On Tracking Down Apollos Angels A History Of Ballet
I spent about three weeks last year looking for a solid copy of Jennifer Homans' book on my shelf, only to realize I'd lent it to someone who never returned it. Ballet history is one of those fields where most people stop at the well-worn fairy tales about Petipa and Nijinsky. Homans actually dug into the source material - correspondence, diaries, court records - and built something that isn't just a timeline but a cultural history of why ballet mattered and how it survived. The full title is Apollos Angels A History Of Ballet, and it runs roughly 600 pages with illustrations. It covers the Renaissance courts, the French Academy period, the Romantic era, the Russian Golden Age, and then moves through the twentieth century into the company politics and artistic decisions that shaped modern ballet. It's dense but readable. Homans writes like someone who actually watched rehearsals and talked to dancers rather than just reading secondary sources.
Where to Get Apollos Angels A History Of Ballet
The book is still in print. You can grab it from most major retailers or used book sites. I found a used hardcover in decent shape on AbeBooks for about twelve dollars, which was fine. The paperback is also widely available if you want something lighter. Some libraries carry it too, though they tend to have long wait lists because dance students and history professors both seem to want it at the same time. There was also a documentary film adaptation released a few years back. It's shorter, obviously, but Homans was involved in the research. If you want the full depth of her argument about how ballet functioned as a political and social institution across centuries, the book is the way to go. The film gives you highlights.
What Actually Makes This Book Useful
Most ballet history books I've read treat the art form as if it appeared fully formed in eighteenth-century France and then just got better. Homans traces the lineage much further back, including the Italian Renaissance courts and the religious and secular reasons dance was considered appropriate or inappropriate in different eras. That context matters because it explains why ballet survived when so many other performance traditions didn't. One thing she does that I found genuinely useful is breaking down the patronage system. The relationship between choreographers and their financial backers isn't just background detail - it directly shaped the work. Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein, for instance, had a very specific vision that required funding from people who agreed with it. When that alignment broke down, the output changed. Most people don't think about that dynamic when they watch a performance, but it's there in every production decision.
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A Real Problem I Hit Working Through It
I was cross-referencing some of Homans' claims about the Paris Opera Ballet's repertoire changes in the 1890s, and I ran into a wall. She cites certain choreographies that were staged and then lost, with fairly specific dates. When I went looking for primary documentation of those staging dates, I found conflicting records between French archives and later secondary compilations. The dates weren't quite lining up. The workaround was to check the original performance listings from Le Menestrel, a French newspaper archive. Those daily performance schedules are more reliable than retrospective encyclopedias, which tended to smooth over inconsistencies. I ended up adjusting about four dates in my notes after comparing against the primary listings. If you're doing serious research with this book, plan to verify dates against primary sources whenever possible. Homans is careful, but even careful historians sometimes rely on earlier scholars who made transcription errors.
Counter-Intuitive Things You'll Find Here
One insight that surprised me was how much of what we consider "classical ballet" was actually choreographed very recently by historical standards. The idea of a stable repertoire - works that get performed consistently for decades - is almost entirely a twentieth-century development. Before that, ballets were staged, performed for a season or two, and then discarded. The Revival Movement of the early nineteen hundreds changed that, and Homans traces that shift clearly. Another thing she gets right that other books miss is the role of male dancers in the early periods. Modern audiences tend to think of ballet as female-dominated, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, men held the artistic power. The great choreographers were mostly men, the principal male dancers were the stars, and the ballerina as cultural icon didn't emerge until the Romantic period. If you're approaching ballet history from a modern perspective, this correction alone changes how you read everything else.
What This Book Doesn't Do Well
Honestly, the coverage of Soviet-era ballet is where I found the most gaps. Homans covers the period, but the political sensitivity around certain figures and the difficulty of accessing Russian archives meant some sections feel thinner than others. If you're particularly interested in the Russian Revolution's impact on ballet companies, you'll want to supplement this with works like Cyril Beaumont's histories or more recent scholarship from Russian archives that wasn't available when she wrote it. Also, the book leans heavily on European and American ballet. If your interest extends into Latin American or Asian ballet traditions, you'll need other sources. Homans acknowledges this limitation in the preface, but it's worth noting before you expect comprehensive global coverage.
Bottom Line
If you want one book that covers the broad sweep of ballet history with actual research behind it, this is it. It's not a picture book. It's not a lightweight overview. It's a proper history that treats the subject seriously and backs its claims with documentation. I've recommended it to students and colleagues for years, and it still holds up. Just go into it knowing you might need to verify some dates against primary sources if you're doing academic work.
