Dancing on Water: A Life in Ballet, from the Kirov to the ABT
Categories: Books, Arts & Photography, Performing Arts



Dimensions: 6.5 x 1 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-13: 978-1555537920
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1555537928
Publisher: Northeastern University Press
Print length: 328 pages
Publication date: May 14, 2013
subtitle: Hardcover – May 14, 2013
author: Visit Amazon's Elena Tchernichova Page search results Elena Tchernichova Joel Lobenthal Joseph Brodsky
review: Editorial Reviews Review "A book as illuminating as it is interesting, revelatory about how ballet works, and fascinating as an account of a life devoted to an art--and to survival."--Robert Gottlieb "New York Review of Books" "The voice in the book is excellent company, as Tchernichova endures growing pains, backstage intrigues, and the shocks of emigration... This book offers a fascinating portrait of a surprisingly open-minded ballet intellectual."-- "Dance Magazine" "Rudolf Nureyev, Natasha Makarova, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Gelsey Kirkland, George Balanchine--these are gods as far as I'm concerned, and we see them here onstage, backstage, and offstage, human-scaled and yet capable of transcendence in performance that makes ballet the most fourth-dimensional of arts."--James Wolcott "Vanity Fair" Review “The Russian classical dance tradition and its postwar relationship with ballet in the West is a story that’s usually told on the fly by defecting stars. In the memoir Dancing on Water: A Life in Ballet, from the Kirov to the ABT, the renowned teacher and director Elena Tchernichova, a classmate and colleague of Nureyev, Baryshnikov, and Makarova, offers an intimate view of the aesthetic ideals and political compromises that defined both the company that was her crucible, the legendary Kirov, and the company she helped elevate to a new artistic standard in the 1980s, American Ballet Theatre. Authoritative, articulate, revealing, inspiring, Dancing on Water is a page-turning journey into the inner sanctums of ballet—and a work of quiet bravura!” (Laura Jacobs, contributing editor, Vanity Fair and author of Landscape with Moving Figures: A Decade on Dance) About the Author ELENA TCHERNICHOVA has spent her life in dance in Russia, the United States, and Europe. She lives in St. Petersburg. JOEL LOBENTHAL is associate editor of the quarterly Ballet Review, and author of Tallulah! The Life and Times of a Leading Lady. JOSEPH BRODSKY was a Russian-American poet and essayist, former US Poet Laureate, and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in 1996. Read more