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Through dance and gender analysis, with reference to dance reviews and dancer interviews, Jill Nunes Jensen proposes that the choreography of San Francisco‐based Alonzo King encourages men and women to reevaluate concepts that have historically determined their relationships in traditional ballet pas de deux. Men in King's LINES Ballet company, for instance, escape many of the limitations of a “prince” and supporter identity by showing frailty and emotion, changing their physical relationship to female partners, and dancing with male partners. Although King's dancers may sometimes use traditional partnering protocols (women on pointe, men supporting them), they also often depart from them by exploring “qualities” not attached to fixed roles in conventional narratives and by sharing dance vocabulary, especially in terms of focus, strength, and use of space. Calling on dance theorists such as Ramsay Burt and Michael Gard, and referencing the work of William Forsythe, the author concludes that King's strategies and artistic output complicate gender in the ballet world in a unique way, offering more choice than is usual to both male and female dancers.

This chapter describes the career and teaching philosophy of Roni Mahler, who has been a principal with the National Ballet of Washington, D.C., and a soloist with the American Ballet Theatre. She is on the faculty of the Juilliard School, and defines technique as the vehicle which moves you around the stage so that you can communicate with the audience. Mahler also says that a true teacher knows how to guide every different body—to stand up, not fall down—and to make people care about what you are doing onstage.

This chapter describes the career and teaching philosophy of Damara Bennett, Director of the School of Oregon Ballet Theatre. Bennett, who was formerly with San Francisco Ballet, defines technique as what you need in order to express the art form, whether for an abstract or a story ballet. It is also how the steps relate to other steps—what steps are connector steps. Technique is also support; it is your partner.

This chapter describes the author's experiences as a student at the School of American Ballet when Balanchine needed dancers to form his company. In order to shape his dancers to perform his choreography in the way he desired, Balanchine started to train them in his style. He gave two-hour classes that were designed to help his dancers achieve “perfection,” as the advanced classes at the Kirov school were called. Balanchine's intention was to speed up our development because he needed an instant company.

This introductory chapter describes Prokofiev's aesthetic outlook, notably the influence of Christian Science on his creativity. There ensues a discussion of his work with the Ballets Russes organization in Paris, commentary on the reception of his ballet Le Pas d'Acier in Moscow, and a chronology of his encounters with Soviet artists (Aleksandr Afinogenov and Ilya Ehrenburg) and cultural officials (Levon Atovmyan and Boris Gusman), who sought, using different creative and financial incentives, to convince him to relocate to Moscow. The case of Atovmyan is particularly significant: a cellist by training, he ascended through the bureaucratic ranks to become the head of Muzfund, the financial division of the Union of Soviet Composers. He was recruited by Narkomindel (the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs) to lure Prokofiev to Moscow.

This chapter describes the experiences of the author as a dancer in the early 1950s. Specifically, she gives an account of an average workday by describing a day on her company's first tour in Europe in 1952, as well as an idea of what the logistics of their lives were like, as members of a poor company.

This chapter discusses how dance was once so central to worship. It argues that the complexity of movement that the dancer seeks to achieve, not least in lifts and leaps from the ground, hints at a world entered that is otherwise than our present flawed reality, and is thus symbolic of the possibility of a quite different form of joyful and ordered existence. The discussion proceeds in two stages. The first half of the chapter offers a largely historical examination of dance as it has functioned in various religiously sanctioned roles. The second part explores how, despite its avowedly ‘secular’ context, the religious dimension does often still emerge in ballet and modern dance, though almost invariably without any hint of worship.

Following her abdication, Queen Christina of Sweden took up residence in the Palazzo Farnese, Rome from 1655. She had already developed a keen interest in music, gained from tuition from a French dancing master, and playing the star role in the ballet The Captured Cupid in honour of her mother's birthday in 1649. Christina's arrival in Rome was marked by performances in her honour in the Palazzo Barberini and Palazzo Pamphili of specially commissioned works by contemporary composers Marco Marazzoli and A.F. Tenaglia, and by her favourite Giacomo Carissimi. Inspired by the chamber music proportions of the cappella of the Collegio Germanico, many of Carissimi's secular arias were composed for his royal Swedish patron. After two years in France, Christina returned to Rome, where she took up residence in the Palazzo Riario on the Janiculum. Inventories record her musical instruments and describe the contents of the Great Hall in which concerts were held.

In a broad contextualization of ancient pantomime within cultural history, the reasons for the importance of research into ancient pantomime are explored: it represents a lost aesthetic of profound and widespread influence in ancient imperial culture; it played, quantitatively speaking, a more important role in educating the majority of inhabitants of the Roman empire in mythology than, for example, recitations of poetry; it was the main medium in which the prestigious tradition of classical tragedy was kept alive in the theatres of the Roman empire; it played a seminal role in the emergence of classical ballet, and subsequently, in the twentieth century, of avant‐garde Tanztheater (dance theatre). The theatrical spaces and the musical accompaniments (provided by the chorus and the hydraulis), of pantomime are given detailed attention. The hostile response that aspects of the perfomance: the dancer, his mask and the music, evoked from the Church Fathers and the place of pantomime in their rhetoric of anti‐theatricalism is also briefly explored.

This chapter explores the art form of pantomime through the perspective of the performer and attempts to get ‘behind the mask’ and discover the dancers themselves as living, breathing, embodied beings with their own perspective. The chapter reconstructs the experience of the pantomime dancer through examining the ancient evidence for the dance and the training undertaken by its performers; particular attention is given to the demands that this performance art made on the body. The ancient evidence is supplemented in the discussion by some testimony about similar mimetic dance forms today, such as North Indian Kathak dance, Balinese dance and Ballet. This modern testimony enables the author to explore the question of the interiority of the dancer, his relationship to his art and to the characters he embodied.

It was ancient pantomime's destiny to play a seminal role in the emergence of classical ballet, and subsequently, in the twentieth century, of avant‐garde Tanztheater. It is well known that the founding fathers of opera in the Florentine Camerata looked to ancient myth, and above all what they believed to have been the all‐sung form taken by ancient theatrical tragic performances, as the model for their new medium. But considerably less exposure has been given to the genealogy traced by the inventors of ballet in Enlightenment Italy, Spain, France and England, to the dancers described in the ancient texts on pantomime. The ancient dances, brought to such a high level of artistry and skill by the ancient star performers named Pylades or Bathyllus, Hylas, or Paris, fundamentally informed, many centuries later, the nature of modern dance theatre in Early Modern culture. The final chapter in this volume therefore briefly outlines some of the uses to which some late seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century dance theorists, such as Weaver and Noverre, put their knowledge of ancient pantomime in their treatises on dance.

Jennifer Fisher provides a history of the “making it macho” strategy for men often employed in the dance world, which has been a response to the prejudices against ballet men throughout the 20th century and beyond. By looking at various rhetorical strategies in dance biography (Shawn, Nureyev, Bruhn), movies (Shall We Dance? The Turning Point), and television (So You Think You Can Dance), it foregrounds the frequency and futility of binary thinking in relation to masculinity as well as femininity when it comes to ballet performance. It references analysis of modern masculinity by Michael Kimmel and George Mosse, as well as dance analysis by Julia Foulkes and Ramsay Burt. It is suggested that, given the challenges for men in the feminized world of ballet, they trade the “macho” moniker for that of “maverick.”

From a sociological perspective, Doug Risner explores the many biases and challenges boys and men in ballet face in the classroom and beyond. Themes revealed in case studies and analysis include gender norms, heterocentric biases, isolation, peer pressure, lack of positive male role models and parental support, sexual harassment, and the lack of support systems for boys in dance education. The chapter concludes with suggestions for parents and dance educators that would increase support for boys and men in ballet.

This chapter presents some suggestions for ballet teachers. Teachers who depend on students attending their classes for their livelihood, or who have a following of less than totally dedicated serious advanced dancers, should not give classes as Balanchine gave them. They are more for professionals who want to discover the basic purity of each movement and step. They are hard on the body. One must approach them as explorations of the numerous forms of a given theme. What Balanchine's steps give the dancer is an awareness of exactly how a movement should be done musically and physically. Consequently, these combinations are of great value to teachers and to dancers who may be performing Balanchine's ballets.

This chapter focuses on the unique teachers chosen by Balanchine, who provided the technique on which he could build his company. Their classes were demanding, and although they were trained in the same tradition, their classes and strengths were very different from each other. Two special teachers were Anatole Oboukhoff and Pierre Vladimiroff.