BY NANCY PRICE GRAFF

"Ballet of the Elephants," by Leda Schubert, illustrations by Robert Andrew Parker, Roaring Brook Press, $17.95

Pairing elephants and gracefulness invites skepticism. In Western culture elephants have long been regarded as enormous but simpleminded curiosities. Because we've had no practical use for them, we've reduced them to exotic behemoths created by a playful God to awe and amuse children in zoos and circuses. Ever since 1882, when the showman P.T. Barnum imported Jumbo from a London zoo to the United States to be the star attraction of his traveling circus, the American public has been willing to plunk down cash to watch elephants poise their enormous toed feet over their trainers' heads or to squat on spangled stools and wave their legs in the air like trained poodles. Only relatively recently have scientists begun to recognize that elephants demonstrate sophisticated thought, develop complex societies, and, indeed, weep.

"The Ballet of the Elephants" shows us what we've been too slow in realizing. Recounting a unique collaboration in 1942 among John Ringling North, Igor Stravinsky, and George Balanchine, "The Ballet of the Elephants" relates the circumstances surrounding a spectacularly original combination of imagination, music and choreography.

Written by Leda Schubert, of Plainfield, most recently the author of the charming picture book "Here Comes Darrell," "Ballet of the Elephants" is a more sophisticated picture book aimed at children in the early elementary grades. On the one hand, Schubert tells youngsters the story of this unusual theatrical production featuring 50 elephants in pink tutus; on the other, she seeks to reassure children, and to a greater extent their elders, that the treatment of these endangered and normally gentle creatures in captivity can be humane.

The story in brief is that John Ringling North, owner and maestro of Ringling and Brothers Circus, dreamed of a ballet starring a large number of young elephants and one grande dame, Modoc. North approached George Balanchine, the most renowned choreographer of the times, who, in turn, approached Igor Stravinsky, the most innovative composer of the era. Both Balanchine and Stravinsky had grown up in St. Petersburg, Russia, but had emigrated to the United States for greater artistic freedom and had wound up as friends. The two Russian artists agreed to create music and a dance for the young elephants, and "Circus Polka" became the remarkable result of this collaboration. First performed at Madison Square Garden, the ballet later traveled to 103 cities, was performed 425 times, and thrilled more than 4 million people.

Schubert tells a complex story that moves back and forth in time. Some of the vocabulary is challenging. June nights in St. Petersburg are white, not black, as young children will expect. Youngsters will have to imagine Stravinsky's music, so jarring and edgy that his audiences sometime hissed, although he believed that children and animals could understand what adults accustomed to the traditional music of the times could not fathom. Notwithstanding the difficulties she faced telling this tale, Schubert succeeds in describing how North, Balanchine and Stravinsky created this thoroughly original circus show demonstrating that elephants can be taught to move and trumpet to music written just for them.

The book excels on three levels. First Schubert's language is punchy and evocative in turns, as necessary to tell this unusual story. "Lions roared and monkeys argued" demonstrates, for example, how a steady stream of thoughtful, active verbs conveys the teeming energy of a large, lively circus. Similarly, lines such as "They wore fluffy pink tutus and jeweled headbands. Their crowns glittered as they moved their gigantic feet and swayed their long trunks in time to the music," evoke the pageantry of this wonder. Second, Schubert doesn't underestimate her audience. When she writes, for example, that Balanchine and Stravinsky "created dances that let audiences see the music and hear the dance," she probably anticipates that a few adults will scratch their heads, believing she's got it backwards, but children exist in a world where such conundrums are commonplace. Most youngsters will hear background music in this book from start to finish without a single note ever being played.

Finally, artist Robert Andrew Parker deserves much credit for illustrations that threaten to steal the show. In a book about enormous, thumping and trumpeting beasts, his soft, bright watercolors are dreamy and dramatic, brilliantly bringing the Greatest Show on Earth to life. While the paintings sometimes come close to anthropomorphizing the elephants, they stop just short: in the end, ballerinas, ringmasters, and trainers stay in character and elephants remain elephants. Especially charming is a fold-out spread near the end that suggests the thrill of a 50-elephant parade through the circus rings and the young ballerinas, also in pink tutus, who contributed to the magic of the moment. On the second-to-last page an old, fuzzy, sepia-toned photograph taken of the dancing elephants proves how breathtaking the ballet really was.

"Ballet of the Elephants" recounts a remarkable story that Schubert first heard of on PBS. Captivated by the tale, she sought out the details in books, museums and libraries, as well as on the Internet, until she had pieced it together. It's a wonderful historical chapter all by itself, but Schubert makes it even better at the end by pointing readers to sources where they can learn more and by assuring readers that many circus and zoo animals are treated better today than they once were. Still, in the spirit of full disclosure, I was troubled by all those elephants in tutus. In a world where elephants are rapidly diminishing in number, I thought the costumes unseemly for such noble beasts. As a historian, however, I know the perils of judging one era by another's values, and as a parent, I know that few forms of entertainment trump a circus.



Nancy Price Graff is a Montpelier writer and editor. She offers a special thanks to Jacob Hatch, a young reader who shared his thoughts about the book with her.