The White Ballets

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.

A reckoning with one of our most beloved art forms, whose past and present are shaped by gender, racial, and class inequities—and a look inside the fight for its future Every day, in dance studios all across America, legions of little children line up at the barre to take ballet class. This time in the studio shapes their lives, instilling lessons about gender, power, bodies, and their place in the world both in and outside of dance. In Turning Pointe, journalist Chloe Angyal captures the intense love for ballet that so many dancers feel, while also grappling with its devastating shortcomings: the power imbalance of an art form performed mostly by women, but dominated by men; the impossible standards of beauty and thinness; and the racism that keeps so many people of color out of ballet. As the rigid traditions of ballet grow increasingly out of step with the modern world, a new generation of dancers is confronting these issues head on, in the studio and on stage. For ballet to survive the twenty-first century and forge a path into a more socially just future, this reckoning is essential.

Gillian Kincade is a rising star on the New York ballet scene, but life becomes complicated when she meets Jacob Ferrar.

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.

A New Classic for Today's Dancer The Ballet Companion is a fresh, comprehensive, and thoroughly up-to-date reference book for the dancer. With 150 stunning photographs of ballet stars Maria Riccetto and Benjamin Millepied demonstrating perfect execution of positions and steps, this elegant volume brims with everything today's dance student needs, including: Practical advice for getting started, such as selecting a school, making the most of class, and studio etiquette Explanations of ballet fundamentals and major training systems An illustrated guide through ballet class -- warm-up, barre, and center floor Guidelines for safe, healthy dancing through a sensible diet, injury prevention, and cross-training with yoga and Pilates Descriptions of must-see ballets and glossaries of dance, music, and theater terms Along the way you'll find technique secrets from stars of American Ballet Theatre, lavishly illustrated sidebars on ballet history, and tips on everything from styling a ballet bun to stage makeup to performing the perfect pirouette. Whether a budding ballerina, serious student, or adult returning to ballet, dancers will find a lively mix of ballet's time-honored traditions and essential new information.

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.

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.