Description
Designed for students, scholars and general readers with an interest in dance and queer history, A Queer History of the Ballet specializes in how, as makers and as audiences, queer women and men have helped to develop among the texts, images, and legends of ballet.
Presenting a series of historical case studies, the book explores the ways wherein, from the nineteenth century into the twentieth, ballet has been a means of conjuring homosexuality – of enabling some degree of expression and visibility for those who were another way declared illegal and obscene.
Studies include:
- the perverse sororities of the Romantic ballet
- the fairy in folklore, literature, and ballet
- Tchaikovsky and the making of Swan Lake
- Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and the emergence of queer modernity
- the formation of ballet in America
- the queer uses of the prima ballerina
- Genet’s writings for and about ballet.
Also including a consideration of how ballet’s queer tradition has been memorialized by such recent dance-makers as Neumeier, Bausch, Bourne, and Preljocaj, that is an very important book within the study of ballet and queer history.