anna pavlova i dreamed i was a ballerina

End notes provide more details about Pavlova's life and about Degas's ballet-inspired art.ĭorian Chong, School of Library and Information Science, San Jose State University, CAĬopyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. This understated moment is followed by a wordless full-spread presentation of The Dance Class, an exuberant painting of ballerinas, color, movement, and anticipation. A lovely pairing occurs when Pavlova's words about her newly discovered passion for ballet appear next to a pencil sketch of a young girl practicing at the bar. There is a pleasing variety of subjects (including musicians and audiences) and perspectives (dancers up close and from afar, in class, and on stage), and text and illustration are in a balanced counterpoint. The few sentences per page are dramatically illustrated by the paintings of Degas, and the selections for this text artfully enhance the words with their beauty. The language of the text is highly stylized, formal, and spare, albeit appropriate both for the story it tells and for the time in which it was originally told. It had a profound effect upon the child and her dream from that moment on was to become a ballerina and perform in that same theater-the Mariinsky in St.

Although very poor, her widowed mother was able to take young Anna to a performance of Sleeping Beauty. K-Gr 2-The story of the famous early-20th-century ballerina, drawn from Pavlova's memoir, Pages of My Life (Michel de Brunoff, 1922 o.p.).

Anna pavlova i dreamed i was a ballerina