Classical Ballet
“At the summit of movement, discipline becomes flight.”
History & cultural context
Classical ballet grew out of the court spectacles of Renaissance Italy and took shape at the French court. Louis XIV, himself a dancer, founded the Académie Royale de Danse in 1661, and the five positions of the feet are credited to his ballet master Pierre Beauchamp. French remains the language of ballet vocabulary to this day.
The Romantic era brought pointe work and the ethereal heroine of La Sylphide (1832) and Giselle (1841). In St Petersburg, Marius Petipa created the grand imperial style of The Sleeping Beauty (1890) and, with Lev Ivanov, the 1895 Swan Lake — works still at the centre of the world repertoire.
Masters, schools & legacy
Training systems carry the tradition: the Vaganova method from St Petersburg, the Italian Cecchetti method, the Danish Bournonville school and the syllabus of the Royal Academy of Dance. Great companies — the Paris Opera Ballet, the Mariinsky, the Bolshoi, the Royal Ballet — keep the repertoire alive, while dancers such as Anna Pavlova, Margot Fonteyn, Maya Plisetskaya and Rudolf Nureyev made ballet an international art.
Dances of this world
- French school of ballet
- Vaganova method
- Cecchetti method
- Bournonville school
- English style of ballet (Royal Academy of Dance)
- Romantic ballet
- Imperial Russian ballet (Petipa's grand style)
- Italian school of ballet
- Cuban school of ballet
- Character dance
Further reading
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