Alphabet Of Movements Of The Human Body

The problem of recording movements of the human body is almost as old as the art of dancing: it has been said that the ancient Egyptians had a system of notation, but there is no real evidence to prove that this was so. The present system was developed by the Russian dancer Vladimir Ivanovich Stepanov at the end of the 19th century. It is based on existing music notation, and although basic is certainly practical: one has only to read the official testimonial, signed by such people as Petipa and Johanssen, to realise this. Lessons in the system were given at the Imperial Ballet Schools, and many ballets of the period were notated in it. Stepanov's book is no more than a skeleton key, showing the general principles of his system and their application, yet even as it stands it can be used to decipher old notations - it was by means of notations made in Stepanov's system that Nicolai Sergeyev was able to reproduce The Sleeping Princess for Diaghilev, and other ballets for the Sadler's Wells Ballet and International Ballet. More recently, other hands have used the system to revive ballets long thought to have been irrevocably lost.

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.

Drawings are not simply tools for communication but important instruments for investigating reality and its structure. This pathbreaking book, richly illustrated, with exercises for readers, illuminates the complex interactions between the material