Download or read book Imperial Dancer written by Coryne Hall and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2012-05-30 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The vivacious Mathilde Kschessinska (1872-1971) was the mistress of three Russian Grand Dukes and the greatest ballerina of her generation. As a young girl, she had enjoyed romantic troika rides, and passionate nights, with the future Tsar Nicholas II. When their relationship ended Mathilde began simultaneous affairs with Nicholas's cousin, Grand Duke Sergei and Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich. When her son was born in 1902 nobody knew for certain the identity of the father - except that he was undoubtedly a Romanov. In ballet, she partnered the great Vaslav Nijinsky, became a force to be reckoned with in the Imperial Theatre and, later in life, taught Margot Fonteyn. Mathilde Kschessinska is mentioned in almost every book about the Romanovs but so many myths surround her that she has become the stuff of legend. It is said a hoard of Romanov treasure lies buried under her house in St Petersburg and that a secret passage connected her home to the Winter Palace. Even her own memoirs, published in the 1960s, are as much fantasy as reality. The real story, which this book will reveal, lies in what Mathilde did not say.
Download or read book Imperial Dancer written by Coryne Hall and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2012-05-30 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mathilde Kschessinska (1872-1971) was the mistress of three Russian Grand Dukes and the greatest ballerina of her generation. She is in almost every book about the Romanovs, but so many myths surround her that she has become the stuff of legend. After her own memoirs, this title aims to reveal the real story by looking at what she did not say.
Download or read book The Lone Hand written by and published by . This book was released on 1913 with total page 916 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Dancer and the Devil written by John E. O'Neill and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Communism must kill what it cannot control. So for a century, it has killed artists, writers, musicians, and even dancers. It kills them secretly, using bioweapons and poison to escape accountability. Among its victims was Anna Pavlova, history’s greatest dancer, who was said to have God-given wings and feet that never touched the ground. But she defied Stalin, and for that she had to die. Her sudden death in Paris in 1931 was a mystery until now. The Dancer and the Devil traces Marxism’s century-long fascination with bioweapons, from the Soviets’ leak of pneumonic plague in 1939 that nearly killed Stalin to leaks of anthrax at Kiev in 1972 and Yekaterinburg in 1979; from the leak of a flu in northeast China in 1977 that killed millions to the catastrophic COVID-19 leak from biolabs in Wuhan, China. Marxism’s dark past must not be a parent to the world’s dark future. COMMUNIST CHINA PLAYED WITH FIRE AND THE WORLD IS BURNING Nearly ten million people have died so far from the mysterious Covid-19 virus. These dead follow a long line of thousands of other brave souls stretching back nearly a century who also suffered mysterious “natural” deaths, including dancers, writers, saints and heroes. These honored dead should not be forgotten by amnesiac government trying to avoid inconvenient truth. The dead and those who remember and loved them deserve answers to two great questions. How? Why? The Dancer and the Devil answers these questions. It tracks a century of Soviet and then Chinese Communist poisons and bioweapons through their development and intentional use on talented artists and heroes like Anna Pavlova, Maxim Gorky, Raoul Wallenberg and Alexis Navalny. It then tracks leaks of bioweapons beginning in Saratov, Russia in 1939 and Soviet Yekaterinburg in 1979 through Chinese leaks concluding in the recent concealed leak of the manufactured bioweapon Covid-19 from the military lab in Wuhan, China. Stalin, Putin, and Xi, perpetrators of these vast crimes against humanity itself, should not be allowed to escape responsibility. This book assembles the facts on these cowardly murderers, calling them to account for their heartless crimes against man concluding in Covid-19.
Download or read book Nijinsky written by Lucy Moore and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'He achieves the miraculous,' the sculptor Auguste Rodin wrote of dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. 'He embodies all the beauty of classical frescoes and statues'. Like so many since, Rodin recognised that in Nijinsky classical ballet had one of the greatest and most original artists of the twentieth century, in any genre. Immersed in the world of dance from his childhood, he found his natural home in the Imperial Theatre and the Ballets Russes, he had a powerful sponsor in Sergei Diaghilev - until a dramatic and public failure ended his career and set him on a route to madness. As a dancer, he was acclaimed as godlike for his extraordinary grace and elevation, but the opening of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring saw furious brawls between admirers of his radically unballetic choreography and horrified traditionalists. Nijinsky's story has lost none of its power to shock, fascinate and move. Adored and reviled in his lifetime, his phenomenal talent was shadowed by schizophrenia and an intense but destructive relationship with his lover, Diaghilev. 'I am alive' he wrote in his diary, 'and so I suffer'. In the first biography for forty years, Lucy Moore examines a career defined by two forces - inspired performance and an equally headline-grabbing talent for controversy, which tells us much about both genius and madness. This is the full story of one of the greatest figures of the twentieth century, comparable to the work of Rosamund Bartlett or Sjeng Scheijen.
Download or read book Bloomsbury Ballerina written by Judith Mackrell and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2013-10-17 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Mackrell's enthralling biography restores Lydia Lopokova to her rightful position centre-stage' DAILY MAIL 'Superb ... Mackrell, with her insider's knowledge of ballet and theatre, lovingly recreates Lydia's many worlds' GAY & LESBIAN REVIEW 'A hugely entertaining and informative study of the Ballets Russes star' SPECTATOR Born in 1891 in St Petersburg, Lydia Lopokova lived a long and remarkable life. Her vivacious personality and the sheer force of her charm propelled her to the top of Diaghilev's Ballet Russes. Through a combination of luck, determination and talent, Lydia became a star in Paris, a vaudeville favourite in America, the toast of Britain and then married the world-renowned economist, and formerly homosexual, John Maynard Keynes. Lydia's story links ballet and the Bloomsbury group, war, revolution and the economic policies of the super-powers. She was an immensely captivating, eccentric and irreverent personality: a bolter, a true bohemian and, eventually, an utterly devoted wife.
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 Harper s Weekly written by and published by . This book was released on 1916 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dancing Genius written by Hanna Järvinen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-05-28 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the historical figure of Vaslav Nijinsky in contemporary documents and later reminiscences, Dancing Genius opens up questions about authorship in dance, about critical evaluation of performance practice, and the manner in which past events are turned into history.
Download or read book Social Dance and the Modernist Imagination in Interwar Britain written by Rishona Zimring and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguing that social dance haunted the interwar imagination, Zimring reveals the powerful figurative importance of music and dance, both in the aftermath of war, and during Britain's entrance into cosmopolitan modernity and the modernization of gender relations. Analysing paintings, films, memoirs, ballet, documentary texts and writings by Modernist authors, Zimring illuminates the ubiquitous presence of social dance in the British imagination during a time of cultural transition and recuperation.
Download or read book Reincarnated Dancer written by Leng YueHanXue and published by Funstory. This book was released on 2020-10-12 with total page 1487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dancer went through several lifetimes of reincarnation, looking for the experience of true love. Among all living things, everyone wished to remember their past and present lives, but who could understand the pain within?
Download or read book A Life Well Danced Maria Zybina s Russian Heritage Her Legacy of Classical Ballet and Character Dance Across Europe written by Jane Gall Spooner and published by Troubador Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2022-12-20 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relatively little has been written about how ballet teachers become teachers themselves and how each generation passes on its experience to the next. The teacher-dancer relationship within the context of the Russian classical tradition is a theme of “A Life Well Danced”. It is presented through the lens of a young girl who lived through emigration and displacement at the time of the Russian Revolution, who experienced this again as an adult after the Second World War and who went on to establish a successful career as a teacher, examiner and choreographer. The book also touches on the teaching and performing of European character dance which is also an under-appreciated field. “A Life Well Danced” was inspired by the author’s direct connection through Zybina and her teachers, Nicolai Legat in London, Evgenia Eduardova in Berlin and Elena Poliakova in Belgrade, to the flowering of Russian classical ballet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when Marius Petipa was choreographing works such as Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty. An interview with Zybina provides the framework for material in memoirs and first-hand accounts that are drawn upon for their lively descriptions of the Imperial Theatre School and the Mariinsky ballet company in St. Petersburg. Born in Moscow, Zybina and her family fled to Europe at the time of the Russian Revolution. Her first marriage to an English diplomat took her to Belgrade and a career as a dancer and ballet mistress in Yugoslavia. The Second World War saw her still in Yugoslavia with her second husband when they and a number of close friends worked in intelligence on behalf of the Allies. A strange twist of events, brought them to England where Zybina established her ballet school and became an examiner for the Federation of Russian Classical Ballet and the Society of Russian Style Ballet Schools.
Download or read book Dancing Fear and Desire written by Stavros Stavrou Karayanni and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout centuries of European colonial domination, the bodies of Middle Eastern dancers, male and female, move sumptuously and seductively across the pages of Western travel journals, evoking desire and derision, admiration and disdain, allure and revulsion. This profound ambivalence forms the axis of an investigation into Middle Eastern dance—an investigation that extends to contemporary belly dance. Stavros Stavrou Karayanni, through historical investigation, theoretical analysis, and personal reflection, explores how Middle Eastern dance actively engages race, sex, and national identity. Close readings of colonial travel narratives, an examination of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, and analyses of treatises about Greek dance, reveal the intricate ways in which this controversial dance has been shaped by Eurocentric models that define and control identity performance.
Download or read book The Red Shoes written by Pamela Hutchinson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-10-05 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Endlessly fascinating, dark and bright, The Red Shoes (1948) employs every branch of the cinematic arts to sweep the audience off its feet, invigorated by the transcendence of art itself, only to leave them with troubling questions. Representing the climax of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's celebrated run of six exceptional feature films, the film remains a beloved, if unsettling and often divisive, classic. Pamela Hutchinson's study of the film examines its breathtaking use of Technicolor, music, choreography, editing and art direction at the zenith of Powell and Pressburger's capacity for 'composed cinema'. Through a close reading of key scenes, particularly the film's famous extended ballet sequence, she considers the unconventional use of ballet as uncanny spectacle and the feminist implications of the central story of female sacrifice. Hutchinson goes on to consider the film's lasting and wide-reaching influence, tracing its impact on the film musical genre and horror cinema, with filmmakers such as Joanna Hogg, Sally Potter, Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma having cited the film as an inspiration.
Download or read book The Price of Peace written by Zachary D. Carter and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 666 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An “outstanding new intellectual biography of John Maynard Keynes [that moves] swiftly along currents of lucidity and wit” (The New York Times), illuminating the world of the influential economist and his transformative ideas “A timely, lucid and compelling portrait of a man whose enduring relevance is always heightened when crisis strikes.”—The Wall Street Journal WINNER: The Arthur Ross Book Award Gold Medal • The Hillman Prize for Book Journalism FINALIST: The National Book Critics Circle Award • The Sabew Best in Business Book Award NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times • The Economist • Bloomberg • Mother Jones At the dawn of World War I, a young academic named John Maynard Keynes hastily folded his long legs into the sidecar of his brother-in-law’s motorcycle for an odd, frantic journey that would change the course of history. Swept away from his placid home at Cambridge University by the currents of the conflict, Keynes found himself thrust into the halls of European treasuries to arrange emergency loans and packed off to America to negotiate the terms of economic combat. The terror and anxiety unleashed by the war would transform him from a comfortable obscurity into the most influential and controversial intellectual of his day—a man whose ideas still retain the power to shock in our own time. Keynes was not only an economist but the preeminent anti-authoritarian thinker of the twentieth century, one who devoted his life to the belief that art and ideas could conquer war and deprivation. As a moral philosopher, political theorist, and statesman, Keynes led an extraordinary life that took him from intimate turn-of-the-century parties in London’s riotous Bloomsbury art scene to the fevered negotiations in Paris that shaped the Treaty of Versailles, from stock market crashes on two continents to diplomatic breakthroughs in the mountains of New Hampshire to wartime ballet openings at London’s extravagant Covent Garden. Along the way, Keynes reinvented Enlightenment liberalism to meet the harrowing crises of the twentieth century. In the United States, his ideas became the foundation of a burgeoning economics profession, but they also became a flash point in the broader political struggle of the Cold War, as Keynesian acolytes faced off against conservatives in an intellectual battle for the future of the country—and the world. Though many Keynesian ideas survived the struggle, much of the project to which he devoted his life was lost. In this riveting biography, veteran journalist Zachary D. Carter unearths the lost legacy of one of history’s most fascinating minds. The Price of Peace revives a forgotten set of ideas about democracy, money, and the good life with transformative implications for today’s debates over inequality and the power politics that shape the global order. LONGLISTED FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE
Download or read book Balanchine the Lost Muse written by Elizabeth Kendall and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-07 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is the first dual biography of the early lives of two key figures in Russian ballet: famed choreographer George Balanchine and his close childhood friend and extraordinary ballerina Liidia (Lidochka) Ivanova. Tracing the lives and friendship of these two dancers from years just before the 1917 Russian Revolution to Balanchine's escape from Russia in 1924, Elizabeth Kendall's Balanchine & the Lost Muse sheds new light on a crucial flash point in the history of ballet. Drawing upon extensive archival research, Kendall weaves a fascinating tale about this decisive period in the life of the man who would become the most influential choreographer in modern ballet. Abandoned by his mother at the St. Petersburg Imperial Ballet Academy in 1913 at the age of nine, Balanchine spent his formative years studying dance in Russia's tumultuous capital city. It was there, as he struggled to support himself while studying and performing, that Balanchine met Ivanova. A talented and bold dancer who grew close to the Bolshevik elite in her adolescent years, Ivanova was a source of great inspiration to Balanchine--both during their youth together, and later in his life, after her mysterious death just days before they had planned to leave Russia together in 1924. Kendall shows that although Balanchine would have a great number of muses, many of them lovers, the dark beauty of his dear friend Lidochka would inspire much of his work for years to come. Part biography and part cultural history, Balanchine & the Lost Muse presents a sweeping account of the heyday of modern ballet and the culture behind the unmoored ideals, futuristic visions, and human decadence that characterized the Russian Revolution.
Download or read book The Wizard of Karres written by Mercedes Lackey and published by Baen Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After eliminating the Worm World threat and outwitting a deadly gang of space pirates, Captain Pausert embarks on a mission for the Empress Haile to stop a nanite plague before it can devastate entire worlds.
