In Shapes of American Ballet: Teachers and Training before Balanchine, Jessica Zeller introduces the first few decades of the twentieth century as an often overlooked, yet critical period for ballet's growth in America. While George Balanchine is often considered the sole creator of American ballet, numerous European and Russian émigrés had been working for decades to build a national ballet with an American identity. These pedagogues and others like them played critical yet largely unacknowledged roles in American ballet's development. Despite their prestigious ballet pedigrees, the dance field's exhaustive focus on Balanchine has led to the neglect of their work during the first few decades of the century, and in this light, this book offers a new perspective on American ballet during the period immediately prior to Balanchine's arrival. Zeller uses hundreds of rare archival documents to illuminate the pedagogies of several significant European and Russian teachers who worked in New York City. Bringing these contributions into the broader history of American ballet recasts American ballet's identity as diverse-comprised of numerous Euro-Russian and American elements, as opposed to the work of one individual. This new account of early twentieth century American ballet is situated against a bustling New York City backdrop, where mass immigration through Ellis Island brought the ballet from European and Russian opera houses into contact with a variety of American forms and sensibilities. Ballet from celebrated Euro-Russian lineages was performed in vaudeville and blended with American popular dance styles, and it developed new characteristics as it responded to the American economy. Shapes of American Ballet delves into ballet's struggle to define itself during this rich early twentieth century period, and it sheds new light on ballet's development of an American identity before Balanchine.

Shapes of American Ballet introduces several lesser-known European and Russian ballet teachers who worked in New York City before Balanchine. Taking into account the effects of America's economic system and the early twentieth century popular stage, this book looks anew at American ballet as derived from multiple influences and lineages.

Provides photographs of members of the American Ballet Theatre demonstrating positions and includes discussion and photographs of classwork, rehearsal, choreography, and major ballets.

"What is strikingly new about Miss Siegel's achievement is that she goes beyond the usual kind of historical reassessment. . . . She performs on behalf of this most evanescent of the arts an act of significant recovery. By tracking down--often in rare stage revivals, on film or on videotape--as many of the works by major creators of the last half century as survive, and by describing them . . . in a manner that combines accuracy and imagination, she has enriched our knowledge of the past and added immeasurably, to our resent stock of critical resources."--Dale Harris, New York Times Book Review "Siegel has a gut feeling for dance and a razor-sharp intelligence about it. It's an irresistible combination."--Margaret Pierpont, Dance Magazine "After you've seen and felt dance this deeply--even vicariously--your way of looking at dance will never be the same."--William Albright, Houston Post She sees, acutely, with her muscles as well as her eyes. She thinks about dance as much as she experiences it. . . . This is dance choreography reconstituted. Dances leap off the page. . . . The ability to do that is extraordinary."--Jean Bunke, Des Moines Sunday Register "The sections in which she describes the dances themselves make up the bulk of the book and they are profoundly illuminating. . . . These descriptions represent an amazing literary, as well as critical, accomplishment, for they are both accurate and resonant, both objective and enlightening, both formal and personal."--Laura Shapiro, The Real Paper "Siegel draws on her years of experience as a working dance critic, a profession she has helped to shape, and brings to a range of American dance a sense of honesty and a mind that wants to understand the antecedents of what is currently in vogue as the dance explosion."--Iris M. Fanger, The Christian Science Monitor

Situating ballet within twentieth-century modernism, this book brings complexity to the history of George Balanchine's American neoclassicism. It intervenes in the prevailing historical narrative and rebalances Balanchine's role in dance history by revealing the complex social, cultural, and political forces that actually shaped the construction of American neoclassical ballet.

Surveying the state of American ballet in a 1913 issue of McClure's Magazine, author Willa Cather reported that few girls expressed any interest in taking ballet class and that those who did were hard-pressed to find anything other than dingy studios and imperious teachers. One hundred years later, ballet is everywhere. There are ballet companies large and small across the United States; ballet is commonly featured in film, television, literature, and on social media; professional ballet dancers are spokespeople for all kinds of products; nail polish companies market colors like "Ballet Slippers" and "Prima Ballerina;" and, most importantly, millions of American children have taken ballet class. Beginning with the arrival of Russian dancers like Anna Pavlova, who first toured the United States on the eve of World War I, Ballet Class: An American History explores the growth of ballet from an ancillary part of nineteenth-century musical theater, opera, and vaudeville to the quintessential extracurricular activity it is today, pursued by countless children nationwide and an integral part of twentieth-century American childhood across borders of gender, class, race, and sexuality. A social history, Ballet Class takes a new approach to the very popular subject of ballet and helps ground an art form often perceived to be elite in the experiences of regular, everyday people who spent time in barre-lined studios across the United States. Drawing on a wide variety of materials, including children's books, memoirs by professional dancers and choreographers, pedagogy manuals, and dance periodicals, in addition to archival collections and oral histories, this pathbreaking study provides a deeply-researched national perspective on the history and significance of recreational ballet class in the United States and its influence on many facets of children's lives, including gender norms, consumerism, body image, children's literature, extracurricular activities, and popular culture.

A pathbreaking social history that takes seriously the experiences of the countless everyday people who pursued recreational ballet, Ballet Class: An American History explores the growth of this now quintessential extracurricular activity as it became an integral part of American childhood across borders of gender, class, race, and sexuality.