book redesign process book

book redesignvisc 414: publication and editorial

patrick dooley

Breanne Fencl

research materials

project synopsis

Redesign an illustrated book of your own choosing. You will design a cover, title page, table of contents, and 8 typical spreads including at least one chapter opening/divider spread, and 6 – 7 spreads with illustration(s). These spreads must have variety and as a group address all the fundamental problems of the publication. You must also design a special feature (e.g. time line for a history; maps for a travel book) not found in the original book and that grows out of your books subject matter, adding extra value to the book.

2.21- Snow Day. Final pushed back to 2.27.

2.26- Snow Day. Final pushed back to 3.5

2.27- Final complete. Ready for printing and binidng.

day to day notes1.22- Presented topic of ballet history book. Adding ballet dic-tionary for supplemental material.

1.24- Brought in book analysis. Ballet dictionary terms will be their own seperate side bar. Add famous dancer bios?

1.29- Brought in hand drawn mock-ups of grids and layouts. My group liked the square and landscape layouts the best. They seem to suggest more movement. Will use those for tomorrow’s computer mockups.

1.31- Finalized color scheme. Found a great amount of images and text. Need to find more information for special feature (History of the Pointe Shoe). Going to go with square layout.

2.5- Revised spreads. Brought in type and image palettes. Both are okay. Might need to revise grid. Too much margin at bot-tom. Use illustrations for definitions. Possibly other places?

2.7- Revised spreads. Make definition own zone. Make it recognizable to the “browser.” Four swans cover got the best response. Consider different placement of title.

2.12- Individual meet up day. Minor revisions needed. Back cover text needs to be shortened. Edit end sheets.

2.14- Binding demonstration. Minor tweaks to spreads. Find papers. Matte would probably be best for subject matter.

2.19- Black fabric for cover works. Need to figure out why cover is bowing in. Study pocket construction.

What is Wrong with the Design as it Currently is in Terms of AudienceThe books are a bit flat in design. The pages are laid out like a novel with full pages of text. In order to see a picture of what the author is describing, the reader has to flip to a separate sec-tion that holds the pictures. The pictures themselves lack order and are just randomly squeezed onto a page.

General Approach to its RedesignMy approach to this book redesign will be to make it simpler and more engaging to read. It will be a book that is able to read cover to cover as well as accommodate a reader who just wants to browse. The main body of the text will be the history of bal-let itself, with sidebars of ballet terms and profiles of different topics. I will also incorporate photos and diagrams with the text to eliminate the constant flipping between text and photo pages.

To Suggest:elegancegraceprecisionevolutionmovementdisciplinebalancepassion

Definitions:evolution: any process of formation or growth; developmentelegance: a refinementprecision: accuracy; exactness

analysisContentThe two books I chose were Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet and Technical Manual and Dictionary of Classical Ballet. The first explores the history of the dance form the 1500s to present day. It is beauti-fully written and is engaging. It has a storytelling approach to telling the history of ballet rather than a straight statement of facts and dates. The second book, a ballet dictionary accurately describes classical ballet steps and positions as well as provides diagrams. I chose these books because ballet is a topic that interests me and I have grown up with it. I have been dancing since I was three and ballet has always been a favorite of mine. The history and technique fascinate me. I also thought it would lend itself to a beautiful illustrated book.

Text Partsheadspull quotescaptionsside barbody

Illustrative Partsprimarydiagramdetailtexture

AudienceThis book will be geared towards a 20-30 year old woman, who is somewhat experienced in ballet, and is interested in learning the history and technical language of the art form. They have a high school diploma and are in college pursuing a degree.

designdevelopment

arabesque[a-ra-BESK]

A position of the body, in profile, supported on one eht htiw ,éilp-imed ro thgiarts eb nac hcihw ,gel

other leg extended behind and at right angles to it, and the arms held in various harmonious positions.

Angelsapollo’sa history of ballet

jennifer homans

I

II

france and the classical origins of balletchapter 1 Kings of Dance 3chapter 2 The Enlightenment and the Story of Ballet 49chapter 3 The French Revolution in Ballet 98chapter 4 The Rise of the Ballerina 135chapter 5 Scandinavain Orthodoxy: The Danish Style 176chapter 6 Italian Hersey: Pantomime, Virtuosity, and Italian Ballet 205

chapter 7 Tzars of Dance: Imperial Russian Classicism 245chapter 8 East Goes West: Russian Modernism and Ballets Russes 290chapter 9 Left Behind? Communist Ballet from Stalin to Brezhnev 341chapter 10 Alone in Europe: The British Moment 396chapter 11 The American Century I: Russian Beginnings 448chapter 12 The American Century II: The New York Scene 470

light from the east: russian worlds of art

chapter 4

dreamsof poets taken seriously.”théophile gautier

“Ballets are the

She is birdlike, quaint, and almost cloy-ingly sweet, and if there is a thought in her head, it is lost in the mists of her vaporous ethereality. She is the pink-tights-and-toe-shoes ballerina of girlish dreams-and femi-nist nighhtmares. Yet Marie Taglioni was one of the most important and influential ballerinas who ever lived. She galvanized a generation and drew some of Europe’s best literary minds to dance; she was an interna-tional celebrity celebrity—ballet’s first—and set the pattern for Margot Fonteyn, Melissa Hayden, Galina Ulanova, and others to fol-low. More than that, she radically changed the art: La Sylphide laid the way for the toe-shoes-and-tutus ballet we know today.

We feel we know Marie Taglioni. We know her from prints of La Sylphide, the Parisian ballet that made her famous in 1832: she is awispy, winged creature, a confection of white tulle and rose perched delicately on toe, torso tilted slightly forward as if she were listening to a faint song.

Marie Taglioni was also known for shortening her skirt in the performance La Sylphide, which was considered highly scandalous at the time. She shortened all of her skirts to show off her excellent pointe work, which the long skirts hid.

B aryshnikovBorn in Riga, Latvia, in 1948, Mikhail Baryshnikov owed his beginnings in ballet to his mother. She was poorly educated but adored ballet; she took him to performances and enrolled him in the prestigious Riga School of Choreography, the city’s state ballet academy, where he received excellent training. When he was twelve, however, tragedy struck: one afternoon his mother left him with his grandmother and committed suicide. In 1964, when he was just sixteen, Baryshnikov traveled to Leningrad with the Latvian National Opera Ballet and successfully auditioned for the Va-ganova School. He was taken in by the teacher Alexander Pushkin, who had also kept and trained Nureyev. Pushkin became a mentor and surrogate father. Baryshnikov rose rapidly: he joined the Kirov in 1967 and became the scar of the company’s 1970 tour to the West.

In the early twentieth century all of this changed with the arrival of the Russians, the tsar’s Imperial dancers. Some came with Diaghilev; others followed in the wake of the First World War and the Russian Revolu-tion. Diaghilev booked his company into the Metropolitan Opera House, but most, including the renowned ballerina Anna Pav-lova, toured the vaudeville circuit. By then, vaudeville was a tightly organized syndicate of theaters and booking agents, run our of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, and like her French and Italian predecessors, “Pavlova the Incomparable” appeared alongside minstrel shows, baseball-playing elephants, and other popular acts. If the theatrical fare tended toward the light, however, Pavlova and her audiences had no doubt about the seriousness of her art. Her natural charisma and ardent commitment left a powerful impression on an entire generation of American and European performers. “She half hypnotized audiences, partaking almost of the nature of a divinity,” the choreographer Agnes de Mille later recalled, “my life was wholly altered by her.” De Mille was not alone: when Pavlova died in 1931 scores of dreamy American girls reportedly fell spontaneously into astate of hysteria.

shoe

history of the 1832Marie Taglioni often gets the credit and the blame for being the first to dance on pointe. But no one really knows for sure. It is established that in 1832 Marie Taglioni danced in the full length La Sylphide on pointe.

ribbonsSewn on by the dancer themselves, the ribbons aid in keeping the shoe on while contstantly changing between en pointe and flat foot.

B


jennifer homans I

II




c o n t e n t s

Ballerinathe rise of thechapter 4

We feel we know Marie Taglioni. We know her from prints of La Sylphide, the Parisian ballet that made her famous in 1832: she is awispy, winged creature, a confection of white tulle and rose perched delicately on toe, torso tilted slightly forward as if she were listening to a faint song. She is birdlike, quaint, and almost cloyingly sweet, and if there is a thought in her head, it is lost in the mists of her vaporous ethereality. She is the pink-tights-and-toe-shoes ballerina of girlish dreams-and feminist nighht-mares. Yet Marie Taglioni was one of the most important and influential ballerinas who ever lived. She galvanized a generation and drew some of Europe’s best literary minds to dance; she was an international celebrity celebrity—ballet’s first—and set the pattern for Margot Fonteyn, Melissa Hayden, Galina Ulanova, and others to follow. More than that, she radically changed the art: La Sylphide laid the way for the toe-shoes-and-tutus ballet we know today.

dreams“Ballets are the of poets taken seriously.”théophile gautier


A position of the body, in profile, supported on one leg, which can be straight or demi-plié, with the


When the French king Henri II wedded the Florentine Catherine de Medici in 1533, French and Italian culture came into close and formal alliance, and it is here that the history of ballet begins. The French court had long reveled in tourna-ments, jousting, and masquerades,but even these impressive and lavish entertainments fell short of those traditionally mounted by the princes and nobility of Milan, Venice, and Florence: flaming torch dances, elaborate horse ballets with hundreds of mounted cavaliers arranged in symbolic forma-tions, and masked interludes with heroic, allegorical, and exotic themes.

The ballet master Guglielmo Ebreo, writing in Milan in 1463, for example, described festivities that included fireworks, tightrope walkers, conjurers, and banquets with up to twenty courses served on solid gold plat-ters with peacocks wandering on the tables. On another occasion, in 1490, Leonardo da Vinci helped to stage Festa de paradiso in Milan, featuring the Seven Planets along with Mercury, the three Graces, the seven Virtues, nymphs, and the god Apollo. The Italians also performed simple bur elegant social dances known as balli and balletti, which consisted of graceful, rhythmic walk-ing steps danced at formal balls and ceremonies, or on occasion stylized pantomime performances: the French called them ballets.

Catherine (who was only fourteen when she married) dominated the French court for many years after Henri’s death in 1559, bringing her Italianate taste to bear on French courtiers—and kings. Her sons, the French kings Charles IX and Henri III, carried the tradition forward: they admired the floats, chariots, and parades of allegorical performances they saw in Milan and Naples, and shared their mother’s keen interest in ceremonial and theatrical events. In their hands, even strictly Catholic processionals could morph into colorful masquerades, and both monarchs were known to promenade through the streets at night dressed en travesti, adorned with gold and silver veils and Venetian masks, accompanied by courtiers in similar attire. Chivalric themes enacted with dancing, singing, and demonstradetions of equestrian skill made for impressive theatrical collages, such as the joust held at Fontainebleau in 1564, which included

Americancentury i: russian beginnings

the

It is hardly surprising, then, that in America ballet was generally regarded as a foreign art, a fact that constant-ly dismayed visiting Europeans for whom it was a second cultural skin. When Paul Taglioni (Marie’s brother) arrived from Berlin with his wife to perform La Sytphide in 1839, for example, he found to his surprise that the women of the corps de ballet—local gals hired on the spot for the occasion—were poorly trained and thought nothing of lounging indecorously onstage between steps and dances. Forty years later, not much had changed: one critic described the dancers in a production he had seen as “an awkward squad of overgrown girls, with gauze-garnished limbs and dissipated-looking blond wigs.” “In the old country,” an Italian ballet master bit-terly lamented, “the ballet is everything; in this, it is... nothing.”

Not nothing, just part of the popular culture mix. Ballet came to America through vaudeville, variety shows, musicals, and (later) film, through kick lines, gymnastic routines, and spectacles of beautiful girls. This was nothing unusual: until the late nineteenth cen-tury, theater and opera performances

typically mixed and matched Mozart with local popular songs, Shakespeare with acrobatic acts and interludes. Ballet was no different. Thus in 1866, to take just one early example, the Kiralfy brothers (lmre and Bolossy, from Pesch, Hun-gary) produced a bloated but extraordi-narily successful theatrical production packed with spectacular dances entitled The Black Crook at New York’s Niblo’s Garden Theater. It featured a company of more than seventy ballet dancers from

Europe, and ran for so long (on and off for some thirty years) that many of them never went back. The shows star, a ballerina trained in Milan at La Scala, later opened a dance school in New York, and others moved on to theater and vaudeville.

Indeed, by the late nineteenth century, Italian dancers in particular were much in demand: reared on Manzotti’s bra-zenly populist pageants, their techni-cal bravura and sensational tricks were enthusiasticallywelcomed by American audiences who saw ballet as little more than a fun entertainment. After The Black Crook the Kiralfy brothers went on to produce Excelsior—Manzocti’s extravaganza and apredecessor to Ziegfeld’s Follies, the

eliteThere is no dilettantism in the professional ball player, pianist, or violinist ... is a word to be fought for.

lincoln kirstein

Pointehistory of the

shoe

Born in Riga, Latvia, in 1948, Mikhail Baryshnikov owed his beginnings in ballet to his mother. She was poorly educated but adored ballet; she took him to performances and enrolled him in the prestigious Riga School of Choreography, the city’s state ballet academy, where he received excellent training. When he was twelve, however, tragedy struck: one afternoon his mother left him with his grandmother and committed suicide. In 1964, when he was just sixteen, Baryshnikov traveled to Leningrad with the Latvian National Opera Ballet and successfully auditioned for the Vaganova School. He was taken in by the teacher Alexander Pushkin, who had also kept and trained Nureyev. Pushkin became a mentor and surro-gate father. Baryshnikov rose rapidly: he joined the Kirov in 1967 and became the scar of the company’s 1970 tour to the West.

baryshnikov

In the early twentieth century all of this changed with the arrival of the Russians, the tsar’s Imperial danc-ers. Some came with Diaghilev; others followed in the wake of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. Diaghilev booked his company into the Metropolitan Opera House, but most, including the renowned ballerina Anna Pavlova, toured the vaudeville circuit. By then, vaudeville was a tightly organized syndicate of theaters and booking agents, run our of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, and like her French and Italian predecessors, “Pavlova the Incomparable” appeared alongside minstrel shows, baseball-playing elephants, and other popu-lar acts. If the theatrical fare tended toward the light, however, Pavlova and her audiences had no doubt about the seriousness of her art. Her natural charisma and ardent commitment left a powerful impression on an entire generation of American and European performers. “She half hypnotized au-diences, partaking almost of the nature of a divinity,” the choreographer Agnes de Mille later recalled, “my life was wholly altered by her.” De Mille was

not alone: when Pavlova died in 1931 scores of dreamy American girls reportedly fell spontaneously into astate of hysteria. Pavlova was the most famous but there were dozens of Russians like her: they toured America in various Ballets Russes spin-off troupes between the wars (some carried on into the 1960s), introduc-ing—and converting—several generations of audiences to classical dance. The work could be grueling. One tour of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1934-35 took the dancers to ninety cities and towns in just six months: the artists covered some twenty thousand miles, with countless one-night stands and stops at “Voolvorts,” where the dancers could order ham and eggs and stock up on toi-letries and extra costume jewelry before getting back on the road. Nonetheless, like Pavlova, these performers were Imperial subjects and saw themselves as standard-bearers for an aristocratic art: they may have dined at “Voolvorts,” but they presented themselves in furs and silk stockings, and they never lost sight of the sanctity of their art. “They bound together in common need like Blitz victims,” de Mille would later note, “they are bound together by training and heritage. They are

lifeDancing is my obsession. My

mikhail baryshnikov


jennifer homans Contents I

II





dreamsWe feel we know Marie Taglioni. We know her from prints of La Sylphide, the Parisian ballet that made her famous in 1832: she is awispy, winged creature, a confection of white tulle and rose perched delicately on

toe, torso tilted slightly forward as if she were listening to a faint song. She is birdlike, quaint, and almost cloyingly sweet, and if there is a thought in her head, it is lost in the mists of her vaporous ethereality. She is the pink-tights-and-toe-shoes ballerina of girl-ish dreams-and feminist nighhtmares. Yet Marie Taglioni was one of the most impor-tant and influential ballerinas who ever lived. She galvanized a generation and drew some of Europe’s best literary minds to dance; she was an international celebrity celebrity—bal-let’s first—and set the pattern for Margot Fonteyn, Melissa Hayden, Galina Ulanova, and others to follow. More than that, she radically changed the art: La Sylphide laid the way for the toe-shoes-and-tutus ballet we know today.

“Ballets are the of poets taken seriously.”théophile gautier When the French king Henri II wedded

the Florentine Catherine de Medici in 1533, French and Italian culture came into close and formal alliance, and it is here that the history of ballet begins. The French court had long reveled in tournaments, jousting, and masquerades,but even these impressive and lavish entertainments fell short of those traditionally mounted by the princes and nobility of Milan, Venice, and Florence: flaming torch dances, elaborate horse ballets with hundreds of mounted cavaliers ar-ranged in symbolic formations, and masked interludes with heroic, allegorical, and exotic themes.

The ballet master Guglielmo Ebreo, writing in Milan in 1463, for example, described festivities that included fireworks, tightrope walkers, conjurers, and banquets with up to twenty courses served on solid gold plat-ters with peacocks wandering on the tables. On another occasion, in 1490, Leonardo


A position of the body, in profile, supported on one leg, which can be straight or demi-plié, with the other leg

extended behind and at right angles to it, and the arms held in various harmonious positions.

da Vinci helped to stage Festa de paradiso in Milan, featuring the Seven Planets along with Mercury, the three Graces, the seven Virtues, nymphs, and the god Apollo. The Italians also performed simple bur elegant social dances known as balli and balletti, which consisted of graceful, rhythmic walking steps danced at formal balls and ceremonies, or on occasion stylized pantomime perfor-mances: the French called them ballets.

Catherine (who was only fourteen when she married) dominated the French court

for many years after Henri’s death in 1559, bringing her Italianate taste to bear on French courtiers—and kings. Her sons, the French kings Charles IX and Henri III, carried the tradition forward: they admired the floats, chariots, and parades of allegorical performanc-es they saw in Milan and Naples, and shared their mother’s keen interest in ceremonial and theatrical events. In their hands, even strictly Catholic processionals could morph into colorful masquer-ades, and both monarchs were known to promenade through the streets at night dressed en travesti, adorned with gold and silver veils and Venetian masks, accompanied by courtiers in similar attire. Chivalric themes enacted with dancing, singing, and demonstra-

top Catherine de Medici

bottom Ballet was as much etiquette as art

Americancentury i: russian beginnings

the

It is hardly surprising, then, that in America ballet was generally regarded as a foreign art, a fact that constantly dismayed visiting Europeans for whom it was a second cultural skin. When Paul Taglioni (Marie’s brother) arrived from Berlin with his wife to perform La Sytphide in 1839, for example, he found to his surprise that the women of the corps de ballet—local gals hired on the spot for the occasion—were poorly trained and thought nothing of lounging indecorously onstage between steps and dances. Forty years later, not much had changed: one critic described the dancers in a production he had seen as “an awkward squad of overgrown girls, with gauze-garnished limbs and dissipated-looking blond wigs.” “In the old country,” an Italian ballet master bitterly lamented, “the ballet is everything; in this, it is... nothing.”

Not nothing, just part of the popular cul-ture mix. Ballet came to America through vaudeville, variety shows, musicals, and (later) film, through kick lines, gymnastic routines, and spectacles of beautiful girls. This was nothing unusual: until the late nineteenth century, theater and opera per-formances typically mixed and matched Mo-zart with local popular songs, Shakespeare with acrobatic acts and interludes. Ballet was no different. Thus in 1866, to take just one early example, the Kiralfy brothers (lmre

top Angela Paul, Carol-Anne Millar,

and Jenny Murphy (left to right, front row),

with Artists of Birming-ham Royal Ballet

elite

and Bolossy, from Pesch, Hungary) pro-duced a bloated but extraordinarily success-ful theatrical production packed with spec-tacular dances entitled The Black Crook at New York’s Niblo’s Garden Theater. It featured a company of more than seventy ballet dancers from Europe, and ran for so long (on and off for some thirty years) that many of them never went back. The shows star, a ballerina trained in Milan at La Scala, later opened a dance school in New York, and others moved on to theater and vaudeville.

Indeed, by the late nineteenth century, Italian dancers in particular were much in demand: reared on Manzotti’s brazenly populist pageants, their technical bravura and sensational tricks were enthusiasticallywelcomed by American audiences who saw ballet as little more than a fun entertain-ment. After The Black Crook the Kiralfy brothers went on to produce Excelsior—Manzocti’s extravaganza and apredecessor to Ziegfeld’s Follies, the Rock-ettes, and Busby Berkeley.

There is no dilettantism in the professional ball player, pianist, or violinist ... is a word to be fought for.

lincoln kirstein

In the early twentieth century all of this changed with the arrival of the Russians, the tsar’s Imperial dancers. Some came with Diaghilev; others followed in the wake of the First World War and the Russian Revolu-tion. Diaghilev booked his company into the Metropolitan Opera House, but most, including the renowned ballerina Anna Pavlova, toured the vaudeville circuit. By then, vaudeville was a tightly organized syn-dicate of theaters and booking agents, run our of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, and like her French and Italian predeces-sors, “Pavlova the Incomparable” appeared alongside minstrel shows, baseball-playing elephants, and other popular acts. If the theatrical fare tended toward the light, however, Pavlova and her audiences had no doubt about the seriousness of her art. Her natural charisma and ardent commitment left a powerful impression on an entire generation of American and European performers. “She half hypnotized audi-ences, partaking almost of the nature of a divinity,” the choreographer Agnes de Mille later recalled, “my life was wholly altered by her.” De Mille was not alone: when Pavlova died in 1931 scores of dreamy American girls reportedly fell spontaneously into astate of hysteria.

life

Pavlova was the most famous but there were dozens of Russians like her: they toured America in various Ballets Russes spin-off troupes between the wars (some carried on into the 1960s), introduc-ing—and converting—several generations of audiences to classical dance. The work could be grueling. One tour of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1934-35 took the dancers to ninety cities and towns in just six months: the artists covered some twenty thousand miles, with countless one-night stands and stops at “Voolvorts,” where the dancers could order ham and eggs and stock up on toiletries and extra costume jewelry before getting back on the road. Nonethe-less, like Pavlova, these performers were Imperial subjects and saw themselves as standard-bearers for an aristocratic art: they may have dined at “Voolvorts,” but they presented themselves in furs and silk stockings, and they never lost sight of the sanctity of their art. “They bound together in common need like Blitz victims,” de Mille would later note, “they are bound together by training

Born in Riga, Latvia, in 1948, Mikhail Baryshnikov owed his beginnings in ballet to his mother. She was poorly educated but adored ballet; she took him to perfor-mances and enrolled him in the prestigious Riga School of Choreography, the city’s state ballet academy, where he received excellent training. When he was twelve, however, tragedy struck: one afternoon his mother left him with his grandmother and committed suicide. In 1964, when he was just sixteen, Baryshnikov traveled to Leningrad with the Latvian National Opera Ballet and successfully auditioned for the Vaganova School. He was taken in by the teacher Alexander Pushkin, who had also kept and trained Nureyev. Pushkin became a mentor and surrogate father. Baryshnikov rose rapidly: he joined the Kirov in 1967 and became the scar of the company’s 1970 tour to the West.

baryshnikov

Dancing is my obsession. My

mikhail baryshnikov

history of the

Pointe shoe


jennifer homansI

II




iBookfrance and the classical origins of ballet


She is birdlike, quaint, and almost cloy-ingly sweet, and if there is a thought in her head, it is lost in the mists of her vaporous ethereality. She is the pink-tights-and-toe-shoes ballerina of girlish dreams-and femi-nist nighhtmares. Yet Marie Taglioni was one of the most important and influential ballerinas who ever lived. She galvanized a generation and drew some of Europe’s best literary minds to dance; she was an interna-tional celebrity celebrity—ballet’s first—and set the pattern for Margot Fonteyn, Melissa Hayden, Galina Ulanova, and others to fol-low. More than that, she radically changed the art: La Sylphide laid the way for the toe-shoes-and-tutus ballet we know today.


dreams

Marie Taglioni was also known for shortening her skirt in the performance La Sylphide, which was considered highly scandalous at the time. She shortened all of her skirts to show off her excellent pointe work, which the long skirts hid.

of poets taken seriously.”théophile gautier

“Ballets are the


A position of the body, in profile, supported on one leg, which can be straight or demi-plié, with the


When the French king Henri II wed-ded the Florentine Catherine de Medici in 1533, French and Italian culture came into close and formal alliance, and it is here that the history of ballet begins. The French court had long reveled in tourna-ments, jousting, and masquerades,but even these impressive and lavish enter-tainments fell short of those traditionally mounted by the princes and nobility of Milan, Venice, and Florence: flaming torch dances, elaborate horse ballets with hundreds of mounted cavaliers arranged in symbolic formations, and masked interludes with heroic, allegorical, and exotic themes.

The ballet master Guglielmo Ebreo, writing in Milan in 1463, for example, described festivities that included fire-works, tightrope walkers, conjurers, and

banquets with up to twenty courses served on solid gold platters with peacocks wandering on the tables. On another occasion, in 1490, Leonardo da Vinci helped to stage Festa de paradiso in Milan, featuring the Seven Planets along with Mercury, the three

Graces, the seven Virtues, nymphs, and the god Apol-lo. The Italians also performed simple bur el-egant social dances known as balli and balletti, which con-sisted of graceful, rhythmic walking steps danced at formal balls and ceremonies, or on

occasion stylized pantomime performances: the French called them ballets.

Catherine (who was only fourteen when she married) dominated the French court for many years after Henri’s death in 1559, bringing her Italianate taste to bear on French courtiers—and kings. Her sons, the French kings Charles IX and Henri III, carried the tradition forward: they admired the floats, chariots, and parades of allegorical performances they saw in Milan and Naples, and shared their mother’s keen interest in ceremo-nial and theatrical events. In their hands, even strictly Catholic processionals could morph into colorful masquerades, and both monarchs were known to promenade through the streets at night dressed en travesti, adorned with gold and silver veils and Vene-tian masks, accompanied by courtiers in similar attire. Chivalric themes enacted with dancing, singing, and demonstradetions of equestrian skill made for impressive theatrical collages, such as the joust held at Fontainebleau in 1564, which included a full-scale reenactment of a castle siege and battles between demons, giants, and dwarfs on behalf of six beautiful nymphs in captivity.

top Catherine de Medici

bottom Ballet was as much etiquette as art. This painting by Laumosnier depicts a meeting between Louis XIV and Philippe IV in 1659 as a kind of dance: two principals pose in mirror im-age with Louis’s courtiers gathered like a corps de ballet.

In the early twentieth century all of this changed with the arrival of the Russians, the tsar’s Imperial dancers. Some came with Diaghilev; others followed in the wake of the First World War and the Russian Revolu-tion. Diaghilev booked his company into the Metropolitan Opera House, but most, including the renowned ballerina Anna Pav-lova, toured the vaudeville circuit. By then, vaudeville was a tightly organized syndicate of theaters and booking agents, run our of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, and like her French and Italian predecessors, “Pavlova the Incomparable” appeared alongside minstrel shows, baseball-playing elephants, and other popular acts. If the theatrical fare tended toward the light, however, Pavlova and her audiences had no doubt about the seriousness of her art. Her natural charisma and ardent commitment left a powerful impression on an entire generation of American and European performers. “She half hypnotized audiences, partaking almost of the nature of a divinity,” the choreographer Agnes de Mille later recalled, “my life was wholly altered by her.” De Mille was not alone: when Pavlova died in 1931 scores of dreamy American girls reportedly fell spontaneously into astate of hysteria.

baryshnikovmikhail

Born in Riga, Latvia, in 1948, Mikhail Baryshnikov owed his beginnings in ballet to his mother. She was poorly educated but adored ballet; she took him to performances and enrolled him in the prestigious Riga School of Choreography, the city’s state ballet academy, where he received excellent training. When he was twelve, however, tragedy struck: one afternoon his mother left him with his grandmother and committed suicide. In 1964, when he was just sixteen, Baryshnikov traveled to Leningrad with the Latvian National Opera Ballet and successfully auditioned for the Va-ganova School. He was taken in by the teacher Alexander Pushkin, who had also kept and trained Nureyev. Pushkin became a mentor and surrogate father. Baryshnikov rose rapidly: he joined the Kirov in 1967 and became the scar of the company’s 1970 tour to the West.

Pavlova was the most famous but there were dozens of Russians like her: they toured America in various Ballets Russes spin-off troupes between the wars (some carried on into the 1960s), introducing—and converting—several generations of audiences to classical dance. The work could be grueling. One tour of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1934-35 took the dancers to ninety cities and towns in just six months: the artists covered some twenty thousand miles, with countless one-night stands and stops at “Voolvorts,” where the dancers could order ham and eggs and stock up on toiletries and extra costume jewelry before getting back on the road. Nonetheless, like Pavlova, these performers were Imperial subjects and saw themselves as standard-bearers for an aristocratic art: they may have dined at “Voolvorts,” but they presented themselves in furs and silk stockings, and they never lost sight of the sanctity of their art. “They bound together in common need like Blitz victims,” de Mille would later note, “they are bound together by training and heritage. They are doing the most difficult and interesting work in the theater.”


mikhail baryshnikov

Russianbeginnings

It is hardly surprising, then, that in America ballet was generally regarded as a foreign art, a fact that constantly dismayed visiting Europeans for whom it was a second cultural skin. When Paul Taglioni (Marie’s brother) arrived from Berlin with his wife to perform La Sytphide in 1839, for example, he found to his surprise that the women of the corps de ballet—local gals hired on the spot for the occasion—were poorly trained and thought nothing of loung-ing indecorously onstage between steps and dances. Forty years later, not much had changed: one critic described the dancers in a production he had seen as “an awkward squad of overgrown girls, with gauze-garnished limbs and dissi-pated-looking blond wigs.” “In the old country,” an Italian ballet master bit-terly lamented, “the ballet is everything; in this, it is... nothing.”

Not nothing, just part of the popular culture mix. Ballet came to America through vaudeville, variety shows,

musicals, and (later) film, through kick lines, gymnastic routines, and spectacles of beautiful girls. This was nothing unusual: until the late nineteenth century, theater and opera performances typically mixed and matched Mozart with local popular songs, Shakespeare with acrobatic acts and inter-ludes. Ballet was no different. Thus in 1866, to take just one early example, the Kiralfy brothers (lmre and Bolossy, from Pesch, Hungary) produced a bloated but extraordinarily suc-cessful theatrical production packed with spectacular dances entitled The Black Crook at New York’s Niblo’s Garden Theater. It featured a company of more than seventy ballet dancers from Europe, and ran for so long (on and off for some thirty years) that many of them never went back. The shows star, a

ballerina trained in Milan at La Scala, later opened a dance school in New York, and others moved on to theater and vaudeville.

Indeed, by the late nineteenth century, Italian dancers in particular were much in demand: reared on Manzotti’s bra-zenly populist pageants, their techni-cal bravura and sensational tricks were enthusiasticallywelcomed by American audiences who saw ballet as little more than a fun

entertainment. After The Black Crook the Kiralfy brothers went on to produce Excelsior—Manzocti’s extravaganza and apredecessor to Ziegfeld’s Follies, the Rockettes, and Busby Berkeley.

Anna Pavlova was the illegitimate daughter of a laundry-woman. Her father was probably a young Jewish soldier and businessman. When she saw The Sleeping Beauty performed, Anna Pavlova decided to become a dancer, and entered the Imperial Ballet School


lincoln kirstein

Pointe 1832

1895

Today

shoe

history of the

Marie Taglioni often gets the credit and the blame for being the first to dance on pointe. But no one really knows for sure. It is established that in 1832 Marie Taglioni danced in the full length La Sylphide on pointe.

Taglioni wore soft satin slip-pers that fit like kid gloves.

They had a leather sole and some darning on the sides

and under, not on, the tip. That’s all. It must have been a lot like standing barefoot.

The blocked pointe shoe with a stiff sole as we know

it today did not evolve until much later.

The Italian school pushed technique to the limit in order to achieve dazzling virtuosic feats. They also had better shoes. Pierina Legnani was the first to do thirty-two fou-ettés on pointe and she caused a huge sensation. The Italian ballerinas were dancing in Italian-made shoes that were actually quite soft, harder than Taglioni’s but nothing like today’s shoes.

improvements to pointe shoes empowered dancers to do more on pointe, and thus expanded the ballerina’s vocabulary and the art as a whole. Petipa, as a choreographer, made great use of this new “equipment” for the feet. He made multiple pirouettes on pointe, sustained balances and promenades and hops on pointe all obligatory for the ballerina. Petipa’s hallmark Grand Pas requires the ballerina to perform all of the above if not more.

Although pointe shoes have evolved in that they have become harder and boxier, their basic construction materials are still antiquated: Leather, burlap, paper, glue and nails. They provide superior suport and alow the dancer to perform the skills of yesterday and the revolutionary tasks of today.

The great Russian ballerinas of the day, Kschessinska, Preobrajenska, Karsavina managed in soft Italian shoes, but other dancers and students required more support so in Russia the pointe shoe grew quite hard and

stiff. Even today Russian shoes are generally stiffer, and Russian technique calls for “pouncing” onto pointe more than rolling through.

ribbons

sole

Sewn on by the dancer themselves, the ribbons aid in keeping the shoe on while contstantly changing between en pointe and flat foot.

The sole of a pointe shoe is usually made of natural leather and provide grip when the dancer is off pointe.

vampThe vamp length is an element used in fitting

shoes to the dancer. The longer the vamp, the more support.

boxThe toe box consists of several layers of sacking and textile fabrics glued tgether.


jennifer homans

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jennifer homans

apollo

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jennifer homans

apollo

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Angelsapollo’sa history of balletjennifer homans

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jennifer homans




I

II



She is birdlike, quaint, and almost cloyingly sweet, and if there is a thought in her head, it is lost in the mists of her vaporous ethereality. She is the pink-tights-and-toe-shoes ballerina of girlish dreams-and feminist nighhtmares. Yet Marie Taglioni was one of the most important and influential bal-lerinas who ever lived. She galva-nized a generation and drew some of Europe’s best literary minds to dance; she was an international ce-lebrity celebrity—ballet’s first—and set the pattern for Margot Fon-teyn, Melissa Hayden, Galina Ula-nova, and others to follow. More than that, she radically changed


the art: La Sylphide laid the way for the toe-shoes-and-tutus ballet we know today.

If Taglioni’s dainty, candy-coated image seems to undercut her artis-tic significance there are reasons. First, the image cannot tell us how she moved: it is static and incom-plete, an inaccurate representa-tion of her talents. But most im-portantly, it is anachronistic: what Taglioni looks like to us now is not what she looked like to audiences in the 1830s. They saw something quite different. To understand why she became an icon of her art, we thus need to climb behind the

Marie Taglioni was also known for shortening her skirt in the performance La Sylphide, which was considered highly scandalous at the time. She shortened all of her skirts to show off her excellent pointe work, which the long skirts hid. dreamsof poets taken seriously.”

théophile gautier“Ballets are the

When the French king Henri II wedded the Florentine Cath-erine de Medici in 1533, French and Italian culture came into close and formal alliance, and it is here that the history of ballet begins. The French court had long reveled in tournaments, jousting, and masquerades,but even these impressive and lavish entertainments fell short of those traditionally mounted by the princes and nobility of Milan, Venice, and Florence: flaming torch dances, elaborate horse ballets with hundreds of mounted cavaliers arranged in symbolic

formations, and masked inter-ludes with heroic, allegorical, and exotic themes.

The ballet master Guglielmo Ebreo, writing in Milan in 1463, for example, described festivities that included fireworks, tightrope walkers, conjurers, and ban-quets with up to twenty courses served on solid gold platters with peacocks wandering on the tables. On another occasion, in 1490, Leonardo da Vinci helped to stage Festa de paradiso in Milan, featuring the Seven Planets along with Mercury, the three Graces, the seven Virtues, nymphs, and the god Apollo. The Italians also performed simple bur elegant social dances known as balli and balletti, which consisted of graceful, rhythmic walking steps danced at formal balls and ceremonies, or

on occasion stylized pantomime performances: the French called them ballets.

Catherine (who was only fourteen when she married) dominated the French court for many years after Henri’s death in 1559, bring-ing her Italianate taste to bear on French courtiers—and kings. Her sons, the French kings Charles IX and Henri III, carried the tradi-tion forward: they admired the floats, chariots, and parades of allegorical performances they saw in Milan and Naples, and shared their mother’s keen interest in ceremonial and theatrical events. In their hands, even strictly Catholic processionals could morph into colorful masquerades, and both monarchs were known to promenade through the streets at night dressed en travesti, adorned with gold and silver veils and Venetian masks, accompanied by courtiers in similar attire. Chival-ric themes enacted with dancing,

singing, and demonstradetions of equestrian skill made for impres-sive theatrical collages, such as the joust held at Fontainebleau in 1564, which included a full-scale reenactment of a castle siege and battles between demons, giants, and dwarfs on behalf of six beauti-ful nymphs in captivity.

These festivities, so seemingly gay in their extravagances, were not mere frivolous diversions. Sixteenth-century France was be-set with intractable and savage civil and religious conflicts: the French kings, drawing on a deep tradition


A position of the body, in profile, supported on one leg, which can be straight or demi-plié, with the other leg extended behind and

at right angles to it, and the arms held in various harmonious positions.

In the early twentieth century all of this changed with the arrival of the Russians, the tsar’s Imperial dancers. Some came with Diaghilev; others followed in the wake of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. Diaghilev booked his company into the Metropoli-tan Opera House, but most, including the renowned ballerina Anna Pavlova, toured the vaudeville circuit. By then, vaudeville was a tightly organized syndicate of theaters and booking agents, run our of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, and like her French and Italian predecessors, “Pavlova the Incomparable” appeared alongside minstrel shows, baseball-playing elephants, and other popular acts. If the theatrical fare tended toward the light, however, Pavlova and her audiences had no doubt about the seriousness of her art. Her natural charisma and ardent commitment left a powerful impression on an entire generation of American and European performers. “She half hypnotized audiences, partaking almost of the nature of a divinity,” the choreographer Agnes de Mille later recalled, “my life was wholly altered by her.” De Mille was not alone: when Pavlova died in 1931 scores of dreamy American girls reportedly fell spontaneously into a state of hysteria.

Pavlova was the most famous but there were dozens of Russians like her: they toured America in various Ballets Russes spin-off troupes between the wars (some carried on into the 1960s), in-troducing—and converting—sev-eral generations of audiences to classical dance. The work could be grueling. One tour of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1934-35 took the dancers to ninety cities and towns in just six months: the artists covered some twenty thousand miles, with countless one-night stands and stops at “Voolvorts,” where the dancers could order ham and eggs and stock up on toiletries and extra costume jewelry before getting back on the road. Nonetheless, like Pavlova, these performers were Imperial subjects and saw themselves as standard-bearers for

an aristocratic art: they may have dined at “Voolvorts,” but they presented themselves in furs and silk stockings, and they never lost sight of the sanctity of their art. “They bound together in com-mon need like Blitz victims,” de Mille would later note, “they are bound together by training and heritage. They are doing the most difficult and interesting work in the theater.”

Four years later Mikhail Barysh-nikov followed. Born in Riga, Latvia, in 1948, Baryshnikov owed his beginnings in ballet to his mother. She was poorly educated

baryshnikovmikhail

Born in Riga, Latvia, in 1948, Mikhail Baryshnikov owed his beginnings in bal-let to his mother. She was poorly edu-cated but adored ballet; she took him to performances and enrolled him in the prestigious Riga School of Choreog-raphy, the city’s state ballet academy, where he received excellent training. When he was twelve, however, tragedy struck: one afternoon his mother left him with his grandmother and commit-ted suicide. In 1964, when he was just sixteen, Baryshnikov traveled to Lenin-grad with the Latvian National Opera Ballet and successfully auditioned for the Vaganova School. He was taken in by the teacher Alexander Pushkin, who had also kept and trained Nureyev. Pushkin became a mentor and surrogate father. Baryshnikov rose rapidly: he joined the Kirov in 1967 and became the scar of the company’s 1970 tour to the West.


mikhail baryshnikov

Russianbeginnings

It is hardly surprising, then, that in America ballet was generally regarded as a foreign art, a fact that constantly dismayed visit-ing Europeans for whom it was a second cultural skin. When Paul Taglioni (Marie’s brother) arrived from Berlin with his wife to perform La Sytphide in 1839, for example, he found to his surprise that the women of the corps de ballet—local gals hired on the spot for the occasion—were poorly trained and thought nothing of lounging indeco-rously onstage between steps and dances. Forty years later, not

much had changed: one critic described the dancers in a pro-duction he had seen as “an awk-ward squad of overgrown girls, with gauze-garnished limbs and dissipated-looking blond wigs.” “In the old country,” an Italian ballet master bitterly lamented, “the ballet is everything; in this, it is... nothing.”

Not nothing, just part of the popular culture mix. Ballet came to America through vaudeville, variety shows, musicals, and (later) film, through kick lines, gymnastic routines, and spec-

tacles of beautiful girls. This was nothing unusual: until the late nineteenth century, theater and opera performances typically mixed and matched Mozart with local popular songs, Shakespeare with acrobatic acts and inter-ludes. Ballet was no differ-ent. Thus in 1866, to take just one early example, the Kiralfy brothers (lmre and Bolossy, from Pesch, Hungary) produced a bloated but extraordinarily successful theatrical production packed with spectacular dances entitled The Black Crook at New York’s Niblo’s Garden Theater.

It featured a company of more than seventy ballet dancers from Europe, and ran for so long (on and off for some thirty years) that many of them never went back. The shows star, a ballerina trained in Milan at La Scala, later opened a dance school in New York, and others moved on to theater and vaudeville.

Indeed, by the late nineteenth century, Italian dancers in par-ticular were much in demand: reared on Manzotti’s brazenly populist pageants, their techni-cal bravura and sensational tricks were enthusiasticallywelcomed by American audienc-es who saw ballet as little more than a fun entertainment. After The Black Crook the Kiralfy brothers went on to produce Ex-celsior—Manzocti’s extravaganza

and a predecessor to Ziegfeld’s Follies, the Rockettes, and Busby Berkeley.

Anna Pavlova was the illegitimate daughter of a laundry-woman. Her father was probably a young Jewish soldier and business-man. When she saw The Sleeping Beauty performed, Anna Pavlova decided to become a dancer, and entered the Imperial Bal-let School at ten. Although the young Pavlova was considered frail and not exactly beautiful, she was nevertheless very hard working. She worked very tire-lessly, and on graduation began


lincoln kirstein

Pointeshoe

history of the1832

1895

Today

the dancer:Marie Taglioni often gets the credit and the blame for being the first to dance on pointe. But no one really knows for sure. It is established that in 1832 Marie Taglioni danced in the full length La Sylphide on pointe.the shoe:

Taglioni wore soft satin slippers that fit like kid gloves. They had a leather sole and some darning on the sides and under, not on, the tip. That’s all. It must have

been a lot like standing barefoot. The blocked pointe shoe with a

stiff sole as we know it today did not evolve until much later.

the dancer:The Italian school pushed technique to the limit in order to achieve daz-zling virtuosic feats. They also had better shoes. Pierina Legnani was the first to do thirty-two fouettés on pointe and she caused a huge sensation. The Italian ballerinas were dancing in Italian-made shoes that were actually quite soft, harder than Taglioni’s but nothing like today’s shoes.

the choreography:Improvements to pointe shoes empowered dancers to do more on pointe, and thus expanded the ballerina’s vocabulary and the art as a whole. Petipa, as a choreographer, made great use of this new “equipment” for the feet. He made multiple pirouettes on pointe, sustained balances and promenades and hops on pointe all obligatory for the ballerina. Petipa’s hallmark Grand Pas requires the ballerina to perform all of the above if not more.

the shoe: Although pointe shoes have evolved in that they have be-come harder and boxier, their basic construction materials are still antiquated: Leather, burlap, paper, glue and nails. They provide superior suport and alow the dancer to perform the skills of yesterday and the revolutionary tasks of today.

The great Russian ballerinas of the day, Kschessinska, Preobrajenska, Karsavina managed in soft Italian shoes, but other dancers and students required more support

so in Russia the pointe shoe grew quite hard and stiff. Even today Russian shoes are generally stiffer, and Russian technique calls for “pouncing” onto pointe more than

rolling through.

1

23

45 6

1 ribbonsSewn on by the dancer themselves, the ribbons aid in keeping the shoe on while contstantly changing between en pointe and flat foot.

2 soleThe sole of a pointe shoe is usually made of natural leather and provide grip when the dancer is off pointe.

3 shankAvailable in varrying stiffness and lengths, allows the dancer to customize the amount of support they recieve.

4 toeThe toe is the platform on which the dancer balances. It also comes in varrying sizes based on the dancer’s preference.

5 toe boxThe toe box consists of several layers of sacking and textile fabrics glued tgether.

6 vampThe vamp length is an element used in fitting shoes to

the dancer. The longer the vamp, the more support.


jennifer homans

Contentstable of

france and the classical origins of ballet


chapter 1 Kings of Dance 3

chapter 2 The Enlightenment and the Story of Ballet 49

chapter 3 The French Revolution in Ballet 98

chapter 4 The Rise of the Ballerina 135

chapter 5 Scandinavain Orthodoxy: The Danish Style 176

chapter 6 Italian Hersey: Pantomime, Virtuosity, and Italian Ballet 205

chapter 7 Tzars of Dance: Imperial Russian Classicism 245

chapter 8 East Goes West: Russian Modernism and Ballets Russes 290

chapter 9 Left Behind? Communist Ballet from Stalin to Brezhnev 341

chapter 10 Alone in Europe: The British Moment 396

chapter 11 The American Century I: Russian Beginnings 448

chapter 12 The American Century II: The New York Scene 470

III



She is birdlike, quaint, and almost cloyingly sweet, and if there is a thought in her head, it is lost in the mists of her vaporous ethereality. She is the pink-tights-and-toe-shoes ballerina of girlish dreams-and feminist nighhtmares. Yet Marie Taglioni was one of the most important and influential bal-lerinas who ever lived. She galva-nized a generation and drew some of Europe’s best literary minds to dance; she was an international ce-lebrity celebrity—ballet’s first—and set the pattern for Margot Fon-teyn, Melissa Hayden, Galina Ula-nova, and others to follow. More than that, she radically changed


the art: La Sylphide laid the way for the toe-shoes-and-tutus ballet we know today.

If Taglioni’s dainty, candy-coated image seems to undercut her artis-tic significance there are reasons. First, the image cannot tell us how she moved: it is static and incom-plete, an inaccurate representa-tion of her talents. But most im-portantly, it is anachronistic: what Taglioni looks like to us now is not what she looked like to audiences in the 1830s. They saw something quite different. To understand why she became an icon of her art, we thus need to climb behind the



When the French king Henri II wedded the Florentine Cath-erine de Medici in 1533, French and Italian culture came into close and formal alliance, and it is here that the history of ballet begins. The French court had long reveled in tournaments, jousting, and masquerades,but even these impressive and lavish entertainments fell short of those traditionally mounted by the princes and nobility of Milan,

Venice, and Florence: flaming torch dances, elaborate horse ballets with hundreds of mounted cavaliers arranged in symbolic formations, and masked inter-ludes with heroic, allegorical, and exotic themes.

The ballet master Guglielmo Ebreo, writing in Milan in 1463, for example, described festivities that included fireworks, tightrope walkers, conjurers, and ban-quets with up to twenty courses served on solid gold platters with peacocks wandering on the tables. On another occasion, in 1490, Leonardo da Vinci helped to stage Festa de paradiso in Milan, featuring the Seven Planets along with Mercury, the three Graces, the seven Virtues, nymphs, and the god Apollo. The Italians also performed simple bur elegant social dances known as balli and balletti, which consisted of graceful, rhythmic walking steps danced at formal balls and ceremonies, or on occasion stylized pantomime performances: the French called them ballets.

Catherine (who was only fourteen when she married) dominated the French court for many years after Henri’s death in 1559, bring-ing her Italianate taste to bear on French courtiers—and kings. Her sons, the French kings Charles IX and Henri III, carried the tradi-tion forward: they admired the floats, chariots, and parades of allegorical performances they saw in Milan and Naples, and shared their mother’s keen interest in ceremonial and theatrical events. In their hands, even strictly Catholic processionals could morph into colorful masquerades, and both monarchs were known to promenade through the streets at night dressed en travesti, adorned with gold and silver veils and Venetian masks, accompanied by

courtiers in similar attire. Chival-ric themes enacted with dancing, singing, and demonstradetions of equestrian skill made for impres-sive theatrical collages, such as the joust held at Fontainebleau in 1564, which included a full-scale reenactment of a castle siege and battles between demons, giants, and dwarfs on behalf of six beauti-ful nymphs in captivity.

These festivities, so seemingly gay in their extravagances, were not mere frivolous diversions. Sixteenth-century France was be-set with intractable and savage civil and religious conflicts: the French




top Ballet was as much etiquette as art. This painting by Laumosnier depicts a meet-ing between Louis XIV and Philippe IV in 1659 as a kind of dance: two principals pose in mirror image with Louis’s courtiers gathered like a corps de ballet.

b0tt0m Catherine de Medici





baryshnikovmikhail

Born in Riga, Latvia, in 1948, Mikhail Baryshnikov owed his beginnings in bal-let to his mother. She was poorly edu-cated but adored ballet; she took him to performances and enrolled him in the prestigious Riga School of Choreog-raphy, the city’s state ballet academy, where he received excellent training. When he was twelve, however, tragedy struck: one afternoon his mother left him with his grandmother and commit-ted suicide. In 1964, when he was just sixteen, Baryshnikov traveled to Lenin-grad with the Latvian National Opera Ballet and successfully auditioned for the Vaganova School. He was taken in by the teacher Alexander Pushkin, who had also kept and trained Nureyev. Pushkin became a mentor and surrogate father. Baryshnikov rose rapidly: he joined the Kirov in 1967 and became the scar of the company’s 1970 tour to the West.


mikhail baryshnikov

Russianbeginnings








Anna Pavlova was the illegitimate daughter of a laundry-woman. Her father was probably a young Jewish soldier and business-man. When she saw The Sleeping Beauty performed, Anna Pavlova decided to become a dancer, and entered the Imperial Bal-let School at ten. Although the young Pavlova was considered frail and not exactly beauti-ful, she was nevertheless very hard working. She worked very


lincoln kirstein

Pointeshoe

history of the

1832

1895

the dancer:Marie Taglioni often gets the credit and the blame for being the first to dance on pointe. But no one really knows for sure. It is established that in 1832 Marie Taglioni danced in the full length La Sylphide on pointe.

the shoe:Taglioni wore soft satin slippers that fit like kid

gloves. They had a leather sole and some darning on

the sides and under, not on, the tip. That’s all. It must have been a lot like

standing barefoot. The blocked pointe shoe with a stiff sole as we know it

today did not evolve until much later.

the dancer:The Italian school pushed technique to the limit in order to achieve dazzling virtuosic feats. They also had better shoes. Pierina Legnani was the first to do thirty-two fouettés on pointe and she caused a huge sensation. The Italian ballerinas were dancing in Italian-made shoes that were actually quite soft, harder than Taglioni’s but nothing like today’s shoes.

the choreography:Improvements to pointe shoes empowered dancers to do more on pointe, and thus expanded the ballerina’s vocabulary and the art as a whole. Petipa, as a choreographer, made great use of this new “equip-ment” for the feet. He made multiple pirouettes on pointe, sustained balances and promenades and hops on pointe all obligatory for the ballerina. Petipa’s hallmark Grand Pas requires the ballerina to perform all of the above if not more. Today

the shoe: Although pointe shoes have evolved in that they have become harder and boxier, their basic construc-tion materials are still antiquated: Leather, burlap, paper, glue and nails. They provide su-perior suport and alow the dancer to perform the skills of yesterday and the revolutionary tasks of today.

1

23

45 6






6 vampThe vamp length is an element used in fitting shoes to the dancer. The longer the vamp, the more support.

Contentstable of















III



She is birdlike, quaint, and al-most cloyingly sweet, and if there is a thought in her head, it is lost in the mists of her vaporous ethe-reality. She is the pink-tights-and-toe-shoes ballerina of girlish dreams-and feminist nighht-mares. Yet Marie Taglioni was one of the most important and influential ballerinas who ever lived. She galvanized a genera-tion and drew some of Europe’s best literary minds to dance; she was an international celebrity celebrity—ballet’s first—and set the pattern for Margot Fonteyn, Melissa Hayden, Galina Ulanova, and others to follow. More than

e feel we know Marie Taglioni. We know her from prints

of La Sylphide, the Parisian ballet that made her famous in 1832:

she is awispy, winged creature, a confection of white tulle and

rose perched delicately on toe, torso tilted slightly forward

as if she were listening to a faint song.

that, she radically changed the art: La Sylphide laid the way for the toe-shoes-and-tutus ballet we know today.

If Taglioni’s dainty, candy-coated image seems to undercut her artistic significance there are reasons. First, the image cannot tell us how she moved: it is static and incomplete, an inaccurate representation of her talents. But most importantly, it is anachro-nistic: what Taglioni looks like to us now is not what she looked like to audiences in the 1830s. They saw something quite different. To understand why she became an



W




Catherine (who was only fourteen when she married) dominated the French court for many years after Henri’s death in 1559, bring-ing her Italianate taste to bear on French courtiers—and kings. Her sons, the French kings Charles IX and Henri III, carried the tradi-tion forward: they admired the floats, chariots, and parades of allegorical performances they saw in Milan and Naples, and shared their mother’s keen interest in ceremonial and theatrical events. In their hands, even strictly Catholic processionals could morph into colorful masquerades, and both monarchs were known to promenade through the streets at night dressed en travesti, adorned with gold and silver veils and Venetian masks, accompanied by

courtiers in similar attire. Chival-ric themes enacted with dancing, singing, and demonstradetions of equestrian skill made for impres-sive theatrical collages, such as the joust held at Fontainebleau in 1564, which included a full-scale reenactment of a castle siege and battles between demons, giants, and dwarfs on behalf of six beauti-ful nymphs in captivity.

These festivities, so seemingly gay in their extravagances, were not mere frivolous diversions. Sixteenth-century France was be-set with intractable and savage civil and religious conflicts: the French



top Ballet was as much etiquette as art. This painting by Laumosnier depicts a meet-ing between Louis XIV and Philippe IV in 1659 as a kind of dance: two principals pose in mirror image with Louis’s courtiers gathered like a corps de ballet.

b0tt0m Catherine de Medici

Arabesque[a-ra-BESK]





baryshnikovmikhail

Born in Riga, Latvia, in 1948, Mikhail Baryshnikov owed his beginnings in ballet to his mother. She was poorly educated but adored ballet; she took him to performances and enrolled him in the prestigious Riga School of Choreography, the city’s state ballet academy, where he received excellent training. When he was twelve, however, tragedy struck: one afternoon his mother left him with his grandmother and committed suicide. In 1964, when he was just sixteen, Baryshnikov traveled to Leningrad with the Latvian National Opera Ballet and successfully auditioned for the Vaganova School. He was taken in by the teacher Alexander Pushkin, who had also kept and trained Nureyev. Pushkin became a mentor and surrogate father. Baryshnikov rose rapidly: he joined the Kirov in 1967 and became the scar of the company’s 1970 tour to the West.


mikhail baryshnikov Russianbeginnings








Anna Pavlova was the illegitimate daughter of a laundry-woman. Her father was probably a young Jewish soldier and business-man. When she saw The Sleeping Beauty performed, Anna Pavlova decided to become a dancer, and entered the Imperial Bal-let School at ten. Although the young Pavlova was considered frail and not exactly beauti-ful, she was nevertheless very hard working. She worked very


lincoln kirstein

merrill ashley a dancer for Balanchine demonstrates tondus in three directions.

Pointeshoe

history of the

1832

1895

1990the dancer:Marie Taglioni often gets the credit and the blame for being the first to dance on pointe. But no one really knows for sure. It is established that in 1832 Marie Taglioni danced in the full length La Sylphide on pointe.









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We are all accustomed to the ballet of today. The

tutus, the pointe shoes, and the timeless stories.

But where did all this come from? France was

a poineer in classical ballet as we know it today.

What started as entertainment for kings and

royalty turned into what we see today.


She is birdlike, quaint, and al-most cloyingly sweet, and if there is a thought in her head, it is lost in the mists of her vaporous ethereality. She is the pink-tights-and-toe-shoes ballerina of girlish dreams-and feminist nighhtmares. Yet Marie Taglioni was one of the most important and influential ballerinas who ever lived. She galvanized a generation and drew some of Europe’s best literary minds to dance; she was an international celebrity celebrity — ballet’s first — and set the pattern for Margot Fonteyn, Melissa Hayden, Galina Ulanova, and others to follow.






More than that, she radically changed the art: La Sylphide laid the way for the toe-shoes-and-tutus ballet we know today.

If Taglioni’s dainty, candy-coated image seems to undercut her artistic significance there are reasons. First, the image cannot tell us how she moved: it is static and incomplete, an inaccurate representation of her talents. But most importantly, it is anachro-nistic: what Taglioni looks like to us now is not what she looked like to audiences in the 1830s. They saw something quite different. To understand why she became

Marie Taglioni was also known for shortening her skirt in the perfor-mance La Sylphide, which was considered highly scandalous at the time. She shortened all of her skirts to show off her excellent pointe work, which the long skirts hid.

dreamsof poets taken seriously.”théophile gautier

“Ballets are the

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Catherine (who was only fourteen when she married) dominated the French court for many years after Henri’s death in 1559, bring-ing her Italianate taste to bear on French courtiers — and kings. Her sons, the French kings Charles IX and Henri III, carried the tradi-tion forward: they admired the floats, chariots, and parades of allegorical performances they saw in Milan and Naples, and shared their mother’s keen interest in ceremonial and theatrical events. In their hands, even strictly Catholic processionals could morph into colorful masquer-ades, and both monarchs were known to promenade through the streets at night dressed en travesti, adorned with gold and silver veils and Venetian masks, accompa-nied by courtiers in similar attire.

Chivalric themes enacted with dancing, singing, and demonstra-detions of equestrian skill made for impressive theatrical collages, such as the joust held at Fontaine-bleau in 1564, which included a full-scale reenactment of a castle siege and battles between demons, giants, and dwarfs on behalf of six beautiful nymphs in captivity.




top Ballet was as much etiquette as art. This painting by Laumosnier depicts a meeting between Louis XIV and Philippe IV in 1659 as a kind of dance: two principals pose in mirror image with Louis’s courtiers gathered like a corps de ballet.

bottom Catherine de Medici

right La Liberazione di Tirreno






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It is hardly surprising, then, that in America ballet was generally regarded as a foreign art, a fact that constantly dismayed visit-ing Europeans for whom it was a second cultural skin. When Paul Taglioni (Marie’s brother) ar-rived from Berlin with his wife to perform La Sytphide in 1839, for example, he found to his surprise that the women of the corps de bal-let—local gals hired on the spot for the occasion—were poorly trained and thought nothing of loung-ing indecorously onstage between steps and dances. Forty years later, not much had changed: one

critic described the dancers in a production he had seen as “an awkward squad of overgrown girls, with gauze-garnished limbs and dissipated-looking blond wigs.” “In the old country,” an Italian ballet master bitterly lamented, “the ballet is everything; in this, it is... nothing.”

Not nothing, just part of the popular culture mix. Ballet came to America through vaudeville, variety shows, musicals, and (later) film, through kick lines, gymnastic routines, and spec-tacles of beautiful girls. This was

nothing unusual: until the late nineteenth century, theater and opera performances typically mixed and matched Mozart with local popular songs, Shakespeare with acrobatic acts and interludes. Ballet was no different. Thus in 1866, to take just one early ex-ample, the Kiralfy brothers (lmre and Bolossy, from Pesch, Hun-gary) produced a bloated but ex-traordinarily successful theatrical production packed with spectacu-lar dances entitled The Black Crook at New York’s Niblo’s Garden Theater. It featured a company of more than seventy ballet dancers

from Europe, and ran for so long (on and off for some thirty years) that many of them never went back. The shows star, a ballerina trained in Milan at La Scala, later opened a dance school in New York, and others moved on to theater and vaudeville.

Indeed, by the late nineteenth century, Italian dancers in par-ticular were much in demand: reared on Manzotti’s brazenly populist pageants, their technical bravura and sensational tricks were enthusiasticallywelcomed by American audiences who saw ballet as little more than a fun entertainment. After The Black Crook the Kiralfy brothers went on to produce Excelsior—Manzocti’s extravaganza and a predecessor to Ziegfeld’s Follies, the Rockettes, and Busby Berkeley.

Anna Pavlova was the illegitimate daughter of a laundry-woman. Her father was probably a young Jewish soldier and businessman. When she saw The Sleeping Beauty performed, Anna Pavlova decided to become a dancer, and entered the Imperial Ballet School at ten. Although the young Pavlova was considered frail and not exactly beautiful, she was nevertheless very hard working. She worked very tirelessly, and on graduation began to perform at the Maryinsky Theatre, debuting on September 19, 1899.


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merrill ashley a dancer for Balanchine demonstrates tondus in three directions.

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4 toeThe toe is the platform on which the dancer bal-ances. It also comes in varrying sizes based on the dancer’s preference.



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Marie Taglioni was also known for shortening her skirt in the performance La Sylphide, which was considered highly scan-dalous at the time. dreamsof poets taken seriously.”


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top This painting by Laumosnier depicts a meeting between Louis XIV and Philippe IV in 1659: two principals pose in mirror image with Louis’s courtiers gathered like a corps de ballet. bottom Catherine de Mediciright La Libera-zione di Tirreno


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f i nal project

concept statementThe two books I chose were Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet and Technical Manual and Dictionary of Classical Ballet. The first explores the history of the dance form the 1500s to present day. It has a sto-rytelling approach to telling the history of ballet rather than a straight statement of facts and dates. The second book, a ballet dictionary, accurately describes classical ballet steps and posi-tions as well as provides diagrams.

I decided to redesign these books to be catered to a 20-30 year old woman, who is somewhat experienced in ballet, and is interested in learning the history and technical language of the art form. They have a high school diploma and are in college pursuing a degree.

what was wrongThe books are a bit flat in design. The pages are laid out like a novel with full pages of text. In order to see a picture of what the author is describing, the reader has to flip to a separate sec-tion that holds the pictures. The pictures themselves lack order and are just randomly squeezed onto a page.

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God”“Dancers are the athletes of

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76When the French king Henri II wedded the Florentine Cath-erine de Medici in 1533, French and Italian culture came into close and formal alliance, and it is here that the history of ballet begins. The French court had long reveled in tournaments, jousting, and masquerades,but even these impressive and lavish entertainments fell short of those traditionally mounted by the princes and nobility of Milan,










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ref lectionI feel like I came out of this project with a bounty of new knowledge and appreciation. I feel very strongly about my output and believe it will fit nicely in my portfolio. Firstly, I learned how to develop my own grid and apply it to my book. I had a hard time at first creating the grid. I didn’t want any-thing too normal, and I had a hard time making it fit within the page without huge margins. I eventually perfected the grid after a while of crunching numbers and working in In Design. Furthermore, I developed my skills in binding the book itself. This took an immense amount of craft and skill. I really en-joyed learning all the steps needed to bind this book. Lastly, I was able to take a plethora of information and organize it into a book format that would be easy to read cover to cover as well as browse. This was difficult at first but I am happy with the overall outcome and the choices I made.