4. Ballet history
Description
This article is from the Ballet and Modern Dance FAQ, by Tom Parsons twp@panix.com with numerous contributions by others.
4. Ballet history
Ballet is at once the oldest and the youngest of the arts. The
impulse to dance must be at least as old as the impulse to sing; but the
first professional ballet dancers appeared on the scene only about 300
years ago. It is also the only high art whose foundations were laid in
recent times by amateurs, and by royal amateurs at that. The French court
put on ballets the way some of our own ancestors may have put on amateur
theatricals or played at charades, and the dancers were drawn from the
members of the Court, including at least two French kings, Louis XIII
and Louis XIV. Many of the gestures in ballet to-day still reflect the
body language of the nobility of the seventeenth century.
Dance history can be approached in different ways. You can address
the history of dance as an art, listing the great teachers and choreo-
graphers who influenced its development; or the history of performance,
naming the stars and describing their careers; or the social history,
discussing how theatrical dance interacted with the social and economic
circumstances in which it found itself. The material that follows is
largely the history of dance as an art.
Modern, or contemporary, dance is (naturally) a recent development.
Where the history of ballet goes back four or more centuries--depending on
when you date its origins--modern goes back only about a hundred years.
Hence the entries here inevitably have much more to say about ballet than
about modern.
The history presented in this version of the FAQ ends after
Diaghilev and the beginnings of modern dance. We are still too close to
more recent developments, and it is difficult to sort out the threads and
to distinguish what was most important.
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