The Royal Ballet: 75 Years

Description

In 1931, Ninette de Valois started a ballet company with just six dancers. Within twenty years, the Royal Ballet - as it became - was established as one of the world's great companies. It has produced celebrated dancers, from Margot Fonteyn to Darcey Bussell, and one of the richest repertoires in ballet. This book is a perceptive and critical account of its first 75 years, tracing the company's growth, and its great cultural importance. Giving full attention to dance style and performance standards, Zoe Anderson will put the Royal Ballet repertoire in context, showings its place in ballet history and in the history of British arts. She looks at the bad times as well as the good, examining the controversial directorships of Norman Morrice and Ross Stretton and the criticism fired at the company as the Royal Opera House closed for redevelopment. An indispensable book for all lovers of ballet.

Zoe Anderson is the dance critic of the Independent. As a freelance critic, she has written for The Dancing Times, Independent on Sunday and Daily Telegraph. She has a doctorate in renaissance literature from the University of York.

"'Remarkable - a lively and varied tale of endeavour, triumph, relapse and retrenchment every inch as engrossing as Richard Morrison's story of the LSO. Anderson has a simple, lucid style many of us would kill for.' BBC Music Magazine"