Ballet dancing only differs from social and recreational dance because it is a theatrical art performed on stage to an audience. It is also stylised dancing, meaning that in order to perform it, dancers must learn a very specific technique. This technique was established centuries ago in the courts of A ballet can be as large a production as The Sleeping Beauty or Swan Lake, involving the full company of seventy dancers plus a large number of extras in sumptuous costumes and wonderful scenery, accompanied by a full symphony orchestra; or it can be a single dancer in the simplest of practice clothes on a bare stage, dancing to a tape recording such as Stephen Page’s Totem created for Steven Heathcote. Of course most ballets exist between these two extremes. All traditional classical ballets combine dancing with drama, décor, and music, but many twentieth century ballets use no special costumes or scenery. Frequently these ballets do not tell an obvious story; they seek to convey a mood or simply to show the beauty of the human form in motion. Today, it is not uncommon for choreographers to produce works that delete one or more of the traditional ingredients of ballet – drama, music, scenery or costumes. Even dance, the one essential ingredient is being constantly redefined, which is the reason why ballet continues to be such an exciting, ever-evolving art form.
Some of the most obvious features of ballet dancing are the use of ‘turn-out’, which is the outward rotation of the legs from the hip, derived from the stance used in fencing; the regal bearing of body and arms and the emphasis on fully stretched legs and feet. This ‘classic’ stance gives the dancers a greater range of movement and allows them to perform in dances created for them by a choreographer, who selects and links movements and steps together to make dances.
