The 17th – 19th Centuries
As civilisation progresses so does dance. Originally a way to express spiritual beliefs, to honour past achievements or to pass on knowledge, dance continues to be an important part of our lives. It continues to be a source of enjoyment, expression and communication both in its social and theatrical forms.
Ballet began as a clever way to fill the time between the courses at a banquet. To celebrate the marriage of Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan and Isabel Aragon of Torrona, in 1489 Bergonzio di Botta presented a series of entrees, choreographed to complement the many different courses he was serving, and started a fashion. Ballet became an elegant pastime for royalty, a way for them to show how cultured, talented and wealthy they were.
One of the most talented, cultured and wealthiest of women of the time was Catherine de Medici who married Henry II of France. She staged at the French court in 1581 what is regarded as the first court ballet, Ballet Comique de la Reine Louise. Instead of a series of divertissements, it was based on a story, the legend of Circe, the enchantress who turned men into animals. Performed almost entirely by royalty, it lasted 5 ½ hours and cost more than 3 ½ million gold francs almost bankrupting the French court. However, it was immensely successful and served to underline the power and majesty of France.
All of the kings of France danced, but it was during the reign of Louis XIV (1643 – 1715) that court ballet reached its peak. Louis XIV loved to dance, even gaining his epithet of The Sun King from a role he portrayed in the Ballet de la Nuit in 1653. In 1661 he ensured that dancing would be regarded as an art and not merely a craft by founding the Academie Royale de Danse consisting of thirteen ballet masters who he charged with the task of “re-establishing the art in its perfection”. It was the king’s ballet master Pierre Beauchamps, a dancer who is said to be one of the first to perform a tour en l’air, who established the important principle that each leg must be ‘turned-out’ - a theatrical adaptation of the fencer’s stance – and that the feet must move to and from the five fundamental foot positions of classical ballet.
When Louis XIV stopped dancing, ballets moved from the court to the theatre and fewer of the nobility appeared in them. At first the only dancers on stage were men. Female roles, as in Shakespeare’s plays, were performed by slender young men wearing women’s costume, wigs and masks. This all changed in 1681 when, led by Mademoiselle de Lafontaine, the first female dancers to perform professionally in a theatre appeared in Le Triomphe de l’Amour.
Well into the 18th century dancers of both sexes were encumbered by masks, wigs or large headdresses, and heeled shoes. Women wore panniers, hoop skirts draped at the sides for fullness. Men also often wore a hooped skirt, the knee-length tonnelet. These costumes made it difficult for dance technique to progress so when Marie Camargo shocked French audiences by shortening her skirt to ankle length, she not only allowed her sparkling jumps and beats to be seen, but also encouraged cleaner and more accurate footwork.
While the dancers of the Paris Opera concentrated on the brilliance of their technique, choreographers in other centres of ballet were experimenting with the dramatic side of dance. In London, the English choreographer John Weaver tried to convey dramatic action solely through dance and pantomime, and in Vienna the Austrian choreographer Franz Hilferding and his Italian pupil Gasparo Angiolini experimented with dramatic themes and gestures.
The most famous 18th century advocate of the dramatic ballet was Frenchman Jean George Noverre, whose Letters on Dancing and Ballet (1760) influenced many choreographers both during and after his lifetime. He advocated costume reform, especially the removal of masks, that all movements should be natural and easily understood and emphasised that all the elements of a ballet should work in harmony to express the ballet’s theme. Noverre found an outlet for his ideas in Stuttgart, Germany, where he first produced his most famous ballet, Medea and Jason (1763).
One of Noverre’s most famous pupils was Jean Dauberval, whose ballet La Fille mal gardée (1789) applied Noverre’s ideas to a comic theme. Dauberval’s ideas were further developed by his Italian pupil Salvatore Vigano, who worked at La Scala in Milan, where he experimented with a variety of expressive pantomime performed in strict time to the music. Meanwhile in London, Charles Didelot, a French student of both Noverre and Dauberval, produced the ballet Flore et Zephire (1796), in which invisible wires helped dancers appear to fly.
Dancing on toe began to develop at about this time, although dancers were only able to balance on the tips of their toes for a moment or two, because blocked toe shoes had not yet been invented, and dancers merely strengthened their light ballet slippers with darning. Meanwhile dance technique was continuing to evolve in Italy where Carlo Blasis recorded the latest advances in his Code of Terpsichore (1830). He is credited with inventing the attitude, derived from a famous work by the Flemish sculptor Giambologna, a statue of the god Mercury poised lightly on the toes of the left foot.
The Romantic Ballet
The ballet La Sylphide, first performed in Paris in 1832, introduced the period of romantic ballet. Marie Taglioni danced the part of the Sylphide, a supernatural creature who is loved and inadvertently destroyed by a mortal man. The choreography, created by her father, Filippo Taglioni, exploited the use of toe dancing to emphasize his daughter’s otherworldly lightness and insubstantiality. La Sylphide inspired many changes in the ballets of the time – in theme, style, technique, and costume. Its successor, Giselle (1841), also contrasted the human and supernatural worlds and in its second act, the ghostly spirits called wilis wear the white tutu popularised in La Sylphide.
Ballet during the romantic era was not restricted, however, to the subject of otherworldly beings. The Austrian dancer Fanny Elssler popularised an earthier, more sensuous character. Her most famous dance, the Cachucha (in Le Diable Boiteux, 1836), was a Spanish-style solo performed with castanets, and she often performed much-stylised versions of national dances.
Women dominated the romantic ballet. Although good male dancers such as the Frenchmen Jules Perrot and Arthur Saint-Leon were performing, they were eclipsed by ballerinas such as Marie Taglioni, Fanny Elssler, the Italians Carlotta Grisi, Fanny Cerrito, and others.
In Paris itself, however, ballet began to decline. Poetic qualities gave way to virtuosic displays and spectacle. Male dancing was neglected. Few ballets of note were produced at the Opéra during the second half of the 19th century. An exception was Coppèlia, choreographed by Arthur Saint-Leon in 1870, but even in it, the principal male role of Franz was danced by a woman.
Denmark, however, maintained the standards of the romantic ballet. The Danish choreographer August Bournonville, who had studied in Paris, not only established a system of training but also created a large body of works, including his own version of La Sylphide (1836). Many of these ballets are still performed by the Royal Danish Ballet.
Russia also preserved the integrity of the ballet during the late 19th century. A Frenchman, Marius Petipa, became the chief choreographer of the Imperial Russian Ballet. He perfected the full-length, evening-long story ballet that combined set dances with mimed scenes. His best-known works are The Sleeping Beauty (1890) and Swan Lake (co-choreographed with the Russian Lev Ivanov), both set to commissioned scores by Piotr IIlych Tchaikovsky.
The 20th Century
With time, Petipa’s choreographic method settled into a formula. Michel Fokine called for greater expressiveness and more authenticity in choreography, scenery and costumes. He was able to realize his ideas through the Ballets Russes, a new company organised by the Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev.
The Ballets Russes opened in Paris in 1909 and won immediate success. The male dancers led by the Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, were particularly admired because good male dancers had almost disappeared in Paris. The company presented a broad range of works, including Fokine’s compactly knit one-act ballets with colourful themes from Russian or Asian folklore: The Firebird (1910), Schéhèrazade (1910), and Petrushka (1911). The Ballets Russes became synonymous with novelty and excitement, a reputation it maintained throughout its 20 years of existence.
Diaghilev assembled some of the world’s greatest artists to create new works for his company, and although most of them were Russian – among them designers Leon Bakst, and Alexandre Benois, composer Igor Stravinsky – he also commissioned many Western European artists such as Pablo Picasso and Maurice Ravel. They encouraged Diaghilev’s choreographers, Michel Fokine, Vaslav Nijinsky, Leonide Massine, Bronislava Nijinska, George Balanchine and Serge Lifar to experiment with new themes and styles of movement.
The offshoots of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes revitalised ballet all over the world. The Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, who danced in its early seasons, formed her own company and toured internationally including two tours of Australia in 1926 and 1929. Leonid Massine contributed to the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, a company formed after Diaghilev’s death that recreated many of his company’s ballets. It also toured to Australia in 1936, 1938, and 1939.
Two former members of the Ballets Russes, the Polish-born Dame Marie Rambert and the Irish-born Dame Ninette de Valois became founders of British ballet. The Rambert Ballet discovered and nurtured the choreographic talents of Sir Frederick Ashton and Antony Tudor who were to influence the formation of an English style of ballet. Dame Ninette de Valois founded what was to become Britain’s Royal Ballet. Through her company came both Dame Peggy van Praagh and Sir Robert Helpmann who became the first artistic directors of The Australian Ballet.
Michel Fokine worked with many companies, including what was to become the American Ballet Theatre. George Balanchine was invited to work in the United States by Lincoln Kirstein, a wealthy American patron of the arts. There he established a school, the School of American Ballet and a company, the New York City Ballet. Serge Lifar the last of Diaghilev’s male stars, revitalised the Paris Opera and dominated French ballet for many years.
In the 1920s and 1930s, modern dance began to be developed in the United States and Germany. The American dancers Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, the German dancer Mary Wigman and others broke away from traditional ballet to create their own expressive movement styles and to choreograph dances that were more closely related to human life at that time. Ballets also reflected this move toward realism. In 1932 the German choreographer Kurt Jooss created The Green Table, an antiwar ballet, and Antony Tudor developed the psychological ballet, which revealed the inner being of his characters.
The technique of modern dance eventually extended the movement vocabulary of ballet, particularly in the use of the torso and in movements done lying or sitting on the floor. Popular dance forms were also used to enrich the ballet vocabulary. In 1944 the American choreographer Jerome Robbins created Fancy Free, a ballet based on the jazz-dance style that had developed in musical comedy.
The idea of pure dance also grew in popularity. In the 1930s Massine invented the symphonic ballet, which aimed to express the musical content of symphonies by the German composers Ludwig Van Beethoven and Johannes Brahms. Balanchine also began to create plotless ballets in which the primary motivation was movement to music. His ballet Jewels (1967) is considered the first evening-length ballet of this type.
Beginning in 1956, Russian ballet companies such as the Bolshoi and Kirov performed in the West for the first time. The intense dramatic feeling and technical virtuosity of the Russians made a great impact. Russian influence on ballet continues today, both through visits from Russian companies and the activities of defecting Soviet dancers such as Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova, and Mikhail Baryshnikov.
Dance in general underwent an enormous upsurge in popularity beginning in the mid-1960s. Ballet began to show the influence of a younger audience, in both themes and style. The athleticism of dancing was enjoyed in much the same way as sports, and virtuosic steps were admired for their challenge and daring. Popular music such as rock and roll and jazz was used to accompany many ballets.
The 21st Century
Today’s ballet repertoire offers great variety. New ballets and reconstructions and re-staging of older ballets co-exist with new works created by contemporary choreographers for ballet companies. Choreographers experiment with both new and traditional forms and styles, and dancers constantly seek to extend their technical and dramatic range. This, plus the frequent tours of ballet companies allow audiences throughout the world to experience the full spectrum of today’s ballet activity.
Resources
Colin Peasley, Education Program Manager, The Australian Ballet
