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Of Books and Ballet

June 21, 2007 At lunch recently an editor friend told me he’s been reading a book about ballet to his five-year-old daughter. Call it the teachable moment or the moment when obsessions take root, but I was also five when a book about ballet caught hold of me and wouldn’t let go.

I must have been coming home from kindergarten when I saw a book in the window of a neighborhood toy store: with the Swan Queen in an ecstatic arabesque and her prince kneeling before her. Who can explain these things? I had to have that book, and my mother (believe me, not one to give in to my every whim) seemed to understand the urgency of my need.

It’s also a lesson in how easily a kid’s imagination can be stimulated. The book was nothing fancy—just the How and Why Wonder Book of Ballet, 50 cents in 1961 (now available on Amazon and eBay from $1.02 to $9.95), with illustrations that look crude to me now but then seemed magical. I couldn’t even read the text yet, but those images are indelibly ingrained in my mind—Marie Camargo, the 18th-century ballerina who daringly shortened her skirt to her ankles to show off her fancy footwork; Nijinsky in Spectre de la Rose; Maria Tallchief as the Firebird. (I still have the book, and it holds up pretty well, except for the drawing of a woman doing a pirouette standing on the pointes of both feet—not exactly how a pirouette goes.)

It’s because of that book that you’ll find me at the State Theater this Friday night, paying trib-ute to the beautiful Kyra Nichols at her last performance before retiring from the New York City Ballet. (The ticket cost somewhat more than 50 cents, partial view only, but…I had to have it!)

That book is why I was delighted to hear through the grapevine recently that a new biography of George Balanchine, NYCB’s founder and mater choreographer, is in the works—long overdue, in my opinion. And it’s why I’m looking forward to Julie Kavanagh’s upcoming biog-raphy, Nureyev: The Life (Pantheon, Sept.), which I expect to be much better than Otis Stu-art’s dishy but artistically unsubstantial Perpetual Motion: The Public and Private Lives of Rudolf Nureyev (1996).

Posted by Sarah Gold on June 21, 2007 | Comments (1)