In 1866, when the ballet La Source debuted, the public at the Paris Opera may have been content to dream about its setting in the verdant Caucasus, its exotic Circassians, veiled Georgians, and powerful Khan. Yet the ballet's botany also played to a public thinking about ethnic and exotic others at the same time-and in the same ways-as they were thinking about plants. Along with these stereotypes, with a flower promising hybridity in a green ecology, and the death of the embodied Source recuperated as a force for regeneration, the ballet can be read as a fable of science and the performance as its demonstration. Programmed for the opening gala of the new Opera, the Palais Garnier, in 1875 the ballet reflected not so much a timeless Orient as timely colonial policy and engineering in North Africa, the management of water and women. One Dead at the Paris Opera Ballet takes readers to four historic performances, over 150 years, showing how-- through the sacrifice of a feminized Nature-- La Source represented the biopolitics of sex and race, and the cosmopolitics of human and natural resources. Its 2011 reinvention at the Paris Opera, following the adoption of new legislation banning the veil in public spaces, might have staged gender and climate justice in sync with the Arab Spring, but opted instead for luxury and dream. Its 2014 reprise might have focused on decolonizing the stage or raising eco-consciousness, but exemplified the greater urgency attached to Islamist threat rather than imminent climate catastrophe, missing the ballet's historic potential to make its audience think.

"At its debut in 1866, La Source already had it all: dagger-wielding Muslims dominating veiled women, a magic flower in a green ecology, and a full blown environmental crisis at the end. When the Paris Opera ballet restages this Orientalist and colonial drama in 2011, and again in 2014, the contemporary context of homegrown jihad, climate politics and a law banning the dissimulation of the face in public spaces, keeps it relevant. At four historic performances, over 150 years, this book explores the resonance of La Source's double narrative in its contemporary contexts: the biopolitics of bodily hybridity and regeneration and the cosmopolitics of the exploitation of human and natural resources"--

Diana Biller's The Brightest Star in Paris is a thrilling story of first loves and second chances. She never expected her first love to return, but is he here to stay? Amelie St. James is a fraud. After the Siege of Paris, she became “St. Amie,” the sweet, virtuous prima ballerina the Paris Opera Ballet needed to restore its scandalous reputation, all to protect the safe life she has struggled to build for her and her sister. But when her first love reappears looking as devastatingly handsome as ever, and the ghosts of her past quite literally come back to haunt her, her hard-fought safety is thrown into chaos. Dr. Benedict Moore has never forgotten the girl who helped him embrace life after he almost lost his. Now, years later, he’s back in Paris. His goals are to recruit promising new scientists, and maybe to see Amelie again. When he discovers she’s in trouble, he’s desperate to help her—and hold her in his arms. When she finally agrees to let him help, they disguise their time together with a fake courtship. Soon, with the help of an ill-advised but steamy kiss, old feelings reignite. Except, their lives are an ocean apart. Will they be able to make it out with their hearts intact? "I foresee years of excellent storytelling from Diana Biller; the certainty of that excites me." - Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

A clothbound companion to Marina Abramovic's tribute to Maria Callas, a new performance that recreates the iconic opera diva's famous onstage death scenes An opera production conceived by the legendary performance artist Marina Abramovic (born 1946), 7 Deaths of Maria Callasis a continuation of the artist's lifelong meditation on the female body as a source of both power and pain. Here Abramovic turns her focus to renowned opera singer Maria Callas, whose stunning soprano voice captivated audiences around the world in the mid-20th century. Though she remains one of opera's greatest singers, Callas' life was beset by struggle and scandal. Today, the opera diva is remembered for having been a figure of both talent and tragedy. Through a mix of narrative opera and film, Abramovic recreates seven iconic death scenes from the American-born Greek singer's most important roles--in La Traviata, Tosca, Otello, Madame Butterfly, Carmen, Lucia di Lammermoorand Norma--followed by an interpretive recreation of Callas' own death performed onstage by Abramovic herself. This clothbound volume serves as a companion to the live performance and provides insight into the conception, planning and execution of Abramovic's project, probing the many creative elements that make up this dynamic exploration of female suffering.

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.”

Ukrainian dancer and choreographer Serge Lifar (1905-86) is recognized both as the modernizer of French ballet in the twentieth century and as the keeper of the flame of the classical tradition upon which the glory of French ballet was founded. Having migrated to France from Russia in 1923 to join Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, Lifar was appointed star dancer and ballet director at the Paris Opéra in 1930. Despite being rather unpopular with the French press at the start of his appointment, Lifar came to dominate the Parisian dance scene-through his publications as well as his dancing and choreography-until the end of the Second World War, reaching the height of his fame under the German occupation of Paris (1940-44). Rumors of his collaborationism having remained inconclusive throughout the postwar era, Lifar retired in 1958. This book not only reassesses Lifar's career, both aesthetically and politically, but also provides a broader reevaluation of the situation of dance-specifically balletic neoclassicism-in the first half of the twentieth century. The Fascist Turn in the Dance of Serge Lifar is the first book not only to discuss the resistance to Lifar in the French press at the start of his much-mythologized career, but also the first to present substantial evidence of Lifar's collaborationism and relate it to his artistic profile during the preceding decade. In examining the political significance of the critical discussion of Lifar's body and technique, author Mark Franko provides the ground upon which to understand the narcissistic and heroic images of Lifar in the 1930s as prefiguring the role he would play in the occupation. Through extensive archival research into unpublished documents of the era, police reports, the transcript of his postwar trial and rarely cited newspaper columns Lifar wrote, Franko reconstructs the dancer's political activities, political convictions, and political ambitions during the Occupation.

When Words are Inadequate is a transnational history of modern dance written from and beyond the perspective of China. Author Nan Ma extends the horizon of China studies by rewriting the cultural history of modern China from a bodily movement-based perspective through the lens of dance modernism. The book examines the careers and choreographies of four Chinese modern dance pioneers-Yu Rongling, Wu Xiaobang, Dai Ailian, and Guo Mingda-and their connections to canonical Western counterparts, including Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, Rudolf von Laban, and Alwin Nikolais. Tracing these Chinese pioneers' varied experiences in Paris, Tokyo, Trinidad, London, New York, and China's metropolises and borderlands, the book shows how their contributions adapted and reimagined the legacies of early Euro-American modern dance. In doing so, When Words are Inadequate reinserts China into the multi-centered, transnational network of artistic exchange that fostered the global rise of modern dance, further complicating the binary conceptions of center and periphery and East and West. By exploring the relationships between performance and representation, choreography and politics, and nation-building and global modernism, it situates modern dance within an intermedial circuit of literary and artistic forms, demonstrating how modern dance provided a kinesthetic alternative and complements to other sibling arts in participating in China's successive revolutions, reforms, wars, and political movements.