White Swan, Black Swan
Stories
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The world's most famous choreographer becomes infatuated with a coltish young dancer who proves both siren and muse. A rising star plunges into an affair with a principal but finds that ecstasy on the stage can't be surpassed in the bed. A dying legend reflects on the evanescent beauty of a life of gesture, lost to everything but memory.
Each bittersweet story plants the reader amid a cast of dancers and choreographers who struggle—valiantly, playfully, fiercely—to find in the rigorous discipline and animating beauty of ballet a counterbalance to the chaos of unscripted life. Many of the tales dare to imagine the inner lives of the century's titans—Balanchine, Fonteyn and Nureyev—which rival in emotional complexity and pathos the classic dramas they enacted onstage: La Bayadere, Don Quixote, Swan Lake.
White Swan, Black Swan translates the pure and essential gestures of ballet into starkly elegant prose while showing the sweat and sex beneath the serene surface. Adrienne Sharp's debut is a bravura performance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The dance world becomes palpably real in this accomplished debut collection by Sharp, a former member of the Harkness Ballet of New York, as she explores both the exultation and the physical and emotional stresses of professional ballet. The dancers in her 12 tales are all grace and confidence in the spotlight, but they balance precariously when thrust back into the real world. In the title story, Robbie Perez is torn between two dancers: his estranged wife, Lexa, and his new teenage partner on and off the stage, Sandra (who reappears in later stories). Like many ballet stars, Robbie feeds his dysfunction with drugs, hoping to recapture the fantasy of performance, where "all the girls were princesses." Dance dropout Katherine is the disillusioned protagonist of "Wili" and "The Brahmins." In the latter, she shows her documentary of young dancers, to a friend, who comments, "I think that is the weirdest collection of little freaks I have ever seen." Katherine doesn't agree; to her, these girls are "like tiny little disciples." "The Immortals: Margot + Rudolf 4 Ever" is a dramatic account of the long relationship between '60s and '70s superstars Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev. Other real-life stars jet in and out of the stories, allowing the collection to resonate with realism for readers who recognize the first-name references. While a knowledge of ballet is necessary for full appreciation, Sharp adroitly develops parallels between classic ballets such as Swan Lake and the personal dramas that play out behind the scenes.
