The Ballet Master: A Novel

At the Academy, Sachs will be working on his next novel, tentatively titled “The Ballet Master,” about an Expressionist choreographer and his daughters at the moment of his break from ballet. When their mother, the prima ballerina of their father’s company, collapses onstage, the fortunes of the two girls diverge: the elder, her legs already turned out in the proper balletic manner, continues her training in ballet, while the younger, under the watchful eye of her father, explores other, more peculiar forms of movement, for which he, disturbed by the evanescence of dance, devises an unusual method of preserving. Their artistic idyll is threatened by a young psychiatrist who becomes intrigued by the goings-on in their villa. “‘The Ballet Master,’” writes Sachs, “draws on fairy tale and historical fact in order to examine the enigmas of self-expression—in art and in science, in families and in isolation. What, if anything, do we have to express, and how, if at all, do we express it?”