Posts filed under: Books

When dancers trade their ballet shoes for a writing career they have one great advantage. Their muscle memory kicks in as they sit at the computer screen. Dancer-writers can speak from the inside out. (more…)

Every dancer knows that without discipline, they would be nothing. And they also know they cannot expect to reach the top of their game unless they have a routine.

These ideas — discipline and routine — are at the core of The Creative Habit. This is an excellent, practical handbook written for artists working in all creative fields, but because it draws so closely on the world Tharp knows best, dancers in particular will get a lot out of it.

Using examples from her experience as a dancer and choreographer across stage and film, she imparts the lessons she’s learned during her 45-year career. As the title suggests, Tharp’s secret to being a successful working artist is to make creativity a habit.

Tharp has an impressive ability to get her ideas across to a broad audience. She is an articulate writer, with an ability to make intelligent, vivid connections between ideas. With Tharp, everything relates back to dance. And dance, of course, relates to everything. (more…)

Tales of passion, seduction, madness, love and lust. When choreographers turn to literature for inspiration, their ballets are as innovative as the literary works they adapt.

Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë’s only novel Wuthering Heights has inspired numerous ballets, including Kader Belarbi’s memorable Hurlevent. Here, the English moors are transformed into a stripped landscape of shadows that psychologises the relationship between the novel’s main characters, Catherine and Heathcliff. In a striking scene, multiple Catherines appear in diaphanous dresses, providing an insightful metaphor for her tortured madness.

Dracula
Written in late Victorian England, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) sensationalised the myth of the vampire into a tale of transgressive desires that has found its way into ballet productions by David Nixon, Mark Godden, and Michael Pink. These ballets’ spooky décor and ghastly (yet toned) vampires remind us of the good old days before Twilight when vampires were appealingly bad, rather than perfectly boring gentlemen.

Eugene Onegin
Aleksandr Pushkin’s Russian novel Eugene Onegin was adapted by John Cranko into the beloved ballet Onegin performed by The Royal Ballet, The National Ballet of Canada, The Royal Danish Ballet and The National Ballet of China. Cranko’s interpretation of the novel relies on careful integration of distinctive choreography and narrative drama. This is a ballet that pays homage to the emotional weight of carefully written words and, like Pushkin’s novel, it remains in the memory as an intense artistic experience. (more…)

February will be a big month for The Australian Ballet, with the company travelling to Brisbane to open the performance year with Graeme Murphy’s The Silver Rose. It will also be a big month on Behind Ballet, and once again we’ll be giving away a fantastic prize for the best blog comment. Up for grabs? A copy of
Lynette Wills’ Step Inside The Australian Ballet, a beautiful photography book capturing our dancers at work and play. Happy commenting!

In her award-winning book, Clair-de-Lune, Australian author Cassandra Golds employs balletic grace and skill to weave a breathtaking fairytale about a talented young dancer who cannot speak. We were lucky enough to chat to Cassandra about the book.

How did the idea for Clair-de-Lune come about?
It started with a picture: I could see a girl at the barre in a 19th century ballet studio, and a mouse watching from a mouse hole nearby. And somehow I knew that the girl could not speak …

Can you tell us a bit about your own background in ballet?
I studied ballet by the Cecchetti method at the Burlakov School of Ballet in Penrith, where I grew up. It was one of the most memorable and influential experiences of my life.

What kind of research did you do for the book?
Clair-de-Lune is set in the 1850s, so I had to read up on ballet in the 19th century. I also saw two fascinating documentaries: Elusive Muse, the story of Suzanne Farrell and her mentor, legendary choreographer George Balanchine, and another one in which Isabelle Fokine discussed her grandfather Mikhail’s choreography for Anna Pavlova’s signature solo, ‘The Dying Swan’.

Do you think that ballet is a crucial element to the story, or could you still have told Clair-de-Lune’s story if you’d made her, say, a basketball player or a violinist?
I guess Clair-de-Lune could have had some other calling … but I had a particular kind of story in mind when I began. I wanted to write something flamboyant and baroque and romantic and intensely emotional. And the world of ballet, with its elaborate culture and traditions, and a body of legend that goes back generations, seemed the perfect background for my purposes. Plus, I wanted to write about relationships between girls and mothers and grandmothers, and about the dangers of shutting out men. Ballet seemed perfect for that, too.

You’ve mentioned that you loved Lorna Hill’s Sadler’s Wells series when you were a kid, and also Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes. What is it about ballet, do you think, that makes it such a compelling storyline for readers?
I think it’s the mixture of romance and discipline. There is nothing more magically lovely than the romantic ballets of the 19th century. And there is nothing that is harder work than becoming a skilled enough dancer to actually dance one of those roles. To work almost impossibly hard to attain such an exquisite ideal is a fascinating story in itself. It’s a metaphor that any idealistic person can understand. And anyone who lives life at that kind of pitch is going to have intense feelings about people too. So passion – and conflict caused by the tremendous demands of the art – becomes a fruitful theme as well.