artistic evolution of a legend through her reconstruction of his first group ballet, Funeral March. Drawing on more than a decade of research conducted in archives in the United States and Europe, Kattner synthesizes textual descriptions, photographs, musical scores, and the comparative study of other early Balanchine ballets in order to re-create this forgotten work. By interpreting and building upon these historical findings in the studio and in performance, this project enables dance history to be experienced kinesthetically. Addressing the controversy surrounding whether unrecorded dances should be reconstructed in the first place, Kattner meticulously describes her research methodologies, providing a valuable resource for other scholars seeking to revive history in this way. Finding Balanchine’s Lost Ballets enriches our understanding of Balanchine’s development as a choreographer through its ambitious, original approach to the subject. Kattner argues for the importance of dance reconstruction, when correctly approached, as a tool for reimagining the past and charting the future possibilities of dance history research.
Download or read book Christmas in Enchantia Magic Ballerina written by Darcey Bussell and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2012-09-21 with total page 17 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prima Ballerina Darcey Bussell takes you on a captivating journey to a faraway land of ballet and magic, in this special HB, perfect for a Christmas gift!
Download or read book Ida Rubinstein written by Judith Chazin-Bennahum and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ida Rubinstein (1883–1960) captivated Paris's dancers, composers, artists, and audiences from her time in the Ballets Russes in 1909 to her final performances in 1939. Trained in Russia as an actress and a dancer, her life spanned the artistic freedom of the Belle Époque through the ravages of World War I, the Depression, and finally World War II. This critical biography carefully examines aspects of Rubinstein's life and career that have previously received little attention. These include her early life in Russia, her writing about performance aesthetics, her curated approach to acting and dancing roles, and her encumbered position as a woman and a Jew. Rubinstein used her considerable fortune to produce dozens of plays, lyric creations, and ballets, making her one of the foremost producers of the first half of the twentieth century. Employing the greatest scenic artists, Léon Bakst and Alexander Benois; the distinguished composers Igor Stravinsky, Arthur Honegger, and Claude Debussy; celebrated writers including Paul Valéry and André Gide; and the brilliant choreographer Bronislava Nijinska, Rubinstein transformed twentieth-century theater and dance.
Download or read book Ballet Music written by Matthew Naughtin and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-07-17 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Musicians who work professionally with ballet and dance companies sometimes wonder if they haven’t entered a foreign country—a place where the language and customs seem so utterly familiar and so bafflingly strange at the same. To someone without a dance background, phrases and terms--boy’s variation, pas d’action, apothéose—simply don’t fit their standard musical vocabulary. Even a familiar term like adagio means something quite different in the world of dance. Like any working professional, those conductors, composers, rehearsal pianists, instrumentalists and even music librarians working with professional ballet and dance companies must learn what dance professionals talk about when they talk about music. In Ballet Music: A Handbook Matthew Naughtin provides a practical guide for the professional musician who works with ballet companies, whether as a full-time staff member or as an independent contractor. In this comprehensive work, he addresses the daily routine of the modern ballet company, outlines the respective roles of the conductor, company pianist and music librarian and their necessary collaboration with choreographers and ballet masters, and examines the complete process of putting a dance performance on stage, from selection or existing music to commissioning original scores to staging the final production. Because ballet companies routinely revise the great ballets to fit the needs of their staff and stage, audience and orchestra, ballet repertoire is a tangled web for the uninitiated. At the core of Ballet Music: A Handbook lies an extensive listing of classic ballets in the standard repertoire, with information on their history, versions, revisions, instrumentation, score publishers and other sources for tracking down both the original music and subsequent musical additions and adaptations. Ballet Music: A Handbook is an invaluable resource for conductors, pianists and music librarians as well as any student, scholar or fan of the ballet interested in the complex machinery that works backstage before the curtain goes up.
Download or read book Five Ballets from Paris and St Petersburg written by Doug Fullington and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-26 with total page 889 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers something entirely new: detailed scene-by-scene descriptions of the action and dancing of Giselle, Paquita, Le Corsaire, La Bayadère, and Raymonda, bringing the reader far closer to what the audience saw when the curtain went up on these five classic story ballets than has heretofore been possible. Drawing on archival documents, the authors show that these ballets were like today's pop entertainment: funnier, more violent, more spectacular, and with female characters far stronger than one might expect. This rigorously researched book fills huge gaps in dance history and is bound to be of interest to practitioners, scholars, and devotees of ballet and the arts.
Download or read book Holly and the Dancing Cat Magic Ballerina Book 13 written by Darcey Bussell and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2012-09-21 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Return to the magical world of Enchantia in the captivating third series of Magic Ballerina by Darcey Bussell!
Download or read book Ballet Class written by Melissa R. Klapper and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-31 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveying the state of American ballet in a 1913 issue of McClure's Magazine, author Willa Cather reported that few girls expressed any interest in taking ballet class and that those who did were hard-pressed to find anything other than dingy studios and imperious teachers. One hundred years later, ballet is everywhere. There are ballet companies large and small across the United States; ballet is commonly featured in film, television, literature, and on social media; professional ballet dancers are spokespeople for all kinds of products; nail polish companies market colors like "Ballet Slippers" and "Prima Ballerina;" and, most importantly, millions of American children have taken ballet class. Beginning with the arrival of Russian dancers like Anna Pavlova, who first toured the United States on the eve of World War I, Ballet Class: An American History explores the growth of ballet from an ancillary part of nineteenth-century musical theater, opera, and vaudeville to the quintessential extracurricular activity it is today, pursued by countless children nationwide and an integral part of twentieth-century American childhood across borders of gender, class, race, and sexuality. A social history, Ballet Class takes a new approach to the very popular subject of ballet and helps ground an art form often perceived to be elite in the experiences of regular, everyday people who spent time in barre-lined studios across the United States. Drawing on a wide variety of materials, including children's books, memoirs by professional dancers and choreographers, pedagogy manuals, and dance periodicals, in addition to archival collections and oral histories, this pathbreaking study provides a deeply-researched national perspective on the history and significance of recreational ballet class in the United States and its influence on many facets of children's lives, including gender norms, consumerism, body image, children's literature, extracurricular activities, and popular culture.
Download or read book The Oxford Dictionary of Dance written by Debra Craine and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2010-08-19 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive and up-to-date dictionary provides all the information necessary for dance fans to navigate the diverse dance scene of the 21st century. It includes entries ranging from classical ballet to the cutting edge of modern dance.
