Choreography and Narrative Ballet}}}s Staging of Story and Desire [Paperback]

Undoubtedly, Choreography and Narrative is an important contribution to dance history research. Nineteenth-Century French Studies

This work is a landmark in the field and belongs in all libraries serving undergraduate, graduate, and faculty researchers in dance. Choice

Invents a new method for writing the history of performance: Foster has found an innovative way of appealing directly to the kinesthetic imagination of her readers, evoking the elusive styles of the pieces she reconstructs. Joseph Roach

An impressive work of scholarship, this elegantly staged study... uses the concept of a culturally constructed, historically specific body to cut across disciplinary boundaries... Library Journal

Foster examines the development of ballet, and conceptions of the dancing body, as ballet separated from opera and emerged as an autonomous art form during the turbulence of 18th-century French society and history.

Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographer, dancer, and writer, is Professor of Dance at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance and editor of Choreographing History and Corporealities.

Illustrations
Preface

Introduction: Pygmalions No-Boby and The Body of Dance

1. Originary Gestures 13
Painting the situations of the soul Vanishing physicalities
Transgressive gestures Originating the action ballet

The Bank of Grass (le banc de gazon)
Telemaque dans lile de Calipso (1759)
On One Side, On the Other; Above and Below
Arlequin Soldat Magicien, ou le Canonier, Pantomime (1764)

2. Staging the Canvas and the Machine
Spectacular dancing bodies Horizontal and vertical perfection
Challenging hierarchy The more sensible machine

Make the Scheme Known
Jason et Medee (1771)
The Invigilant Dancer
Apelles et Campaspe (1776)

3. Narrating Passion and Prowess
Dancing the action A passionl#­