Among the few dancers who’ve made the rare transition from stage to page are Agnes de Mille, Toni Bentley, Meredith Daneman and, most recently, Jennifer Homans, author of Apollo’s Angels, the acclaimed new history of ballet. Homans’s prose is muscular. As we read her description of The Four Temperaments, choreographed in 1946, we can almost hear the scrape of feet on the floor, the sharp intakes of breath.

George Balanchine’s work was “all tension and physical manipulation, classical positions tipped or broken and reconfigured with a hip or an arm thrust abruptly out. It encompassed jerky, pained, and clutching movements, too-deep backbends, deliberate and gyrating off-balance kicks, turns on pointe dissected and broken into their component parts, and ominous low-skimming bomber-like lifts …”

And when she writes of the “low crouch of the street” in Jerome Robbins’ West Side Story, there, in your mind’s eye, are the Sharks, keeping it cool, real cool.

Apollo’s Angels traverses five centuries, beginning in the French court of Henri II and ending with the 20^th-century works of Balanchine. Each era is mapped, contextualised and illuminated with great skill.

Homans, an academic and dance critic for The New Republic, danced with two major American companies, Pacific Northwest Ballet and San Francisco Ballet, both dedicated to the Balanchine repertoire. So it’s no surprise that Balanchine is the ghost that haunts the epilogue to the book, titled ‘The Masters are Dead and Gone’. Here, Homans declares that “the world’s major ballet companies – companies that built their reputations on new work – have now become museums for the old.”

This makes me wonder if she has seen the ever-changing contemporary repertoire of the Paris Opera Ballet, for example, or the works of both Alexei Ratmansky, artist in residence at American Ballet Theatre, and Wayne McGregor, resident choreographer of The Royal Ballet.

Still, the epilogue takes up just 10 pages of 550 that overflow with gems of description, from the bounce of Bournonville to the sweat and labour of such Russian spectacles as Spartacus to the grace and wit of Frederick Ashton.

Homans’ labour of love (it took a decade to write) deserves all the praise it has already earned.

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.

At the end of every chapter, there’s a section called ‘Exercises’, but they’re presented in such a way that they also work as reflective asides. There is no pressure to do this book as a “course” of any kind. Rather, the exercises get you thinking about your own practice. There are some tips for getting yourself out of creative ruts and soldiering on through both success and failure, and through it all Tharp’s smart and sharp attitude shines through.

Full of anecdotes — there is one whole section describing how much Tharp learned during the development and staging of her Billy Joel ballet, Movin’ Out — and teeming with practical advice, The Creative Habit is a highly readable book. Whether you’re in a creative rut, or you’re just interested to peek inside the mind of one of America’s greatest choreographers, this book is for you.

The Creative Habit: Learn it and Use it for Life
By Twyla Tharp
Simon and Schuster

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.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses
From the sublime to the devious, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s French epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses has been compared to an elaborately choreographed game. It therefore seems fitting that it has been adapted into ballet by David Nixon and Jean Grand-Maître who provide real choreography to match the novel’s metaphors and literary allusions.

Hamlet
Nixon’s 2008 adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a braver attempt to reconceptualise the metaphorical significance of the play’s original themes of power, identity, madness and war. Set in a Nazi-occupied Paris, where Claudius is a fascist collaborator and Hamlet is a soldier, Nixon’s modernised Hamlet highlights ballet’s interrogative and critical relationship with literature.

Image: Matthew Trent and Olivia Bell in Onegin. Photography Jeff Busby

It’s possible to lose a day poring over old issues of Ballet and Ballet and Opera magazine. With their technicolour covers, articles about ballet’s rich past and dreamy black and white photos that look like they’ve been shot in a smoky haze, these magazines capture a fascinating era of ballet.

From top L-R
Ballet Vol 9 No 2 February 1950 – Margot Fonteyn. Photograph by Felix Fonteyn
Ballet Vol 9 No 3 March 1950 – Kenneth MacMillan. Photograph by Hans Wild
Ballet and Opera Vol 8 No 4 October 1949  – Moira Shearer and Michael Somes. Photograph by Baron
Ballet Vol 9 No 2 February 1950 – Ram Gopal
Ballet Vol 10 No 1 July 1950 – Nicholas Magallanes and Tanaquil Le Clercq. Photograph by George Platt Lynes
Ballet and Opera Vol 8 No 2 August 1949 – Jean Babilee. Photograph by Roger Wood

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.