Book Description

There has long been a popular perception of a connection between ballet and homosexuality, a connection that, for strategic reasons, has often been denied by those in the dance world. A Queer History of the Ballet focuses on how, as makers and as audiences, queer men and women have helped to develop many of the texts, images, and legends of ballet. Further, the book explores the ways in which, from the nineteenth century into the twentieth, ballet has been a means of conjuring homosexuality - of enabling some degree of expression and visibility for people who were otherwise declared illegal and obscene. The book presents a series of historical case studies, including: the perverse sororities of the Romantic ballet; the fairy in folklore, literature, and ballet; Tchaikovsky and the making of Swan Lake; Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and the emergence of queer modernity; the formation of ballet in America; the queer uses of the prima ballerina; Genet's writings for and about ballet. Stoneley ends with a consideration of how ballet's queer tradition has been memorialised by such contemporary dance-makers as Neurmeier, Bausch, Bourne, and Preljocaj. This lively, accessible study will appeal to students, scholars, and general readers with in interest in dance and in queer history.