Download or read book The Ballet Called Giselle written by Cyril William Beaumont and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Ballet Called Swan Lake written by Cyril W. Beaumont and published by Dance Books Limited. This book was released on 2012 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic book, first published in 1952, is the definitive work on one of ballet's greatest and most popular works, Swan Lake. The book is in two parts. The first describes the evolution of Swan Lake from its initial conception to its first realisation by the Austrian choreographer Julius Wenzel Reisinger, which was a comparative failure, followed by the story of the ballet's resuscitation and eventual triumph by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov. Included are the original synopses of both the original Reisinger production and the Petipa-Ivanov version. There is an account of Tchaikovsky and his score, together with details of the original settings and costumes, and many of those designed for later productions. The second part of the book is concerned with the actual presentation of the ballet. The choreography of all four acts of the Petipa-Ivanov version is set out in full, with explanations of not only the stage action, but also of how the dancers move, the kind of steps they do, the gestures they make and what they are intended to express. The various roles are also analysed from the dancers' points of view, and some of the problems that may confront both dancer and producer are considered and resolved. Finally, there is a survey of some of the great dancers who over the years have achieved distinction in the roles of Odette-Odile and Prince Siegfried.
Download or read book Ballet and Opera in the Age of Giselle written by Marian Smith and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-29 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marian Smith recaptures a rich period in French musical theater when ballet and opera were intimately connected. Focusing on the age of Giselle at the Paris Opéra (from the 1830s through the 1840s), Smith offers an unprecedented look at the structural and thematic relationship between the two genres. She argues that a deeper understanding of both ballet and opera--and of nineteenth-century theater-going culture in general--may be gained by examining them within the same framework instead of following the usual practice of telling their histories separately. This handsomely illustrated book ultimately provides a new portrait of the Opéra during a period long celebrated for its box-office successes in both genres. Smith begins by showing how gestures were encoded in the musical language that composers used in ballet and in opera. She moves on to a wide range of topics, including the relationship between the gestures of the singers and the movements of the dancers, and the distinction between dance that represents dancing (entertainment staged within the story of the opera) and dance that represents action. Smith maintains that ballet-pantomime and opera continued to rely on each other well into the nineteenth century, even as they thrived independently. The "divorce" between the two arts occurred little by little, and may be traced through unlikely sources: controversies in the press about the changing nature of ballet-pantomime music, shifting ideas about originality, complaints about the ridiculousness of pantomime, and a little-known rehearsal score for Giselle. ?
Download or read book The Ballet Called Giselle written by Cyril W (Cyril William) 1 Beaumont and published by Hassell Street Press. This book was released on 2021-09-09 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book The Cursed Ballet written by Megan Atwood and published by Darby Creek ™. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 67 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every time the Dario Quincy Academy has performed Giselle, the ballet's lead dancer has died. That's what the rumors say, anyway. But Ophelia doesn't believe in all that. She's determined to win the lead and beat the so-called curse. As Ophelia begins sneaking out at night to practice Giselle's moves, she meets a mysterious boy hiding in the shadows. He's got great moves, and his looks aren't bad either. After a series of secret meetings, Ophelia starts to feel drained of her strength. She even blacks out during dance class. Is she just pushing herself too hard? Or are the boy and the curse connected?
Download or read book The White Ballets written by and published by Tundra Books. This book was released on 2011-10-11 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Possibly the best-loved of all ballets are “Giselle,” “La Bayadère,” and “Swan Lake.” Known as the White Ballets, they each tell stories of ethereal maidens costumed in floating white, who seem to be lovely creatures suspended somewhere between heaven and earth. It is every ballerina’s dream to dance “Giselle.” Despite being frail, the simple peasant girl, Giselle, can’t give up dancing. She is afraid that if she dies before she weds, she will become a Wili, a spirit maiden who haunts the forests seeking revenge on young men. Though she can’t change her own fate, she finds a way to save the one she loves. Nikiya is a beautiful temple dancer, a bayadère. She fights tradition when she falls in love with the warrior Solor. Solor has already been promised to a well-born girl, but he risks everything for Nikiya. “Swan Lake” is also about recognizing true love and risking everything for it. Prince Siegfried meets Odile by the shores of a mysterious lake and he vows to marry her. But Odile is under a curse: she must spend every day in the form of a swan and is only human for a few hours during the night. If they are to spend eternity together, Siegfried has to find a way to lift the curse. Rajka Kupesic, herself a dancer, has retold the stories and set them against her breathtaking art to create a book to cherish. Notes about the ballets are included.
Download or read book Marius Petipa written by Nadine Meisner and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019-06-03 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most important ballet choreographers of all time, Marius Petipa (1818 - 1910) created works that are now mainstays of the ballet repertoire. Every day, in cities around the world, performances of Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty draw large audiences to theatres and inspire new generations of dancers, as does The Nutcracker during the winter holidays. These are his best-known works, but others - Don Quixote, La Bayadère - have also become popular, even canonical components of the classical repertoire, and together they have shaped the defining style of twentieth-century ballet. The first biography in English of this monumental figure of ballet history, Marius Petipa: The Emperor's Ballet Master covers the choreographer's life and work in full within the context of remarkable historical and political surroundings. Over the course of ten well-researched chapters, Nadine Meisner explores Marius Petipa's life and legacy: the artist's arrival in Russia from his native France, the socio-political tensions and revolution he experienced, his popularity on the Russian imperial stage, his collaborations with other choreographers and composers (most famously Tchaikovsky), and the conditions under which he worked, in close proximity to the imperial court. Meisner presents a thrilling and exhaustive narrative not only of Petipa's life but of the cultural development of ballet across the 19th and early 20th centuries. The book also extends beyond Petipa's narrative with insightful analyses of the evolution of ballet technique, theatre genres, and the rise of male dancers. Richly illustrated with archival photographs, this book unearths original material from Petipa's 63 years in Russia, much of it never published in English before. As Meisner demonstrates, the choreographer laid the foundations for Soviet ballet and for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, the expatriate company which exercised such an enormous influence on ballet in the West, including the Royal Ballet and Balanchine's New York City Ballet. After Petipa, Western ballet would never be the same.
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 Complete Ballet written by John Haskell and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dark-hued, hybrid novel by a writer who “delivers our culture back to us, made entirely new” (A. M. Homes) In The Complete Ballet, John Haskell choreographs an intricate and irresistible pas de deux in which fiction and criticism come together to create a new kind of story. Fueled by the dramatic retelling of five romantic ballets, and interwoven with a contemporary story about a man whose daunting gambling debt pushes him to the edge of his own abyss, it is both a pulpy entertainment and a meditation on the physicality—and psychology—of dance. The unnamed narrator finds himself inexorably drawn back to the pre–cell phone world of Technicolor Los Angeles, to a time when the tragedies of his life were about to collide. Working as a part-time masseur in Hollywood, he attends an underground poker game with his friend Cosmo, a strip-club entrepreneur. What happens there hurtles the narrator down the road and into the room where the novel’s violent and surreal showdown leaves him a different person. As the narrator revisits his past, he simultaneously inhabits and reconstructs the mythic stories of ballet, assessing along the way the lives and obsessions of Nijinsky and Balanchine, Pavlova and Fonteyn, Joseph Cornell and the story’s presiding spirit, the film director John Cassavetes. This compulsively readable fiction is ultimately a profound and haunting consideration of the nature of art and identity.
Download or read book Ballet 101 written by Robert Greskovic and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 2005 with total page 660 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a look at the world of dance; an analysis of ballet movement, music, and history; a close-up look at popular ballets; and a host of performance tips.
Download or read book Tallchief written by Maria Tallchief and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2001-10-01 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Growing up on the Osage Indian reservation, Maria Tallchief was a gifted pianist and dancer. According to Osage tradition, women are not permitted to dance, but Maria's parents recognized her gifts and allowed her to break the rule. Then when Maria reached the age of twelve, her father told her it was time to choose between her two loves. Maria chose ballet. It was a decision that would change not only the course of her life, but the face of classical ballet in America. The fascinating story of Maria Tallchief's rise to become America's prima ballerina will captivate young readers.
Download or read book A Dancer in Wartime written by Gillian Lynne and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-11-08 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: London during the Blitz was a time of hardship, heroism and hope. For Gillian Lynne – a budding ballerina – it was also a time of great change as she was evacuated from war-torn London to a crumbling mansion, where dance classes took place in the faded ballroom. Life was hard, but her talent and dedication shone through and an astonishing journey ensued, which saw Gillian dancing a triumphant debut in Swan Lake, performing in the West End with doodlebugs falling and touring a devastated Europe entertaining the troops. A Dancer in Wartime paints a vivid and moving picture of what life was really like during the hard years of the Blitz and brings to life a lost world.
Download or read book I Was a Dancer written by Jacques D'Amboise and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Who am I? I’m a man; an American, a father, a teacher, but most of all, I am a person who knows how the arts can change lives, because they transformed mine. I was a dancer.” In this rich, expansive, spirited memoir, Jacques d’Amboise, one of America’s most celebrated classical dancers, and former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet for more than three decades, tells the extraordinary story of his life in dance, and of America’s most renowned and admired dance companies. He writes of his classical studies beginning at the age of eight at The School of American Ballet. At twelve he was asked to perform with Ballet Society; three years later he joined the New York City Ballet and made his European debut at London’s Covent Garden. As George Balanchine’s protégé, d’Amboise had more works choreographed on him by “the supreme Ballet Master” than any other dancer, among them Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux; Episodes; A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream; Jewels; Raymonda Variations. He writes of his boyhood—born Joseph Ahearn—in Dedham, Massachusetts; his mother (“the Boss”) moving the family to New York City’s Washington Heights; dragging her son and daughter to ballet class (paying the teacher $7.50 from hats she made and sold on street corners, and with chickens she cooked stuffed with chestnuts); his mother changing the family name from Ahearn to her maiden name, d’Amboise (“It’s aristocratic. It has the ‘d’ apostrophe. It sounds better for the ballet, and it’s a better name”). We see him. a neighborhood tough, in Catholic schools being taught by the nuns; on the streets, fighting with neighborhood gangs, and taking ten classes a week at the School of American Ballet . . . being taught professional class by Balanchine and by other teachers of great legend: Anatole Oboukhoff, premier danseur of the Maryinsky; and Pierre Vladimiroff, Pavlova’s partner. D’Amboise writes about Balanchine’s succession of ballerina muses who inspired him to near-obsessive passion and led him to create extraordinary ballets, dancers with whom d’Amboise partnered—Maria Tallchief; Tanaquil LeClercq, a stick-skinny teenager who blossomed into an exquisite, witty, sophisticated “angel” with her “long limbs and dramatic, mysterious elegance . . .”; the iridescent Allegra Kent; Melissa Hayden; Suzanne Farrell, who Balanchine called his “alabaster princess,” her every fiber, every movement imbued with passion and energy; Kay Mazzo; Kyra Nichols (“She’s perfect,” Balanchine said. “Uncomplicated—like fresh water”); and Karin von Aroldingen, to whom Balanchine left most of his ballets. D’Amboise writes about dancing with and courting one of the company’s members, who became his wife for fifty-three years, and the four children they had . . . On going to Hollywood to make Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and being offered a long-term contract at MGM (“If you’re not careful,” Balanchine warned, “you will have sold your soul for seven years”) . . . On Jerome Robbins (“Jerry could be charming and complimentary, and then, five minutes later, attack, and crush your spirit—all to see how it would influence the dance movements”). D’Amboise writes of the moment when he realizes his dancing career is over and he begins a new life and new dream teaching children all over the world about the arts through the magic of dance. A riveting, magical book, as transformative as dancing itself.
Download or read book Reworking the Ballet written by Vida L. Midgelow and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-11-13 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reworking the Ballet illuminates the choreographic praxis, the context and the politics of reworkings in the light of counter-canonical discourses as developed within feminism, queer theory and postcolonialism.
Download or read book Dancing on Water written by Elena Tchernichova and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2013-05-14 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dancing on Water is both a personal coming-of-age story and a sweeping look at ballet life in Russia and the United States during the golden age of dance. Elena Tchernichova takes us from her childhood during the siege of Leningrad to her mother's alcoholism and suicide, and from her adoption by Kirov ballerina Tatiana Vecheslova, who entered her into the state ballet school, to her career in the American Ballet Theatre. As a student and young dancer with the Kirov, she witnessed the company's achievements as a citadel of classic ballet, home to legendary names--Shelest, Nureyev, Dudinskaya, Baryshnikov--but also a hotbed of intrigue and ambition run amok. As ballet mistress of American Ballet Theatre from 1978 to 1990, Elena was called "the most important behind-the-scenes force for change in ballet today," by Vogue magazine. She coached stars and corps de ballet alike, and helped mold the careers of some of the great dancers of the age, including Gelsey Kirkland, Cynthia Gregory, Natalia Makarova, and Alexander Godunov. Dancing on Water is a tour de force, exploring the highest levels of the world of dance.
Download or read book Russian Ballet Master written by Marius Petipa and published by Dance Books Limited. This book was released on 1958 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These highly entertaining memoirs of Marius Petipa, the great Franco-Russian choreogapher had never before been translated into English before their first publication in 1958. As virtual dictator of the Russian ballet in the second half of the 19th century, Petipa moulded its course for many years and may have been said to have created the style of classical dancing still known as Russian. His renown is undisputed, and his work lives not only in the pages of dance history but in the ballet repertoire of most Companies today. Petipa's memoirs reveal many interesting details of his career and of the people he worked with, including Tchaikovsky and the young Pavlova, and give an insight into his character and genius that it is not possible to gain from any other source. Written towards the end of his long life, in a mood of disillusion, when his work was neglected and in decline, he would have been delighted to know that his great ballets such as Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, and La Bayadere are more popular today than ever before.