Sun kings and sylphs, glamour and grit

A short history of ballet

The Dominicus King

Ballet began every bit an elaborate aristocratic entertainment in Italy and France, where information technology was performed by noble amateurs (predominantly men) in the halls of thousand estates and palaces. Combining trip the light fantastic, music and song, the earliest ballets were enactments of events from mythology, heavy on gods and heroes, and featuring wildly fantastical costumes and masks.

Court ballets reached their pinnacle during the reign of Louis Xiv, a smashing dancer himself, who was dubbed the Dominicus Rex afterward his part in Le Ballet de la Nuit (1653), which ran from sunset to sunrise. His personal ballet master, Pierre Beauchamp, choreographed many of the dances performed at Versailles and is credited with codifying ballet as a system of movement. Louis' legacy includes the establishment of the Academie d'Opera (the forerunner of the Paris Opéra Ballet) in 1669, which paved the way for ballet equally a profession.

Louis XIV equally Apollo, 1653

From aristocrats' play to playing aristocrats

Following the French fashion, theatres and opera houses sprang up across Europe during the 1700s, positioning ballet dancers as part of a cosmopolitan community of performers, nobles and intellectuals. Equally ballet's reach expanded, so did involvement in its dramatic possibilities. By mid-century, several choreographers were developing ballet as a story-telling medium, with the familiar gods and heroes, merely likewise nobles and princesses, peasants and romantic trysts.

Women contributed to this historic period of experimentation, although they remained in the minority. Both Francois Prevost and her student Marie Sallé created works exploring the expressive possibilities of confront and gesture. In an age when few women ventured into the public spotlight, danseuses were a fascinating and often highly regarded novelty. Poesy was written in their praise, gossip exchanged, and paintings deputed past earnest admirers; Frederick the Great kept a portrait of Barbara Campanini in his study.

Portrait of Barbara Campanini by Antoine Pesne

Enter the pointe shoe

The French Revolution and the wars that followed profoundly contradistinct ballet, sweeping away the lingering, courtly trappings of baroque dance. Dancers shed their heeled shoes and heavy brocades in favour of lite, looser-fitting outfits that allowed them a wider range of motion. The era became synonymous with dazzling feats. The introduction of soft slippers encouraged multiple pirouettes and higher leaps, and a new play tricks – posing en pointe – was pioneered by dancers like Fanny Bias and Amalia Brugnoli.

While ballets based on mythological themes persisted, choreographers increasingly focused on character, realism and nationalist values. New works, inspired by Romantic themes, transported audiences to the medieval past or exotic locales like Red china, Arabia or Mexico. Aided past innovative scenic effects, ballet past the 1820s was an enchanting realm of Gothic ruins and distant lands, enticing an ever-growing audition.

Polish ballet dancers at the 1827 Venice Carnival. Both dancers are women; one is performing every bit a man

Sylph Power

In 1832, the Paris premiere of La Sylphide introduced a distinctive Romantic manner of dancing: a theatrical vision in which femininity, landscape, folk elements and the supernatural fluidly combined. The new style, popularised by Marie Taglioni as the eponymous sylph, was ane of airy restraint and softened arms, and was marked by the use of pointe work as an artistic element, rather than a show of virtuosity.

La Sylphide's success was followed by a series of iconic, French-made ballets featuring supernatural female characters, nigh famously Giselle in 1841. However, their appeal was equalled by an extraordinary vogue for national dances. The great Romantic ballerinas, including Fanny Elssler, Fanny Cerrito and Taglioni herself, danced a dazzling array of balleticised czardas, polkas, mazurkas and boleros. The period remains synonymous with the poetry and burn of these intrepid female celebrities.

Marie Taglioni as Flore in Charles Didelot's ballet Zephire et Flore, circa 1831

Ballet in the music halls

Past the 1870s, ballet was flourishing around the globe as an essential ingredient of pop amusement. In Great britain lone, dozens of new venues for ballet opened across the country. Some staged divertissements, pantomimes or narrative ballets based on well-known works like La Sylphide and Paquita. Others, similar London'due south Alhambra Theatre, specialised in lavish ballet "spectaculars" that historic patriotic pride and popular civilisation, employing vast numbers of buxom young women.

This was the age of the apprehensive, downtrodden "ballet daughter", simply it was also the age of feisty, creative women like Katti Lanner, who directed ballets for an enormous public of ordinary men and women. By 1900, music halls, rather than opera houses, were where stars like Adeline Genée, Pierina Legnani and Anna Pavlova captured people'due south hearts. They also nurtured local talent, producing Britain'due south start prima ballerina Phyllis Bedells, and Ninette de Valois, who would proceed to found what is at present The Royal Ballet.

Anna Pavlova

The Age of Petipa

Ballet was embraced by Russian federation's rulers in the early on 1700s as part of a project of cultural modernisation begun by Peter the Dandy. Over time, hundreds of leading dancers from Europe travelled to work in the Imperial Theatres, helping foster an outstanding native ballet tradition. The visitors included ballet masters like Franz Hilverding and Charles Didelot, celebrities such as Fanny Elssler, and virtuosic Italian ballerinas who starred alongside Russian-built-in talent. Notwithstanding, none left a greater legacy than Frenchman Marius Petipa, who was appointed ballet main of the Mariinsky Theatre in 1871. Across 4 decades, Petipa created some of the earth's all-time-loved ballets, including The Sleeping Beauty, La Bayadère, and (in collaboration with his deputy Lev Ivanov) Swan Lake and The Nutcracker. After the Revolution, choreographic notations for many of Petipa'due south most important ballets were smuggled to the W past Nicholas Sergeyev; they are still preserved, and are used to inform modern stagings of these famous ballets.

Marie Petipa as the Lilac Fairy and Lyubov Vishnevskaya as an Attendant in The Sleeping Beauty, 1890

Keeping it real

By the belatedly 19th century, ballet had cheerfully given itself over to popular civilization. In reaction to its excesses, a new form of "art dance" adult, influenced, initially, past three very purposeful women: Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan and Ruth St Denis. They collectively spearheaded the entreatment of new dance techniques, encouraging freer forms of expression influenced by nature and spirituality, every bit well as Symbolism and other artistic movements.

In the 20th century, America and Germany emerged every bit important centres for modern dance, producing choreographers such as Kurt Jooss and Martha Graham, whose approaches to movement and expression have immeasurably enriched ballet. Since the 1940s, numerous ballet companies have supported experimentation and cross-pollination past inviting modern choreographers to create new ballets. Today, The Australian Ballet continues this tradition with a repertoire that includes works by Maurice Bejart, Twyla Tharp, William Forsythe, Graeme Murphy and Wayne McGregor.

Ruth St Denis by Orval Hixon

The Ballets Russes

In the spring of 1909, Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev assembled an infrequent group of dancers, artists and musicians to present a short season of ballets in Paris. They dazzled theatre-goers, seduced the French press and thrust ballet into mode'south limelight. For the adjacent 20 years the nomadic Ballets Russes was synonymous with glamour, sophistication and the kaleidoscopic brilliance of the avant garde.

Under Diaghilev'due south leadership, the company hosted trailblazing collaborations between composers similar Stravinsky and Ravel, artists similar Bakst, Picasso and Matisse, style designers similar Coco Chanel, and dancers from the Imperial Ballet, including Vaslav Nijinsky, Tamara Karsavina and Michel Fokine. The resulting ballets – Firebird (1910), Petrouchka (1911), Schéhérazade (1910) and Les Noces (1923) among them – set new standards for musical and choreographic complication. Despite its name, the Ballets Russes never performed in Russia, but provided a dynamic haven for artists separated from their homeland by conflict, many of whom founded their own schools and companies.

Tamara Karsavina as Zobeida in Schéhérazade, 1911. Photography E.O. Hoppe

Reddish ballet

When revolution broke out in 1917, Russia'southward dancers feared for the futurity of their Tsarist fine art. Yet, far from purging ballet, Soviet cultural policy embraced information technology, throwing open the theatres so that people might be improved through exposure to the nation'due south balletic achievements. In St Petersburg, 19th-century classics provided the backbone of the Kirov (Mariinsky) Ballet's repertoire. In Moscow, the rise of drambalet produced dancers of extraordinary stage presence, including Galina Ulanova, Vladimir Vasiliev and Maya Plisetskaya.

During the Cold War, tours by the Soviet companies became a fundamental focus for improving Russia'south diplomatic relations with the Due west – despite the defections of dancers including Rudolf Nureyev and Natalia Makarova. In the 1950s, Russian authorities also sent ballet teachers from the Kirov and Bolshoi to the People's Republic of Cathay. Although classical ballet was denounced during the Cultural Revolution, it survived under the auspices of Madame Mao. Today, Chinese-trained dancers perform with companies around the earth.

Galina Ulanova and Yury Zhdanov in Romeo and Juliet

Balanchine in America

After Diaghilev's death, the Ballets Russes' dancers dispersed. Amid them was George Balanchine, who arrived in USA in 1933. He institute himself in a country where ballet was the stuff of children teetering about in pointe shoes and curvaceous, prosaic ballerinas. Steeped in the traditions of Russian's royal ballet and the dynamism of the avant garde, Balanchine became the master engineer of ballet in modern America.

A prolific choreographer, Balanchine created ballets referencing many different styles, from the neo-classicism of Apollo to the jazz-inflected Rubies, from the hoedowns of Western Symphony to his own immensely successful product of The Nutcracker, which drew on his childhood memories of St Petersburg. Among Balanchine's most celebrated works, still, are his abstract ballets, including The Four Temperaments and Agon, modernist masterpieces that are timeless in their fusion of music and form. His ballets are now performed all over the world.

The Australian Ballet's Gaylene Cummerfield in Balanchine'southward Apollo, 2007

Gossamer and grit

In the 20th century, ballet in U.k. was influenced not merely past Russian emigrés, but besides by the energies of newly inspired, determined dancers from the uttermost corners of its former empire. They included Australians, Canadians and South Africans, and many came together as members of the Vic-Wells Ballet (later The Imperial Ballet). One of several companies founded during the 1930s, information technology prospered thanks to the apprehending of its Irish gaelic-built-in founder Ninette de Valois, and the choreographic talent of Frederick Ashton. His ballets revealed an extraordinary lightness of bear upon, wit and musicality, and included works created specifically for England's favourite ballerina, Margot Fonteyn. Ashton's successor, Kenneth MacMillan, worked with a younger, grittier generation of dancers. Both men created enormously diverse works, from comedies to abstruse ballets, but MacMillan is best-remembered for his (then shocking) explorations of human frailty and sexuality. Today, their full-length ballets, including Romeo and Juliet, La Fille mal gardée and Manon, are regarded equally 20th-century classics.

Men on the Map

At Paris' Le Bourget airport, Rudolf Nureyev made his very public interruption for freedom in 1961. Thirteen years afterwards, another brilliant young male dancer, Mikhail Baryshnikov, defected in Toronto by darting from the theatre into a waiting auto. Both were superbly talented, charismatic and sexy. They were hungry to dance everything, and became pop-culture icons who raised the standard and kudos of male dancing in the West.

In the 1960s, Nureyev formed a legendary partnership with Margot Fonteyn: they thrilled audiences all over the world. In the 1980s, he directed and choreographed for the Paris Opera Ballet, where he restaged several full-length classics with new, more circuitous choreography for the male roles. In America, Baryshnikov made his mark dancing with New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre. Like Nureyev, he extended his celebrity through televised performances, roles in Hollywood films and other cameo appearances. Between them, they continue to inspire the artistry and adventurousness of male dancers.

Rudolf Nureyev and The Australian Ballet'south Lucette Aldous in Don Quixote. Photography Paul Cox

Pushing the Limits

Today's dancers are expected to perform a wider range of movements and trip the light fantastic styles than ever earlier, and dance medicine is playing an increasingly important role in helping them meet the demands on their bodies. Since the 1990s, an intensified interest in athleticism, speed and hyper-flexibility has seen many gimmicky ballets explore the aesthetics of endurance itself. The French ballerina Sylvie Guillem, with her "six-o'clock" extension and sculpted muscles, both epitomised and inspired the new borderland of technique. Speed was rewriting creative processes, also, with shortening timeframes for creating and revising new works.

Today, ballet is telling new stories across a wider range of cultures than always before. Leading choreographers like Christopher Wheeldon, John Neumeier and Alexei Ratmansky are drawing fresh inspiration from literary classics. Many companies have also invested in historical reconstructions of 19th-century works. Meanwhile, the digital historic period is shifting our relationship with our passions, and for ballet information technology offers both challenges and opportunities.

Amber Scott and Ty King-Wall in Alexei Ratmansky's Cinderella. Photography Lynette Wills

The truest expression of a people is in its trip the light fantastic and in its music. Bodies never lie.

Agnes De Mille

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