Allen & Unwin The Faber Pocket Guide to Ballet book Art & design English Paperback 288 pages

A new updated edition of the essential pocket guide to this enduringly popular art form; a perfect introduction to over eighty of the most performed ballets today.

The essential, easy-to-use classical ballet guide - spanning nearly two centuries of classical dance - with entries for more than eighty works from ballet companies around the world. This new edition has been revised to include new ballets by Wayne McGregor, Alexei Ratmansky and Christopher Wheeldon.Features include: plot summaries; analysis of each ballet's principal themes; useful background and historical information; a unique, behind-the-scenes, performer's-eye viewDip in at random or trace the development of dance from cover to cover. Written by former Royal Ballet principal Deborah Bull and leading dance critic Luke Jennings, this ever popular Faber Pocket guide is a must for all ballet-goers - regulars and first-timers alike.

Deborah Bull was a Principal Dancer with The Royal Ballet, noted particularly for her performances in the works of Forsythe and MacMillan. Formerly Creative Director of the Royal Opera House, she is now Director of Cultural partnerships at King's College London, as well as a writer and broadcaster. She has written and presented several programmes for BBC TV and radio, including the award-winning The Dancer's Body. She is the author of The Vitality Plan (1998), Dancing Away (1998) and (with Luke Jennings) The Faber Pocket Guide to Ballet (2004) and The Everyday Dancer (2011). She was awarded a CBE in the 1998 Queen's Birthday Honours list.Luke Jennings is the dance critic for the Observer and has written extensively about dance and contemporary culture for the New Yorker and in the UK press. He is also an award-winning documentary film-maker and the author of several novels - Breach Candy (1993), Atlantic (1995) Beauty Story (1998) and of a personal memoir Blood Knots (2010).