This book retells twelve great ballets as fairy tales—fairy tales set to music and told through the medium of dance. It is the first collection of ballet stories in which the characters and the worlds they inhabit exist as they do at the ballet, on stage behind the proscenium arch.
Jane Rosenberg has re-created as fully as possible, in words and pictures, the actual experience of a ballet performance. Here are the romantic arabesques of Giselle, the classical attitudes of The Sleeping Beauty. Here are ballerinas partnered by their cavaliers; villains in the guises of sorcerers, witches, and magicians; comic characters and noble, tragic ones.
Whether the tales are read as an introduction to ballet or to relive a production already seen, text and art combine to give you a clear understanding of plot, scene, and character. Young children in particular will enjoy reading the stories—or having them read—both as lovely fairy tales and to help them share in the magic of the ballet.
Here is a book for young and old alike, for all those who love fairy tales and the enchanted world of the ballet.
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