Dance Classics: A Viewer's Guide to the Best-Loved Ballets and Modern Dances

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Dance Classics accomplishes a difficult task for a dance book: it provides an informative narrative compelling to the balletomane as well as the lay reader. While not pretending to be a comprehensive guide to every ballet and modem dance ever created, the authors do describe 53 well-known works, with a two-to-four page synopsis of plot and dance movements, usually accompanied by anecdotes. For example, the authors note that when Coppelia was choreographed (in 1870, by Arthur Saint-Leon), "Dancing as a profession for men had reached a very low ebb in public estimation-, things were so bad that the leading rnale role in Coppelia - a youth named Franz - was actually danced by a woman in men's clothing. The role was made as brief as possible and contained no virtuoso dance passages.The ballets and modem dances are grouped by historical periods. From the romantic period, which flourished between 1830 and the mid-1940s, and the rise of classicism in Russia (the Danse d'Ecole, or academic vocabulary), the book continues with chapters on "Early Ballet Rebels" (Michael Fokine and Vaslav Nijinsky) and a comprehensive section, "Modem Ballets," covering the works of 11 major choreographers, including George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. The last (shorter) section is on "Modern and Contemporary Dance," where the authors discuss the (now blurring) distinctions between ballet and modem dance. The 53 photographs (mostly by Martha Swope) lack dates, and there are few mentions of dancers for whom the ballets were created. However, the book is an excellent resource and guide to the last 150 years of dance and the listing of video distributors for particular dances is helpful. It also serves as a handy reference for the occasional ballet-goer seeking a last-minute §ynopsis for this evening's performance. -- From Independent Publisher