Queer History of the Ballet

<p>Designed for students, scholars and general readers with an interest in dance and queer history, <em>A Queer History of the Ballet</em> focuses on how, as makers and as audiences, queer men and women have helped to develop many of the texts, images, and legends of ballet.</p><p>Presenting a series of historical case studies, the book explores the ways in which, from the nineteenth century into the twentieth, ballet has been a means of conjuring homosexuality – of enabling some degree of expression and visibility for people who were otherwise declared illegal and obscene.</p><p>Studies include:</p><ul> <p> </p> <li>the perverse sororities of the Romantic ballet</li> <li>the fairy in folklore, literature, and ballet</li> <li>Tchaikovsky and the making of Swan Lake</li> <li>Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and the emergence of queer modernity</li> <li>the formation of ballet in America</li> <li>the queer uses of the prima ballerina</li> <li>Genet’s writings for and about ballet.</li> </ul><p>Also including a consideration of how ballet’s queer tradition has been memorialized by such contemporary dance-makers as Neumeier, Bausch, Bourne, and Preljocaj, this is an essential book in the study of ballet and queer history.</p> <p>Introduction 1. Components: Spaces, Bodies, Movement 2. Nuns and Fairies 3. Swans 4. Queer Modernity 5. New York and the "Closed Shop" 6. The Prima and Her Fans 7. Dance of the Sailors. Conclusion</p>