Angela Barrett: The Orchard Book of Stories From the Ballet

That Angela Barrett would illustrate a book of ballet stories seems inevitable, as her style perfectly matches the nature of ballet: delicate, elegant, and with a fairy tale-like ambiance. The Orchard Book of Stories From the Ballet has no less than four original covers, so the publishers certainly got their money’s worth.

This compilation includes ten stories in all, from the most famous (Swan Lake, The Nutcracker) to the more obscure (La Sylphide, Petrouchka) and all those in-between (Giselle, Coppelia, The Firebird). Interestingly, Barrett makes the call to depict the events of these stories as non-diegetic – that is, real events – no matter how magical – as opposed to a ballet enacted on the stage. For a comparison, Francesca Crespi illustrated her firebird in A Little Box of Ballet Stories as a person dressed as the firebird, whereas Barrett depicts it as an actual bird. The title is Stories From the Ballet, not Ballet Stories.

Aside from the cover art, the frontispiece and a few tiny images of ballet shoes and masks and other paraphernalia strewn throughout the pages, these stories are illustrated in a rendering of the real world, not as a theatrical illusion. I’m making a point of this, because there’s one exception, and that’s naturally going to be the subject of this post...

I love this image, positioned directly before the retelling of “Swan Lake” for the way it provides a portal into the stories that are about to be told. Its edges depict a theatre: the curtain, the proscenium, the royal box with an audience member seated inside – but the view before us (and her) is clearly not a backdrop painted on canvas. The ripples on the water, the glow of the setting sun, the murky reflection of the trees in the lake…

Okay, so I realize it’s paradoxical that I’m describing this landscape as “real” (or “more real”) when it’s clearly no more or less real than the theatre surrounding it. It’s all very René Magritte’s “this is not a pipe,” when clearly everything is part of the same (imaginary) picture. But there is an expansiveness to the scenery that certainly makes it feel as though it’s meant to be a vista and not just scenery at the back of a theatre.

There are other clues: the vines climbing up the column on the left don’t look like anything a real theatre would allow inside an auditorium, and while the proscenium depicts the crossbow and arrows that are so important to Prince Siegfried in the story, we can also see several white feathers drifting down over the carvings and past the curtains.

This then, is a picture of movement from one world into another, of barriers melting away; a threshold between the illusion of the theatre and the naturalistic realism of the outside world. It captures the entire point of the theatre-going experience: to be transported to another place entirely. The reflection of the waning sun in the water forms a pathway that draws the eye across the lake, out towards the expanse of open sky, far from the confinement of the theatre box.

So then, what are we to make of the solitary figure seated there? Given that this illustration directly precedes “Swan Lake,” is she meant to be Odette? The Queen Mother? Her hair and clothes don’t match up with anyone in the story, for though Odile is described as wearing a veil at one point, her dress is scarlet, not purple as depicted here. Maybe she’s meant to remain a mystery; a member of the audience so hypnotized by the scene before her that she’s pondering – like Odette did – her own leap into the waters. Those swan feathers are drifting down towards her; like us, she’s halfway between worlds.