Choreography and Narrative: Ballet's Staging of Story and Desire

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.

Author: Susan Leigh Foster
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 08/22/1998
Pages: 392
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.93lbs
Size: 10.03h x 7.06w x 1.13d
ISBN: 9780253212160

About the Author

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.