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, Reference Ebreo and Sparti1993), 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 notation as an independent art form of symbolic representation. As such, she has reopened, extended to other fields, and deepened the discussion of the relation between choreography and dance notation.Footnote ¹ By underestimating the importance of dance notation systems, and the consistent attempt to create efficient new ones over time, Homans undermines crucial questions on the very essence of choreography—a different practice than dance, but one obviously inseparable from it.

The fairy tale tone of the beginning of Homan's first chapter is vividly clear: “When the French king Henri II wedded the Florentine Catherine de Medici in 1533, French and Italian culture came into close and formal alliance, and it is here that the history of ballet begins” (3). Homans opts for a narrative style that supports the construction of a nostalgic past by romantically describing the origins of ballet as if conceived by a noble, intercultural love. Her stylistic strategy is repeated throughout the book, and in fact the argument for each chapter is effectively summarized by an eloquent, opening sentence: “By the late 1770s the Paris Opera was in crisis” (98), “We feel we know Marie Taglioni” (135), “By right, classical ballet should have been Italian” (205), “Classical ballet was everything America was against” (448) and so on, to the most dramatic one: “In the years following Balanchine's death his angels fell, one by one, from their heights” (540). After each incipit, many informative pages follow, organized according to her own ideas of “order, hierarchy, and tradition” (550). Homans writes with the temperamental, strongly opinionated voice of a diarist. She describes individuals as if she knew them personally. If one were not very familiar with the history or work of the protagonists of the book, he or she would have no other choice than to blindly trust her polarizing descriptions. Her absolutist voice can be a page-turner—sometimes back and forth when contradictions occur. Principles such as harmony, musicality, and proportion, considered necessary requirements for classicism in ballet (and often synonyms of excellence in dance for certain schools of dance criticism), are the only parameters she uses to navigate through the dance past. Ballet fails Homans' Apollonian test when new experiments and changes in style occur, often described as degrading falls into virtuosity, slightly tweaking the meaning of the word, turning virtuosity almost into a moral vice.

One of Homans' most problematic positions concerns reception, described as a destabilizing element of the objectivity of art and its creators: “I have resisted too the kind of thinking that assumes a dance does not exist until it is seen by an audience—that it is the reception rather than the creation of a work of art that determines its meaning” (xxiii, emphasis is the author's). This position is not simply naïve. It is odd. The performative role of spectators is especially relevant in the past, not only in influencing and determining the future of a genre through the spectators' dialogical response, but also in producing and preserving the documents found in archives today.

The Chapter “Italian Heresy: Pantomime, Virtuosity, and Italian Ballet” exemplifies Homans' intuitions and acknowledgment of relevant documents. Despite her meticulous research, her general argument is sabotaged by her presumptions. Here, she insists in applying French ballet de cour's aesthetic principles to the understanding of nineteenth-century Italian dance. There is no space for combination/contamination of styles, and every attempt of Italian ballet to find its own identity, for example by experimenting with new steps, is seen as an act of betrayal. Salvatore Viganò, with his choreodrama, for instance: “… by turning his back on pure (French) dance, narrowed its scope and deprived the art of its most appealing attributes” (220). The drawings of human figures in poses in Carlo Blasis's Traité élémentaire, Théorique et Practice de l'Art de la Danse (1820) is read by Homans as “his characteristically Italian obsession with antiquity” (222), more than an analytical attempt to graphically visualize and deconstruct a technique.

For Homans the court is the political deus ex machina that guarantees stability in dance classicism and plot linearity in her (hi)story. She asks what happens in the absence of a court, when a country is not a country but a quilt of independent states under foreign empires' governance, where people speak different dialects, and audiences express different tastes? She carefully searches for answers to all her questions, concluding that the villain [in Vladimir Propp's (Reference Propp1968) terms] is the Risorgimento, and its sinister accomplice Luigi Manzotti (1835–1905). She writes: “The revolutions of 1848 and the wars of Italian unification ruined Italian ballet” (227). History happens.

Homans' disapproval of Luigi Manzotti's work is visceral, and Excelsior (1881) for her: “… was not really a ballet at all: it was a regimented celebration, more political spectacle than art” (234). She does not understand why his ballets “struck a strong chord with the public, even as they also exhibited an utter lack of critical and artistic judgment” (237). Ignoring the issue of comparative artistic value, Manzotti's ballets must have struck the same chord as Giuseppe Verdi's Nabucco. Ballet—as all art forms—expresses the sentiments and turbulence of the context in which it is formed.

By denying the importance of reception, Homans reaches the otherwise inexplicable conclusion that “Musicians were less vulnerable to such social and political transformations, since their art required mastery and self-contained and sophisticated musical language that demanded and developed analytic skills that dancers and ballet masters often did not have—or need” (39). How can musical language be more impermeable to social and political transformations than ballet? How did Verdi's operas become the very symbol of the Risorgimento?Footnote ²

By claiming: “Ballet is an art of memory, not history” (xix), and with a notably melancholic attitude toward the past, Homans extends to memory the ephemeral aura that both subjects have been enveloped in. Recently, a multidisciplinary approach to the study of memory—“as a culture construction in the present rather than a storage and retrieval system of the past” (Huyssen Reference Huyssen1995, 3)—has provided new reflections on the function of historical discourse, which is no longer there in Andreas Huyssen's words “to guarantee the relative stability of the past in its pastness” (Huyssen Reference Huyssen2003, 1).Footnote ³ Homans general tendency is to substitute the old twentieth century's obsession with the future, with a new obsession with a lost past. Without a balanced cooperation of both disciplines—history and memory—she risks creating corrupted time machines that have trouble making sense of our present and imagining possible futures. The critical reviews of the book have justifiably disagreed with her argument in the “Epilogue: The Masters Are Dead and Gone,” where Homans paints a bleak landscape of the post-Balanchine era, and ballet seems to be destined to die.

The recent past of ballet (approximately the last three decades) described as a desolated landscape in Homans's Epilogue, becomes an animated world in Siegel's Mirrors & Scrims: The Life and Afterlife of Ballet, a collection of reviews and longer essays. The liveliness of Siegel's pages arises in part from the immediacy and urgency of review writing, but also by her vibrant curiosity. The thematic—rather than chronological—organization of the book makes the reading more compelling, and reveals that reflections are not permanently fixed but can evolve and change perspective over time. Siegel belongs to the “Edwin Denby school” of American dance criticism, and more than other critics of her generation she has adopted Denby's open mind toward performance. In her Introduction, she writes: “I see myself as both a demystifyer and a validator, sometimes an interpreter, but not a judge” (xiii). More than presenting herself as an austere Virgil for the audience, Siegel continually challenges her own subjective positions. Dance performances are gently dissected and evaluated with respect to theatricality, choreography, skill, conception, and audience responses. The reviews provide detailed, lucid descriptions of what is visible and experiential on stage, while historical facts are delivered with precision and dispassion: organically informative, never pedantic. Discordant sources and critiques are considered so that readers can exercise their critical capacities. One does not expect nor need, by reading Siegel's reviews, to necessarily agree with her, but her writing is instructive through her openness, elegant arguments, and generosity of questioning.

Two major issues in ballet—authenticity in the restaging of old and more recent classics, and the idea of innovation—are the recurrent concerns of Siegel's thinking. Her critical gaze remains that of a contemporary viewer, transported by the experiential power of dance performances. One of the most controversial recreations of the last few decades has been Nijinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps by choreographer Millicent Hodson for the Joffrey Ballet, in 1987. Is it possible to reconstruct a ballet, without notation, based solely on written documents and iconography? In her initial review for the Christian Science Monitor, Siegel describes the process of the reconstruction as “the highest order of scholarship, and something more” given the “overwhelming” experience of the ballet (5). In a longer essay, for Dance Now, written more than a decade later, she describes Hodson's “archeological journey fascinating and convincing.” In contrast, many of her contemporaries had already declared the reconstruction illegitimate. For Siegel, authenticity is not simply a matter of accuracy, but instead necessarily involves a re-envisioning of the past. “Perhaps the greatest challenge is to recreate the ballet's visual images, illusions and metaphors” (164), she writes in a review of Balanchine's Mozart Violin Concerto, restaged by Tulsa Ballet in 1988. Both Mozart Violin Concerto and the first version of Stravinsky Violin Concerto were conceived in the early 1940s, before New York City Ballet was founded. The Mozart, created by Balanchine's residency for the Ballet of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, remained in repertory in Latin America, but had been barely seen in the United States before the 1980s. Bringing older works to contemporary audiences may restage older traditions, but only active re-imagining of the past creates continuity. In this regard, the most instructive section of Mirrors and Scrims is that of the “Balanchine Diaspora.”

Siegel intuitively recognizes talent and innovation in choreography. She can describe in a few precise lines the strength of a choreographer, thereby engaging the audience in the project of imagining a possible future for ballet. In her review of Ratmansky's Russian Seasons (2006), for example, Siegel writes: “Without fudging the line, elevation, speed, ‘character’ displacements of the upper body, articulation and mobility in the legs and feet—classical ballet's arsenal of technical resources—Ratmansky combined steps in new ways, gave his charged virtuosity space to breathe, and created a community through a constant modulating stream of dancing” (157).

Such clarity may not always be easy. If, in other instances, defining the genius of an innovator is more complex and challenging, Siegel's efforts to understand, describe, and make it intelligible for the audience, persist. This is the case for William Forsythe, probably the greatest absence in Homans' book. Siegel's review of Forsythe's Artifact (1987) opens her section titled “Ballet in Transit.” Describing the first few minutes of a dancer moving on stage while the spectators take their seats, Siegel immediately captures what a Forsythe performance can generate: “By this time we know the piece is going to be about the nature of the dancer in her relationship to the audience. Two hours later we don't know much more, except that Forsythe has projected us into a state where we must question the nature and that relationship for ourselves, and enter whatever we thought were their limits” (206). It is clearly not “affronting the audience” (Croce, Reference Croce2000, 444).Footnote ⁴

Forsythe has never limited his vision to the comfort zones, where many other choreographers, after being flattered by the approval of critics and audience, have retired. His vision—which seems to have naturally found a home on the architectural stage, and where choreography is only one of the languages in his polyglot capacity to communicate his rigorous knowledge—keeps pushing boundaries and continues to ask questions about the very essence of choreography and of art tout court.

One of Siegel's important lessons is that she understands that rigor in art (and in criticism) does not need to be synonymous with restriction and exclusion, just as tradition is not a monolithic manual of conventions fallen on earth, but the art of acknowledging, learning, and managing old rules while creating new ones.