This book is a perceptive and critical account of the first 75 years of The Royal Ballet, tracing the company's growth, and its great cultural importance - an indispensable book for all lovers of ballet. In 1931, Ninette de Valois started a ballet company with just six dancers. Within twenty years, The Royal Ballet - as it became - was established as one of the world's great companies. It has produced celebrated dancers, from Margot Fonteyn to Darcey Bussell, and one of the richest repertoires in ballet. The company danced through the Blitz, won an international reputation in a single New York performance and added to the glamour of London's Swinging Sixties. It has established a distinctive English school of ballet, a pure classical style that could do justice to the 19th-century repertory and to new British classics. Leading dance critic, Zoë Anderson, vividly portrays the extraordinary personalities who created the company and the dancers who made such an impact on their audiences. She looks at the bad times as well as the good, examining the controversial directorships of Norman Morrice and Ross Stretton and the criticism fired at the company as the Royal Opera House closed for redevelopment.

The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden is home of two of the most famous opera and ballet companies in the world. In this official history, Frances Donaldson discusses Covent Garden's many legendary achievements - Der Rosenkavalier with Lotte Lehmann, the unparalleled partnership of Fonteyn and Nureyev, the recent Otello with Domingo. She follows the attitude of the English to opera and their Opera House, and the crusade for opera to be sung in English. She looks at the internal politics and at the often charismatic personalities who have worked at the Opera House: Thomas Beecham, George Solti, Maria Callas, Tito Gobbi, Ninette de Valois and Frederick Ashton. Underlying the story, despite the many successful seasons, are the ever-present problems of financial support and uncertainty of the future. The history is superbly well-documented from the Royal Opera House archives. Comments from journalists of the time -whose critical reviews sometimes led to singers of international acclaim refusing to return to Covent Garden - lend spice to this fine analysis of administrative and artistic management at the Garden.

Presents a look at the world of dance; an analysis of ballet movement, music, and history; a close-up look at popular ballets; and a host of performance tips.

The best of America's best writer on dance "Theoretically, I am ready to go to anything-once. If it moves, I'm interested; if it moves to music, I'm in love." From 1973 until 1996 Arlene Croce was The New Yorker's dance critic, a post created for her. Her entertaining, forthright, passionate reviews and essays have revealed the logic and history of ballet, modern dance, and their postmodern variants to a generation of theatergoers. This volume contains her most significant and provocative pieces-over a fourth have never appeared in book form-writings that reverberate with consequence and controversy for the state of the art today.

Taking center stage this spring: Ellie Brown in The Royal Ballet School Diaries! With a passion for dancing and the drive to succeed, Ellie, an American girl, will stop at nothing to achieve her dream of getting accepted as a ballet student at the Royal Ballet School in London. This new series is the perfect mix of ballet, friendship, competition, and taking chances!

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 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. Lavishly illustrated and beautifully told, Apollo’s Angels—the first cultural history of ballet ever written—is a groundbreaking work. 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. 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, a historian, critic, and former professional ballerina, wields a knowledge of dance born of dedicated practice. Her admiration and love for the ballet, as Entertainment Weekly notes, brings “a dancer’s grace and sure-footed agility to the page.”