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ballet

(bă-lā', băl'ā') pronunciation

A classical dance form characterized by grace and precision of movement and by elaborate formal gestures, steps, and poses.
A theatrical presentation of group or solo dancing to a musical accompaniment, usually with costume and scenic effects, conveying a story or theme.
A musical composition written or used for this dance form.
A company or group that performs ballet.

[French, from Italian balletto, diminutive of ballo, dance, from ballare, to dance. See ballerina.]

balletic bal·let'ic (bă-lĕt'ĭk) adj.

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World of the Body: ballet

Imagine your legs rotated, from your hips to the tips of your toes, heels touching, to form an angle of 180 degrees. Every muscle, from the waist down, is contracted. Your buttocks are tight and scooped inwards and under. Your stomach is concave, muscles rippling. You have taken a breath so deep that your waist is floating; your ribs a mile from your hips. Your shoulders press down on your rigid spine. Your head floats on its elongated neck. Gently curved arms flow down to precisely positioned fingers.

Ballet begins here — the head held high, the chest broad, the top half of the body generally quite rigid, with the waist downwards performing whatever skills tradition requires. Every position, from a simple demi-plié to the most complex enchaînement or batterie combination, places exacting, apparently unreal demands on the body. Demands that can, from the best performers, elicit movements of unimaginable agility, virtuosity, and beauty.

Surely, human beings must always have used stylized movement to communicate expression of mood and intent, from ritualistic tribal war ceremonies to dances expressing love or affirming the sense of community. Dance is a body language: one dancer's body is usually in dialogue or in full confrontation (aggressive or friendly) with that of another.

Ballet evolved from the formal bals and entertainments held for the pleasure of monarchs and courtiers in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century courts of Western Europe. The movements articulated in court dances were precise, measured, allowing only the best body lines to be exposed. Thus legs and feet were turned out. The trunk was usually three-quarters crossed (croisé) to the partner's body or to the audience, rather than full-face (en face) — certainly never side-on, exposing the ugly silhouette of over-prominent buttocks, knock-knees or large stomach. These conventions charted the route to the highly technical forms of classical ballet, as we know it at the start of the twenty-first century.

Louis IV, the Sun King of France (1638-1715), an ardent lover of dance and an enthusiastic dancer himself, established the Académie Royale de Musique. Here the steps and postures that he and his courtiers loved were formalized and refined, and the French terms that had been used well before Louis's reign were consolidated. French ballet terms are now a world-wide language. A classically trained dancer can follow without difficulty a ballet class in New York, Shanghai, Sydney, or Florence.

Over the centuries, ballet skills have become yet more rigorous and exacting. At the same time, poise and ethereal grace must never be lost. Odile's 32 fouettés (turning en pointe, on one leg, 32 times) in Swan Lake must be delivered with effortless finesse. (The audience will think less of the ballerina who does not achieve both the number of turns and the necessary grace associated with the role.)

As with art and music, the nineteenth century witnessed immense changes in ballet, from the aerial romanticism of the ballerinas Taglioni, Elssler, and Cerrito in the first decades to the strict formulaic style of master choreographer Marius Petipa later in the century. Petipa, ballet master and choreographer for the Imperial Russian Ballet in St Petersburg from 1862, sought, above all, sculpted perfection, epitomized in his ballets The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake, to the music of Tchaikovsky. Not only the individual steps but the entire tableaux of corps de ballet represent precision itself. As a rebellion against Petipa's formality and rigidity of style came the more expressive works of Russian choreographer Michael Fokine. In the first decade of the twentieth century, after the Russian Revolution, Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes in Paris, extended the boundaries of ballet in experimental, sometimes controversial works, including Stravinsky's The Firebird, Petruschka, and The Rite of Spring. The most enigmatic of Diaghilev's dancers was Vaslav Nijinsky, who interpreted his roles with primitive sensuality and often abandoned classical techniques, such as turnout.

Through the twentieth century, the classical technique and the choreographic masterpieces of the nineteenth century survived, forever preserved, indeed refined in interpretation, especially by the great ballet companies of Europe and North America. But ballet (or modern dance as it became known, to distinguish it from classical ballet) also continued to develop, becoming ever more experimental, improvised, diverging from the rigours of classical ballet. Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham are but a few of the leaders in contemporary dance, in which expression of movement and mood is conveyed through contraction of the torso, flexing of the feet, parallel position of the legs, and many other movements that are out of bounds in classical ballet.

The arduous training pursued by a modern dancer in the search for near-perfect technique results in muscular and anatomical development of the physique — a striking contrast to the first professional ballet dancers of the nineteenth century as we see them depicted in illustrations. Marie Taglioni, who made her début in Paris in 1822, though considered technically brilliant, was ‘stoop-shouldered and skinny with over-long arms’. A famous dancer of the 1840s, Fanny Cerrito, captured in a black and white photograph, appears dumpy and awkward, resembling a mushroom with her legs protruding from a huge knee-length voile skirt. Théophile Gautier, the French poet and sometime dance critic, described her as

‘short of stature and round in frame … plump, dimpled arms … a delicate ankle and well-rounded leg. Her shoulders, her bosom do not have that scrawniness characteristic of female dancers whose whole weight seems to have descended into their legs.’

Dancers now jump higher, pirouette more times — more than the naked eye can count — spend hours in traction to stretch their limbs and torsos a centimetre or two more. Like modern athletes, their aim is perfection, speed of movement, flexibility of limbs. At the same time, they must retain grace and delicacy. ‘Graceful beyond all comparisons, wonderful lightness and absence of all violent effort, or at least the appearance of it, and a modesty as new as it is delightful to witness, ’ as Marie Taglioni was described when dancing at the Paris Opéra in the 1820s.

— Andrée Blakemore

Bibliography

Fonteyn, M. (1980). The magic of dance. BBC Books, London

See also body language; dance; female form.

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: ballet

Theatrical dance in which a formal academic technique (the danse d'école) is combined with music, costume, and stage scenery. Developed from court productions of the Renaissance, ballet was renewed under Louis XIV, who in 1661 established France's Académie Royale de Danse, where Pierre Beauchamp developed the five ballet positions. Early ballets were often accompanied by singing and incorporated into opera-ballets by composers such as Jean-Baptiste Lully. In the 18th century Jean-Georges Noverre and Gasparo Angiolini separately developed the dramatic ballet (ballet d'action) to tell a story through dance steps and mime, a reform echoed in Christoph Willibald Gluck's music. Significant developments in the early 19th century included pointe work (balance on the extreme tip of the toe) and the emergence of the prima ballerina, exemplified by Marie Taglioni and Fanny Elssler. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Russia became the centre of ballet production and performance, through the work of innovators such as Sergey Diaghilev, Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky, Marius Petipa, and Michel Fokine; great ballets were composed by Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Igor Stravinsky. Since then, ballet schools in Great Britain and the U.S. have elevated ballet in those countries to Russia's level and greatly increased its audience. See also American Ballet Theatre; Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo; Ballets Russes; Bolshoi Ballet; New York City Ballet; Royal Ballet.

For more information on ballet, visit Britannica.com.

Dictionary of Dance: ballet

A form of Western academic theatrical dance based on the technique known as danse d'école (the classical school), usually presented with elements of music and design to dramatic or lyric effect. The history of ballet began with the Renaissance spectacles (which combined all the artforms in a single entertainment) and quickly moved to France where the foundations of classical ballet as we know it today were laid at the royal court. Louis XIV was a keen performer himself in his younger days, and featured in ballets by Lully and Beauchamps. Following his retirement, the Académie Royale de Musique was set up in 1671 and ballet became the province of professional performers instead of royal amateurs, while theatres replaced banquet halls as the preferred performance venue. By the early 19th century technique had been codified (see Blasis, Carlo). The delicate and refined Romantic ballet flowered in France in the first half of the 19th century, with ballets such as Giselle. Dance developed a more virtuosic and athletic style in Russia in the latter half of the 19th century, the era which gave birth to the three Tchaikovsky ballets (Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker). In 1909 Diaghilev brought Russian dance to the West, sparking an international ballet boom that eventually led to the creation of schools and companies throughout Europe and America (the founding of the Royal Ballet by de Valois, for example). Strictly speaking, the term ballet should only be applied to works based on the danse d'école and subsequent permutations of the academic form, but with the enormous cross-fertilization of dance in the 20th century the term took on a much broader meaning and is now frequently used to describe a wide range of non-classically based theatrical dance.

US History Encyclopedia: Ballet

The "unofficial" ballet came to America with immigrant performers and dancing masters. Performances in the colonial and early federal periods were presented in the port cities on the East Coast and inland cities connected to them by navigable rivers. The first documented ballet presented in America was The Adventures of Harlequin and Scaramouch, with the Burgo'master Trick'd (4 February 1735), given in Charleston by Henry Holt, a British dancing master. The next major figure was Alexander Placide, who trained at the Paris Opéra in ballet before learning tightrope with the popular Les Grands Danseurs du Roi. He brought companies of ballet and rope dancers to Santo Domingo (1788), New York (1792), and Charleston (1794–1796). The latter seasons brought the first presentations of the Paris Opéra repertory, staged by Jean-Baptiste Francisqui.

Nineteenth-Century Touring Performers

European performers from opera houses and popular theater continued to tour and immigrate to the United States throughout the nineteenth century. Augusta Maywood and Mary Ann Lee, each raised in Philadelphia theater families, are jointly considered America's first native-born ballerinas. As adolescents, they studied with Paris Opéra–trained Paul H. Hazard and performed in Philadelphia and on the Mississippi River circuit from 1837 before going to Paris for further study. Maywood remained in Europe, becoming a prima ballerina at Milan's Teatro alla Scala. Lee returned to America, where she staged and starred in Giselle and other Romantic ballets of Jean Coralli before retiring in 1847. The tour of Fanny Elssler in 1840 imported the cults of Romantic ballet and performer celebrity to America. She was thronged from Boston south to Havana and New Orleans. Elssler's grace and pointe work inspired poems, music, laudatory odes, and engravings.

As transatlantic travel became safer, family troupes from opera-ballet and popular theater scheduled tours of North America and Central America. The gold rush brought an expansion of American audiences and theaters, especially in the San Francisco Bay area and mining communities in Nevada and Colorado. Tours for ballet on its own or as part of extravaganzas began in New York's Niblo's Garden and moved west to the theaters owned by Thomas Maguire or his rivals in San Francisco. La Scala ballerinas Maria Bonfanti, Rita Sangalli, and Giuseppina Morlacchi presented ballet solos and pas de deux interpolated into huge extravaganzas, most notably The Black Crook (1867). The corps de ballets for these productions were mostly local women, trained by European émigré dancing masters.

The Impact of the Russian Ballets

Meanwhile, in Europe, ballet itself was changing. Mikhail Fokine tried to shift the emphasis of the Imperial Russian Ballet away from full-length, three-or four-act plotted ballets. He choreographed shorter works, many of them more abstract music visualizations, such as his Les Sylphides (1907) to piano works by Chopin. This change was considered "too revolutionary" for the Imperial Ballet but was adopted by impresario Serge Diaghilev for his Ballets Russes tours of western Europe. Although some full-evening ballets, such as Swan Lake, Coppelia, and The Nutcracker, remained popular, the Fokine revolution took hold in twentieth-century ballet companies and served as the model for most ballet presentations in America.

Although Diaghilev's company did not reach the United States until 1916, many rival companies of dancers associated with the troupe brought its repertoire and designs to America, using names such as the All-Star Imperial Russian Ballet. Anna Pavlova, generally considered the greatest ballerina of the early twentieth century, presented music visualizations by (or after) Fokine on annual Western Hemisphere tours from 1910 through the 1920s. Like Elssler, she inspired America's love for Romantic ballet and had a major impact on the development of ballet schools, companies, and audiences.

A large number of Ballets Russes dancers chose to stay in America, becoming teachers, choreographers, and ballet masters for theaters, civic ballets, and opera houses across the country. Many worked in prologs (short vaudevilles that alternated with feature films in motion picture palaces of the 1920s–1940s). Among them were Theodore Kosloff, who became a popular choreographer for silent films, and Mikhail Mordkin, whose school and company were the incubators for Ballet Theatre.

Sol Hurok, an impresario based in New York, had a national network of local auditoriums and concert promoters. Hurok added the post-Diaghilev Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo to his roster in 1934 and presented it until 1939 and after 1946. The Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo and the related Original Ballet Russe toured in some manifestation until 1962. These companies brought many more fine European dancers and teachers to the United States, where they worked with opera companies, ballet schools, and universities, raising the level of technical training available in America. Hurok maintained ballet on his national roster throughout his career, becoming known in the 1950s and 1960s for his importation of the (British) Royal Ballet and the Soviet Bolshoi and Kirov companies. He was often able to place excerpts from ballet and folklore on television variety shows, such as the Ed Sullivan Show, greatly expanding the audience for ballet.

Americana Ballet

Choreographers and companies have intermittently pursued the idea that ballet in America should be distinctly American. Ballet Caravan, Lincoln Kirstein's small troupe, existed from 1936 to 1941. Although generally remembered as an interim step between the School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet (NYCB), it also represents an unusual ballet experiment with Americana, living composers, and popular front imagery. The Americana ballets created for and by company members included Lew Christensen's Pocahontas (1939, music by Elliott Carter) and Filling Station (1938, Virgil Thomson); William Dollar's Yankee Clipper (1937, Paul Bowles); and Eugene Loring's masterpiece Billy the Kid (1938), with a commissioned score by Aaron Copland. The Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo also occasionally experimented with Americana, commissioning Ghost Town (1939, choreographed by Marc Platt to music by Richard Rodgers) and Rodeo (1942, Agnes de Mille to Aaron Copland). That work, like De Mille's Fall River Legend (1948, to Morton Gould) and Billy the Kid, remains in the active repertory of the American Ballet Theatre (ABT). The short-lived Jerome Robbins' Ballets: USA, in the mid-1950s, experimented with American movement vocabularies, jazz music, and silence. One of the few companies independent of ABT and NYCB was the Joffrey Ballet (founded 1956), which became the City Center Joffrey Ballet (NYC) in 1966 and later relocated to Chicago. Joffrey and fellow choreographer Gerald Arpino created ballet works inspired by 1960s American counterculture.

Civic, Regional, and Professional Companies

Major professional ballet companies have been established and maintained across the country. Among the best regarded are the San Francisco Ballet, associated with long-term director Lew Christensen, and Utah's Ballet West, directed by his brother Willam. There have been major companies in Chicago since the rival troupes of Ballets Russes dancers Adolf Bolm and Andreas Pavley and Serge Oukrainsky. Bolm protégée choreographer Ruth Page ran the Chicago Lyric Opera Ballet for much of the latter twentieth century.

Former NYCB dancers directed companies across the country, among them the Christensens, Kent Stow-ell's Pacific Northwest Ballet, Arthur Mitchell's Dance Theatre of Harlem, and Edward Villella's Miami City Ballet. In the mid-1970s, two of ABT's dancers who had been experimenting with choreography left to form companies—Eliot Feld remained in New York with the Eliot Feld Ballet (later Ballet Tech), while Dennis Nahat established the San Jose Cleveland Ballet.

The schools that had been thriving since the Pavlova tours began to convert from annual recitals to established civic or regional ballet companies. Many had only two seasons per year—a Christmas presentation of The Nutcracker and a late spring "graduation" performance. But some companies became major cultural forces, performing regularly scheduled seasons with live music and professional dancers. The first Regional Ballet Festival was held in Atlanta in 1956. The National Association for Regional Ballet mounts festivals and seminars on choreography, teaching, and nonprofit management across the country. The Nutcracker is still the most popular presentation, giving American audiences a taste of ballet's history.

Bibliography

Barker, Barbara. Ballet or Ballyhoo: The American Careers of Maria Bonfanti, Rita Sangalli, and Giuseppina Morlacchi. New York: Dance Horizons, 1984.

Barzel, Ann. "European Dance Teachers in the United States." Dance Index III, no. 4–6 (April–June, 1944).

Delarue, Allison, ed. Fanny Elssler in America. Brooklyn: Dance Horizons, 1976. Anthology includes her memoir of the American tour as well as verses about her.

Hudson, Alice C., and Barbara Cohen-Stratyner. Heading West, Touring West: Mapmakers, Performing Artists, and the American Frontier. New York: New York Public Library, 2001.

MacDonald, Nesta. Diaghilev Observed by Critics in England and the United States, 1911–1929. New York: Dance Horizons, 1975.

Magriel, Paul, ed. Chronicles of the American Dance: From the Shakers to Martha Graham. New York: Da Capo Press, 1978. Anthology originally published in 1948.

Moore, Lillian. Echoes of American Ballet: A Collection of Seventeen Articles. New York: Dance Horizons, 1976. Anthology of historical articles from American Dancer, Dance Index, Dance Magazine, Dancing Times, and Etude.

—Barbara Cohen-Stratyner

Russian History Encyclopedia: Ballet

The origins of the Russian ballet, like those of most other Western art forms, can be traced to eighteenth-century St. Petersburg, where Empress Anna Ivanovna established the first dancing school in Russia in 1738. This school, whose descendant is the present-day Academy of Russian Ballet, was headed by a series of European dancing masters, the first of whom was Jean-Baptiste Landé.

By the 1740s, Empress Elizabeth employed three balletmasters. The continued presence of ballet in Russia was assured by Catherine II, who established a Directorate of Imperial Theaters in 1766, saw to the construction of St. Petersburg's Bolshoi Theater in 1783, and incorporated Landé's school into the Imperial Theater School she founded in 1779.

The tenure of French balletmaster Charles-Louis Didelot (1767 - 1837) in St. Petersburg (1801 - 1831) marked the first flowering of the national ballet. The syllabus of the imperial school began to assume its present-day form under Didelot, and his use of stage machinery anticipated the exploitation of stage effects to create atmosphere and build audiences for the ballet across Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. After Didelot's departure, Jules Perrot led the Petersburg ballet from 1848 to 1859. Arthur Saint-Léon succeeded Perrot and choreographed in St. Petersburg until 1869.

Russian ballet began to assume its familiar form during the decades of Marius Petipa's (1818 - 1910) work in the Imperial Theaters. Petipa came to Petersburg as a dancer in 1847, and became balletmaster in 1862. The ballets Petipa choreographed in Russia functioned as a choreographic response to nineteenth-century grand opera; they featured as many as five acts with numerous scene changes. If Perrot is identified primarily with the development of narrative in Russian ballet, and Saint-Léon could be accused of overemphasizing the ballet's divertissement at the expense of the story line, Petipa combined the two trends to make a dance spectacle with plots as complex as their choreography. The ballets Petipa staged in St. Petersburg still serve as cornerstones of the classical ballet repertory: Sleeping Beauty (1890), Swan Lake (1895) (with Lev Ivanov), Raymonda (1898), Le Corsaire (1869), Don Quixote (1869), and La Bayadère (1877).

The distinctive features of nineteenth-century dance represent developments of the Russian school of dancing under Petipa's leadership. The new focus on the female dancer was the result of recent developments in point technique, which allowed the ballerina not only to rise up on the tips of her toes, but to remain posed there, and eventually to dance on them. Petipa's choreography emphasizes two nearly opposite facets of the new technique that these technical advances afforded: first, the long supported adagio, in which the woman is supported and turned on point by her partner; second, the brilliant allegro variations (solos) Petipa created for his ballerinas, to exploit the steel toes of this new breed of female dancer.

The work of two ballet reformers characterize the late- and post-Petipa era. Alexander Gorsky became the chief choreographer of Moscow's Bolshoi Theater in 1899 and attempted to imbue the ballet with greater realism along the lines of the dramas of Konstantin Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theater. Gorsky's ballets featured greater cohesion of design elements (sets and costumes) and an unprecedented attention to detail. In Petersburg, Michel Fokine fell under the spell of dancer Isadora Duncan and theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold. Influenced by the free dance of the former, and by the latter's experiments in stylized symbolist theater, Fokine pioneered a new type of ballet: typically a one-act work without the perceived expressive confines of nineteenth-century mime and standard ballet steps.

Fokine and his famed collaborators, Vaslav Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova, achieved their greatest fame in Europe as charter members of Sergei Diagilev's Ballets Russes, which debuted in Paris in 1909. Fokine's ballets (Les Sylphides, Petrushka, Spectre de la Rose) were the sensations of the early Diagilev season. The Diagilev ballet not only announced the Russian ballet's arrival to the European avant-garde, but also the beginning of a rift that would widen during the Soviet period: the rise of a Russian émigré ballet community that included many important choreographers, dancers, composers, and visual artists, working outside Russia.

The 1917 revolution posed serious problems for the former Imperial Theaters, and not least to the ballet, which was widely perceived as the bauble of the nation's theater bureaucracy and former rulers. Nonetheless, the foment that surrounded attempts to revolutionize Russian theater in the years following the October Revolution had limited impact on the ballet. With most important Russian choreographers, dancers, and pedagogues already working outside of Russia in the 1920s (Fokine, George Balanchine, Vaslav Nijinsky, Bronislava Nijinska, Anna Pavlova, and Tamara Karsavina, to name a few), experimentation in the young Soviet ballet was borne of necessity.

The October Revolution and the subsequent shift of power, both political and cultural, to Moscow, led to the emergence of Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet. The company that had long occupied a distinct second place to the Petersburg troupe now took center stage - a position it would hold until the breakup of the Soviet Union. The creative leadership of the company had traditionally been imported from Petersburg, but in the Soviet period, so would many of its star dancers (Marina Semyonova, Galina Ulanova).

A new genre of realistic ballets was born in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and dominated Soviet dance theater well into the 1950s. The drambalet, shorthand for dramatic ballet, reconciled the ballet's tendency to abstraction (and resulting lack of ideological content) to the new need for easily understandable narrative. The creative impotence of Soviet ballet in the post-Stalin era reflected the general malaise of the so-called period of stagnation of the Brezhnev years. When Russian companies dramatically increased the pace of moneymaking Western tours in the 1980s, it became clear that the treasure-chest of Russian classic ballets had long ago been plundered, with little new choreography of interest to refill it. As the history of the two companies would suggest, the loss of Soviet power resulted in the speedy demotion of the Moscow troupe and the rise of a post-Soviet Petersburg ballet.

Bibliography

Roslavleva, Natalia. (1956). Era of the Russian Ballet. London: Gollancz.

Scholl, Tim. (1994). From Petipa to Balanchine: Classical Revival and the Modernization of Ballet. London: Routledge.

Slonimsky, Yuri. (1960). The Bolshoi Ballet: Notes. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.

Souritz, Elizabeth. (1990). Soviet Choreographers in the 1920s, tr. Lynn Visson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Swift, Mary Grace. (1968). The Art of the Dance in the USSR. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Wiley, Roland John, ed. and tr. (1990). A Century of Russian Ballet: Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, 1810-1910. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

—TIM SCHOLL

Columbia Encyclopedia: ballet

(băl'ā, bălā') [Ital. ballare=to dance], classic, formalized solo or ensemble dancing of a highly controlled, dramatic nature performed to music.

See also dance; modern dance.

The Development of Ballet in Western Europe

Foreshadowed in earlier mummeries and lavish masquerades, ballet emerged as a distinctive form in Italy before the 16th cent. The first ballet that combined movement, music, decor, and special effects was presented in France at the court of Catherine de' Medici in 1581. Organized by the violinist Balthasar de Beaujoyeux, it was entitled Le Ballet comique de la Reine. This production was the first ballet de cour, the ancestor of the modern ballet, which influenced the English court masque, a 16th-century entertainment with dance interludes. The first treatise on ballet dancing was the Orchésographie of Thoinot Arbeau (1588).

The 17th cent. saw the major development of ballet in France. At first a court entertainment, the simple entrées were extended c.1610 and joined together to form scenes, called divertissements, which culminated in a grand ballet. Louis XIV founded the Royal Ballet Academy (1661), the Royal Music Academy (1669), which became the Paris Opéra, and the first National Ballet School (1672). All parts were performed by male dancers; boys in wigs and masks took the female roles.

The first ballet using trained women was The Triumph of Love (1681), with music by Lully. Ballet remained a court spectacle and included opera or drama until about 1708, when the first ballet was commissioned for public performance. Thereafter the form, infused with new ideas, developed as a separate art (although the court ballet continued its historic traditions). Choreographic notation came into being, and for the first time mythological themes were explored.

With the increased influence of the Italian school of ballet, movement became elevated and less horizontal, and the five classic positions of the feet, which form the base for the dancer's stance and movement, were established by Pierre Beauchamps. The costumes, which had been cumbersome with decoration, long skirts, and high heels (for both men and women) were newly designed to allow greater freedom of movement. The virtuosa dancer Marie Camargo, who introduced the entrechat (elevation) for women, shortened her skirt to the middle of the calf and wore tights and what were to be the first ballet slippers (heelless shoes). Her rival, Marie Sallé (who was also the first female choreographer), was the first dancer to wear a filmy, liberating Grecian-style costume, made popular two centuries later by Isadora Duncan.

Jean Georges Noverre, a revolutionary 18th-century maître de ballet, established the determining principles of the ballet d'action, which he described in his Lettres sur la danse et les ballets (1760). He wanted the ballet to tell a story, aided by the music, decor, and dance; he wanted the performer to interpret his role through the dance and through his own body and facial expression. In stressing naturalism, Noverre simplified the costume and c.1773 abolished the mask. Other important innovations came from the great artists of the period, Gaetan and Auguste Vestris, Salvatore Vigano, and Charles Didelot. Technical innovation in dance movement was increased after further modification of the ballet costume.

The Romantic Period and Ballet's Eclipse

In Milan in 1820 Carlo Blasis first set down the technique of ballet as we know it today—with its stress on the turned-out leg, which permits great variety of movement. With the production of La Sylphide (1832) the romantic period formally began, ushering in a new era of brilliant choreography that emphasized the beauty and virtuosity of the prima ballerina. In this production Maria Taglioni first wore the filmy, calf-length costume that was to become standard for classical ballet. The great ballerinas of the era included Taglioni, Fanny Elssler, Carlotta Grisi, and Fanny Cerrito. In keeping with the literature and art of the romantic movement, the new ballet concerned the conflicts of reality and illusion, flesh and spirit. Love stories and fairy tales replaced mythological subjects.

At the same time dancing sur les pointes [on the toes] had come into favor. By the end of the century the blocked toe had appeared, and the tutu, a very short, buoyant skirt that completely freed the legs, had come into use. The male dancer functioned as partner to support the ballerina, the central focus of the dance and drama. Ballet declined progressively after 1850 with the ballet d'action giving way entirely to divertissements; finally the great stars had retired, and the sets, costumes, and choreography had become stereotyped and uninteresting. The naturalistic trend in the theater had all but destroyed the imaginative touch necessary to ballet.

The Modern Ballet Renaissance

Russian Ballet

The renaissance in romantic ballet began in Russia after 1875. The Russian Imperial School of Ballet had been founded in 1738. During the early 19th cent. the Imperial Theatre housed more than 40 ballet productions staged by the celebrated Swedish master Charles Didelot. Marius Petipa, who created a powerful sense of unity by rigorously training his corps de ballet as had not been done before, indicated in his choreography the direction of intensified romantic drama that the newly revived art was to take. Petipa contributed many of the classic ballets still considered to be the greatest expressions of the form, including Don Quixote, La Bayadère, The Sleeping Beauty, Raymonda, Harlequinade, and restagings of Giselle, Coppélia, La Sylphide, and, with Lev Ivanov, Swan Lake.

In 1909 the celebrated impresario Sergei Diaghilev took his Russian company to Paris, and for 20 years it dominated the world of dance, displaying the creative talents of such choreographers and dancers as Michel Fokine, Léonide Massine, Vaslav Nijinsky, Bronislava Nijinska, Anna Pavlova, and George Balanchine. After Diaghilev's death in 1929, offshoots were formed by René Blum and Col. W. de Basil, which kept the Diaghilev tradition alive during the 1930s. The company merged with Blum and de Basil's Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, which nurtured the talents of Alexandra Danilova, André Eglevsky, and Igor Youskevitch.

Russian dancing has been maintained at the highest level of excellence to the present day. Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet, which brought fame to Galina Ulanova, Maya Plisetskaya, and V. M. Gordeyev, and the Kirov Ballet (since 1991 the St. Petersburg Maryinsky Ballet), whose dancers have included Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova, and Mikhail Baryshnikov, are the two foremost Russian companies and are ranked among the finest in the world.

British Ballet

In England around 1918, Enrico Cecchetti, who had taught many great dancers including Pavlova, Nijinsky, Massine, and Danilova, set down his method of training (which is still in practice) in collaboration with Cyril Beaumont, proprietor of “Under the Sign of the Harlequin,” a world-famous bookstore specializing in the dance. The Cecchetti Society was founded in 1922 to preserve and protect that system.

In 1930 Marie Rambert founded the Ballet Club, the first permanent ballet school and company in England. A year later Ninette de Valois established what became the Sadler's Wells Ballet (now the Royal Ballet). This company has drawn international attention to the work of Alicia Markova, Anton Dolin, Frederick Ashton, Margot Fonteyn, Robert Helpmann, Rudolf Nureyev, Antoinette Sibley, Svetlana Beriosova, and Anthony Dowell. Nureyev, both a choreographer and dancer, was instrumental in changing the traditional supportive role of the male dancer to a far more significant, dynamic, and athletic place in the ballet; many other contemporary choreographers have similarly given their male dancers a more flamboyant showcase.

American Ballet

In the United States, Lincoln Kirstein and Edward Warburg founded the American Ballet company in 1934. Under the direction of George Balanchine, its chief choreographer, the company established the first major school of ballet in the country, developed the talents of many notable American dancers (including Maria Tallchief, Todd Bolender, Suzanne Farrell, Patricia McBride, Jacques d'Amboise, Arthur Mitchell, and Edward Villella), and influenced enormously the evolution of an American ballet style as parent company to the New York City Ballet (founded 1948), one of the world's outstanding companies. Other celebrated choreographers who created ballets for the New York City Ballet are Eugene Loring, Jerome Robbins, and Peter Martins.

The other major American company, the American Ballet Theatre (formerly the Ballet Theatre), was founded in 1939 as an offshoot of the smaller Mordkin Ballet. The company's principal dancers have included Lucia Chase, Anton Dolin, Nora Kaye, Alicia Alonso, Michael Kidd, Scott Douglas, Royes Fernandez, Sallie Wilson, and Mikhail Baryshnikov, performing in works designed for them by Michel Fokine, Léonide Massine, Antony Tudor, Jerome Robbins, Michael Kidd, Agnes de Mille, Herbert Ross, Eugene Loring, Glen Tetley, Twyla Tharp, and many others. Through numerous tours both the New York City Ballet and the American Ballet Theatre have earned international reputations of a high order. Other American companies of note include the Joffrey Ballet (founded 1956) and the Dance Theatre of Harlem (founded 1970). In addition to these, there are many active regional ballet companies throughout the United States.

Using traditional formal training and movement, American choreographers have designed a new sort of pure, abstract ballet, far less dependent on literary plot, often using modern rock and electronic music, and have developed greatly simplified decor and costuming (e.g., Balanchine's Agon, Robert Joffrey's Astarte, and Glen Tetley's Chronochromie). Many modern choreographers have also designed dances for stage and film musicals (e.g., Jerome Robbins's West Side Story and Agnes de Mille's Oklahoma!). In the late 20th cent. ballet was increasingly receptive to techniques and music from many dance forms. It grew in popularity, international touring expanded, and, particularly with the collapse of the Soviet Union, international exchange was encouraged.

Bibliography

See S. Lifar, A History of Russian Ballet (tr. 1955); F. Reyna, A Concise History of Ballet (tr. 1965); A. L. Haskell, Ballet Retrospect (1965); A. Chujoy and P. W. Manchester, The Dance Encyclopedia (rev. and enlarged ed. 1967); W. Terry, The Ballet Companion (1968); L. Kirstein, Movement and Metaphor (1972); M. Clarke and C. Crisp, Ballet: An Illustrated History (1973); E. Binney, Glories of Romantic Ballet (1985); J. Anderson, Ballet and Modern Dance (1986); H. Koegler, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Ballet (2d ed. 1987); R. Greskovic, Ballet 101 (1998); N. Reynolds and M. McCormick, No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century (2003).

Fine Arts Dictionary: ballet

Theatrical entertainment in which dancers, usually accompanied by music, tell a story or express a mood through their movements. The technique of ballet is elaborate and requires many years of training. Two classical ballets are Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, composed by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Two great modern ballets are The Rite of Spring, composed by Igor Stravinsky, and Fancy Free, by Leonard Bernstein.

Music: Ballet

A theatrical dance form with a story, sets, and music.

Word Tutor: ballet

IN BRIEF: A dance performed on a stage that often tells a story by means of its graceful movements.

The dancers in the ballet were very precise in their movements.

Tutor's tip: She rushed from the "ballet" (form of classical dance) to cast her "ballot" (paper on which a voter indicates her choice) before it was too late.

Wikipedia: ballet

Painting of ballet dancers by Edgar Degas, 1872.

Ballet is academic dance form and technique which is taught in ballet schools according to specific methods. There are many ballet schools around the world that specialize in various styles of ballet and different techniques offered. Works of dance choreographed using this technique are called ballets, and usually include dance, mime, acting, and music (usually orchestral but occasionally vocal). Ballet is best known for its unique features and techniques, such as pointe work, turn-out of the legs; its graceful, flowing, precise movements; and its ethereal qualities.

The Origin of Ballet

Theatre in ancient Greece.

Dance is prominent throughout history. Traditions of narrative dance evolved in China, India, Indonesia and Ancient Greece. Theatrical dance was well-established in the wider arena of ancient Greek theatre. When the Roman Empire conquered Greece, it assimilated Greek dance and theatre with their art and culture.^[1] While dance continued to be important throughout the Middle Ages, in spite of occasional suppression by the Church, the art of ballet did not emerge until the late 1400s in Italy. Italy began the ballet tradition, but it was the French that enabled it to blossom. Incorporating aspects of Italian ballet, French ballet gained prominence and influenced the dance genre internationally. To this day, the majority of ballet vocabulary originates from French.

In the last century, the United States also developed its own ballet traditions, most notably with choreographer George Balanchine. Although interest in contemporary dance has expanded to include modern dance, jazz, flamenco and other forms, ballet has endured the test of time and is still taught and performed.

The etymology of the word "ballet" corresponds to the art form's development. The word ballet comes from French and was borrowed into English around the 17th century. The French word in turn has its origins in Italian balletto, a diminutive of ballo (dance). Ballet ultimately traces back to Latin ballere, meaning to dance.^[2]

Ballet in Italy - 'Ballo'

Ballet originated in the Renaissance court as an outgrowth of court pageantry in Italy,^[3]^[4] Aristocratic weddings were lavish celebrations. Court musicians and dancers collaborated to provide elaborate entertainment for them.^[5] Ballet was further shaped by the French ballet de cour, which consisted of social dances performed by the nobility in tandem with music, speech, verse, song, pageant, decor and costume.^[6] When Catherine de' Medici, an Italian aristocrat with an interest in the arts, married the French crown heir Henry II, she brought her enthusiasm for dance to France and provided financial support.

A ballet of the Renaissance would look nothing like a performance of Giselle or Swan Lake at the Bolshoi. Tutus, ballet slippers and pointe work was unheard of. The choreography was adapted from court dance steps. Performers dressed in fashions of the times. For women that meant formal gowns that covered their legs to the ankle.^[7] Early ballet was participatory, with the audience joining the dance towards the end.

Engraving of the first scene of the Ballet Comique de la Reine. Click to enlarge.

Domenico da Piacenza was one of the first dancing masters. Along with his students, Antonio Cornazano and Guglielmo Ebreo, he was trained in dance and responsible for teaching nobles the art. Da Piacenza left one work: De arte saltandi et choreus ducendi (On the art of dancing and conducting dances), which was put together by his students.^[8]

Ballet, if not the first, produced and shown was Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx's Ballet Comique de la Reine (1581) and was a ballet comique (ballet drama).^[1] In the same year, the publication of Fabritio Caroso's Il Ballarino, a technical manual on court dancing, both performance and social, helped to establish Italy as a centre of technical ballet development.^[2]

France - Courtroom Dance

Ballet developed as a separate, performance-focused art form in France during the reign of Louis XIV, who was passionate about dance and determined to reverse a decline in dance standards that began in the 17th century. King Louis XIV established the Académie Royale de la Danse (which evolved into the company known today as the Paris Opera Ballet) in 1661.^[3] The earliest references to the five core positions of ballet appear in the writings of Pierre Beauchamp, a court dancer and a choreographer.^[4]

Jean-Baptiste Lully, an Italian composer serving in the French court, played a significant role in establishing the general direction in which ballet would follow for the next century. Supported and admired by King Louis XIV, Lully often cast the king in his ballets. The title of Sun King, by which the French monarch is still referred to today, originated from Louis XIV's role in Lully's Ballet de la Nuit (1653).^[5] Lully's main contribution to ballet was his nuanced compositions: his understanding of movement and dance allowed him to compose specifically for ballet, with musical phrasings which complemented physical movements.^[6] Lully also went on to collaborate with the French playwright Molière. Together, they took an Italian theatre style, the commedia dell'arte, and adapted it into their work for a French audience, creating the comédie-ballet. Among their greatest productions was Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670).^[7] Later in life, Lully became the first director of the Académie Royale de Musique after its scope was expanded to include dance.^[8] Jean-Baptiste Lully brought together Italian and French ballet, creating a legacy which would define the future of ballet.

The first ballet school was in France, taught by Juliette Blanche, and the terminology was crystallized there. Nearly everything in ballet is described by a French word or phrase. (You even wish dancers good luck in French. Actors wish one another good luck before a performance by saying, "Break a leg!" Dancers say, "Merde!", a French expletive ). The drawback of the common terminology is that dancers must learn the French names for the steps and movements; the advantage is that they can take a ballet class anywhere in the world and, no matter how unintelligible the rest of the talk is, the terminology will still be in French and therefore understood.^[9]

Russia

Mikhail Mordkin as Prince Siegfried and Adelaide Giuri as Odette with students as the little swans in the Moscow Imperial Bolshoi Theatre's production of the Petipa/Ivanov/Tchaikovsky Swan Lake. 1901

While France was instrumental in early ballet, other countries and cultures soon adopted the art form, most notably by Russia. Russia has a recognized tradition of ballet and Russian ballet has had great importance in its country throughout history. After 1850, ballet began to wane in Paris and concentrate in Denmark and, most notably, Russia thanks to masters such as August Bournonville, Jules Perrot, Arthur Saint-Léon, Enrico Cecchetti and Marius Petipa. In the late nineteenth century, orientalism was in vogue. Colonialism brought awareness of Asian and African cultures, but distorted with disinformation and fantasy. The East was often perceived as a faraway place where anything was possible, provided it was lavish, exotic and decadent. Petipa appealed to popular taste with The Pharaoh's Daughter (1862), and later The Talisman (1889), and La Bayadère (1877). Petipa is best remembered for his collaborations with Tchaikovsky where he choreographed The Nutcracker (1892, though this is open to some debate among historians), The Sleeping Beauty (1890), and the definitive revival of Swan Lake (1895, with Lev Ivanov). These works were all drawn from western folklore.

The classical tutu began to appear at this time. It consisted of a short skirt supported by layers of crinoline that revealed the acrobatic legwork. At times the classic tutu revealed more than the audience cared to see and it became customary to wear a leotard as an undergarment.^[10]^[11]

Sergei Diaghilev brought ballet full-circle back to Paris when he opened his company, Ballet Russe. At the Ballet Russe Vaslav Nijinsky became famous for his leaps. Diaghilev and composer Igor Stravinsky combined their talents to bring Russian folklore to life in The Firebird and Petrushka. The most controversial work of the Ballet Russe was Rite of Spring. Many associate Rite of Spring with the lovely time-delayed sequences of growing flowers in Fantasia but the ballet shocked audiences with its theme of human sacrifice.

After the “golden age” of Petipa, Russian ballet entered a period of stagnation until Michel Fokine revitalized the art. ^[12] Fokine began his career in St. Petersburg but moved to the USA after the Bolshevik revolution. He felt that the ballet of the time offered little more than prettiness and athletic display. For Fokine that was not enough. In addition to technical virtuosity he demanded drama, expression and historical authenticity. The choreographer must research the period and cultural context of the setting and reject the traditional tutu in favour of accurate period costuming. Fokine choreographed Sheherazade and Cleopatra and reworked Petrushka and The Firebird. One of his most famous works was The Dying Swan performed by Anna Pavlova. Beyond her talents as a ballerina, Pavlova had the theatrical gifts to fulfil Fokine's vision of ballet as drama. Legend has it that Pavlova identified so much with the swan role that she requested her swan costume from her deathbed.

In the meantime, Russian Ballet was also developing under the Soviet rule. There was little talent left in the country after the revolution, but it was enough to seed a new generation. After a stagnation in the 1920's, by the mid-1930's that new generation of dancers and choreographers appeared on the scene. Ballet was popular with the public and both the Moscow based Bolshoi and the St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) based Kirov ballet companies were active. Due to the ideological pressure many socialist realist pieces were created and performed, most of which made little impression on the public and were removed from the repertoire of both companies later. Some, however, were remarkable. The Romeo and Juliet by Prokofiev and Lavrovsky is a masterpiece. The Flames of Paris, while it shows all the signs of the socialist realist art, pioneered the excessive involvement of the corps de ballet in the performance and required stunning virtuosity. The ballet version of the Pushkin poem, The Fountain of Bakhchisarai with music from Boris Asafiev and choreography by Zakharov was also a hit. The well-known masterpiece Cinderella, for which Prokofiev provided the music is also the product of the Soviet ballet. During the Soviet era these pieces were mostly unknown outside the Soviet Union and later outside of the Eastern Block. However, after the collapse of the Soviet Union they got more recognition. The 1999 North American premiere of The Fountain of Bakhchisarai by the Kirov Ballet in New York was an outstanding success, for example. The Soviet era of the Russian Ballet put a lot of emphasis on technique, virtuosity and strength, the latter usually above of the norm of contemporary Western dancers. The talent of their primadonnas such as Galina Ulanova or Natalya Dudinskaya and choreographers such as Pyotr Gusev can only be marvelled when watching restored old footage. The technical perfection and precision of dance was promoted (and demanded) by Agrippina Vaganova, who had been taught by Petipa and Cecchetti and during the Soviet era was running the Vaganova Ballet Academy.

Russian companies, particularly after World War II engaged in multiple tours all over the world that revitalized ballet in the west and made it a form of entertainment embraced by the general public. George Balanchine brought state of the art technique to America by opening a school in Chicago and later in New York. He adapted ballet to the new media, movies and television. ^[13] A prolific worker, Balanchine rechoreographed classics such as Swan Lake And Sleeping Beauty as well as creating new ballets. He produced original interpretations of the dramas of William Shakespeare such as Romeo and Juliet, The Merry Widow and A Midsummer Night's Dream. In Jewels Balanchine broke with the narrative tradition and dramatized a theme rather than a plot. Today, partly thanks to Balanchine, ballet is one of the most well-preserved dances in the world.

Barbara Karinska was an Russian emigree and a skilled seamstress who collaborated with Balanchine to elevate the art of costume design from a secondary role to an integral part of a ballet performance. She introduced the bias cut and a simplified classic tutu that allowed the dancer more freedom of movement. With meticulous attention to detail, she decorated her tutus with beadwork, embroidery, crochet and appliqué.

Development as an art form

The 18th century was a period of vast advancement in the technical standards of ballet and the period when ballet became a serious dramatic art form on par with the opera. Central to this advance was the seminal work of Jean-Georges Noverre, Lettres sur la danse et les ballets (1760), which focused on developing the ballet d'action, in which the movements of the dancers are designed to express character and assist in the narrative. At this time, women played a secondary role as dancers, encumbered as they were with hoops, corsets, wigs and high heels.

Marie Taglioni, a pioneer of pointework.

Reforms were made in ballet composition by composers such as Christoph Gluck. Finally, ballet was divided into three formal techniques sérieux, demi-caractère and comique. Ballet also began to be featured in operas as interludes called divertissements.

The 19th century was a period of great social change, which was reflected in ballet by a shift away from the aristocratic sensibilities that had dominated earlier periods through romantic ballet. Ballerinas such as Geneviève Gosselin, Marie Taglioni and Fanny Elssler experimented with new techniques such as pointework that rocketed the ballerina into prominence as the ideal stage figure, professional librettists began crafting the stories in ballets, and teachers like Carlo Blasis codified ballet technique in the basic form that is still used today. The ballet slipper was invented to support pointe work.

Romanticism was a reaction against formal constraints and also of industrialization with the introduction of complex machinary and factories.[22] The zeitgeist led choreographers to compose romantic ballets that were light, airy and fae that would act as a contrast to the reductionist science that had, in the words of Poe, "driven the hamadryad from the woods". These "unreal" ballets portrayed women as fragile unearthly beings, delicate creatures who could be lifted effortlessly. Ballerinas began to wear romantic tutus, with pastel, flowing skirts that bared the shins. The stories revolved around uncanny, folkloric spirits. An example of one such romantic ballet is "La Sylphide",one of the oldest romantic ballets still danced today.

Ballet in the late nineteenth and twentieth century

Technique

Dancers appear delicate and airy when dancing en pointe, a unique feature of the ballet form of dance.

Ballet, especially classical ballet, puts great emphasis on the method and execution of movement^[14]. A distinctive feature of ballet is the outward rotation of the thighs from the hip. The foundation of the dance consists of five basic positions, all performed with the turnout. Young dancers receive a rigorous education in their school's method of dance, which begins when they are young and ends with graduation from high school. Students are required to learn the names, meanings, and precise technique of each movement they learn. Emphasis is put on building strength mostly in the lower body, particularly the legs, and the core (also called the center or the abdominals) as a strong core is necessary for many movements in ballet, especially turns, and on developing flexibility and strong feet for dancing en pointe.

Methods

Ballet techniques are generally grouped by the area in which they originated, such as Russian ballet, French ballet, Italian ballet. Although there are some small regional variations, the 'rules' and movement vocabulary of ballet remain the same throughout the world. The different training techniques of ballet are designed to produce a different aesthetic quality from a student. This is particularly noticeable in the high extensions and dynamic turns of Russian ballet, whereas Italian ballet tends to be much more grounded, with a heavy focus on fast intricate footwork (eg. the Tarantella is a well known Italian folk dance, which is believed to have influenced Italian ballet.)

In many cases, the most notable ballet methods are named after their originator. For example, two prevailing systems from Russia are known as the Vaganova method after Agrippina Vaganova, and the Legat Method, after Nikolai Legat. The well-known Cecchetti method is based on technique developed and taught by the Italian dancer Enrico Cecchetti (1850-1928). Another European system, based on the teaching methods of the Frenchman Auguste Vestris, was that developed in Copenhagen by August Bournonville (1805-1879), a system that is little taught outside Bournonville's own country of Denmark.

Thereafter, ballet spread to other parts of the world e.g., Danish Ballet of Denmark, Imperial Ballet of UK, the American Balanchine method, the Australian Ballet and recently the National Ballet Academy & Trust set up in India.

Illusion of Flight in Ballet

To perform the more demanding routines, a ballet dancer must appear to defy gravity though he cannot, of course, escape its constraints. Basic physics and the science of human perception provide insight into how this is accomplished.

For example, during the grand jeté, the dancer may appear to hover. Physically, his/her center of mass describes a parabola, as does a ball, when thrown (or, indeed, any object when in flight and acted upon by only the gravitational force alone). However, advantage is taken of the limitation in the human ability to reckon center of mass when a projectile changes its configuration in flight. When leaping, the dancer extends the arms and legs. The manoeuvre camouflages the fall and leads the audience to perceive the dancer is floating.^[15]^[16]^[17] A Pas de Chat (step of the cat) creates a similar illusion. The dancer starts from a plié, then during the ascending phase of the step, quickly lifts each knee in succession with hips turned out, so that for a moment both feet are in the air at the same time, passing each other. For a moment, the dancer appears suspended in air.

The ability of a dancer to seemingly hold a position in mid-air is called ballon.

The fall must be performed carefully. The laws of physics decree that momentum must be dissipated but a crash landing would destroy the impression of airiness and likely injure the dancer. Part of the solution is a floor designed to absorb shock. But essentially, the dancer must bend at the knees (plies) and roll through the foot, from toe to heel. For artistic as well as safety reasons this technique must be taught by a qualified instructor.^[18] ^[19]^[20]

References

Notes

^ Anderson (1992), p. 32.
^ Lee (2002), p. 54.
^ Bland (1976), p. 49.
^ The History of Dance.
^ Lee (2002), pp. 72-73.
^ Lee (2002), p. 73.
^ Lee (2002), p. 74. Anderson (1992), p. 42.
^ Lee (2002), p. 74.
^ http://www.dancer.com/tom-parsons/faq_2.html
^ Two Types Of Tutu.
^ The Word Detective.
^ http://www.yonkershistory.org/fokine.html Michel Fokine
^ http://balanchine.org/01/index.html George Balanchine
^ Kirstein (1952), pp. 6-7, 21.
^ Physics of Dance.
^ Simulation of the Airborne Phase of the Grand Jete in Ballet.
^ The Grand Jete. Illusion of Floating..
^