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Title details for Apollo's Angels by Jennifer Homans - Wait list

Apollo's Angels

A History of Ballet

by Jennifer Homans
Kirsten Potter
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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. A ballerina dancing The Sleeping Beauty today is a link in a long chain of dancers stretching back to sixteenth-century Italy and France: Her graceful movements recall a lost world of courts, kings, and aristocracy, but her steps and gestures are also marked by the dramatic changes in dance and culture that followed. Ballet has been shaped by the Renaissance and Classicism, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, Bolshevism, Modernism, and the Cold War. Apollo's Angels is a groundbreaking work—the first cultural history of ballet ever written, beautifully told.


Ballet is unique: It has no written texts or standardized notation. It is a storytelling art passed on from teacher to student. The steps are never just the steps—they are a living, breathing document of a culture and a tradition. And while ballet's language is shared by dancers everywhere, its artists have developed distinct national styles. French, Italian, Danish, Russian, English, and American traditions each have their own expression, often formed in response to political and societal upheavals.


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. It was in Russia that dance developed into the form most familiar to American audiences: The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, and The Nutcracker originated at the Imperial court. 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 is a historian and critic who was also a professional dancer: She brings to Apollo's Angels a knowledge of dance born of dedicated practice. She traces the evolution of technique, choreography, and performance in clean, clear prose, drawing listeners into the intricacies of the art with vivid descriptions of dances and the artists who made them. Apollo's Angels is an authoritative work, written with a grace and elegance befitting its subject.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    February 17, 2011

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781452621081
      • File size: 675662 KB
      • Duration: 23:27:37

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Since the Court of Louis XIV, ballet has been a standard of culture in the Western world, albeit one without much written history or notation. Jennifer Homans changes that with APOLLO'S ANGELS, so ably narrated by Kirsten Potter. Homans chronicles ballet from its beginnings to its place of prominence throughout the Western world in a manner easily accessible even to those who are not dancers. Potter's narration is similarly accessible and clear, while at the same time poised and well modulated enough to reflect ballet's aristocratic leanings. Homans's artistic and social history is perfectly complemented by Potter's narration. J.L.K. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from February 28, 2011
      Holmes's magisterial history of ballet is even better in audio. Kirsten Potter has a deep, smooth, sensuous voice that sounds as cultivated as the art form she describes. With pacing that allows the listener to savor the musicality of former ballerina Holmes's sentences, their lulling alliteration and lively wit, Potter brings the ambitious study of ballet's 500-year history (and bleak prognostications for its future) to life. Potter's French accent could use a bit of work; it's clumsy and forced, but doesn't detract too much from the pleasure of this panoramic look at the art's singularity, the discipline it demands (in Holmes's phrase, it is "a grammar of movement"), and the liberation it allows. A Random hardcover.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from November 1, 2010
      In an important and original work of cultural history, New Republic dance critic Homans places ballet—an art often viewed as hermetic and esoteric—in the larger context of the times and societies in which it evolved, flourished, and flagged, only to be revitalized by an infusion of fresh ideas. That revitalization could come from a ballet master like Jean-Georges Noverre, presented by Homans as an important Enlightenment figure whose ideas on reforming ballet were consonant with those of Diderot on reforming theater. Renewal came from the genius of dancers like Marie Taglioni, the incarnation of romanticism, whose originality, Homans indisputably shows, reached far beyond dancing up on her tippy-toes. But in a closing section that will be hotly debated, this exhilarating account sounds a despairing note: "ballet is dying," she declares. Not only is the creative well running dry and performances dull, but more crucially, Homans sees today's values as inimical to those of ballet ("We are all dancers now," she writes, evoking what she sees as a misguided egalitarianism that denies an art rooted in discipline and virtuosity). Her cultural critique, as well as her expansive and penetrating view of ballet's history, recommend this book to all readers who care about the history of the arts as well as their present and possible future. Color and b&w illus.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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