The Cambridge Companion to Ballet

Front Cover
Marion Kant
Cambridge University Press, Jun 7, 2007 - Music
Ballet is a paradox: much loved but little studied. It is a beautiful fairy tale; detached from its origins and unrelated to the men and women who created it. Yet ballet has a history, little known and rarely presented. These great works have dark sides and moral ambiguities, not always nor immediately visible. The daring and challenging quality of ballet as well as its perceived 'safe' nature is not only one of its fascinations but one of the intriguing questions to be explored in this Companion. The essays reveal the conception, intent and underlying meaning of ballets and recreate the historical reality in which they emerged. The reader will find new and unexpected aspects of ballet, its history and its aesthetics, the evolution of plot and narrative, new insights into the reality of training, the choice of costume and the transformation of an old art in a modern world.
 

Contents

3 English masques
32
4 The baroque body
42
the ballet daction
53
the
65
John Weaver and
78
dance and reform
87
9 The French Revolution and its spectacles
98
18301850
113
13 Russian ballet in the age of Petipa
151
16 The soul of the shoe
184
the Ballets Suedois and
201
the new Russian and
212
19 George Balanchine
224
20 Balanchine and the deconstruction of classicism
237
a cultural icon
246
23 Giselle in a Cuban accent
263

the women
126
French
138
24 European ballet in the age of ideologies
272

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 15 - The Loves of Mars and Venus, first performed as an afterpiece at Drury Lane Theatre on 2 March 1717 and described in the scholarly programme accompanying the production as 'A Dramatick Entertainment of Dancing, Attempted in Imitation of the Pantomimes of the Ancient Greeks and Romans
Page 10 - Ballets, opéra et autres ouvrages lyriques, par ordre chronologique, depuis leur origine, avec une table alphabétique des ouvrages et des auteurs.

About the author (2007)

Marion Kant teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

Bibliographic information