Ballet S Magic Kingdom

Author : A. L. Volynskiĭ
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 351 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2008-12-01
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9780300142495

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Ballet's Magic Kingdom by A. L. Volynskiĭ Pdf

Akim Volynsky was a Russian literary critic, journalist, and art historian who became Saint Petersburgs liveliest and most prolific ballet critic in the early part of the twentieth century. This book, the first English edition of his provocative and influential writings, provides a striking look at life inside the world of Russian ballet at a crucial era in its history. Stanley J. Rabinowitz selects and translates forty of Volynskys articlesvivid, eyewitness accounts that sparkle with details about the careers and personalities of such dance luminaries as Anna Pavlova, Mikhail Fokine, Tamara Karsavina, and George Balanchine, at that time a young dancer in the Maryinsky company whose keen musical sense and creative interpretive power Volynsky was one of the first to recognize. Rabinowitz also translates Volynskys magnum opus, The Book of Exaltations, an elaborate meditation on classical dance technique that is at once a primer and an ideological treatise. Throughout his writings, Rabinowitz argues in his critical introduction, which sets Volynskys life and work against the backdrop of the principal intellectual currents of his time, Volynsky emphasizes the spiritual and ethereal qualities of ballet.

Author : Stanley J. Rabinowitz
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2019-07-31
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9780190943387

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And Then Came Dance by Stanley J. Rabinowitz Pdf

Presenting for the first time Akim Volynsky's (1861-1926) pre-balletic writings on Leonardo da Vinci, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Otto Weininger, and on such illustrious personalities as Zinaida Gippius, Ida Rubinstein, and Lou Andreas-Salome, And Then Came Dance provides new insight into the origins of Volynsky's life-altering journey to become Russia's foremost ballet critic. A man for whom the realm of art was largely female in form and whose all-encompassing image of woman constituted the crux of his aesthetic contemplation that crossed over into the personal and libidinal, Volynsky looks ahead to another Petersburg-bred high priest of classical dance, George Balanchine. With an undeniable proclivity toward ballet's female component, Volynsky's dance writings, illuminated by examples of his earlier gendered criticism, invite speculation on how truly ground-breaking and forward-looking this critic is.

Author : Mark Franko
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2020-06-19
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9780197503348

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The Fascist Turn in the Dance of Serge Lifar by Mark Franko Pdf

Ukrainian dancer and choreographer Serge Lifar (1905-86) is recognized both as the modernizer of French ballet in the twentieth century and as the keeper of the flame of the classical tradition upon which the glory of French ballet was founded. Having migrated to France from Russia in 1923 to join Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, Lifar was appointed star dancer and ballet director at the Paris Opéra in 1930. Despite being rather unpopular with the French press at the start of his appointment, Lifar came to dominate the Parisian dance scene-through his publications as well as his dancing and choreography-until the end of the Second World War, reaching the height of his fame under the German occupation of Paris (1940-44). Rumors of his collaborationism having remained inconclusive throughout the postwar era, Lifar retired in 1958. This book not only reassesses Lifar's career, both aesthetically and politically, but also provides a broader reevaluation of the situation of dance-specifically balletic neoclassicism-in the first half of the twentieth century. The Fascist Turn in the Dance of Serge Lifar is the first book not only to discuss the resistance to Lifar in the French press at the start of his much-mythologized career, but also the first to present substantial evidence of Lifar's collaborationism and relate it to his artistic profile during the preceding decade. In examining the political significance of the critical discussion of Lifar's body and technique, author Mark Franko provides the ground upon which to understand the narcissistic and heroic images of Lifar in the 1930s as prefiguring the role he would play in the occupation. Through extensive archival research into unpublished documents of the era, police reports, the transcript of his postwar trial and rarely cited newspaper columns Lifar wrote, Franko reconstructs the dancer's political activities, political convictions, and political ambitions during the Occupation.

Author : Doug Fullington,Marian Smith
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 889 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2024-03-26
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780190944506

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Five Ballets from Paris and St. Petersburg by Doug Fullington,Marian Smith Pdf

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.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : In the Hands of a Child
Page : 98 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2024-06-11
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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Favorite Animated Ballets by Anonim Pdf

Author : Elizabeth Kattner
Publisher : University Press of Florida
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2020-10-20
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9780813057668

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Finding Balanchine's Lost Ballets by Elizabeth Kattner Pdf

Ever since George Balanchine arrived on the American dance scene in 1933, his revolutionary, fleet-footed repertoire has been immortalized in the ballet canon. Yet most of the works he created in Russia as a budding choreographer have been lost to history—until now. In the first book to focus exclusively on Balanchine’s Russian ballets, Elizabeth Kattner offers new insights into the artistic evolution of a legend through her reconstruction of his first group ballet, Funeral March. Drawing on more than a decade of research conducted in archives in the United States and Europe, Kattner synthesizes textual descriptions, photographs, musical scores, and the comparative study of other early Balanchine ballets in order to re-create this forgotten work. By interpreting and building upon these historical findings in the studio and in performance, this project enables dance history to be experienced kinesthetically. Addressing the controversy surrounding whether unrecorded dances should be reconstructed in the first place, Kattner meticulously describes her research methodologies, providing a valuable resource for other scholars seeking to revive history in this way. Finding Balanchine’s Lost Ballets enriches our understanding of Balanchine’s development as a choreographer through its ambitious, original approach to the subject. Kattner argues for the importance of dance reconstruction, when correctly approached, as a tool for reimagining the past and charting the future possibilities of dance history research.

Author : Mary Ellen Snodgrass
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 421 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2015-06-08
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781442245266

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The Encyclopedia of World Ballet by Mary Ellen Snodgrass Pdf

Throughout the centuries, ballet has had a rich and ever-evolving role in the humanities. Renowned choreographers, composers, and performers have contributed to this unique art form, staging enduring works of beauty. Significant productions by major companies embrace innovations and adaptations, enabling ballet to thrive and delight audiences all over the globe. In The Encyclopedia of World Ballet,Mary Ellen Snodgrass surveys the emergence of ballet from ancient Asian models to the present, providing overviews of rhythmic movement as a subject of art, photography, and cinema. Entries in this volume reveal the nature and purpose of ballet, detailing specifics about leaders in classic design and style, influential costumers and companies, and trends in technique, partnering, variation, and liturgical execution. This reference covers: Choreographers Composers Costumers Dance companies Dancers Productions Set designers Techniques Terminology Among the principal figures included here are Alvin Ailey, Afrasiyab Badalbeyli, George Balanchine, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Pierre Beauchamp, Sergei Diaghilev, Agnes DeMille, Nacho Duato, Isadora Duncan, Boris Eifman, Mats Ek, Erté, Martha Graham, Inigo Jones, Louis XIV, Amalia Hernández Navarro, Rudolf Nureyev, Marius Petipa, Jerome Robbins, Twyla Tharp, and Agrippina Vaganova. This work also features dance companies from the Americas, Australia, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Korea, New Zealand, Russia, South Africa, and Vietnam. Productions include such universal narrative favorites as Coppélia, The Nutcracker, The Sleeping Beauty, Scheherazade, Firebird, and Swan Lake. Featuring a chronology that identifies key events and figures, this volume highlights significant developments in stage presentations over the centuries. The Encyclopedia of World Ballet will serve general readers, dance instructors, and enthusiasts from middle school through college as well as professional coaches and performers, troupe directors, journalists, and historians of the arts.

Author : Kathrina Farrugia-Kriel,Jill Nunes Jensen
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 1013 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2021
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9780190871499

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The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet by Kathrina Farrugia-Kriel,Jill Nunes Jensen Pdf

"Nearly four hundred and fifty years in, ballet still resonates-though the stages have become international, and the dancers, athletes far removed from noble amateurs. While vibrations from the form's beginnings clearly resound, much has transformed. Nowadays ballet dancers aspire to work across disciplines with choreographers who value a myriad of abilities. Dance theorists and historians make known possibilities and polemics in lieu of notating dances verbatim, and critics do the daily work of recording performance histories and interviewing artists. Ideas circulate, questions arise, and discussions about how to resist ballet's outmoded traditions take precedence. In the dance community, calls for innovation have defined palpable shifts in ballet's direction and resultantly we have arrived at a new moment in its history that is unquestionably recognized as a genre onto its own: Contemporary Ballet. An aspect of this recent discipline is that its dancemakers, more often than not, seek to reorient the viewer by celebrating what could be deemed vulnerabilities, re-construing ideals of perfection, problematizing the marginalized/mainstream dichotomy, bringing audiences closer in to observe, and letting the art become an experience rather than a distant object preciously guarded out of reach. Hence, the practice of ballet is moving to become a less-mediated and more active process in many circumstances. Performers and audiences alike are challenged, and while convention is still omnipresent, choices are being made. For some, this approach has been drawn on for decades, and for others it signifies a changing of the guard, yet however we arrive there, the conclusion is the same: Contemporary Ballet is not a style. That is to say, it is not a trend, phase, or fashionable term that will fade, rather it is a clear period in ballet's time deserved of investigation. And it is into this moment that we enter"--

Author : Martha Ullman West
Publisher : University Press of Florida
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2021-05-18
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9780813065847

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Todd Bolender, Janet Reed, and the Making of American Ballet by Martha Ullman West Pdf

Martha Ullman West illustrates how American ballet developed over the course of the twentieth century from an aesthetic originating in the courts of Europe into a stylistically diverse expression of a democratic culture. West places at center stage two artists who were instrumental to this story: Todd Bolender and Janet Reed. Lifelong friends, Bolender (1914–2006) and Reed (1916–2000) were part of a generation of dancers who navigated the Great Depression, World War II, and the vibrant cultural scene of postwar New York City. They danced in the works of choreographers Lew and Willam Christensen, Eugene Loring, Agnes de Mille, Catherine Littlefield, Ruthanna Boris, and others who West argues were just as responsible for the direction of American ballet as the legendary George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. The stories of Bolender, Reed, and their contemporaries also demonstrate that the flowering of American ballet was not simply a New York phenomenon. West includes little-known details about how Bolender and Reed laid the foundations for Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet in the 1970s and how Bolender transformed the Kansas City Ballet into a highly respected professional company soon after. Passionate in their desire to dance and create dances, Bolender and Reed committed their lives to passing along their hard-won knowledge, training, and work. This book celebrates two unsung trailblazers who were pivotal to the establishment of ballet in America from one coast to the other.

Author : Jane Gall Spooner
Publisher : Troubador Publishing Ltd
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2023-01-28
Category : History
ISBN : 9781803134024

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A Life Well Danced: Maria Zybina’s Russian Heritage Her Legacy of Classical Ballet and Character Dance Across Europe by Jane Gall Spooner Pdf

This book explores the relationships between dancers and their teachers, and classical ballet pedagogy through the life of Maria Zybina. It was inspired by the author’s direct connection through Zybina and her teachers.

Author : Robert Gottlieb
Publisher : Pantheon
Page : 1362 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2008-11-04
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9780375421228

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Reading Dance by Robert Gottlieb Pdf

Robert Gottlieb’s immense sampling of the dance literature–by far the largest such project ever attempted–is both inclusive, to the extent that inclusivity is possible when dealing with so vast a field, and personal: the result of decades of reading. It limits itself of material within the experience of today’s general readers, avoiding, for instance, academic historical writing and treatises on technique, its earliest subjects are those nineteenth-century works and choreographers that still resonate with dance lovers today: Giselle, The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake; Bournonville and Petipa. And, as Gottlieb writes in his introduction, “The twentieth century focuses to a large extent on the achievements and personalities that dominated it–from Pavlova and Nijinsky and Diaghilev to Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham, from Ashton and Balanchine and Robbins to Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor and Twyla Tharp, from Fonteyn and Farrell and Gelsey Kirkland (“the Judy Garland of Ballet”) to Nureyev and Baryshnikov and Astaire–as well as the critical and reportorial voices, past and present, that carry the most conviction.” In structuring his anthology, Gottlieb explains, he has “tried to help the reader along by arranging its two hundred-plus entries into a coherent groups.” Apart from the sections on major personalities and important critics, there are sections devoted to interviews (Tamara Toumanova, Antoinette Sibley, Mark Morris); profiles (Lincoln Kirstein, Bob Fosse, Olga Spessivtseva); teachers; accounts of the birth of important works from Petrouchka to Apollo to Push Comes to Shove; and the movies (from Arlene Croce and Alastair Macauley on Fred Astaire to director Michael Powell on the making of The Red Shoes). Here are the voices of Cecil Beaton and Irene Castle, Ninette de Valois and Bronislava Nijinska, Maya Plisetskaya and Allegra Kent, Serge Lifar and José Limón, Alicia Markova and Natalia Makarova, Ruth St. Denis and Michel Fokine, Susan Sontag and Jean Renoir. Plus a group of obscure, even eccentric extras, including an account of Pavlova going shopping in London and recipes from Tanaquil LeClerq’s cookbook.” With its huge range of content accompanied by the anthologist’s incisive running commentary, Reading Dance will be a source of pleasure and instruction for anyone who loves dance.

Author : Jennifer Homans
Publisher : Random House
Page : 672 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2010-11-02
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9780679603900

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Apollo's Angels by Jennifer Homans Pdf

NATIONAL BESTSELLER 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, asEntertainment Weekly notes, brings “a dancer’s grace and sure-footed agility to the page.” NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW • LOS ANGELES TIMES • SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE • PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Author : Matthew Naughtin
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 471 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2014-07-17
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780810886605

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Ballet Music by Matthew Naughtin Pdf

Musicians who work professionally with ballet and dance companies sometimes wonder if they haven’t entered a foreign country—a place where the language and customs seem so utterly familiar and so bafflingly strange at the same. To someone without a dance background, phrases and terms--boy’s variation, pas d’action, apothéose—simply don’t fit their standard musical vocabulary. Even a familiar term like adagio means something quite different in the world of dance. Like any working professional, those conductors, composers, rehearsal pianists, instrumentalists and even music librarians working with professional ballet and dance companies must learn what dance professionals talk about when they talk about music. In Ballet Music: A Handbook Matthew Naughtin provides a practical guide for the professional musician who works with ballet companies, whether as a full-time staff member or as an independent contractor. In this comprehensive work, he addresses the daily routine of the modern ballet company, outlines the respective roles of the conductor, company pianist and music librarian and their necessary collaboration with choreographers and ballet masters, and examines the complete process of putting a dance performance on stage, from selection or existing music to commissioning original scores to staging the final production. Because ballet companies routinely revise the great ballets to fit the needs of their staff and stage, audience and orchestra, ballet repertoire is a tangled web for the uninitiated. At the core of Ballet Music: A Handbook lies an extensive listing of classic ballets in the standard repertoire, with information on their history, versions, revisions, instrumentation, score publishers and other sources for tracking down both the original music and subsequent musical additions and adaptations. Ballet Music: A Handbook is an invaluable resource for conductors, pianists and music librarians as well as any student, scholar or fan of the ballet interested in the complex machinery that works backstage before the curtain goes up.

Author : Adrienne Sharp
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2010-10-26
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781429962858

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The True Memoirs of Little K by Adrienne Sharp Pdf

Exiled in Paris, tiny, one-hundred-year-old Mathilde Kschessinska sits down to write her memoirs before all that she believes to be true is forgotten. A lifetime ago, she was the vain, ambitious, impossibly charming prima ballerina assoluta of the tsar's Russian Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg. Now, as she looks back on her tumultuous life, she can still recall every slight she ever suffered, every conquest she ever made. Kschessinka's riveting storytelling soon thrusts us into a world lost to time: that great intersection of the Russian court and the Russian theater. Before the revolution, Kschessinska dominated that world as the greatest dancer of her age. At seventeen, her crisp, scything technique made her a star. So did her romance with the tsarevich Nicholas Romanov, soon to be Nicholas II. It was customary for grand dukes and sons of tsars to draw their mistresses from the ranks of the ballet, but it was not customary for them to fall in love. The affair could not endure: when Nicholas ascended to the throne as tsar, he was forced to give up his mistress, and Kschessinska turned for consolation to his cousins, two grand dukes with whom she formed an infamous ménage à trois. But when Nicholas's marriage to Alexandra wavered after she produced girl after girl, he came once again to visit his Little K. As the tsar's empire—one that once made up a third of the world—began its fatal crumble, Kschessinka's devotion to the imperial family would be tested in ways she could never have foreseen. In Adrienne Sharp's magnificently imagined novel, the last days of the three-hundred-year-old Romanov empire are relived. Through Kschessinska's memories of her own triumphs and defeats, we witness the stories that changed history: the seething beginnings of revolution, the blindness of the doomed court, the end of a grand, decadent way of life that belonged to the nineteenth century. Based on fact, The True Memoirs of Little K is historical fiction as it's meant to be written: passionately eventful, crammed with authentic detail, and alive with emotions that resonate still.

Author : A. L. Volynskiĭ
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2019
Category : Ballerinas
ISBN : 0190943408

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And Then Came Dance by A. L. Volynskiĭ Pdf

"At 49 years old, Russian literary scholar, art historian, and journalist Akim Volynsky (1861-1926) experienced a turning point in his intellectual and emotional life, embarking on a journey to become the foremost ballet critic in Russia of his time. His corpus of nearly 300 reviews of women dancers, as well as the performances that graced St. Petersburg's storied Maryinsky Theater between 1911 and 1924, helped catapult two generations of exceptional women achievers to a status they had not previously enjoyed. But Volynsky's depiction of the body beautiful on stage, represented here by 34 previously untranslated articles about a dozen ballerinas, was preceded by his earlier attention to women in literature, in art, and in real life. Presenting for the first time Volynsky's pre-balletic writings on Leonardo da Vinci, Dostoevsky, Otto Weininger, and on such illustrious personalities as Zinaida Gippius, Ida Rubinstein, and Lou Andreas-Salome, And Then Came Dance provides new insight into the origins of Volynsky's life-altering interest in dance, and in female dancers in particular. A man for whom the realm of art was largely female in form and whose all-encompassing image of woman constituted the crux of his aesthetic contemplation that crossed over into the personal and libidinal, Volynsky looks ahead to another Petersburg-bred high priest of classical dance, George Balanchine. Indeed, with an undeniable proclivity toward ballet's female component, Volynsky's dance writings, illuminated here by examples of his earlier gendered criticism, invite speculation on how truly ground-breaking and forward-looking this understudied critic is."--