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.
September 15, 2010
A magisterial and often moving history of the silent art by a former dancer and current journalist.
New Republic dance critic Homans confronts her historical problems immediately—most ballets are lost. Because of difficulties with notation, the evanescent nature of movement itself and the relatively late arrival of visual-recording technology, we will never really know how Vaslav Nijinsky moved—or how his many other predecessors created, defined and refined the dance. The author also expresses her fear that ballet is dying, a theme she revisits in a sadly valedictory section at the end. After stating these admonitions and worries, Homans leaps into European history, beginning with the 16th-century French, whose lavish court entertainments fathered the art. Later, she notes that Charles Perrault's 1697 story "Sleeping Beauty" would achieve enormous significance in ballet history (it was Balanchine's earliest and last dance experience). The author examines the increasing importance of story in ballets of the 18th century and credits Marie Antoinette for aiding ballet's success. In the 19th century, the ballerina began to soar in importance (here the author tells the story of Marie Taglioni). The scene then shifts to Denmark, where August Bournonville inspired a dance revolution. Next is Italy, where the art flourished before political and military matters fractured it. Unsurprisingly, Homans devotes many pages to the Russians, whose techniques of training and staging were dominant for decades. She looks at the Ballets Russes, Sergei Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Balanchine, Nijinska, Ulanova, Nureyev, Baryshnikov and other luminaries known and forgotten. The British had their (brief) time in the sun, but Homans shifts her focuse to Balanchine (who deservedly dominates the final sections), Joffrey, Robbins and many others in the American school.
The author artfully choreographs a huge, sometimes unruly cast, producing a work of elegance, emotion and enduring importance.
(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)
Starred review from November 1, 2010
Homans brings her intimate experience as a dancer and her discerning dance critics eye to her fascinating and exquisitely detailed history of ballet, an art that combines rigor and idealism. Homans begins with how the Renaissance belief in the transforming power of art engendered the first ballets, which were performed in the sixteenth-century French court of King Henri II and Catherine de Medici, thus launching ballets long association with state governments. Louis XIV then established ballets core rules and conventions, including the five true or noble positions. Homans thoroughly and conversantly tracks ballets flourishing in France, robust flowering in Russia, and exuberance in the U.S., emphasizing the progression from elaborate artifice to profound expressiveness. Homans also warmly profiles pivotal ballet masters, choreographers, and dancers, including the pioneering ballerina Marie Taglioni in La Sylphide (1832), the first modern ballet, and the essential Balanchine. Most arrestingly, Homans assesses ballets grace under terror during the French and Russian revolutions, the world wars, and the cold war. Homans brings her glorious landmark study of ballets ideals and enchantment to a somber close as she asks why this strong and supple art of belief, which triumphed over catastrophe and adversity, is now in danger of extinction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)
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.