A Few Book Reviews

I've already blogged before about how I love a good children's book (check out Summer Reading, Ballerina Style), and as it's a new year, I'm hoping to make it to a few bookstores in the near future to scope out some new children's material.  Today though, I wanted to share a few adult ballet book reviews.

First is a link to a fantastic looking book and nice review from ballet.co by Jane Simpson on a new publication on The Royal Danish Ballet.  Check it out here.  I've never had the chance to see The Royal Danish Ballet, but would love to should they ever make a Bay Area appearance.  The Danes are known for their magnificent jumps and clean technique.  The Royal Danish Ballet in Photographs looks like it has some gorgeous photos and interesting history and documentation of the company's 2006-2007 season.

For my birthday a few months back my brother and his family gave me Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet.  Now, having been required to ready many a ballet history books for various classes I've taken, or projects I've done I'll admit that they can be kind of dense.  But I'm about 100 pages in to Apollo's Angels and can tell you it's anything but.  It's well written by Jennifer Homans, not to mention well researched.  It's a vast and complete history of the beginnings of ballet and I'm learning things that I never knew before about its history, which I'm loving.  I also skipped ahead to peruse some of the later chapters and was pleased to find that Homans addresses the future of ballet with honest opinions and facts, discussing the recent decline of new balletic works and where the future of dance is headed.  (I can't wait to get to those chapters).

So if you're in the market for a good ballet read, check some of these out, or do a quick Google/Amazon search.  There's a plethora of ballet literature out there, so I'm sure there's something that'll tickle your ballet fancy.  Happy reading!