Ballet In Western Culture

A history of the development of ballet from the origins of dance through the 20th century.

Throughout her history, the ballerina has been perceived as the embodiment of beauty and perfection--the feminine ideal. But the reality is another story. From the earliest ballerinas in the 17th century--who often led double lives as concubines--through the poverty of the corps de ballet dancers in the 1800's and the anorexic and bulimic ballerinas of George Balanchine, starvation and exploitation have plagued ballerinas throughout history. Using the stories of great dancers such as Anna Pavlova, Isadora Duncan, Suzanne Farrell, Gelsey Kirkland, Evelyn Hart, Marie Camargo, and Misty Copeland, Deirdre Kelly exposes the true rigors for women in ballet. She rounds her critique with examples of how the world of ballet is slowly evolving for the better. But to ensure that this most graceful of dance forms survives into the future, she says that the time has come to rethink ballet, to position the ballerina at its center and accord her the respect she deserves.

'...full credit to Thomas and Macmillan for embarking on such a worthwhile venture - Dance Research I have already found the Thomas edition of enormous value in teaching both undergraduates and postgraduates, from the perspectives of dance anthropology, ethnography and theatre dance analysis - Theresa Buckland, Department of Dance Studies, University of Surrey This unique collection of papers, written specially for this volume, explores the aspects of the ways in which dance and gender intersect in a variety of cultural contexts, from social and disco dance to performance dance, to the Hollywood musical and dances from different cultures. The contributors come from a broad range of disciplines, such as cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, dance studies, film studies, and journalism. They bring to the book a wide body of ideas and approaches, including feminism, psychoanalysis, ethnography and subcultural theory. List of Plates - Preface to the 1995 Reprint - Notes on the Contributors - Introduction - PART 1: CULTURAL STUDIES - Dance, Gender and Culture; T.Polhumus - Dancing in the Dark: Rationalism and the Neglect of Social Dance; A.Ward - Ballet, Gender and Cultural Power; C.J.Novack - 'I Seem to Find the Happiness I Seek': Heterosexuality and Dance in the Musical; R.Dyer - PART 2: ETHNOGRAPHY - An-Other Voice: Young Women Dancing and Talking; H.Thomas - Gender Interchangeability among the Tiwi; A.Grau - 'Saturday Night Fever': An Ethnography of Disco Dancing; D.Walsh - Classical Indian Dance and Women's Status; J.L.Hanna - PART 3: THEORY/CRITICISM - Dance, Feminism and the Critique of the Visual; R.Copeland - 'You put your left foot in, then you shake it all about ...': Excursions and Incursions into Feminism and Bausch's Tanztheater; A.Sanchez-Colberg - 'She might pirouette on a daisy and it would not bend': Images of Femininity and Dance Appreciation; L-A.Sayers - Still Dancing Downwards and Talking Back; Z.Oyortey - The Anxiety of Dance Performance; V.Rimmer - Index

Classical ballet was perhaps the most visible symbol of aristocratic culture and its isolation from the rest of Russian society under the tsars. In the wake of the October Revolution, ballet, like all of the arts, fell under the auspices of the Soviet authorities. In light of these events, many feared that the imperial ballet troupes would be disbanded. Instead, the Soviets attempted to mold the former imperial ballet to suit their revolutionary cultural agenda and employ it to reeducate the masses. As Christina Ezrahi’s groundbreaking study reveals, they were far from successful in this ambitious effort to gain complete control over art. Swans of the Kremlin offers a fascinating glimpse at the collision of art and politics during the volatile first fifty years of the Soviet period. Ezrahi shows how the producers and performers of Russia’s two major troupes, the Mariinsky (later Kirov) and the Bolshoi, quietly but effectively resisted Soviet cultural hegemony during this period. Despite all controls put on them, they managed to maintain the classical forms and traditions of their rich artistic past and to further develop their art form. These aesthetic and professional standards proved to be the power behind the ballet’s worldwide appeal. The troupes soon became the showpiece of Soviet cultural achievement, as they captivated Western audiences during the Cold War period. Based on her extensive research into official archives, and personal interviews with many of the artists and staff, Ezrahi presents the first-ever account of the inner workings of these famed ballet troupes during the Soviet era. She follows their struggles in the postrevolutionary period, their peak during the golden age of the 1950s and 1960s, and concludes with their monumental productions staged to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution in 1968.

Apollo's Angels is a major new history of classical ballet. It begins in the courts of Europe, where ballet was an aspect of aristocratic etiquette and a political event as much as it was an art. The story takes the reader from the sixteenth century through to our own time, from Italy and France to Britain, Denmark, Russia and contemporary America. The reader learns how ballet reflected political and cultural upheavals, how dance and dancers were influenced by the Renaissance and French Classicism, by Revolution and Romanticism, by Expressionism and Bolshevism, Modernism and the Cold War. Homans shows how and why 'the steps' were never just the steps: they were a set of beliefs and a way of life. She takes the reader into the lives of dancers and traces the formal evolution of technique, choreography and performance. Her book ends by looking at the contemporary crisis in ballet now that 'the masters are dead and gone' and offers a passionate plea for the centrality of classical dance in our civilization. Apollo's Angels is a book with broad popular appeal: beautifully written and illustrated, it is essential reading for anyone interested in history, culture and art.

"During the Cold War, the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union developed cultural exchange programs, in which they sent performing artists abroad in order to generate goodwill for their countries. Ballet companies were frequently called on to serve in these programs, particularly in the direct Soviet-American exchange. This book analyzes four of the early ballet exchange tours, demonstrating how this series of encounters changed both geopolitical relations and the history of dance. The ballet tours were enormously popular. Performances functioned as an important symbolic meeting point for Soviet and American officials, creating goodwill and normalizing relations between the two countries in an era when nuclear conflict was a real threat. At the same time, Soviet and American audiences did not understand ballet in the same way. As American companies toured in the Soviet Union and vice-versa, audiences saw the performances through the lens of their own local aesthetics. Ballet in the Cold War introduces the concept of transliteration to understand this process, showing how much power viewers wielded in the exchange and explaining how the dynamics of the Cold War continue to shape ballet today"--

Retellings of seven of the world's greatest ballet stories.