Books About Dance

[kyriacarlisle]

I need to do some catching up on dance and dance history (the classic "librarian two books ahead of likely reference questions" approach). I'm especially interested in ballet and modern, though if there's a magnificent book about another dance form, I'm very glad to know about that, too.

Much though I loved them as a child, I'm not really looking for books like A Very Young Dancer or Life at the Royal Ballet School (although if you happen to be looking for a graphic novel about ballet, try Siena Cherson Siegel & Mark Siegel, To Dance). I'm also not so very interested in hagiography - in my usual field, I'd think of this as the ten zillion coffee table books about Maria Callas. On the other hand, if the photographs are simply too revelatory to pass up....

I'm reading Apollo's Angels now. I've already read Dance to the Piper, Winter Season, Off Balance, and Behind the Scenes at the Boston Ballet.

Comments

[kyriacarlisle]

Thank you, thank you, thank you. These all look great, and will save me from wandering around the shelves and shelves of coffee table books - not that those don't have their place, but sometimes one needs a little more argument. Or any argument at all.

And having to practice my French won't do me any harm, either.

I'm selfishly interested in the Hilton; the 17th and 18th centuries are closer to my time period, but I'd probably better head for the later books first: the faculty concentrate on Diaghilev-and-after.

Autobiographies are hard: not only do they (usually) have to conform to the genre's structure (childhood, adolescence, first love, adversity, success, tragedy, more success, acceptance...), they're also so often squirm-inducingly unaware.

Thanks again!

[anne]

Please let me know if you want French translations; that's my thing. (Well, technically I'm a medievalist, but I started learning French because I was such a bunhead, and then I just kind of mutated.)

If you want Ballets Russes stuff, the University of Texas at Austin has the Harry Random Humanities Research Collection (or Center, now, I think), which has a fair few Ballets Russes costumes--like almost all the ones from the original production of Le Sacre du Printemps. I don't know what else they have--ephemera, certainly, and possibly also notes, designs, etc. The Bernard Taper bio of Balanchine might be a starting point for Ballets Russes stuff, though IIRC it's a bit hagiographic.

Good luck, and let me know if I can help. I have lots of random facts rattling around in my head, and might be able to save you some time.