Personal Growth / Body /  

Ballet


Ballet is perhaps the most difficult art form, demanding strength, speed, poetic grace, unfailing musicality, and lifelong study. It's no wonder that dancers and audiences alike use the Web to find one another and share their love for ballet's beauty and uniquely exacting discipline.

The Best

The Dance section of the World Wide Web Virtual Library is an excellent place to begin if you're hunting for specific information. This collection of pointers to dance-related information available on the Web and the Internet is comprehensive and frequently updated. The links are well organized, broken down into an extensive (and searchable) alphabetical listing of all dance-related sites and resources; a list of college and university dance programs with Web pages in Canada and the US; dance companies, groups, events, and presenters organized by dance type (such as ballet, ballroom, break dancing, etc.); and a section titled "dance resources," which links to information on everything from advocacy to competitions, calendar listings, and publications.

You'll enjoy your visit to the San Francisco Ballet's home page. Not only is it the cyber home to one of the world's most accomplished ballet companies, but it is also a lesson in what its contemporaries ought to be doing to promote awareness and attendance via the net. The site's 14 subsequent pages are devoted to information about the company's dancers, choreographers, and orchestra; the ballet school; current and upcoming tour and season information; a history of the company; the auxiliary and volunteer organizations, the corporate donors program and company trustees; as well as a performance schedule and ticket buying advice. This constantly updated site strikes the perfect balance between advertising and education.

Short of a live performance, there's no better way to savor the beauty of this art form than the Body and Grace pages. The Body and Grace exhibit is a photographic study of the American Ballet Theatre, featuring black-and-white portraits of the company's dancers by Nancy Ellison and a series of ABT archival photographs assembled in honor of the company's recent 55th anniversary. You'll find 30 of Ellison's photographs and 12 ABT performance photos selected specifically for the Web. After perusing this teaser you may wish to see more of the collection, so watch for the traveling exhibition, which is currently touring the States.

The Rest

The Dance Pages, created and compiled by Estelle Souche, dancer and university student, is a promising start on a difficult task: to provide a breadth of content ranging from information about the West's premiere dance companies and the ballets they've performed (many embellished with .GIFs) to curriculum-vitae-esque biographies of 20th century ballet's greatest dancers and choreographers like Balanchine, Massine, and Graham. When completed, this information will be a valuable resource, showing the history and the intertwining influences that make modern ballet what it is. At present, however, the list is as notable for its gaps as its content. The Dance Pages has decent links to related sites that range from the specific to the esoteric.

Amy Reusch, a dance videographer with a practiced eye, has assembled Dance Links from the list compiled for the alt.arts.ballet newsgroup. You'll find decent ballet-related links to companies, the alt.arts.ballet newsgroup, and pages by and about dancers.

The Dance Directory Links Index includes a few ballet-related sites, but the real attraction is hundreds of other links devoted to every imaginable type of dance.

Dance On the Web has hundreds of links to dance sites across the country and around the world, but you'll have to dig deep to find ballet-specific information.

Dance student and enthusiast Philip S. Kuwayama shares his enthusiasm on the Kuwayama Home Page. You'll find a detailed, extensive listing of Kuwayama's favorite ballets, a copy of his resume, and links to pages devoted to famous dancers of the past and present, such as Suzanne Farrell and Gelsey Kirkland.

PastelBlue CD and Video Shop's Ballet Video Index Home Page shows that ballet is an ephemeral art form that resists being taped. What's available is here.

In the Educational & How-To Video Warehouse section of Digitalis Television Productions' InfoVID Outlet there's a subdirectory devoted to how-to dance videos . Among them you'll find several instructional ballet titles.

by Abigail Crane

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Internet Life Vol.1 No.1 Winter 1995