By Martha Ullman West
According to Jennifer Homans, whose Apollo’s Angels the New York Times Book Review has anointed one of the 10 best books of 2010, ballet is dead, not only because Balanchine is dead, but also because the courts of Louis XIV, XV and XVI are long gone.
That conclusion is based on my reading of the first few chapters and the last two, all I’ve gotten through so far, though I hasten to add that despite the over-use of “indeed” and a rather girlish use of italics when she wants to emphasize a point, Homans’ book (she has a Ph.D. in modern European history from New York University) is a very well-written history of ballet. Based on what I’ve seen in the last six weeks in our neck of the woods, though, when it comes to the death of ballet you could have fooled me.
Item: Early in January I had a peek at an Oregon Ballet Theatre School rehearsal of Coppelia, Kent Stowell’s version, which the students will perform in their annual concert on April 29th and 30th. Stowell the Elder and Francia Russell were staging it, with just as much energy as the littlest kids in rehearsal, working together as a team as they’ve been doing for decades.
But somehow or other, while critical eyes were cast elsewhere, 
All of this is an honor, and the awards ceremony is bound to be a lot of fun. But as writers tend to do, most of these people have already moved on to new projects. Acito is shifting his attention to New York and a new life in the world of Broadway musicals. Taylor’s had another play, The Strange Case of the Miser at Christmas, on stage for a first reading. And Dixon has just released his newest novel, The Ingram Interview, through 
Pepys had notoriously little patience for Shakespeare and his fripperies. What might he have thought, then, of Constance Congdon’s adaptation of Moliere’s 
Here at Chez Scatter, the arrival of Christmas always includes a good deal of flutter over food. How many people will we be this year? Who eats meat and who doesn’t? What recipes have we been longing to try? How traditional and how daring are we going to be?
You still occasionally hear people refer to it as Morris’s winking bad-boy spoof of the ubiquitous holiday story ballet, but people who think that about it (a) aren’t paying a lot of attention to the dance itself, and (b) apparently haven’t read the 
“You probably want one of the adaptations,” the clerk said helpfully. “The language is modernized, and they’re a lot easier for kids to read than the original.”