The Cambridge Companion to Ballet

by Marion Kant (Editor)

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.

396 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2007

Reviews

[G.G.]

This isn't a book one can read from cover to cover, but I'm enjoying dipping into it occasionally. After seeing a student production of Swan Lake last weekend I was moved to read Thérèse Hurley's essay on Tchaikovsky's ballet music and learned a lot.
Update 19/1/2014: Prompted by another student production (La Bayadère), I read with profit Lynn Garafola's essay on Russian ballet in the age of Petipa. Marion Kant's essay, "The soul of the shoe," makes some interesting connections between newly invented industrial techniques and changes to ballet costumes and especially ballet shoes, but I wasn't convinced by her claim that Giselle is "an existential conflict about the place of women in society" and that ballet costumes "once were able to tell the story of that conflict" (p. 196).