This book offers something entirely new: detailed scene-by-scene descriptions of the action and dancing of Giselle, Paquita, Le Corsaire, La Bayadère, and Raymonda, bringing the reader far closer to what the audience saw when the curtain went up on these five classic story ballets than has heretofore been possible. Drawing on archival documents, the authors show that these ballets were like today's pop entertainment: funnier, more violent, more spectacular, and with female characters far stronger than one might expect. This rigorously researched book fills huge gaps in dance history and is bound to be of interest to practitioners, scholars, and devotees of ballet and the arts.

How do we choose? Why do we worry about what others think of us? Why do we doubt ourselves? Here are some of the questions the poet ponders, and delves into emotions that we experience every day. Each poem makes the reader realize that they are about our feelings or what happens to us, but we never really put into words because we take the simple things for granted.

This cultural biography of the nineteenth-century ballet master Marius Petipa -- creator of The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake -- tells the full story of his life and work in the remarkable context in which he lived.