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

Undoubtedly,Choreography and Narrativeis 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.

The first critical history of French ballet that illuminates relations of politics, spectacle, gender, and narrative.

1997 Special Citation, Dance Perspectives Foundation, de la Torre Bueno PrizeA Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 1997

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.

This complex and beautifully written investigation of ballet's development in France from the early 18th through the late 19th century extends Foster's earlier efforts to link dance theory and practice (see Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance, CH, Apr'87; Choreographing History, 1995; and Corporealities, CH, Jun'96). Foster (Univ. of California at Riverside) has become increasingly adept at presenting historical, physical, and theoretical dancing bodies in rl³'