Apollo's Angels

Ballet has no written texts and no standard notation. Steps, stories and style pass from teacher to student, so every dancer on stage today is one link in a chain that reaches back to sixteenth-century Italy and France.

This history follows that chain from the Renaissance forward. Ballet begins in the courts, where its movements carry the memory of kings and aristocracy. Under Louis XIV, himself an avid dancer, its basic steps and positions are codified.

From there the art moves across Europe, passing among court cities that include Paris, Milan, Vienna and St. Petersburg. Technique, choreography and performance shift as dance and the wider culture around it change, and the dancers' steps bear the marks of those changes.

Jennifer Homans writes as a historian and critic who was also a professional dancer. Her prose is clear, and she builds the account on vivid descriptions of particular dances and of the artists who made them. It is a non-fiction history for readers who want to know how an art with no written record has survived and altered.