Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet, and: Mirrors & Scrims: The Life and Afterlife of Ballet (review)

Not many books on dance have received such overwhelmingly positive attention from the mainstream media as has Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet. Jennifer Homans, a former ballet dancer, follows a familiar path for practitioners who, during or at the end of their career as performers or choreographers, turn into dance writers, historians, and theorists. The negotiation between writing and performance dates back to the Renaissance.

Writing universalizing, encyclopedic volumes on an art form, such as ballet, that emerged and shape-shifted through centuries and crossed different national boundaries and cultures, involves the inevitable risk of omitting more or less relevant information. The book is diachronically and geographically divided into two major sections of what are traditionally considered the epicenters of classic ballet: "France and the Classical Origins of Ballet" and "Light From the East: Russian Worlds of Art." The former focuses on France (more precisely on heliocentric Paris), but extends over the Scandinavian, Danish, and Italian styles as well. The latter begins with imperial Russia, which through the powerful influence of Les Ballet Russes passes all over Europe, and ends with Balanchine's death. The book includes a valuable 40-page, detailed, chapter-by-chapter bibliography, divided into primary and secondary sources.

Homans writes in her acknowledgments: "Clement Crisp's sharp injunction to avoid postmodern jargon was always to the fore" (ix). While she has succeeded, in my estimation, in avoiding the jargon of postmodernism, she unfortunately also missed some of its crucial contributions. Even if we accept the premise that we do not need a postcolonial approach to better understand a ballet such as Fokine's Schéhérazade, and that gender and feminist studies have been largely irrelevant for explaining certain cultural phenomena in ballet, Apollo's Angels remains problematic in its presumptions, methodology, and occasional philological inaccuracies.

The author's florid rhetoric around the "illusive and ephemeral" nature of the "blissfully mute" art form can be quite misleading to general readers. Some of the arguments in her Introduction—often expressed as a struggle between unattainable dichotomies: terrestrial vs. celestial beings, creation vs. reception, memory vs. history—reiterate old clichés about dance rather than offer new historical or analytical perspectives. Homans writes: "Ballet has no texts and no standardized notation, no scripts or scores, and only the most scattered written records; it is unconstrained by tradition and the past" (xix). References to the issues of notation are only sporadically cited in the book. Ballet master Guglielmo Ebreo's De Pratica Seu Arte Tripudii, available for almost twenty years in Barbara Sparti's meticulous English translation (Ebreo, 1993), is reduced by Homans to a book that simply describes festivities and banquets, whereas it is in fact one of the first fifteenth-century dance treatises, with detailed information on the scienza & arte del danzare (the science and art of dance), with descriptions of steps, choreographic phrases, dance exercises, and music scores. It has been a remarkable resource for scholars and choreographers who have been reconstructing and restaging Renaissance ballets for decades (the reconstruction of Renaissance and Baroque ballets is certainly not a new academic trend, as described in her Epilogue). The only system of dance notation mentioned as such is that of Raoul Auger Feuillet, for la belle danse, but after the French revolution, Homans declares with certitude: "As the genres collapsed, so did dance notation" (125). Probably the most significant oversight is that Rudolf Laban receives only a paragraph in Apollo's Angels. She seemingly forgets that Laban was the creator of one of the most complex and accurate dance notation systems to this day. The first edition of the Labanotation textbook, edited by Ann Hutchinson Guest, appeared in 1954 with a preface by Balanchine no less. More recently, Laurence Louppe, in Danses Tracées (1994), has presented...