By Barbara Quick What Disappears, my new novel set in the world of the Ballets Russes (Regal House), had a decades-long gestation. When I started it, the story was about my maternal great-grandmother and her family, Russian Jews in Kishinev in the time of the tsars. Dance had nothing to do with that first draft,
Much like the 19th-century Impressionist movement that forever changed the art world through the genius of Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas and others, Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes of the early 20th century forever changed the dance world, through such artists as Vaslav Nijinsky, Michel Fokine and George Balanchine. As part of Milwaukee Ballet’s 50th-anniversary