Shapes of American Ballet
Teachers and Training before Balanchine
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP USA
- Date of Publication 4 August 2016
- ISBN 9780190296698
- Binding Paperback
- No. of pages216 pages
- Size 226x155x15 mm
- Weight 295 g
- Language English
- Illustrations 25 photographs 0
Categories
Short description:
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.
MoreLong description:
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.
Using a wealth of archival sources, including dance manuals, newspaper and magazine articles, and interviews, Zeller focuses on pedagogy or, as she writes, 'the unspoken, underexamined element of the oral tradition' that is the 'unique working relationship of the dancer and pedagogue in the studio' (3). By taking stock of the various ballet teachers who lived, worked, trained and choreographed in the United States prior to Balanchine's arrival, Zeller indeed succeeds at 'offer[ing] a new telling of the history of American ballet' and 'refute[ing] the widespread notion that the period between 1909 and 1934 was 'largely barren ground' (1).
Table of Contents:
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Historical Perspectives
1. Ballet as Migrant: From Italy and Russia to America
2. Themes of Heterogeneity and Pluralism: Ballet in New York City, 1909-1934
3. Ballet in America: Coming of Age in a Market Economy
Part II: Teachers and Training
4. Ballet's Traditionalists: Malvina Cavallazzi and Luigi Albertieri
5. Nostalgic Revisionists: Stefano Mascagno and Mikhail Mordkin
6. Pragmatic Revisionists: Veronine Vestoff, Sonia Serova, and Louis H. Chalif
Conclusion
Selected Bibliography
Index
