Where Snowflakes Dance and Swear: Inside the Land of Ballet

Carla Korbes, principal dancer at Pacific Northwest Ballet, in Swan Lake

By Stephen Manes, New York: Cadwallader & Stern, 2011

A fun, informal look at the daily life inside an important regional ballet company, the Pacific Northwest Ballet (PNB) in Seattle. I learned a lot from this book about how ballets are transmitted from a contemporary choreographer to different ballet troupes.  A stager is dispatched to a company who assumes primary responsibility for a ballet: the stager casts the dance from company members, teaches the dance to the dancers (often with the help of digital recordings), signs off on the costumes, stage lighting, scenery, and even the tempo of the music.  Much of the work I assumed was performed by a company's Artistic Director is actually the job of the stager.  Christopher Wheeldon, Twala Tharp (she's difficult!), and Susan Stroman make cameo appearances in the text.

At 897 pages this book certainly could have used an editor, but I'm glad I plowed through it.  I often felt that Manes was recording episodes he witnessed while observing the PNB without any thought to their significance.  I enjoyed his portraits of the ballet dancers.  I felt relieved when Noelani Pantastico finally decided to move to The Monte-Carlo Ballet.  Carla Korbes, while unmistakeably gorgeous, is too much of an obvious favorite to win my heart.