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W.B. Yeats's invitation to Ninette de Valois to come to Dublin and help him stage his plays for dancers and to found a School of Ballet at the Abbey Theatre have been known facts for many years, not least from de Valois' own autobiographies. Collaborations is the first detailed study of the creative relationship of poet and dancer that resulted, which lasted from 1927 to 1934. Their meeting at the Festival Theatre in Cambridge, a remarkable venture in experimental staging run by Terence Gray, de Valois' cousin, had a profound impact on her subsequent work with Yeats. Gray promoted the expressionist style in terms of design and movement, for which de Valois devised the choreography, and it was a similar style that Yeats encouraged her to pursue in mounting his own plays. Four productions were achieved: Fighting the Waves, The Dreaming of the Bones, At the Hawk's Well and The King of the Great Clock Tower. This study is divided into two parts: the first investigates what precisely de Valois learned from her association with Terence Gray at the Festival Theatre and the nature of her achievements there; the second looks at how this preparation bore special fruit in her roles as performer and choreographer at the Abbey Theatre and why these four productions were for Yeats the most satisfying staging of his dance plays in his lifetime. Their success as collaborators grew from the deep respect each sustained for the integrity of the other's artistry. Yeats is often viewed as dictatorial in his handling of theatre practitioners and personnel, but this view needs to be revised in light of the creative freedom he gave to de Valois, who rapidly became for him the ideal exponent and embodiment of the dance. In this volume what is opened up and extensively illustrated for scholars is a whole new chapter of theatre and dance history, which documents the successful creating of a bridge between these two disciplines. Throughout, the focus of the discussion is on performance. Richard Allen Cave is Professor Emeritus in Drama and Theatre Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he taught from 1984 to 2008. He has published extensively in the fields of Renaissance Theatre (Jonson, Webster, Brome, Shakespeare), Modern English and Irish Theatre (Wilde, Yeats, T.C. Murray, McGuinness, Friel) and in dance and movement studies. Professor Cave is also a trained Feldenkrais practitioner, who works on vocal techniques with professional actors and on extending movement skills with performers in physical theatre.

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.

Centering on Ninette de Valois's formative years as a choreographer and a shaper of British ballet, this book closely examines her 1934 ballet Bar aux Folies-Bergère, which was inspired by the famous Edouard Manet painting and created for Marie Rambert's comapny, then known as the Ballet Club.

Peter Wright has been a dancer, choreographer, teacher, producer and director in the theatre as well as in television for over 70 years. In Wrights & Wrongs, Peter offers his often surprising views of today's dance world, lessons learned – and yet to learn – from a lifetime's experience of ballet, commercial theatre and television. Peter started his career in wartime, with the Kurt Jooss company. He has worked with such greats as Pina Bausch, Margot Fonteyn, Rudolf Nureyev, Marcia Haydée, Richard Cragun, Monica mason, Karen Kain, Miyako Yoshida and Carlos Acosta - as well as today's generation of starts including Alina Cajocaru, Marianela Nunez, Natalia Osipova and Lauren Cuthbertson. While now regarded as part of the British ballet establishment, for many years Peter developed his career outside London, particularly in Germany with John Cranko's Stuttgart Ballet. That distance gives him a unique and unrivalled view on ballet companies. His close association with choreographers Frederick Ashton, Ninette de Valois, founder of the Royal Ballet, Kenneth MacMillan and David Bintley gives Peter an authoritative perspective on British ballet. Wrights and Wrongs includes black-and-white photographs from Wright's career, and as Exeunt magazine comments: 'Anyone with an interest in British ballet will find plenty to occupy them in Wright's book... the many dramas and delights of his life in dance spring forth from the page with brio.'

"Ninette de Valois was gifted with myriad talents. It has required a wealth of writers, teachers, performers, colleagues, one-time students and collaborators to come together to engage with and celebrate the complexity of this remarkable woman. The titles of the sections into which the volume has been divided (Biography, Teaching, Wordsmith, Company, Turkey, Choreography, Collaborations, Herself) merely intimate the strength of her inner resources and the diversity of her public achievements, her vision for a company and for the potentials of dance as an art-form. Determining those strengths and that diversity is the objective of 'Ninette de Valois: Adventurous Traditionalist'. Writing alone cannot hope fully to capture the vitality of theatrical performance or the rigours of the training and rehearsal schedules that underpin its virtuosity and so the volume is accompanied by many previously unpublished photographs and a DVD, offering four hours of filmed material of archival value. This study offers a substantial resource to assist future exploration of de Valois' life and work. The essays pursue divergent approaches and encompass contrasting viewpoints; but it is without question that de Valois' unparalleled success derived from her unshaken faith that ballet in its training methods and its repertoire must be both fearlessly adventurous and confidently traditionalist"--Publisher's description, back cover.

Ninette de Valois was an extraordinary woman. Not only did she create The Royal Ballet, The Royal Ballet School and the company that has become Birmingham Royal Ballet – in themselves great achievements – but she was a gifted choreographer, dancer, teacher, administrator, speaker and writer. She also identified and developed so many of the talented dancers, choreographers and teachers who went onto make Britain a world leader in ballet and dance. During the 50th Anniversary Celebrations of The Royal Ballet in 1981, Ninette de Valois accepted an invitation to speak to the Yorkshire Ballet Seminars. In that illuminating talk, printed here for the first time, she focuses on what ‘English Ballet’ is. Combined with her 1955 article, Some Problems of Ballet Today, and Sir Peter Wright’s fascinating Madam’s Memorial Address, this volume raises questions as meaningful today as they were when de Valois first addressed them. In an increasingly connected dance world, what does it mean to have a national style? Why is a national style important? How might a national style be identified, developed and nurtured? This volume provides thought-provoking and fascinating reading for all lovers of ballet, dance and art.

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.”