For a year-end wrap-up, I’m looking at each category this week. Yesterday I started with my favourite history posts of 2022, and later this week, we will have books, royals, and style. If you are familiar with the blog, you will then know that today is for culture! While it is a niche area to blog about and admittedly there is less interest, ballet and ballet history are two of my passions and I love being able to share them with everyone. Like yesterday, I am going to share my favourite culture posts of 2022, and why I enjoyed writing them!
The Perfect Easter Ballet: The Tales of Beatrix Potter
This post became bizarrely popular later in the year, so thank you to whomever ended up sharing it! I loved writing this post because I think this is one of the most entertaining ballets I’ve seen that hits notes for every age group. Children even as young as four or five can follow Peter and his friends through these stories, and for those of us that are older, this certainly strikes a nostalgic note.
And quite frankly, I think that this is one of the more creative ballet adaptations I’ve seen. To act as animals, the dancers need to move very specifically, and they do that in full costume. I don’t know that I would watch this over and over, but it is a must-see at least once for any ballet fan!
The Best Winter-Themed Ballets
This post was particularly interesting to write and research because it forced me to really dig into the ballets that I know and those that I don’t. My theory on why winter does not show up in ballet a lot, outside of The Nutcracker, is that it is a lot of work to stage. You either need falling snow or set dressings that mimic snow, which can get expensive quickly. However, as someone who loves the winter, I think it deserves its fair spot on the stage.
The three ballets that I’ve featured are all fantastic. I have only seen two of the three ballets, but I know people who have seen the third ballet and concur!
World Ballet Day 2022
World Ballet Day is absolutely one of my favourite days of the year. At the end of October/beginning of November, a Wednesday is chosen for ballet companies around the world to open their studios and stages to the world. Companies like the Royal Ballet stream classes, rehearsals, performances, interviews, documentaries and more to show what life and careers are like for ballet dancers. I love that it is free and accessible, and shows that culture does not need to be kept behind doors.
I try to gather as many of the streams each year as I can. Some of the companies only make their streams available for a certain amount of time, so there might be some that are no longer viewable but many still are!
Who Is Margot Fonteyn?
Each May, I pick a different theme and share four to five posts on it. For May 2022, I focused on Margot Fonteyn. Fonteyn was one of the greatest dancers to ever grace the stage, and she led an endlessly fascinating life off-stage, as well. However, despite being one of the biggest celebrities on the planet in the 1950s and 1960s, very few people outside of the ballet world know who she is now.
For my first post, I introduced Margot. I covered the major moments in her life, her training and how she ended up on the stage, and how she became the world’s star. (If you are really interested in her, I would recommend the other posts I have on her later life, because it is bonkers…)
The Best Historical Fiction Books About Ballet
This is one of those posts that I loved researching and writing, absolutely in my top five of any on the blog this year. Of course, it does not hurt that the research in this case was reading historical fiction. However, finding those that are centred around ballet was a favourite project of mine. Interestingly, there are not very many hist-fic books about ballet, at least not for adults. (Though if you are looking for kids or tweens, you would have more options.) Happy (elegant) reading, friends!
Which have been your favourite culture posts of 2022 on the blog?
Cheers,
The Historian
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