Swan

One thing that happened this year with all the injuries was that Schevchenko, Lane and Brandt were now dancing the leads in ballets like "Le Corsaire" and others. This meant they were pulled out of dancing things like the Odalisque trio and someone had to replace them. Luciana Paris was injured and not dancing until the end of the season. So ABT had to dig into the corps de ballet for soloist women. The long neglected and pushed aside Zhong-Jing Fang was dancing the second odalisque…

Called, "The Mother of Dance", Isadora Duncan was one of the most influential dancers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her technique was a precursor to modern dance and she became very popular in Europe for her naturalistic approach to dancing and performances to classical music. She faced many struggles throughout her lifetime, with her children dying after their nanny had accidentally driven into the Seine River and her husband committing suicide. Then, not much later, Isadora died…

“Ballet is not just movement, not simply abstract. It’s something beautiful.” Nina Ananiashvili, the artistic director for the State Ballet of Georgia, begins to describe the magic and mystic found within the art of ballet. Only a ballerina possesses the key to unlock the mysteries hidden within each graceful movement of dance. Nevertheless ballet, like almost everything else, has a side far less romantic to it. Throughout her entire career, a dancer struggles to ensure a strong and healthy body…

bloody face, she hears her drawings screaming at her, and even watches as her body transforms before her. She violently scratches at her skin. Suddenly, her skin develops goose bumps, her eyes turn red, and her knee joints fall back like that of a swan. Her mother is trying desperately to open the bedroom door to held her, but Nina slams the door, breaking her hand. Though her mom was only trying to help, Nina’s unstable mind causes her to have a melt down and even hurt her mother. She wakes up…

Seafarer” is a metaphor for the scop, or storyteller, in Anglo-Saxon communities. This line indicates the importance of community because it shows the speaker trying to recreate the social aspects of community in his sea-bound exile. The use of the swan as a scop undermines the speaker’s community in exile in nature and leads the speaker to conclude that the only community left for him is in heaven. The “swan’s song” is echoed throughout the elegy, particularly in the first line, “I can sing a…

Misty Copeland is a woman who defied all the odds and ended up becoming the first African-American principal dancer for the American Ballet Theatre. In her autobiography Life in Motion, Copeland depicts her life as a young woman before her days of ballet until recently. This book particularly stands out as a commendable autobiography because Misty writes this book as a story a form of empowerment to “the little brown girls” who do not think that they are able to fight despite all of the odds.…

The purpose of this project is to show that Misty Copeland is changing the way the ballet world defines the correct image and body shape of a ballerina. Copeland does not fit the stereotype of ballerina: she is 5’2, has really defined muscles, has bust, and is African American. She started ballet at the age of 13, late for a dancer, but her pure talent made her into a prodigy. Misty Copeland really set out to become a professional ballerina, regardless of her ethnicity and body shape, she pushed…

Agnes de Mille's career was a very long and successful but also hard journey through the world of 20th century American theater and ballet. Born in 1905 in New York City, she was the daughter of William Churchill de Mille a very popular playwright and Anna George the daughter of the economist and single tax advocate George. When Agnes was little her father followed his brother Cecil B. de Mille to California, to try for work in the new gold field of motion pictures. He went for a year's stay and…

(Johnson, 2006). However, the moves are an expression of a typically female type of dancing but performed by completely male dancers. The idea of using totally male dancers represent a certain symbol of masculinity and the gay culture. Performance The Swans Lake performance arranged in Sadler’s Wells in London in the year 1995. Mathew Bourne’s performance in Sadler’s Wells is an inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock’s film “The Birds.” Mathew applies the idea of the film “The Birds” in an expression…

The Black Swan is a very twisted story about a young ballerina looking to become the best dancer possible. She wants to have the perfect body and performance as a dancer. Nina, the main character, is portrayed as an innocent and pure character. From the beginning, Nina shows signs of mental instability. As the movie progresses, it reveals deeper into her character as she develops and shows many symptoms of schizophrenic behavior. According to the DSM; Schizophrenia is a serious mental health…