CELESTIAL BODIES: How to Look at Ballet

Combining history, interviews with dancers, technical definitions, descriptions of performances and personal stories, she offers an intimate and passionate guide to watching ballet and understanding the central elements of choreography. In this way she draws from many sources to present a portrait of a magical art form and to help us appreciate it so much more. 'Ballets can be delicious meringues, old friends, vintage wines, great loves, great banquets, spiritual sustenance, long-standing enigmas' says the author in her Introduction. 'I have chosen ballets that are performed regularly by most companies', the staples around the world and 'while I have discussed the history of some core ballets - La Sylphide, Giselle, Swan Lake - I have not gone into the choreographic revisions.' For many of us ballet remains a foreign language. It communicates through movement, not words, and much of its history lies abroad, in France, Italy and Russia. Here veteran dance critic Laura Jacobs makes the foreign familiar, providing a lively poetic and uniquely accessible introduction to the world of classical dance. She guides us through the evolution of ballet from its codification in the court of Louis XIV to its expansion in the Romantic era and its modernisation in the 20th century. From the foundation five positions and the Arabesque and other fundamentals to the meaning of pointe work, from the vocabulary of a performance to the perfect pirouette, Jacobs explores the many facets of ballet. 252pp, beautiful line art.