Where Snowflakes Dance And Swear Inside The Land Of Ballet Stephen Manes by Stephen Manes instant download after payment.

The internationally acclaimed new book that takes you behind the scenes to reveal how ballet really happens:
In
a scuffed-up studio, a veteran dancer transmits the magic of an
eighty-year-old ballet to a performer barely past drinking age. In a
converted barn, an indomitable teacher creates ballerinas as she has for
more than half a century. In a monastic mirrored room, dancers from as
near as New Jersey and as far as Mongolia learn works as old as the
nineteenth century and as new as this morning.
"Where
Snowflakes Dance and Swear" zooms in on an intimate view of one full
season in the life of one of America's top ballet companies and schools:
Seattle's Pacific Northwest Ballet. But it also tracks the Land of
Ballet to venues as celebrated as New York and Monte Carlo and as
seemingly ordinary as Bellingham, Washington and small-town
Pennsylvania. Never before has a book taken readers backstage for such a
wide-ranging view of the ballet world from the wildly diverse
perspectives of dancers, choreographers, stagers, teachers, conductors,
musicians, rehearsal pianists, lighting directors, costumers, stage
managers, scenic artists, marketers, fundraisers, students, and even
pointe shoe fitters--often in their own remarkably candid words.
The book follows characters as colorful as they are talented.
Versatile dancers team up with novice choreographers and those as
renowned as Susan Stroman, Christopher Wheeldon, and Twyla Tharp to
create art on deadline. At the book's center is Peter Boal, a former New
York City Ballet star in his third year as PNB's artistic director, as
he manages conflicting constituencies with charm, tact, rationality and
diplomacy. Readers look over Boal's shoulder as he makes tough decisions
about programming, casting, scheduling and budgeting that eventually
lead the calm, low-key leader to declare that in his job, "You have to
be willing to be hated."
"Where Snowflakes Dance and Swear"
shows how ballet is made, funded, and sold. It escorts you front and
center to the kick zone of studio rehearsals. It takes you to the
costume shop where elegant tutus and gowns are created from scratch. It
brings you backstage to see sets and lighting come alive while
stagehands get lovingly snarky and obscene on their headsets. It sits
you down in meetings where budgets get slashed and dreams get
funded--and axed. It shows you the inner workings of Nutcracker, from
kids' charming auditions to no-nonsense marketing meetings, from snow
bags in the flies to dancing snowflakes who curse salty flurries that
land on their tongues. It follows the tempestuous assembly of a version
of Romeo and Juliet that runs afoul of so much pressure, disease,
injury, and blood that the dancers begin to call it cursed.
The
book uncovers the astounding way ballets, with no common form of
written preservation, are handed down via the prodigious memories of
brilliant athletes who also happen to be artists. It goes on tour with
the company to Vail, Colorado, where dancers contend with altitude that
makes their muscles cramp and their lungs ache. It visits cattle-call
auditions and rigorous classes, tells the stories of dancers whose
parents sacrificed for them and dancers whose parents refused to. It
meets the resolute woman who created a dance school more than fifty
years ago in a Carlisle, Pennsylvania barn and grew it into one of
America's most reliable ballerina factories. It shows ballet's appeal to
kids from low-income neighborhoods and board members who live in
mansions.
Shattering longstanding die-for-your-art clichés,
this book uncovers the real drama in the daily lives of fiercely
dedicated union members in slippers and pointe shoes--and the musicians,
stagehands, costumers, donors and administrators who support them.
"Where Snowflakes Dance and Swear: Inside the Land of Ballet" brings
readers the exciting truth of how ballet actually happens.