One of the things I don’t love about the AO3’s layout is how it puts the author notes right in your face as soon as you finish reading. These notes in particular are relatively extensive, so I decided to put them on their own page here. These are more or less chronological by how things appear in the fic.
Béjart’s Boléro is real, as are most of the ballets referenced in this fic. The Maya Plisetskaya performance of Boléro with the Ballet du XXème Siècle, which Minako studies on tape in chapter two, is well worth a watch. In general, dancers/choreographers/skaters who are only name-dropped are real people, while the ones who appear as characters are fictional.
The criticism of The Red Shoes (namely, what’s the fuss, they’re in the same company, just let them get married) actually comes from George Balanchine as quoted in Maria Tallchief’s autobiography. A good read, as I recall it! But I read it about twenty years ago, so that recall is not super reliable.
Silvia Camerlengo, Celestino’s partner, is named after Pasquale Camerlengo. I suspect this guy was the model for Celestino in the first place--at least, he’s an Italian ice dancer who now teaches and choreographs at the Detroit Skating Club. Celestino & Silvia finish in fifth at the Olympics because that’s what Calegari & Camerlengo historically did in 1992. Sorry, fictional characters, but fifth at the Olympics is still very good.
“Hammer coffee” is something a former teacher at my high school used to talk about. I can’t independently confirm whether the Danes ever use an expression like that, but they do drink a lot of coffee—they’re ranked fourth in the world in per-capita coffee consumption. Just so you know.
During the brief period when I considered naming all the chapters in this fic after poems, before I decided that was too precious (and would end up being too Anglosphere-centric for Minako), chapter two was going to get a title from “At Twenty-Eight” by Amy Fleury, and I still have a fondness for that one.
The line about ballet masters thinking of the whole company, while dancers think only about themselves, is a paraphrased quote from Peter Martins, before he got fired as artistic director of the New York City Ballet. Oh, and “best partnering in the competition” is what Scott Hamilton said about Sui & Han in Pyeongchang. That should be it for things that are, or border on, direct quotes.
Shizuka Arakawa’s competitive career was a little too early to get much love from the YOI fandom, but she did a lot for Japanese figure skating, and her layback Ina Bauer really is incredible. I like this introductory post about her.
There are a lot of good discussions out there of what it’s like for dancers to retire, but my favorites are the BBC Radio documentary A Dancer Dies Twice and the film Restless Creature: Wendy Whelan. Please feel free to contact me if you’d like the names of more of the sources I used for more general “how does ballet work” background, although they are a bit out of date now, and an unfortunate number of them featured various NYCB sex pests.
Thanks again to my betas, chestnut_pod and postmodern_robot. If you liked this, you should check out chestnut_pod’s Lilia/Minako fic.
And thank you so much for reading. If you enjoyed the story, I’d love to hear from you.