The only authorized biography about the creator of the renowned Russian ballet curriculum-for the first time in English. The first English edition of the only authorized biography of Agrippina Vaganova (1897-1951) was originally published in Russian in 1989. It tells the story of one of the most important dance teachers of the 20th century, who created a system of teaching ballet that spread throughout the former Soviet Union and beyond. Vaganova rose through the ranks to become a ballerina in the Imperial Ballet during the last days of Tsarist Russia. After the Revolution of 1917, she became a teacher and transformed the St. Petersburg/Leningrad School of Ballet into a premier institution. She also served as the artistic director of the Kirov Theater. Written by a direct eyewitness to many of the described incidents, someone who knew Vaganova intimately, the biography is a window into the personality and thinking of this great teacher. It vividly recounts the training and individual styles of such world-renowned ballerinas as Marina Semyonova, Natalia Dudinskaya, Galina Ulanova, and Tatiana Vecheslova, and it offers a unique insight into the world of classical ballet during the era of Tsarist Russia and the early Soviet years.

The average length of a professional dancer's career is 10 to 15 years. Similar to professional athletes, once the prime years of physical prowess have passed, retirement is inevitable. After retirement, there are still many years of adult life ahead for dancers. Making the transition to a new career is challenging to many. Motivated by her own career transition, author Nancy Upper interviewed former ballet dancers who have made successful transitions into new careers after they stopped performing. Part 1 of the book features interviews with individuals who remained in ballet-related careers. Part 2 discusses the experiences of four dancers who moved on to careers outside the field of dance. Part 3 focuses on former dancers who have used their non-dance careers to help dancers and to promote ballet awareness. Appendices provide information about marketable qualities dancers develop as a result of their training, career transition tips, transition resources and a graph mapping the transition process.

In distinction to many extant histories of ballet, The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet prioritizes connections between ballet communities as it interweaves chapters by scholars, critics, choreographers, and working professional dancers. The book looks at the many ways ballet functions as a global practice in the 21st century, providing new perspectives on ballet's past, present, and future. As an effort to dismantle the linearity of academic canons, the fifty-three chapters within provide multiple entry points for readers to engage in balletic discourse. With an emphasis on composition and process alongside dances created, and the assertion that contemporary ballet is a definitive era, the book carves out space for critical inquiry. Many of the chapters consider whether or not ballet can reconcile its past and actually become present, while others see ballet as flexible and willing to be remolded at the hands of those with tools to do so.

The Ballets Russes was perhaps the most iconic, yet at the same time mysterious, ballet company of the twentieth century. Inspired by the unique vision of their founder Sergei Diaghilev, the company gained a large international following. In the mid-twentieth century - during the tumultuous years of World War II and the Cold War - the Ballets Russes companies kept the spirit and traditions of Russian ballet alive in the West, touring extensively in America, Europe and Australia. This important new book uncovers previously-unseen interviews and provides insights into the lives of the great figures of the age - from the dancers Anna Pavlova and Alicia Markova to the choreographers Leonide Massine, George Balanchine and Anton Dolin. The dancers' own words reveal what life was really like for the stars of the Ballets Russes and provide fascinating new insights into one of the most vibrant and creative groups of artists of the modern age.

History is fiction and personal identity nothing more than historical illusion: Eleanora Antinova is the renowned US contemporary artist Eleanor Antin - Eleanor Antin is Eleanora Antinova, a black American ballerina. Shifting the boundaries between art and life this book publishes the exciting memoirs of Antinova found by Eleanor Antin. The ballerina Eleanora Antinova could be called an artist of oblivion. Years ago, the contemporary artist and femininist Eleanor Antin, found an unpublished manuscript of the ballerina's memoirs: the stories of her early modernist forgotten ballets, her romantic entanglements and her friends at the glamorous Ballet Russe with its great maestro, Serge Diaghilev. Generations later Eleanor Antin lived for three weeks in New York as Antinova. Her journal of that time brings back the now forgotten ballerina. For the first time this publication brings together the journal and the memoirs of Antin and Antinova accompanied by a selection of photographs from the performances of the artists..

London during the Blitz was a time of hardship, heroism and hope. For Gillian Lynne - a budding ballerina - it was also a time of great change as she was evacuated from war-torn London to a crumbling mansion, where dance classes took place in the faded ballroom. Life was hard, but her talent and dedication shone through and an astonishing journey ensued, which saw Gillian dancing a triumphant debut in Swan Lake, performing in the West End with doodlebugs falling and touring a devastated Europe entertaining the troops. A Dancer in Wartime paints a vivid and moving picture of what life was really like during the hard years of the Blitz and brings to life a lost world.

This volume reproduces the piano score of the ballet La Source, a joint composition by Ludwig Minkus and Leo Delibes.After the success of Nemea (1864), the Paris Opera ordered a new grand ballet from the famous choreographer Arthur Saint-Leon to a libretto based on a Persian legend by Charles Nuitter. Saint-Leon involved his musical collaborator in St Petersburg, Ludwig Minkus, in the project, securing for him a hand in the composition of the first and fourth scenes of the of this new work, La Source, a fantastic ballet in three acts. The composition of the other two scenes (the second and third) were entrusted to the young, unknown Leo Delibes, thirty at the time, who had drawn favourable attention to himself in the preparation of the ballet music for the premiere of Meyerbeer's posthumous L'Africaine in 1865. The first performance of La Source was on 12 November 1866 at the Theatre Imperial de l'Opera, with the principal dancers Guglielmina Salvioni (Naila), Eugenie Fiocre (Nouredda) and Louis Merante (Djemil). The ballet as a whole was very successful, with 73 performances until 1876. Saint-Leon immediately began planning another work with Nuitter and Delibes-Coppelia-one which would crown the young French's composer's success with triumph. This was premiered on 25 May 1870, the last of Saint-Leon's work, and the last great success of the French Romantic ballet at the Salle Le Peletier before the crisis of the Franco-Prussian War, and the end of the Second Empire.As regards the music of La Source, Delibes's contribution to the score, his first essay at ballet music, was noted for its vigour and many delightful melodies. In Jouvin's opinion, his music was "vivacious and especially lively," and contrasted effectively with the plaintive melodies of Minkus. "The style of the two composers," observed the critic of La France Musicale (18 November 1866), "is essentially different and easily recognizable at a first hearing. M. Minkus's music has a vague, indolent, and melancholic character, full of grace and languor. That of M. Delibes, fresher and more rhythmic, is much more complicated in orchestration, and sometimes a little more ordinary. I should add that this difference in style is perfectly justified by the: contrasting character of the two parts of the ballet."

Cesare Pugni was born in Genoa on 31 May 1802, and studied in Milan from 1815 to 1822, with Antonio Rollo and Bonifazio Asioli. He became a cymbalist in the theatre orchestra, and on the death of Vincenzo Lavigna, was appointed musical director. He later moved to Paris where he became director of the Paganini Institute and met the great choreographers of the time. He started an artistic collaboration that was to prove one of the most productive in the history of ballet-working closely with Jules Perrot (1810-1892), first in Paris, then in London. Here Pugni presented some of the most renowned ballets of the 19th century, such as Esmeralda (1844) and the Pas de Quatre (1845), which still find their place in some modern repertories. He also worked with Arthur Saint-Leon (1821-1870), Paolo Taglioni (1808-1884), Marius Petipa (1818-1910), and some of the greatest dancers of the century. Pugni followed Perrot to Russia and became official composer of the Imperial theatres in St Petersburg where he composed new ballets, notably Doch' Faraona (Pharaoh's Daughter) (1862) and Koniok Gorbunok (The Little Humpbacked Horse) (1862). His most famous collaboration, with Marius Petipa, dominated these years, lasting until the composer's death on 26 January 1870. Pugni is remarkable for his enormous output of some 300 ballets (either original compositions or in arrangements). Arthur Saint-Leon, famous for Coppelia with Leo Delibes (1870), created The Little Humpbacked Horse to the music of Cesare Pugni for the Imperial Ballet (today the Maryinsky Ballet). The story of Koniok Gorbunok is based on the popular fairy-tale by Petr Yershov (1834), and tells of the spectacular deeds of Ivanushka with the help of the magical Little Humpbacked Horse. The scenario is notable for its humour as well as its fantasy. The ballet is of particular interest as being the first to be based on themes from Russian folklore, a particular interest of Saint-Leon, who chose the subject and the source, and devised the scenario himself. The first performance was on 13 December 1864 at the Imperial Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre in St. Petersburg. The Emperor Alexander II attended the premiere, a great and enduring success. Marius Petipa revived the ballet in 1895 as The Tsar-Maiden for the dancer Pierina Legnani. The work lived on for many years in the repertory of the Imperial Ballet (given in St Petersburg over 200 times), a success continued in Soviet times at the Kirov Ballet, and also the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow in a version by Alexander Gorsky (1901). Alexander Radunsky choreographed his own version of this ballet to a score by Rodion Shchedrin for the Bolshoi Ballet in 1960, a version of which was filmed with Maya Plisetskaya as the Tsar-Maiden and Vladimir Vasiliev as Ivanushka. In 2009 Alexei Ratmansky choreographed a new version for the Maryinsky Ballet, also using Shchedrin's score. A reconstruction of Saint-Leon's original was filmed in 1989 for Russian television with graduates from the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet in the lead roles. The film included narrated sections and illustrations from a popular 1964 Russian edition of Yershov's book.

The two ballets in this volume, Paquita and Nuit et Jour, represent Ludwig Minkus (1826-1917) towards the end of his career in Russia, working at the peak of his creative powers. They are respectively the thirteenth and fourteenth collaborations between the Viennese composer and the famous choreographer of the Russian classical ballet, Marius Petipa (1819-1910).The Grand Pas, written for Petipa's revival of Deldevez's Paquita in St Petersburg in 1881, is well-known and loved, a jewel of the classical ballet repertoire in its own right. As an independent, abstract divertissement, the Grand Pas has remained popular with ballet companies and their audiences all over the world, but had not been seen outside Russia in its original context (as the climax of the concluding celebrations) before Pierre Lacotte's sensitive re-creation of the 1846 ballet in its entirety at the Paris Opera in 2001.The Grand Pas was designed for ballerina, premier danseur, six premieres danseuses and eight second soloists. Over the years, this Spanish flavoured piece has become a kind of miniature gala performance, with an array of solo variations that are particularly interesting not only for their choreography but also their occasional obbligato writing. Minkus had a talent in composing for the violin, his own special instrument-as can be seen in the sumptuous, extended adagio. His ballets also contain effective virtuoso pieces for the flute, harp, cello and cornet. The violin and harp solos were written with the talents of the famous violinist Leopold Auer and harpist Albert Zabel in mind, both of whom served as instrumental leaders in the St Petersburg theatre orchestras in the late 19th century.The contemporary manuscript piano arrangements reproduced here, repetiteur scores from the Soviet era, present a longer and a shorter version of the Grand Pas. They reflect the performing edition as it has variously evolved over the 130 years of its independent stage life on the Russian stages, and-through the agency of Anna Pavlova's travelling company in the 1920s-as also adapted by ballet companies across the world.The less familiar Nuit et Jour was created by Petipa and Minkus to mark the accession to the throne of Tsar Alexander III in 1883. It is an interesting development of the popular contemporary genre of abstract allegorical works, illustrating the movement of time through the day and the seasons of the year. The ballet depicts the innate beauties of both night and day (created by the great ballerinas Yevgeniya Sokolova and Yekaterina Vazem respectively), the daily struggle between darkness and light, and climaxes in an achievement of harmony in a dance of the nations. This is given a patriotic resonance by reflecting ten national types from the Russian Empire in a tour de force, testing the composer's skill in capturing the various national styles: Uzbek, Tartar, Siberian, Finnish, Cossack, Belarusian, Polish, Caucasian, and Ukrainian. The score reproduced here is the piano version published in both Hamburg and St Petersburg about 1885.