What are Fairy Tales? What do they mean? Despite conventional wisdom, they are not ageless and universal stories. Through the adaptation of oral studies into literary texts, these tales have been edited, rewritten and modified according to the zeitgeist of the authors. They have been designed within particular socio-historical and cultural contexts. The book looks at the literary work of Charles Perrault in seventeenth-century France and the Brothers Grimm in nineteenth-century Germany. It also presents the Fairy Tale Ballets by Marius Petipa who choreographed Sleeping Beauty and the Nutcracker for the Imperial Ballet in Russia. Finally, under a postmodern infatuation with convention, it discusses contemporary Dance-Theatre Fairy Tales works, such as Pina Bausch's Bluebeard, Maguy Marin's Cinderella, and Kinematic's The Maiden Without Hands.