For a lot more than 500 years, the art of ballet has stood at the guts of Western civilization. Its traditions serve as a record of our past. A ballerina dancing The Sleeping Beauty today is normally a link in an extended chain of dancers extending back again to sixteenth-century Italy and France: Her elegant actions recall a lost globe of courts, kings, and aristocracy, but her techniques and gestures are also marked from the dramatic adjustments in dance and tradition that followed. Ballet continues to be shaped by the about Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet Renaissance and Classicism, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, Bolshevism, Modernism, and the Cold War. Apollo’s Angels is usually a groundbreaking work-the first cultural history of ballet ever created, beautifully told.

Ballet is exclusive: It has no written text messages or standardized notation. It really is a storytelling artwork passed on from teacher to pupil. The steps should never be simply the steps-they certainly are a living, inhaling and exhaling document of a tradition and a tradition. Even though ballet’s language is normally shared by dancers almost everywhere, its artists are suffering from distinct national styles. French, Italian, Danish, Russian, English, and American customs each possess their own manifestation, often created in response to politics and societal upheavals.

From ballet’s origins in the Renaissance and the codification of its basic actions and positions under France’s Louis XIV (himself a devoted dancer), the talent wound its way through the courts of European countries, 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, as well as the Nutcracker originated at the Imperial courtroom. In the twentieth century, emigre dancers taught their artwork to a era in the United States and in American Europe, setting off a new and radical change of dance.

Jennifer Homans is a historian and critic who was simply also a professional dancer: She brings to Apollo’s Angels a knowledge of dance given birth to of dedicated practice. She traces the evolution of technique, choreography, and functionality in clean, apparent prose, drawing listeners in to the intricacies from the artwork with vivid descriptions of dances as well as the artists who made them. Apollo’s Angels can be an authoritative function, written having a grace and beauty befitting its subject.