Book 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. The company danced through the
Blitz, won an international reputation in a single New York
performance and added to the glamour of London's Swinging Sixties. It
has established a distinctive English school of ballet, a pure
classical style that could do justice to the 19th-century repertory
and to new British classics. Leading dance critic, Zoë Anderson,
vividly portrays the extraordinary personalities who created the
company: de Valois, founding music director Constant Lambert and chief
choreographers Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan. She records the
dancers: Fonteyn, Robert Helpmann and Moira Shearer, mould-breaking
artists like Lynn Seymour, golden partnerships like that of Antoinette
Sibley and Anthony Dowell, through to stars of today like Bussell,
Cope, Cojocaru, Kobborg and Rojo, and guest artists who became part of
the company, from Nureyev to Guillem. Giving full attention to dance
style and performance standards, Zoë Anderson will put Royal Ballet
repertoire in context, showing its place in ballet history and in the
history of British arts. She looks at the bad times as well as the
good, examing 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.
Zoë 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.
