Celebrating 10 Years of the Ballet Theatre Chronicles

To celebrate 10 years of the Ballet Theatre Chronicles, enjoy FREE copies of ALL four books! (Scroll to the bottom for the four individual links.) The adventure started with this, my 2015 New Year’s resolution, in a blog of its own but paraphrased here with the choice bits: Do I want this blog to be … Read more

A re-imagined “Raymonda” lights up the SF Ballet stage

Marius Petipa’s 1898 classic, Raymonda, has long been due for a reboot. Set during the Crusades, it features a courtly knight and his betrothed, the helpless but beautiful Raymonda. In this current Bolshoi staging, the gallant Jean de Brienne heads off to fight the infidels, leaving Raymonda to fend for herself (or not) against a … Read more

Nutcracker magic returns to San Francisco

In 2004, San Francisco Ballet’s then-Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson took a creative leap with a new production of the perennially popular Nutcracker. Stakes were high; the San Francisco Ballet was, after all, the first U.S. company to stage and produce a full-length version (based on the Ivanov/Petipa 1892 original), which premiered on Christmas Eve, 1944, there … Read more

World Ballet Day 2024

  World Ballet Day 2024 is … … Sadly, not going to happen. Following is news from the official World Ballet Day site today, September 23, 2024:  After 10 fantastic years of bringing together audiences around the globe on World Ballet Day, The Australian Ballet, The Royal Ballet, and San Francisco Ballet have decided to … Read more

More things my cats have taught me about ballet

I wrote my first post on this in 2013, mere months after I’d started my blog. I didn’t have a lot of posts or readers back then. I’d feel lucky to get twenty views a day, and I’d savor that number, cheering when it rose to thirty and feeling teary when it dropped to ten … Read more