Apollo's Angels

Apollo's Angels PDF Author: Jennifer Homans
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679603905
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 640

Get Book Here

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

Apollo's Angels

Apollo's Angels PDF Author: Jennifer Homans
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679603905
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 640

Get Book Here

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

The Code of Terpsichore

The Code of Terpsichore PDF Author: Carlo Blasis
Publisher: Dance Books Limited
ISBN: 9781852731267
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 600

Get Book Here

Book Description


When Ballet Became French

When Ballet Became French PDF Author: Ilyana Karthas
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773597816
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 405

Get Book Here

Book Description
For centuries before the 1789 revolution, ballet was a source of great cultural pride for France, but by the twentieth century the art form had deteriorated along with France's international standing. It was not until Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes found success in Paris during the first decade of the new century that France embraced the opportunity to restore ballet to its former glory and transform it into a hallmark of the nation. In When Ballet Became French, Ilyana Karthas explores the revitalization of ballet and its crucial significance to French culture during a period of momentous transnational cultural exchange and shifting attitudes towards gender and the body. Uniting the disciplines of cultural history, gender and women's studies, aesthetics, and dance history, Karthas examines the ways in which discussions of ballet intersect with French concerns about the nation, modernity, and gender identities, demonstrating how ballet served as an important tool for France's project of national renewal. Relating ballet commentary to themes of transnationalism, nationalism, aesthetics, gender, and body politics, she examines the process by which critics, artists, and intellectuals turned ballet back into a symbol of French culture. The first book to study the correlation between ballet and French nationalism, When Ballet Became French demonstrates how dance can transform a nation's cultural and political history.

Ballet 101

Ballet 101 PDF Author: Robert Greskovic
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9780879103255
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 660

Get Book Here

Book Description
Presents a look at the world of dance; an analysis of ballet movement, music, and history; a close-up look at popular ballets; and a host of performance tips.

The Paris Opéra Ballet

The Paris Opéra Ballet PDF Author: Ivor Guest
Publisher: Dance Books Limited
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Get Book Here

Book Description
The cradle of ballet, tracing the origin of ballet as a theatre art back to its foundation by Louis XIV in 1669.

The Oxford Dictionary of Dance

The Oxford Dictionary of Dance PDF Author: Debra Craine
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199563446
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 512

Get Book Here

Book Description
This comprehensive and up-to-date dictionary provides all the information necessary for dance fans to navigate the diverse dance scene of the 21st century. It includes entries ranging from classical ballet to the cutting edge of modern dance.

Classical Ballet Terms

Classical Ballet Terms PDF Author: Richard Glasstone
Publisher: Dance Books Limited
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 110

Get Book Here

Book Description
Wherever ballet is taught in the world, and in whatever language, it retains one common denominator: the technical terms used are in French. This dictionary aims to prevent confusion by explaining the precise meanings of over 560 of the French technical terms used in classical ballet.

Letters on Dancing and Ballets

Letters on Dancing and Ballets PDF Author: Jean Georges Noverre
Publisher: David Leonard
ISBN: 9781852731007
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
The dancer and choreographer Jean-Georges Noverre's Letters On Dancing and Ballets were first published in Stuttgart in 1760, and set forth his ideas for the reform of ballet, ideas which were considered revolutionary in their day and indeed anticipated changes to be carried out more than a century later by Laban, Fokine, and Jooss. At a time when court ballet had degenerated into a meaningless succession of conventional dances, Noverre advocated a unity of design and a logical progression from introduction to climax in which the whole was not sacrificed to the part and anything unnecessary to the theme was eliminated. Movement was to be defined by the tone and time of the music, and choreographers were advised to avoid over-complicated steps and turn to nature for natural means of expression which could be understood by all. He advocated also the reform of costume, and lived to see masks, full-bottomed wigs and cumbersome dresses abandoned in favor of attire better suited to the roles portrayed. Noverre's Letters can be said without exaggeration to be one of the most important dance books ever published, and through its influence Noverre can be seen as the grandfather of ballet as we know it.

Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France

Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France PDF Author: Kate van Orden
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022676799X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 341

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this groundbreaking new study, Kate van Orden examines noble education in the arts to show how music contributed to cultural and social transformation in early modern French society. She constructs a fresh account of music's importance in promoting the absolutism that the French monarchy would fully embrace under Louis XIV, uncovering many hitherto unpublished ballets and royal ceremonial performances. The great pressure on French noblemen to take up the life of the warrior gave rise to bellicose art forms such as sword dances and equestrian ballets. Far from being construed as effeminizing, such combinations of music and the martial arts were at once refined and masculine-a perfect way to display military prowess. The incursion of music into riding schools and infantry drills contributed materially to disciplinary order, enabling the larger and more effective armies of the seventeenth century. This book is a history of the development of these musical spheres and how they brought forth new cultural priorities of civility, military discipline, and political harmony. Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France effectively illustrates the seminal role music played in mediating between the cultural spheres of letters and arms.

A History of Opera

A History of Opera PDF Author: Carolyn Abbate
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393089533
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 648

Get Book Here

Book Description
“The best single volume ever written on the subject, such is its range, authority, and readability.”—Times Literary Supplement Why has opera transfixed and fascinated audiences for centuries? Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker answer this question in their “effervescent, witty” (Die Welt, Germany) retelling of the history of opera, examining its development, the musical and dramatic means by which it communicates, and its role in society. Now with an expanded examination of opera as an institution in the twenty-first century, this “lucid and sweeping” (Boston Globe) narrative explores the tensions that have sustained opera over four hundred years: between words and music, character and singer, inattention and absorption. Abbate and Parker argue that, though the genre’s most popular and enduring works were almost all written in a distant European past, opera continues to change the viewer— physically, emotionally, intellectually—with its enduring power.