The

Encyclopedia of World Ballet

The Encyclopedia of World Ballet
Mary Ellen Snodgrass
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
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Snodgrass, Mary Ellen.
The encyclopedia of world ballet / Mary Ellen Snodgrass.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4422-4525-9 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-4526-6 (ebook) 1. Ballet—Encyclopedias. I.
Title.
GV1585.S66 2015
792.8—dc23
2014049730

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for
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Printed in the United States of America
For dance master Louis Nunnery and
ballet buddy Kathleen Lilly.
We miss you.
 Contents
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chronology
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
U
V
W
Bibliography
About the Author
 Preface
The Encyclopedia of World Ballet surveys dance art from social occasions at the court of
Louis XIV to current venues in myriad countries, from Cyprus to Singapore. To enlighten
the dancer, choreographer, student, teacher, and arts historian, 170 major entries reveal the
nature and purpose of ballet. Data include leaders in dance design and style, influential
ballet companies, and trends in the development of staging, costuming, and set design by
such creators as George Balanchine, Erté, and Inigo Jones. Entries summarize public
response to repertoires and to the symbolism of worship dance, Anacreontic and story
ballet, and the universal favorites—Swan Lake, Coppélia, The Nutcracker, and The
Sleeping Beauty. Research reveals the social and political ramifications of arts
controversies over gay ballet, Fascist and Islamic censorship, and arts propaganda under
the Communist regimes of the Soviet Union, Cuba, and China.
Headwords include topics such as dance essentials (eurythmics, character role,
technique, terminology), pedagogues (Enrico Cecchetti, Agrippina Vaganova, Martha
Graham, Jules Perrot), and styles (mime, ballet d’action, en pointe, pas de deux,
divertissement). Biographies cover choreographers (Michel Fokine, Gerald Arpino,
Marius Petipa), dancers (Rudolf Nureyev, Maria Tallchief, Christian Johansson), and
innovators (Nacho Duato, Twyla Tharp, Paul Taylor, Amalia Hernández Navarro). There
are also overviews of significant Asian (Vietnam, Korea, Siberia, Guangzhou, Iranian,
Shanghai, Tokyo) and Pacific companies (Australian, Royal New Zealand, Philippines),
African ensembles (Joberg, Cape Town, Cairo), European performers (Greek, Polish,
Swedish, Kiev, Netherlands, Finnish, Swedish), and North American troupes (Winnipeg,
Washington, Boston, San Francisco, Houston, New York City). The complete A to Z
encompasses contrasts and similarities of training, programming, and tours. Blended
artistries of such performers as Maurice Béjart, Carmen De Lavallade, and August
Bournonville disclose efforts to broaden dance with ethnic elements, an asset of jazz
ballet, Universal Ballet, folkloric ballet, Apsara dance, and hybrid ballet.
Historical details (Erté, Pierre Beauchamp, Dance Magazine, Alexander Gorsky) orient
the reader amid trends (Renaissance dance, polonaise, pas de deux, neoclassical ballet,
romantic dance). Specifics of the early twentieth century (Vaslav Nijinsky, Ballet Russe de
Monte Carlo, Sergei Diaghilev, Isadora Duncan) account for emerging modernism and
efforts at racial integration by Birgit Cullberg, Lester Horton, Judith Jamison, Alicia
Alonso, and Alvin Ailey. Classic dances (The Lady of the Camellias, Eugene Onegin, Don
Quixote) share space with less common works (Fall River Legend, Spartacus, Totentanz)
and specific venues (Paris Opera Ballet, La Scala Theatre Ballet, Moulin Rouge).
Peripheral subjects (opéra-ballet, ballet in art and film, choreography, ballet attire and
shoes, barre warm-up) fill in particulars essential to an understanding of people and
movements—for example, Mikhail Baryshnikov’s contributions to dance cinema, Margot
Fonteyn’s interest in spreading the arts to underserved populations, archivists’ collections
of specific works with Benesh notation, Marie Camargo’s alterations to professional
shoes, and public debuts of promising members of juvenile companies. For visual
illustration, the text features photos from a variety of ensembles, including Ballet
Kelowna, Compañia Nacional de Danza in Madrid, Estonian National Opera, Royal New
Zealand Ballet, School of Dance in Ottawa, Dancecyprus, and Sofia Ballet.
Completing the ballet reference source, a timeline orders events from Cambodia’s
Angkor Wat in 802 CE to the pastoral traditions of Acis and Galatea reprised in summer
2014 by the Mark Morris Dance Company. Signal achievements range from the
introduction of comédie-ballet, temps lie, gas lighting, and female membership in all-male
casts to the creation of the Basque entrechat-deux, the defection of Serge Lifar from
Russia, and Nikolai Sergeyev’s rescue of classic Russian choreography. The time span
preceding and encompassing World War II illustrates the impact of the Nazi high
command on Czech performances, the value of Cinderella as a protest of Stalinism, and
the loss of Viennese dancers to the Holocaust. A note on artistic freedom legitimates the
work of Nima Kiann in Sweden to reclaim Iranian dance tradition. The resurgence of
interest in satiric and humorous ballet fills entries on Matthew Bourne and Les Ballets
Trockadero de Monte Carlo.
A comprehensive index of primary and secondary topics covers major essays on Zoltán
Nagy, Mats Ek, and the Hong Kong Ballet along with clarifying and contributive
elements:
Concepts: neoromanticism, dram-balet, fusion dance, ballet contemporain, puppetry,
flamenco, ballet-féerie, eukinetics, social dance, intermedio
People: Coco Chanel, Marie Guimard, Suzanne Farrell, Julia Pak Moon, Judith
Jamison, Ali Pourfarrokh, Igor Stravinsky, Nejad Ahmadzadeh, Pearl Primus
Musicians: Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Samuel Barber, Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt, Cesare
Pugni, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Gabriel Fauré
Choreographers: John Cranko, Agnes de Mille, Glen Tetley, Ninette de Valois, Paul
Taylor, Jirˇí Kylián, Léonide Massine, Antony Tudor, Christopher Wheeldon
Companies: Romanian National Ballet, Forsythe Company, Ballet Folklorico Azatlan,
Deutsche Oper Berlin, Dance Theater of Harlem, Sadler’s Wells, Prague Ballet
Ballets: Cry!, Highland Fling, Le Corsaire, Edward Scissorhands, Marie Antoinette,
Giselle, Miss Julie, The Moon Raindeer, Dream of the Red Chamber, Zhu Fu,
Company B, Rodeo, Paquita, Firebird, Lux in Tenebris, Zorba
Eras: French Revolution, World War I, World War II, Louis XIV, Cairo Opera Ballet,
Pol Pot dictatorship, Black Plague, Napoleonic Empire
Issues: propagandist dance, The Red Poppy, protest dance, partnering, religion, The
Green Table, The Red Detachment of Women
Dance manuals: Modern Educational Dance, On the Art of Dancing and Directing
Choruses
 Acknowledgments
Lani Almanza-Marshall, director, Ballet Folklorico Azatlan, West Covina, CA
Lisa Auel, archivist, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, Pittsburgh, PA
Seresta Beskou, choreographer, Seresta Dance Company, Athens, Greece
Berta Bolick, instructor, Louis Nunnery School of Ballet, Hickory, NC
Candace Bouchard, marketing coordinator, Oregon Ballet Theatre, Portland, OR
Alexander Brady, education director, Tharp Productions, New York, NY
Kate Crowder, media coordinator, Richmond Ballet, Richmond, VA
Matthew De Waelsche, reference, San Antonio Public Library, San Antonio, TX
Paul-James Dwyer, artistic director, Oremus, Toronto, ON
Charthel Arthur Estner, managing director, Gerald Arpino and Robert Joffrey Foundation,
Cambria, CA
Peniel Guerrier, director, Tamboula d’Haiti, Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Jeff Hacker, editor, North Salem, New York
Mary Haegert and Susan Halpert, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Laura Hagglund, marketing, Toronto Dance Theatre, Toronto, ON
Nicola Henry, assistant artistic director, The School of Dance, Ottawa, ON
Claire Hill, manager, Dancemakers, Toronto, ON
CiCi Houston, associate director, Alexandra Ballet, Chesterfield, MO
Lene Jacobsen, media director, Norwegian National Opera & Ballet, Oslo, Norway
Bengt Jörgen, Artistic Director, Ballet Jörgen Canada, Toronto, ON
Catherine Kanner, design director, Los Angeles Ballet, Los Angeles, CA
Katerina Ker-Lindsay, Dancecyprus, Limsassol, Cyprus
Katerina Kordatou, media coordinator, Hamburg Ballet, Hamburg, Germany
Lisa Labrado, public relations director, Paul Taylor Dance Company, New York, NY
Arthur Laurent, communications, Akram Khan Company, London, UK
Thomas Lisanti, permissions, New York Public Library, NY
Claire Lishman, media officer, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Birmingham, UK
Ken Ludden, director, Margot Fonteyn Academy of Ballet, Beacon, NY
Steve MacLeod, public service librarian, University of California, Irvine, CA
Ellen McDonald, publicity, Kansas City Ballet, Kansas City, MO
Lindsay McDonald, public relations, Joburg Ballet, Johannesburg, South Africa
Kathryn Mihelick, director, Leaven Dance Company, Stowe, OH
David Ross Mulligan, archivist, San Rafael, CA
Nima Naik, assistant publicity coordinator, National Ballet of Canada, Toronto, ON
Kalyn Oden, media intern, Houston Ballet, Houston, TX
Martin Otts, reference, Patrick Beaver Library, Hickory, NC
Sofia Pantouvaki, professor of costume design, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland
Michael J. Panvini, production director, Ballet Arizona, Phoenix, AZ
Anu Pork, sales manager, Estonian National Opera, Tallinn, Estonia
Jane Puchniak, public relations coordinator, Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Winnipeg, MKB
Jennifer Pugsley, media manager, Canadian Opera Company, Toronto, ON
Selina Rajani, associate media director, Vancouver Opera, Vancouver, BC
Christina Riley, marketing and communications, Scottish Ballet, Glasgow, Scotland
Jens Rosen, artistic director, Royal Swedish Ballet, Stockholm, Sweden
Martine Roth, communication, Bejárt Ballet, Lausanne, Switzerland
Abra Rudisill, artistic director, Alameda Ballet Academy, Alameda, CA
Mechthilld Rühl, marketing manager, The Forsythe Company, Frankfurt, Germany
Helmi Saksala, managing director, Finnish National Ballet, Helsinki, Finland
Sharlyn Sawyer, director, Afsaneh Art & Culture Society, Woodacre, CA
Mark Schumaker, Jackson Library, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC
Joann Schwendemann, contract manager, Dover Publications, Mineola, NY
Erika Sjöling, public relations, Royal Swedish Opera, Stockholm, Sweden
Melissa Tan, marketing, Singapore Dance Theatre, Singapore
Taban Teyhoo, coordinator, Les Ballets Persans, Solna, Sweden
John Tomlinson, executive director, Paul Taylor Dance Company, New York, NY
Glenna Turnbull, photographer, Ballet Kelowna, Kelowna, BC
Liina Viru, literary editor, Estonian National Opera, Tallinn, Estonia
Zachary Whittenburg, communication manager, Hubbard Street Dance, Chicago, IL
Jeff Willhelm, photographer, Hickory, NC
Cassandra Williamson, Marketing Executive, West Australian Ballet, Maylands, West
Australia
Gretchen Wilson, instructor, Louis Nunnery School of Ballet, Hickory, NC
Thanks to institutions lending major works on dance:
Duke University Library, Durham, NC
Patrick Beaver Library, Hickory, NC
Walter Clinton Jackson Library, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC
Z. Smith Reynolds Library, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC
 Introduction
Like fireflies in the night sky and waves to a craggy shore, dance bemuses and
mesmerizes. An ephemeral art born of social dance for court entertainment, the first
professional ballet offered opportunities to members of the upper and lower classes to
develop body strength and grace while moving to music. The addition of costumes and
props gradually removed presentations from banquet halls, gardens, and nuptial chambers
to the stage. Sets and lighting advanced ballet to theater as adjuncts to opera.
Theories of choreography set in motion a history of debates over intuitive dance versus
structured steps. Scholarly syllabi directed the curriculums of the leading companies—the
Bolshoi, Kirov, Paris Opera, and La Scala—and elevated the prominence of Jean-Georges
Noverre, Salvatore Viganò, Carlo Blasis, Alexander Gorsky, and Marius Petipa. Offshoots
of controlling theories challenged the status quo with the modest Danish enchaînements of
August Bournonville, the toe dancers coached by Filippo Taglioni, and the folk elements
that Arthur Saint-Léon incorporated in Coppélia. Mime, the province of character dancer
Enrico Cecchetti, enlivened Russian dance with drama and emotion.
An explosion of synergy from Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes allied the music of
Alexander Borodin and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov with art deco sets by Pablo Picasso and
Léon Bakst, costumes by Coco Chanel, Max Ernst and Joan Miró’s curtains, Jean
Cocteau’s posters, kinetic dance by Vaslav Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova, and the avant-
garde choreography of Scheherazade, Firebird, Petrouchka, The Afternoon of a Faun, The
Rite of Spring, and Le Coq d’Or. The 1920s added to the mix dancers Alexandra Danilova
and Serge Lifar, choreographer George Balanchine, scenarist Boris Kochno, and painters
Georges Braque and Maurice Utrillo, the sources of genius for productions of The
Prodigal Son, Jeux, and Apollon Musagète.
The intrusion of two world wars set dancers on a search for stability during careers
limited by health, age, and employment. The previous merger of ballet with folkloric steps
and rhythms prefaced the subsequent history of fusions, which overlaid standard turnout
and enchaînements with barefoot expressionism, bluesy jazz, and Broadway tunes for On
Your Toes, Rodeo, The King and I, and Oklahoma. Authenticity demanded the inclusion of
nonwhite performers, thus adding the Creole background of Janet Collins, Caribbean
panache of Alicia Alonso, Filipina mountain steps of Agnes Locsin, and African
exuberance of Lester Horton, Alvin Ailey, Judith Jamison, and Carmen De Lavallade.
From the 1960s, star couples generated glitzy headlines, beginning with the chemistry
of Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn in Marguerite and Armand and Mikhail
Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova in Giselle. Simultaneously, the spread of Communism
bore Russia’s balletic skills to ensembles in Guangzhou, Havana, Cairo, Tehran, Shanghai,
and, eventually, Hanoi. The fusion performance of José Limón, Katherine Dunham,
Hikaru Kobayashi, and Merce Cunningham and the choreography of Martha Graham,
Maurice Béjart, Nima Kiann, Boris Eifman, Edouard Borovansky, and Twyla Tharp
overshadowed cliché fairy tale dance. In place of princely wooing, new formats interjected
intriguing contemporary subjects—The Kabuki, Xochitl, Bhakti, Songs of a Wayfarer,
Terra Australis, The Outlaw, and Little Deuce Coupe.
Modernism foregrounded a complete makeover of stage customs, beginning with
expenditures that raised the price of tickets. Costumers replaced pointe shoes, twinkly
tutus, courtly uniforms, and coronets with unitards and bare feet. Music segued from strict
classical romances of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Léo Delibes to Duke Ellington, the
Andrews Sisters, the Beatles, Haitian steel pans, and the experimental tones of Arnold
Schoenberg and Philip Glass. In Warsaw, Krzysztof Pastor enlarged on spectacle with
postmodern mixed media, particularly kaleidoscopic lighting.
In the current climate, ballet mavens enjoy a broad selectivity of style, subject, and
presentation, from the challenging works of Glen Tetley and Paul Taylor to the Korean
folk grace of Universal Ballet and the acrobatic Cirque du Soleil. Contributions to variety
derive from a host of cultural backgrounds—South African choreographer Kirsten
Isenberg’s neoclassical Of Gods and Men, Chinese-Canadian choreographer Fu
Xingbang’s hero story Mei Lanfang, Nguyen Tan Loc’s agrarian tribute in Suong Som
(The Mist), Joburg choreographer Alvaro Restrepo’s God-by-the-Sea, and Argentine tango
by the Seresta Dance Company of Athens, Greece. The future of ballet suggests more
rather than less invention and a lengthening of dance history in myriad artistic genres.
 Chronology
802 King Jayavarman II, founder of the Angkor Empire of Cambodia, creates Apsara court
dance to promote righteousness and right thinking.

1425 Italian ballet theorist Domenico da Piacenza, founder of the Lombardic storytelling
dance, initiates written notation in a dance monograph, On the Art of Dancing and
Directing Choruses.

1518 Queen Bona Sforza, wife of Sigismund of Poland, imports Italian dance to Krakow.

1581 For the court of Henry II of France, Italian choreographer Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx
produces Le Ballet-Comique de la Reine, the first authentic ballet, staged at the Louvre
in Paris.

1589 Dijon clergyman Thoinot Arbeau’s Orchésographie initiates the five standard ballet foot
positions.

1622 Empress Eleonore Gonzaga introduces ballet to Hapsburg royalty in Vienna.

1642 Aristocratic control of the arts begins to wane with the rise of democratic ideals during
the English Civil Wars.

1648 To increase turnout from the hips, French instructor Pierre Beauchamp lightens wardrobe
and invents flexible slippers.

1653 In Paris, Louis XIV settles the title of court composer of instrumental dance music on
Jean-Baptiste Lully.

1661 For Louis XIV, the collaboration of Lully, dramatist Molière, and choreographer Pierre
Beauchamp yields the comédie-ballet Les Fâcheux (The Bores), a forerunner of
modern musical theater.

Louis XIV creates a royal step, the Basque entrechat-deux.

Under French sponsorship, ballet becomes an independent theatrical art taught in Paris
by dancer Pierre Beauchamp at the Académie Royale de Danse, the world’s first ballet
school.

1681 Jean Baptiste Lully’s opera Le Triomphe de l’Amour (The Triumph of Love) adds the
first ballerinas to all-male casts in Paris.

1697 At the Paris Opera, composer André Campra synthesizes opera-ballet with L’Europe
Galante (Europe in Love).

1717 English dance theorist John Weaver experiments with nonverbal stage narrative by
producing The Loves of Mars and Venus.

1720s
 Marie Camargo perfects the entrechat quatre, the crisscrossing of the feet en l’air that
elevates the stature of the female dancer.

1730s Camargo introduces the original ballet slipper, a heelless leather or satin shoe.

1738 Russia’s first imperial ballet school opens in St. Petersburg under the direction of Jean
Baptiste Landé, who teaches servants’ children.

1740 The Vienna ensemble mounts Franz Hilverding’s original Don Quixote, which focuses
on the title character’s foibles.

1741 Marie Camargo becomes the first danseuse to dominate a repertoire.

1742 Frederick the Great establishes Berlin’s Royal Opera House, a court venue featuring a
resident ballet troupe.

1744 Catherine the Great studies dance at the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg, Russia.

1750 Jean-Georges Noverre choreographs and dances in the first ballet pantomime, Le
Jugement de Paris.

1755 Jean-Georges Noverre’s presentation of Les Fêtes Chinoises at Drury Lane arouses anti-
French viewers to destroy expensive silk costumes and sets.

1763 For a performance of Médée et Jason in Paris, Gaëtano Vestris introduces the unmasked
mimicry of character roles.

1771 The Vienna State Opera Ballet opens a dance academy.

1773 Italian dance coach Filippo Beccari trains fifty-four orphans, the child company
forerunner of Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet.

In Stockholm, King Gustav III initiates the Royal Swedish Opera Ballet.

1778 Milan’s La Scala Theatre Ballet forms when the new theater opens.

1785 Stanislaus Augustus, King of Poland, supports His Majesty’s National Dancers, a troupe
of thirty local performers.

1787 Ballet master Charles Le Picq imports to Russia experienced dancers from Spain,
Austria, and France.

At the Paris Opera, ballet master Pierre Gardel advocates natural drama and uniformity
of performance.

1790s The addition of the polonaise to court and ritual scenes legitimizes the ballon (bounce), a
light-footed promenade introduced in Krakow, Poland.

1801 Vincenzo Galeotti’s Lagertha expresses Scandinavian themes in a Danish ballet.

1804
 At Milan, ballet master Salvatore Viganò introduces coreodramma, a parallel to ballet
d’action.

1815 German dance master Friedrich Horschelt’s Viennese Kinderballett (Children’s Ballet)
begins enrolling homeless six-year-olds.

1817 French ballerina Geneviève Gosselin introduces toe dancing at the Paris Opera.

1818 The term corps de ballet comes into use in the Paris media.

1820 Theorist Carlo Blasis compiles Elementary, Theoretical, and Practical Treatise on the
Art of Dance, the first comprehensive manual on dance technique, issued in Paris.

1820s Gallo-Danish choreographer August Bournonville invents temps lie, an interconnection

of gliding steps.

1822 The installation of gaslights and the shortening of gauze and tulle skirts to reveal toe
dancing on the stages of London’s Drury Lane and Covent Garden enhance ensemble
movement.

1823 Amalia Brugnoli reprises toe dancing in Vienna for Paolo Samengo’s The Fairy and the
Knight.

1825 A Russian debut of Fernando Sor’s Cinderella inaugurates the newly rebuilt Petrovsky
Theatre, home of Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet.

1827 At the Paris Opera, Marie Taglioni debuts a light, airy style on demi-pointe.

1829 In Copenhagen, choreographer August Bournonville introduces the boxed set, scenery
shaped from three flats and a roof.

1832 With La Sylphide at Covent Garden, a prime element of Romantic ballet, dance master
Filippo Taglioni introduces London to female performers en pointe.

1839 Marius Petipa dances Jean Coralli’s La Tarentule (The Tarantula), the first ballet on
Broadway.

1841 For the first time in ballet history, Giselle, a story with universal appeal, sweeps
European companies.

Swedish dancer Christian Johansson coordinates the Franco-Danish romantic vision with
Russian classical ballet.

1860 Dance master Vaclav Reisinger, the father of Czech professional ballet, becomes the first
native choreographer in Prague.

1864 Arthur Saint-Léon choreographs The Little Humpbacked Horse (1864), the first ballet
featuring a Russian story.

1869
 Ballet master Marius Petipa and composer Ludwig Minkus debut the epic ballet Don
Quixote, which engages the imagination of audiences across Europe.

1870 The music of Leo Delibes and choreography of Arthur Saint-Léon for Coppélia
legitimize folk repertoire.

1877 The premiere of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake disappoints the audience.

1879 The first Finnish ballet ensemble enhances operas and operettas at Helsinki.

1887 Enrico Cecchetti begins transforming static male roles into vibrant embellishments of
Russian ballet.

Manhattan cobbler Salvatore Capezio, an immigrant from Lucano, Italy, refurbishes

slippers and pointe shoes for the Metropolitan Opera House.

1890 Marius Petipa’s choreography of The Sleeping Beauty turns the Grimms’ fairy tale into a
four-hour ballet.

1892 Tchaikovsky’s two-part Nutcracker divides the story into a family Christmas ritual and a
ballet-féerie (fantasy ballet).

1899 Alexander Gorsky’s A Table of Signs and Notation systemizes the written stage
directions of Vladimir Ivanovich Stephanov, who codifies St. Petersburg’s archival
Russian dance plans.

1900 The Bolshoi Ballet enters a golden age under St. Petersburg choreographer Alexander
Gorsky.

1909 In Paris, Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes debuts a color riot in set and costume and the
choreography of Michel Fokine, called ballet contemporain.

Michel Fokine choreographs the first abstract ballet reverie, Les Sylphides.

1911 For a tour of Europe and the United States, Anna Pavlova excerpts the snowflake waltz
as a showpiece from The Nutcracker.

1913 Russo-Polish dancer Vaslav Nijinsky choreographs Jeux (Games), the world’s first
modern ballet.

1914 The outbreak of World War I sets Pavlova on a global tour from Russia to Asia, the
Pacific, and the Western Hemisphere.

George Gurdjieff choreographs The Struggle of the Magicians, the first modern worship
dance.

1917 After the ouster of the Romanov dynasty, the Soviet state censors and suppresses
classical performances by the Bolshoi and Kirov troupes and closes the Imperial Ballet
School.
 Prima ballerina Yekaterina Geltzer rallies the arts community to preserve ballet as a
Russian national treasure.

The Finnish National Ballet initiates artistry independent of Russia.

1918 Nicholai Sergeyev transports the choreography archive of the Imperial Ballet from St.
Petersburg to Paris.

1919 At Kiev’s l’École de Mouvement, Bronislava Nijinska initiates avant-garde rhythms and
gestures gleaned from the Ballets Russes.

1922 Russian prodigy George Balanchine forms the Young Ballet at St. Petersburg at the
Mariinsky Theatre.

Enrico Cecchetti separates weekly exercises into individual sets for each of six days and
stresses legato (smooth) transitions.

1923 Serge Lifar flees Russia and joins the Ballets Russes.

French musician Darius Milhaud composes the bluesy La Création du Monde (The
Creation of the World), the first Negro ballet.

1924 George Balanchine defects from St. Petersburg to Paris.

1926 The Martha Graham Company premieres in New York City.

1927 The first Soviet ballet, The Red Poppy, a labor melodrama set in an Asian port, expresses
Russia’s propagandist themes to Communist China.

1931 Irish dance master Ninette de Valois joins five dancers of the Sadler’s Wells dance
academy and guest star Anton Dolin at the debut of the Vic-Wells Ballet.

1932 German choreographer Kurt Jooss’s The Green Table predicts the atrocities of war under
Adolf Hitler.

In Hollywood, dance instructor Lester Horton opens the first racially integrated ballet
academy in the United States.

A splinter company, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, debuts on the Riviera.

1933 At the debut of the San Francisco Ballet, Danish-Russian choreographer Adolph Bolm
directs fifty performers in Le Ballet Mécanique.

1934 Russian ballet instructor Agrippina Vaganova compiles the first Kirov syllabus.

Nicholai Sergeyev directs The Nutcracker for its first presentation outside Russia, a
performance in England that sets a standard in the West.

At the University of Cape Town, Dulcie Howes founds the world’s first university ballet
academy.
 George Balanchine moves to New York City to found the School of American Ballet.

1936 Jazz ballet debuts on Broadway in the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart musical On
Your Toes.

1937 In Baku, Azerbaijan, Gamar Almaszadeh, the first Muslim ballerina, forms a state
folkloric ballet.

Mikhail Mordken forms the parent ensemble of the American Ballet Theatre.

At Kiev, Igor Moiseyev directs the State Academic Ensemble of Popular Dance, the
world’s first professional national ballet.

1939 Nazis ban Russian ballet in Czechoslovakia.

1940 Afrasiyab Badalbeyli composes the score and libretto for Qiz Galasi (The Maiden
Tower), the first Azerbaijani ballet.

1941 A bomb damages the Bolshoi Theatre, forcing the troupe to evacuate to the Russian
countryside.

1942 Agnes de Mille hybridizes cowboy ballet for Rodeo to the music of Aaron Copland for
performance at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House.

1945 Under the tyranny of Josef Stalin, the Kirov’s empathetic mime of Cinderella’s wretched
life captures the yearning of Russians for liberation.

1946 Czech-Australian impresario Edouard Borovansky choreographs Terra Australis,

Australia’s first native ballet.

French dance maker Roland Petit generated a post–World War II revival of his nation’s
ballet.

1948 Soloist Alicia Alonso and her husband and brother-in-law initiate the Cuban National
Ballet in Havana.

George Balanchine co-forms the New York City Ballet, the premiere U.S. company.

1950 For choreographer George Balanchine, costumer Barbara Karinska replaces the pancake
tutu with the wireless powder puff tutu.

Leon Wojcikowski opens a ballet school in Warsaw on the model of imperial Russian
academies.

1951 Creole ballerina Janet Collins becomes the first black dancer with the Metropolitan
Opera Ballet.

1952 Choreographer Dulcie Howes initiates creative dance at Cape Town with Vlei Legend
(1952), the first South African ballet.
 In Mexico City, arts scholar Amalia Hernández Navarro pioneers Mesoamerican dance
for the Mexican Folkloric Ballet.

1953 The Bolshoi makes its first post-Soviet tour of the United States.

1956 Joan and Rudolf Benesh introduce a physical movement coding system in An
Introduction to Benesh Dance Notation.

1958 English choreographer Frederick Ashton reclaims the story ballet tradition with Ondine.

The Paris Opera becomes the first non-Russian troupe to perform at Moscow’s Bolshoi
Theatre following World War II.

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater debuts with Blues Suite, based on the African
American diaspora in North America.

1959 Cuban rebel Fidel Castro grants $200,000 to subsidize Alicia Alonso’s dance school.

1960 Ailey’s Revelations, the era’s most popular U.S. ballet, identifies black religion as a
source of spirituals and blues.

The Bolshoi hosts Maria Tallchief, the first American soloist with the Russian company.

1961 Rudolf Nureyev defects from the Soviet Union to the West.

John Cranko, founding director of the Stuttgart Ballet, energizes German dance.

1962 Choreographer Glen Tetley fuses ballet to mime and gymnastics for Pierrot Lunaire
(1962), a popular hybrid dance for the Joffrey Ballet.

Also for the Joffrey, Alvin Ailey choreographs Feast of Ashes (1962), a first pointe
dance for modern ballet.

1963 Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev electrify viewers at Covent Garden with the
passionate pas de deux of Marguerite and Armand.

Dance coaches Ellen Virginia Williams and Sydney Leonard establish the Boston Ballet.

Scots choreographer Peter Darrell designs Mods and Rockers (1963), the first ballet set
to Beatles music.

1964 The Guangzhou Ballet premieres The Red Detachment of Women, for which dancers
study sword fighting in army camps.

1965 South African choreographer John Cranko adapts Alexander Pushkin’s novel Eugene
Onegin for the Stuttgart ballet.

1966 To foster Communist influence in Egypt, Bolshoi artistic director Leonid Lavrovsky
guides the neophyte Cairo Opera Ballet in a presentation of The Fountain of
Bakhchisarai.
1967 Armenians Nejad and Haideh Ahmadzadeh found the Iranian National Ballet.

1970 Natalia Makarova defects from the Soviet Union to London.

Ukrainian instructor Serge Lifar introduces the Cairo Opera Ballet to neoclassic style.

1972 Judith Jamison initiates feminist ballet with Alvin Ailey’s Cry.

1973 The Cairo Opera ballet performs the first Egyptian dance, Abdel Kamel’s nationalistic El
Somoud (Steadfastness).

Twyla Tharp’s hip Deuce Coupe fuses ballet with modernism, a breakthrough in the
history of concert dance.

1974 Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo initiates satiric drag ballet in New York City.

Mikhail Baryshnikov flees from KGB control to freedom in Toronto.

1976 The juvenile company of the Cairo Opera Ballet wins a gold medal at a competition in
Yugoslavia.

1977 Rogue choreographer Boris Eifman forms the Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg, Russia.

1979 Under the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, fundamentalist Muslims outlaw the Iranian
National Ballet.

1980 Dancer Peter Mallek returns Austrian ballet to classical tradition by creating the Vienna
Festival Ballet.

1984 The Reverend Sun Myung Moon, head of the Unification Church, funds a Kirov
Academy of Ballet in Washington, D.C.

1985 The Alvin Ailey ensemble becomes the first U.S.-sponsored ballet to perform in China.

1986 The Tokyo Ballet achieves a world first by debuting Maurice Béjart’s The Kabuki, an
amalgam of Japanese theater and conventional ballet steps set to the original score of
Toshiro Mayuzumi.

1987 In Lausanne, Switzerland, Maurice Béjart forms Béjart Ballet, a leading contemporary
company.

1989 Under glasnost, the Kirov Ballet reinstates George Balanchine’s works in Russia.

The English National Ballet survives as the nation’s only classical ensemble.

Judith Jamison, dancer-choreographer of the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre, becomes the
first African American female director of a modern ballet company.

1990 The Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv establishes an Israeli youth company,
Batsheva Ensemble.
1994 English choreographer Matthew Bourne’s homoerotic Swan Lake sets attendance records
for ballet.

1999 In Sweden, dance master Nima Kiann revives the Iranian ballet under the title Les
Ballets Persans.

2002 After twenty-three years of censorship, the New Iranian National Ballet debuts in
Stockholm.

2007 Xing Jin’s memoir Shanghai Tango (2007) describes how a Korean colonel in the
People’s Army seeks China’s first gender-change operation before she becomes a prima
transsexual with the Shanghai Ballet.

2008 Cape Town City Ballet instructor Andrew Warth organizes the world’s largest ballet
class, consisting of 989 dancers.

2011 David Hallberg of South Dakota becomes the first American hired by the Bolshoi Ballet.

2012 Director Twyla Tharp revives Victorian Gothic narrative ballet with The Princess and
the Goblin.

2014 In a U.S. tour, Arabesque Vietnam performs choreographer Nguyen Tan Loc’s Suong
Som (The Mist) honoring the nation’s agrarian heritage.

The Mark Morris Dance Company reprises the conventions of mythic opéra-ballet with a
Lincoln Center production of Acis and Galatea.

2015 Sergei Polunin’s Internet masterpiece “Take Me to Church” arouses debate over
athleticism in ballet.
 • A •
AILEY, ALVIN (1931–1989)
The pioneer of eclectic multinational ballet, actor-dancer Alvin Ailey negated the racist
notion that black performers were incapable of disciplined ensemble presentations. The
son of Alvin Ailey and Lula Elizabeth Cliff of Rogers, Texas, he was born in a cabin in the
Brazos Valley on January 5, 1931, and weaned on milk and cornbread. He lived in
Wharton and Navasota at the height of the Great Depression, when his teenaged mother
found work picking cotton, taking in laundry, and earning three dollars a week cleaning
houses, where she lived in servants’ quarters. After an old white man raped Lula Ailey in
1936, Alvin feared white males.
An interweaving of slave sorrow songs, Southern Baptist gospel sermons, gymnastics,
and jukebox jive from the Dew Drop Inn fed Ailey’s musical bent, which his mother
scorned. In 1942, he and Lula lived in Los Angeles, where he entered the predominantly
white student body of Thomas Jefferson High School. While working in the Lockheed
aircraft factory, his mother reared him alone and migrated frequently to other jobs. In
1945, she married Fred Cooper, a sailor based at Oxnard.
Resettling in a black neighborhood eased Ailey’s terror of whites. In high school, he
thrilled to a performance of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and briefly took classes
under Katherine Dunham. Friendship with dancers Carmen De Lavallade and James
Truitte in 1949 introduced Ailey to ballet instructor Lester Horton, a choreographer for
stage and film and the teacher of ballerina Carmen De Lavallade. Horton’s blend of
international dance elements from Indonesia, Japan, the Caribbean, and Native Americans
produced a holistic style requiring anatomical strength and agility and idiosyncratic eye
and limb movements derived from the global experience with dance.
Entry-Level Dance
At UCLA and Los Angeles City College, Ailey studied Romance languages and black and
southern literature and began a lengthy affair with socialist David McReynolds. In
partnership with Maya Angelou, in San Francisco in 1951, Ailey formulated a nightclub
act, “Al and Rita,” the preface to dance opportunities at the New Orleans Champagne
Supper Club, where he also waited tables. Returning to California, he made a cinema
debut in Lydia Bailey (1952). Set on a career in ballet, he joined the Horton Dance
Company and performed in Revue Le Bal Caribe (1953) and the film Carmen Jones
(1954), choreographed by Herbert Ross.
Horton’s death from a heart attack on November 2, 1953, gave a serendipitous turn to
Ailey’s career. Lacking direction, the Horton ensemble accepted Ailey’s supervision of a
memorial dance to their mentor, starring De Lavallade and Truitte. Within months, Ailey,
De Lavallade, and Geoffrey Holder appeared on Broadway in Harold Arlen and Truman
Capote’s Haitian musical House of Flowers (1954), which featured steel pan rhythms from
Tobago and Trinidad. Ailey also sampled television with his troupe, who danced Party at
Ciro’s (1954).
 During the Black Cultural Renaissance, Ailey performed opposite the era’s stars—
Diahann Carroll, Pearl Bailey, Harry Belafonte—in the failed musical Sing, Man, Sing
(1956), as actor-dancer in an off-Broadway production of Show Boat, and as lead dancer
opposite Crystine Lawson in Jamaica (1957), starring Lena Horne and Ricardo
Montalban. As Ailey developed a unique balletic theory, he rejected the sweep of Martha
Graham’s technique and, in 1958, pioneered ethnic breakthroughs for his ensemble, the
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT).
The Ailey Troupe
The historic AAADT premiered on March 30, 1958, in Blues Suite, which exploited the
theme of the African experience in the Western Hemisphere. More focused on the racist
South, Ailey’s Revelations (1960) identified black religion as a source of spirituals and
blues. A three-part opus for ten dancers, the ballet featured the abasement and soulful
yearning of the abducted African in “Pilgrim of Sorrow” through the bending of necks and
dragging of steps. With simple props—fans, umbrella, stools, folded length of silk—part
two, “Take Me to the Water,” transported downtrodden slaves with the holy joy of
baptism. The finale, “Move Members, Move,” pronounced the death of bondage through
fundamentalism, a unity expressed in corps de ballet kinetics representing faith.
Revelations became the era’s most popular ballet and a feature of a U.S. tour to Southeast
Asia and Australia.
Ailey recognized the importance of variety and challenge to art by starring in the play
Call Me by My Rightful Name (1961), teaming with De Lavallade in the sultry Roots of the
Blues (1961), and touring Russia for the U.S. State Department in 1962. In Lisbon, the
company restaged a novel of Garcia Lorca as Feast of Ashes (1962) and premiered Congo
Tango Palace (1965) in Africa and Europe, the debut tour of Judith Jamison. Ailey
designed Ariadne (1965) for star Maria Tallchief and Macumba (1966), a carnival ballet
that he researched in Bahia, Brazil, for the Harkness Ballet’s performance in Barcelona.
At the Edinburgh Festival, the AAADT presented Quintet (1968), which parodied the
Supremes. Ailey featured Jamison in Masekela Language (1969), a poignant, despairing
drama set in a saloon. In 1970, Ailey’s dance company launched a U.S. State Department
tour to Greece, Iran, Soviet Russia, and North Africa to perform Revelations, which turned
audiences into participants with syncopated clapping and sing-alongs. In response, Ailey
enlarged the production into concert dance, which entertained attendees at the 1977
inauguration of President Jimmy Carter.
Ailey accepted a commission from the American Ballet Theatre to choreograph the
tunes of Duke Ellington. Their synergy yielded The River (1970), which featured Cynthia
Gregory, Sallie Wilson, and Marcos Paredes in combinations suggesting birth, death, and
rebirth symbolized by cascades, streams, and ocean tides. In 1971, Ailey choreographed
the Leonard Bernstein Mass for its Kennedy Center debut. The ballet master designed
Mingus Dances for the Robert Joffrey ensemble, followed by the staging of marijuana and
heroin indulgence for Shaken Angels (1972), presented at the 10th New York Dance
Festival.
Ailey’s Stardom
At the pinnacle of success, Ailey created Cry (1971), a gynocentric anthem set to gospel
music and jazz and featuring Jamison as a paradigm of female strength and endurance.
The public embrace of Jamison’s barefoot, skirt-whirling portrayal prefaced Ailey’s
mirrored teaming of Russian dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov with Jamison in Pas de Duke
(1976) a flirtatious piece d’occasion staged for a fund raiser. For the duo, Ailey patterned
a series of flowing bourrées and attitudes en tournant sparsely punctuated with clean
petits battements veneered with a slick jazz grace.
The kudos of critics and audiences earned the AAADT higher ticket sales than any
other U.S. troupe. To ensure continuity, he combed public schools for young talent for
Ailey II, his junior company. The choreographer’s final years won him a 1975 Dance
Magazine citation, 1977 Springarn Medal, and the 1979 Capezio Award, which followed
the premiere of Memoria (1979), a threnody for a friend set to the piano music of Keith
Jarrett. Ailey’s celebrity preceded a series of financial miscalculations, alcohol and
cocaine addiction, arrest for breaking and entering, and disability from weight gain and
arthritis.
In 1983, the director originated Precipice, an introspective study of stardom for the
Paris Opera Ballet set to works by Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. In 1985, the AAADT
became the first U.S.-sponsored modern dance company to perform in China, a tour
preceding Ailey’s receipt of the 1987 American Dance Festival Award. He and his
company returned to television for A Duke Named Ellington (1988), Kennedy Center
Honors (1988), and a Bill Cosby salute in 1989.
After Ailey’s death on December 1, 1989, from terminal blood and marrow disease
brought on by AIDS, his fame and influence continued to shape world arts, including a
PBS presentation of a jam session in “For Bird—With Love” (1991), a tribute to musician
Charlie Parker featuring compositions by Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, and Jerome Kern.
The iconic Revelations graced stages in seventy-one countries to the delight of millions,
encompassing a 1993 open-air performance in New York’s Central Park, the 1996
Olympics Arts Festival in Atlanta, the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, the 2005
invitational to the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, and the 2009 inauguration of
President Barack Obama.
See also De Lavallade, Carmen; Jamison, Judith.
Source: DeFrantz, Thomas F. Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of
African American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
ALONSO, ALICIA (1921–)
A proponent of Cuban culture, Alicia Alonso Martínez coached a generation of island
dancers by co-establishing the Ballet Nacional de Cuba. The daughter of military
veterinarian Antonio Martinez de Arredondo and Ernestina Hoyo, she was born on
December 21, 1921, in an exclusive section of Havana. During her father’s deployment to
Spain in 1929, at her grandfather’s insistence, she learned flamenco with castanets and
studied at the Ballet School of the Sociedad Pro Arte Musical under Bolshoi-trained
instructor Sofia Fedorova.
 By age nine, Alonso debuted in The Sleeping Beauty as the Bluebird in beaked
headdress, feathery tunic, and wings made by Ernestina. In her mid-teens, Alicia’s older
brother Antonio introduced her to Cuban dancer Fernando Alonso, whom she wed in
1937. She debuted in the United States in two musical comedies, Great Lady (1938) and
Stars in Your Eyes (1938), and joined George Balanchine’s Ballet Caravan. For her
homeland, she created Dioné (1940), the first production to Cuban music, scored by
Eduardo Sánchez de Fuentes and featuring Alicia and Fernando.
The couple, along with Fernando’s brother, choreographer Alberto Alonso, immigrated
to Manhattan in 1940 to study with Michel Fokine, Léonide Massine, Bronislava Nijinska,
Antony Tudor, Jerome Robbins, and Agnes de Mille. Apart and together, Fernando and
Alicia performed works of the classical canon with the American Ballet Theatre. After the
birth of daughter Laura, the couple separated to pursue career opportunities, Fernando
with the Mordkin Ballet Company and Alicia to study in London with Vera Volkova, a
Russian defector and instructor at the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School.
A Disabled Dancer
In 1941, Alonso incurred a detached retina in her right eye. Throughout a two-year
recovery from four eye surgeries, she lay heavily bandaged and immobile at Columbia
Presbyterian Hospital and bedfast at home for months. She continued to practice
combinations with her feet and hands. With finger modeling, Fernando coached her to
visualize the lead roles in Giselle and Carmen. Rehabilitation included daily practice at
the barre. On July 27, 1943, she survived a head blow from a shower of wood and glass
splinters from a patio door smashed by a hurricane while she tried to shield her Great
Dane and a litter of pups.
Relocated to New York, in 1943, Alonso filled in for ailing lead performer Alicia
Markova in Giselle, a role that earned critical applause from the New York Times. As a
soloist, Alonso added to her repertory Swan Lake, Antony Tudor’s Undertow (1943), and
Balanchine’s Theme and Variations (1947). She debuted as Lizzie Borden in Fall River
Legend (1948), created by Agnes de Mille. Staging of Alonso’s dramatic solos required
color-coded spotlights and cues from Ukrainian partner Igor Youskevitch to enhance her
limited peripheral vision. A boundary wire prevented falls from the apron of the stage.
On repatriation to Cuba in 1948, Alonso joined her husband in launching the Alicia
Alonso Ballet Company, forerunner of Cuba’s national ensemble. While Fernando
directed productions of Swan Lake, Les Sylphides, Coppélia, Fiesta Negra, and A Voyage
to the Moon on South American tours, Alicia auditioned ballet masters from New York to
groom young members in classical execution and Latin vigor. Her constant travel included
a performance with the Washington Ballet in the Dominican Republic.
In 1952, Alonso gave the first performance in the U.S.S.R. by an American at the
Bolshoi and Kirov. She presented Giselle opposite Cyril Atanassof in 1953 at the Paris
Opera; appeared with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo; and toured Czechoslovakia, Italy,
Austria, and Asia. At Jacob’s Pillow in Becket, Massachusetts, in 1955, she partnered with
Danish star Erik Bruhn in Giselle. For her technically exacting style, Dance Magazine
conferred its 1958 award.
The Cuban Arts
The Alonso ballet academy closed in 1956 from lack of funds. In 1959, the rebel Fidel
Castro subsidized Alonso’s career with $200,000 to operate the Escuela Nacional de
Ballet, which opened the year following the Cuban Revolution. Alonso’s allegiance to
Cuban Communism diminished her global renown in democratic countries, but did not
lessen the pleasure of Latvians in her 1960 comic performance as Swanhilde in Coppélia.
The French continued to extol her work in 1966 with a Grand Prix de la Ville and Anna
Pavlova citations.
Still touring with Carmen in 1967, Alonso executed turns and combinations with a fiery
seductive allure unlike the maidenly bourées in Giselle. Upon her separation from
Fernando in 1974, she rebutted his claim to the title of “Father of Cuban Ballet.” To the
surprise of her grandson, Iván Monreal, she eloped with Pedro Simón, critic and director
of the journal Cuba en el Ballet.
Alonso led the Cuban ensemble in Canada, Puerto Rico, and Vietnam and danced
Spartacus for U.S. audiences in 1975. Her presentation of Swan Lake in 1990 at the
Metropolitan Opera House renewed a bond with U.S. audiences. In San Francisco, the
Cuban National Ballet appeared in the premiere of Middle of the Sunset (1995) and in
presentations of her original program Farfalia (Butterfly) that preceded her retirement
from dance.
The 1990s brought recognition from France, Mexico, Panama, the Dominican Republic,
and Spain, including an honorary doctorate for her establishment of the annual global
ballet festival held at the Gran Teatro de la Habana. Residing part time in Madrid and
Havana, she continues to judge competitions in Japan, Brazil, Bulgaria, Russia, and the
United States and mentors neophyte dancers, who find places in England’s Royal Ballet
and U.S. ensembles. For propagating classical ballet, UNESCO awarded her the 1999
Pablo Picasso Medal and, in 2002, named her a goodwill ambassador of culture.
Source: Roca, Octavio. Cuban Ballet. Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 2010.
AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE
A pioneer of North American stage artistry, the American Ballet Theatre (ABT) maintains
U.S. primacy in world dance. A work in progress, the company derived its basis from
Russian defector Mikhail Mordkin, a Bolshoi academy graduate. With funding from
dancer Lucia Chase, the fairy godmother of American ballet, Mordkin formed the parent
ensemble, Mordkin Ballet, in 1937, featuring seventeen-year-old soloist Lila Zali, an
escapee from Georgia. Another Russian defector, Meis Zlatin, conducted the orchestra.
Chase joined scheduler Richard Pleasant in managing the first rocky years. In the
company’s infancy, Ballets Russes veteran Alicia Markova danced prominent ABT roles.
After the company premiered at Radio City on January 11, 1940, the dancers tackled
Jardin au Lilas (Lily Garden), Dark Elegies, and The Great American Goof, with sardonic
libretto by William Saroyan. Life magazine featured the February 1940 debut of Voices of
Spring and the fouettés, cabrioles, and pointe work of Nana Gollner, who overcame
paralytic polio.
ABT under Tudor
In 1940, Antony Tudor left England to serve ABT as resident choreographer for a decade.
He fostered the performance of founding ABT member Patricia Bowman in Swan Lake
and Les Sylphides and mounted works by Agnes de Mille, George Balanchine, Eugene
Loring, and Léonide Massine. During the 1941–1942 season at the Metropolitan Opera
House, the heady days of cast formation elevated Xenia Petrova for her exotic appearance.
Tudor showcased Annabelle Lyon and Anton Dolin in Giselle and staged exciting
premieres—an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet and Michel Fokine’s Bluebeard (1941) and
Helen of Troy (1942), Nora Kaye in Pillar of Fire (1942) and Dim Lustre (1943), and
André Eglevsky and Rosella Hightower in Mam’zelle Angot (1943). Throughout the early
1940s, the ABT mastered story ballets and overtly American choreographies, including de
Mille’s Rodeo (1942) and Jerome Robbins’s Fancy Free (1944), which staged a sailor’s
balletic hornpipe to the music of Leonard Bernstein. In peacetime, the ensemble began
building its corps de ballet to support guest stars and promising recruits for tours of the
Americas, Asia, and Europe sponsored by the U.S. State Department.
Quality remained high with Cuban ballerina Alicia Alonso in Undertow (1945) and
Jerome Robbins and Annabelle Lyon teaming in Summer Day (1947) to Sergei
Prokofiev’s Music for Children. Dancer John Kriza supplied character dance for the
hybrid classical-vernacular steps of Interplay (1945) and for the minister in de Mille’s Fall
River Legend (1948), the tale of a double ax murder. Media headlines acclaimed Danish
danseur noble Erik Bruhn and Markova in the 1955 presentation of Giselle.
Maintaining Standards
Wise acquisitions built the ABT reputation for tasteful, technically sharp programs. The
1960 presentation of Swedish choreographer Birgit Cullberg’s Lady from the Sea preceded
Robbins’s Les Noces (The Wedding), a massive 1965 production that required thirty-six
singers and twenty-five dancers. After a tour of Alaska and Hawaii, the troupe introduced
Glen Tetley’s Ricercare (Etude, 1966).
Another influx of major talent in the 1960s strengthened ABT with the partnering of
Carla Fracci and Erik Bruhn and the dancing of Eleonor D’Antuono, Edward Verso,
Gelsey Kirkland, and Cynthia Gregory, the partner of Cuban-American star Fernando
Bujones in La Sylphide and Coppélia. Set designer Oliver Smith, a veteran of thirty works
for ABT, readied the stage for the 1967 performance of Swan Lake, the first in North
America, starring Cynthia Gregory. The live PBS telecast of Swan Lake featured Russian
principal Natalia Makarova, a defector from the Kirov.
By commissioning ballets from leading artists, ABT flourished with Eliot Feld’s
Harbinger (1967) and At Midnight (1967), Dennis Nahat’s Brahms Quintet (1969), Alvin
Ailey’s The River (1970), Tudor’s The Leaves Are Fading (1975) and Other Dances
(1976), Glen Tetley’s Sphinx (1977), and Twyla Tharp’s Push Comes to Shove (1976), a
vehicle for Russo-Latvian soloist Mikhail Baryshnikov as the sleazy skirt chaser. Another
television coup for ballet, Baryshnikov starred with Gelsey Kirkland in The Nutcracker, a
popular 1977 performance in reruns and on DVD. The weighty season lineups earned
ABT the title of official Kennedy Center ballet.
After Chase’s retirement in 1980, Baryshnikov, the new director, instituted rigorous
Russian barre work and anchored the ABT repertoire in classics, including Raymonda,
Cinderella, The Sleeping Beauty, Romeo and Juliet, and the first full-length American
staging of La Bayadère (The Temple Dancer). Chase starred in Le Fils Prodigue (The
Prodigal Son) in 1980 and commissioned Tharp to compose Sinatra Suite (1984) and
Bum’s Rush (1989). Baryshnikov fostered youth, notably, Susan Jaffe, Keith Roberts,
Cynthia Harvey, Italian prima ballerina Alessandra Ferri, and Bujones, at age nineteen the
world’s youngest principal dancer.
At the fiftieth anniversary in 1990, momentum kept ABT solvent and popular for a
West Coast tour of Clark Tippet’s Rigaudon, Frederick Ashton’s Birthday Offering, and de
Mille’s The Informer, a reflection of Irish nationalism in the 1910s and 1920s. Early on,
Spanish virtuoso Ángel Corella made his mark with Theme and Variations (1995), a part
originated by Igor Youskevitch. ABT director Kevin McKenzie contributed to the Emmy-
winning Le Corsaire (The Pirate, 1998), broadcast by PBS. Tharp added to the repertoire
How Near Heaven (1995), featuring costumes by Gianni Versace. The millennium
concluded with the historical romance Anastasia (1999), an identity mystery based on the
murder of the last Romanov tsar and his family.
In 2004, the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School began producing qualified trainees for
ABT. The ensemble’s inspired casting earned raves for Julio Bocca partnering Ferri in a
2006 staging of Manon. After a lengthy hiatus, in 2014, the ABT hired its second
choreographer in residence, Alexei Ratmansky, former director of the Bolshoi. The
multinational troupe displayed virtuoso performances from Argentinians Herman Cornejo
and Paloma Herrera, Brazilian Marcelo Gomes, South Korean Hee Seo, Cuban Xiomara
Reyes, Italian Roberto Bolle, and five Russians along with five Americans. In summer
2014, ABT celebrated Shakespeare with The Tempest and The Dream, a compressed
version of the forest fantasy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
See also Baryshnikov, Mikhail; De Mille, Agnes; photography, ballet in.
Source: Cubberley, William, and Joseph Carman, eds. Round about the Ballet. Pompton
Plains, NJ: Limelight, 2004.
ANACREONTIC BALLET
A neoclassic focus of late eighteenth-century dance, Anacreontic ballet foregrounded
scenarios with pastoral elements and uncomplicated rural ideals. The term derived from
the early fifth century BCE lyric poet Anacreon, who wrote Bacchic court odes for his
patron, Polycrates of Samos. Dance idylls based on Greek principles featured multiple
tableaux, allegorical themes, frolicsome action, and balanced boy-girl matches. Characters
with such stereotypical names as Eros, Flora, Zephyr, and Columbine pantomimed wooing
scenes in ferny bowers and by fountains and springs. Costumes mimicked classical chitons
and tunics, but incorporated parasols, folding fans, and other anachronistic ornaments.
 In a monograph, Lettres sur la Dance, et sur les Ballets (Letters on Dance and Ballet,
1756), dance reformer Jean-Georges Noverre justified stripping court ballet of its
pompous wigs, masks, and high-heeled pumps. In their place, his arcadian pantomime, Les
Caprices de Galathée (Galathea’s Fantasies, 1757), with Marie Guimard as prima
ballerina, presented leopard pelts and tree bark as sources of realistic costumes for bucolic
characters. At the King’s Theatre in London, Noverre taught Venetian dancer Giovanna
Baccelli emotive, pictorial mimodrama based on stereotypical female dalliance and
deceptions of love.
Anacreontic presentations offered little suspense. In Bordeaux, Pierre Stapleton debuted
Tout Cède à l’Amour (All Yields to Love, 1781). Four years later, Jean Dauberval
presented his model, Le Bonheur Est d’Aimer (Happiness Is Being in Love, 1785). The
1791–1792 season in London at Drury Lane advertised the demi-caractère (melodramatic)
ballets La Fontaine d’Amour (The Fountain of Love) and Satyre, starring James Harvey
D’Egville, an English dancer who frequently took such classical roles as Hercules, Jupiter,
Agamemnon, Caractacus, Roman patricians, and fauns. At Lyons, Gallo-Swedish
choreographer Charles Didelot premiered L’Amour Vengé, ou La Métamorphose (Love
Avenged, or The Transformation, 1796), a touch of magic common to Anacreontic libretti.
In England, as fairy tales of romantic ballet began replacing myth as sources of classical
dance, choreographer Henry Rowley Bishop proposed a conclusion to the Anacreontic era
with his ballet Narcisse et les Grâces (Narcissus and the Graces, 1805), performed at the
Haymarket Theatre to harp and piano accompaniment. His presentation coincided with a
performance of French dance master Bernardin de St. Pierre’s Cupid’s Revenge or The
Hunting Nymphs in Dublin’s Crow Street Theatre. Despite Bishop’s belief that Greek-style
pantomime was passé, more classic models graced the stage, including Jean Coralli’s La
Statua di Venere (The Statue of Venus, 1825), D’Egville’s La Naissance de Venus (Birth of
Venus, 1826), and, at La Scala, Salvatore Taglioni’s Pelius and Miletus (1827), which
blessed true mating with sculpted columns and the stage apotheosis of Venus.
In a dance manual, The Code of Terpsichore (1828), ballet master Carlo Blasis reflected
on the simplicity of Anacreontic ballet as a contrast to more complex styles of dance
design. At century’s end, Marius Petipa returned to the genre with Le Réveil de Flore
(Flora’s Awakening, 1894). Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes reprised bucolic ideals with
Les Tentations de la Bergère (The Temptations of a Shepherdess, 1924), a one-on-one
contrast between peasant wooing and aristocratic courtship.
At Boston’s Citi Shubert Theater in May 2014, the Mark Morris Dance Company
reprised a favorite myth, Acis and Galatea (2014). A dramatic serenade drawn from
Ovid’s Metamorphosis and set to the music of Georg Friedrich Handel, the two-hour
presentation employed Isaac Mizrahi’s ferny chitons and dappled backdrops to enhance a
forest setting. Geometric enchaînements retained the structuring of early court dance and
filled the opera-ballet with an effusive tribute to dance as a primal human art appreciated
by listening with the eyes.
See also Noverre, Jean Georges; opera-ballet.
 Source: Chazin-Bennahum, Judith. The Lure of Perfection: Fashion and Ballet, 1780–
1830. New York: Routledge, 2005.
APSARA DANCE
The sacred Khmer court dance of Cambodia, Apsara mimes sixty examples of epic verse
and Hindu prayer and mythology. Similar in nature and source to Thai and Lao theater
dance, Apsara stylizes costumes and fifteen hundred attitudes and finger and hand
gestures. The dance relates character roles—nobles, mermaids, nymphs, soldiers, ogres—
that portray episodes of the Hindu epic Ramayana (ca. 400 BCE). Moving in unison,
dancers perform for dual reasons—to entertain royalty and to petition the gods for the
health, safety, and prosperity of Cambodians.
To the tones of gongs; oboes; flutes; drums; finger cymbals; clappers; and bamboo,
teak, or brass xylophones, the Royal Ballet of Cambodia sinks into plié for deft side-to-
side movements. The troupe performs on a stereotypical setting reminiscent of the altar in
the orchestra (dancing place) of the classical Greek theater. A low platform serves the
physical needs of the scenario, whether table, bed, apartment, or throne. Props such as
fans, gift bouquets, swords, bows, and clubs contribute verisimilitude. With a crystal ball,
the sea goddess Manimekhala prophesies the approach of the makara, a water monster
that is part fish and part land animal.
Original Apsara
Cambodian ballet had its beginning in the religious dance of India. After 802 CE, King
Jayavarman II, founder of the Angkor Empire, established court presentations. Both
courtiers’ children and likely candidates from all parts of Cambodia trained from age
seven to honor the Khmer New Year and the birthdays, weddings, and funerals of kings.
For the good of the people, performances fostered righteousness and right thinking.
For six centuries, Apsara presentations took place at temples, sometimes lasting all
night. From 1171, King Jayavarman VII promoted dance by supporting a host of four
thousand dancers. After Thais sacked Angkor Wat and destroyed the Khmer Empire in
1431, the invaders abducted an entire ballet company to Siam.
Apsara after the Mid-1800s
Apsara dance came to world attention in the nineteenth century, when the French made
Cambodia a protectorate. In collaboration with Siamese choreographers and performers,
stage presentation underwent restructuring in the 1860s under the direction of King Ang
Duong. At the 1906 Colonial Exposition in Marseilles, French ambassador George Bois
showcased the court company of Sisowath I, son of Ang Duong.
Late in the nineteenth century, Indochinese scholar George Groslier hybridized heritage
dances with scenarios he derived from the bas-reliefs carved on Angkor Wat. French artist
Auguste Rodin sketched one hundred fifty views of the dancers, whose poses he compared
to classic Greek art. In 1939, Russo-Ukrainian dancer Serge Lifar, in flight from World
War II and the closing of the Paris Opera Ballet, sojourned in Bali and Indonesia, where
Apsara dance influenced his future choreography. A Broadway version of Asian costume
and style, “The Small House of Uncle Thomas” expressed East-West misunderstandings in
Jerome Robbins’s choreography of The King and I (1951).
In 1955, Queen Sisowath Kossamak added male monkey dancers to all-female
companies. She also compressed story ballets to one-hour reenactments for presentation to
state guests at the Silver Pagoda and Throne Hall of the Royal Palace and at Wat Phnom, a
sanctuary of the Buddha founded in 1373. Central to the fantasy, wings, tails, epaulettes,
metal belts and collars, spired crowns, anklets, armbands, and bracelets coordinated with
sarongs and sampans (wrapped trousers), crisscrossed banners, and shawls coated in
beading and sequins, costumes worn by the queen’s granddaughter, Princess Bopha Devi.
Survival of Apsara
Under communist dictator Pol Pot, in the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge exiled the court and
closed the University of Fine Arts. Thugs seized, tortured, starved, and murdered an
alleged three million citizens, many of them intellectuals and artists. Some 90 percent of
the trained temple performers died in the slaughter. Ironically, during the Asian mayhem,
choreographer Alvin Ailey imported Apsara conventions to Revelations (1970), a
universal anthem to spirituality that employed a length of silk as a symbolic baptism pool.
After Vietnamese insurgents overthrew the Communist regime on January 7, 1979,
refugees reunited. During the shutdown, choreographer Peter Darrell, director of the
Scottish Ballet, recognized Thai specialties in Apsaras (1974), performed in Cork, Ireland,
to the music of Jules Massenet’s Le Roi de Lahore (King of Lahore, 1877), a medieval tale
of unrequited love and the reunion of two souls in the afterlife.
To lift spirits, in 1980, the surviving seventeen temple performers and young
apprentices, including leader Bopha Devi and choreographer Sophilene Cheam Shapiro,
reclaimed classical dance for presentation at the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom
Penh. The first public performance in 1995 took place at Angkor Wat. Symbolism shifted
from traditional antipathies between sea and thunder to the political face-off between
Communism and capitalism.
Into the twenty-first century, Cambodian troupes of forty dancers toured the country.
Amateur companies offered classical dance at restaurants, dinner theaters, and hotels in
Phnom Penh and the resort city of Siem Reap. In 2003, representatives of the United
Nations identified Apsara dance as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, a recognition
the ballet shares with the Khmer Shadow Theatre. In May 2006, Sophiline Shapiro
received the Nikkei Asia Prize for her contributions to Asian culture and for adapting to
Apsara dance William Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s
opera The Magic Flute.
See also worship dance.
Source: Burridge, Stephanie, and Fred Frumberg. Beyond the Apsara: Celebrating
Dance in Cambodia. New York: Routledge, 2010.
ARABESQUE VIETNAM
For more than two decades, Arabesque Vietnam (AV), Hanoi’s first dance troupe, has
coordinated contemporary ballet artistry with lighting, props, drifting smoke, and sound to
create atmospheric dance. Professional trainers introduced young and mature clients to
workshops and barre exercises focused on classic steps and body toning. Visiting dancers
from Sri Lanka and Korea expanded the ensemble’s perceptions of world dance and
encouraged the mounting of To (Two) and Moc (Simplicity, 2011), a layered performance
of orchestral strains, bars of light, and a shower of confetti.
Directed by visionary actor-choreographer Nguyen Tan Loc, a graduate of the Fujisato
Ballet School in Tokyo, AV employs dancers with backgrounds in fitness, disc jockeying,
puppetry, modeling, beauty pageants, circus, opera, symphony, and dance coaching.
Arabesque Vietnam has staged live advertising for such firms as Salvatore Ferragamo and
Toyota and toured East Asia, Washington, D.C., and St. Louis, Missouri. In September
2009, Arabesque Vietnam premiered Wish—Story of the Shoes, which featured partnering
and corps de ballet movement amid atmospheric smoke.
Recognition from within and without the dance microcosm has rewarded the ensemble
for spirituality and precision. In 2012, Kiev-trained ballerina Ngo Thuy To Nhu achieved
the title of Meritorious Artist from Vietnam’s president, Truong Tan Sang. Other members,
choreographer Ngo Thanh Phuong and soloists Nguyen Huu Thuan and Do Thi Hai Anh,
won silver awards at the 2012 Korea International Modern Dance Competition.
For the 2013 International Dance Festival at the Ho Chi Minh City Opera House, AV
danced instinctive reactions in Intimacies and the narrative dance Tich Tac (Tick Tock), a
virtuoso athletic ballet introduced by the ticking of a clock, a symbol of the passage of
time in the life of a young ballerina. In staging a masterwork, Suong Som (The Mist),
premiered in seven acts at Saigon and Hanoi in December 2014, Arabesque Vietnam
honored the nation’s agrarian foundations and their rural heritage. The layering of tiny
lanterns, silk drapes, and sounds of the zither, flute, drum, and wood clappers enhanced
the tranquil arc of rice planting, cultivation, and husking, the cycle of East Asian life. The
choreography developed changes over time in national traditions and sensibilities,
concluding with a shower of rice, a token of plenty. On a tour of their ballet in Nagano and
Tokyo, Japan, the company starred Ngo Thuy To Nhu at the Taste of the World Culinary
Festival.
See also ballet music.
Source: Winterton, Bradley. “Arabesque’s The Mist—an Undeniable Masterpiece.”
Saigon Times (25 November 2013).
ARPINO, GERALD (1923–2008)
Populist dancer-choreographer Gerald “Gerry” Arpino stimulated ballet lovers with
traditional American values and revolutionary artistry. A New Yorker from Staten Island,
he was born Gennaro Peter Arpino on January 14, 1923, to Louis Arpino, an Italian
investor from Sorrento. After Louis died during the Great Depression, their Italian mother,
waitress Anna Arpino, reared Gerry with his older brothers Frank and Anthony and sisters
Jennie and Lena.
 Gerald learned ballroom dance from his siblings and attended nearby Wagner College
for a year. While serving on a Coast Guard frigate in 1942 in Cold Bay, Alaska, he
witnessed Russian folk dancing, the impetus to his career choice. He began taking ballet
lessons in Seattle from Mary Ann Wells, an eclectic practitioner of eurythmics and
visualized steps, and migrated to the American Ballet Center in New York. In his twenties,
he performed with the modern dance troupe of May O’Donnell, a disciple of Martha
Graham who also taught Ben Vereen and Robert Joffrey.
Company Choreographer
In 1956, Arpino joined Joffrey in establishing the Robert Joffrey Theatre Ballet and
adopted eclecticism as their performance model. After a debut of Ropes (1961) at a
YMHA, the six dancers toured eleven states by station wagon with funding by donor
Rebekah Harkness. Until retired by a back injury in 1963, Arpino served as principal
dancer and resident choreographer for tours to India, the Soviet Union, and the Middle
East.
Because Harkness assumed rights to the Joffrey repertoire and ensemble, Arpino and
Joffrey sought a Ford Foundation grant to begin a new company. While Joffrey taught
classes and managed the troupe, Arpino originated dances in varied genres, including the
homoerotic solo Olympics (1966), rock ballet Astarte (1967), nuclear protest work The
Clowns (1968), forest idyll Secret Places (1968), and youthful Confetti (1970),
accentuated with tambourines. Arpino’s Kettentanz (Chain Dance, 1971) set a high-
stepping corps de ballet to the Viennese dance tunes of Johann Strauss.
For their chutzpah, in 1974, Arpino received the Vaslav Nijinsky Medal and a Dance
Magazine award. Joffrey and Arpino’s selection of scores ranged from Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Vivaldi to Charles Ives, Victor Herbert, and Stephen Foster,
source of the score for Drums, Dreams and Banjos (1975). In a retreat from predictable
tunes, the gospel fervency of Touch Me (1977) released spiritual yearnings from a male
soloist.
Arpino commissioned works by Alvin Ailey, William Forsythe, and Twyla Tharp,
excerpted L’Air D’Espirit (1978) from Giselle, and revived classics by Léonide Massine,
Igor Stravinsky, Frederick Ashton, George Balanchine, Antony Tudor, Ruth Page, and
Kurt Jooss. For the company’s silver anniversary, celebrated at the Los Angeles Music
Center, Arpino designed Light Rain (1981), a bluesy, syncopated showpiece for the
juvenile ensemble.
During the AIDS epidemic, Arpino mounted Round of Angels (1983), an erotic, all-in-
white vehicle for partners Valerie Madonia and Daniel Baudendistel. The following year,
the city of San Antonio, Texas, invited Arpino to design a dance that encompassed the
city’s spirit. He obliged with Jamboree (1984), a romantic glimpse of Texas history, from
prairie settlers and cowboys to clogging and a passion play extolling the Virgin of
Guadalupe. The following year, Tom Bradley, the mayor of Los Angeles, made a similar
request that Arpino originate a ballet for the city.
Inevitable Changes
At his partner’s death from AIDS on March 25, 1988, Arpino continued directing the
Joffrey ensemble, earning a 1989 Tiffany Award for the performing arts. His lighting-and-
costume extravaganza, Two-A-Day (1989), designed for the White House, brought critical
scorn for glitzy extremes. He staged Billboards (1993) to a score by Prince in London’s
Royal Festival Hall, another failed work that elicited sneers from British critics.
During lean years in the 1990s, Arpino relocated to Chicago, for which he received a
Chicago Tribune Chicagoan of the Year 1995 citation and a 1996 distinguished service
honor from the Chicago Academy for the Arts. Cinema director Robert Altman featured
Arpino’s work in a biopic, The Company (2003). After months of illness with prostate
cancer, the choreographer died on October 29, 2008, leaving rights to his choreography to
the Gerald Arpino and Robert Joffrey Foundation.
See also Joffrey Ballet.
Source: Sawyers, June Skinner. Chicago Portraits: New Edition. Chicago:
Northwestern University Press, 2012.
ART, BALLET IN
Since the late Renaissance, the impression of toned carriage and effortless exertion has
influenced painting, prints, murals, and sculptures of dancers. As ballet companies
evolved professionalism in the 1600s, the delicate battements (beats) of the foot against
the ankle and floating leaps inspired artists to study dance for its symmetry, equilibrium,
and dynamism. Archived drawings of the ballets choreographed by Pierre Beauchamp and
staged by Inigo Jones glimpsed an evolving visual art based on setting and costumed
divertissements (entertainments), for example, the rayed tunic, headpiece, and shoes that
Louis XIV wore to epitomize Apollo, his role in Le Ballet Royale de la Nuit (The Royal
Ballet of the Night, 1653).
Early eighteenth-century French painter Jean Antoine Watteau envisioned ballet as a
study in harmonious costume—a ballerina’s shapely bodice over panniered skirts adjacent
to a partner’s masculine boots and knee breeches. In French Comedian (1720), the male
performer typified the dominance of men’s fashions with an embroidered tunic fitted with
layered sleeves and gathered cuffs. In 1755, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo depicted the
masculine jut of the knee as a contrast to the delicate lifting of the skirt in an impromptu
minuet at carnival time.
Gendered responses to ballet music echoed the structured male and female behaviors
demanded of genteel people both on and off stage. By the 1730s, Gallo-Belgian ballerina
Marie Camargo shortened her muslin skirts to reveal rapid battus (beats), which she
performed in thin, heelless slippers. Scandalous at first, the ankle-length ballet skirt gained
acceptance as a necessary adjunct to increasingly agile steps for female dancers. By 1856,
public acceptance of costuming inspired watercolorist Alfred Albert to capture the exotic
Greek and Turkish stage garments that Marius Petipa created for La Corsaire (The Pirate).
Since the late Renaissance, the impression of toned carriage and effortless exertion has influenced painting,
prints, murals, and sculptures of dancers, especially French impressionist Edgar Degas, who captured the
flurry of dancers before the footlights. Six Degas Ballet Dancers

French Impressionism
The master of balletic poses excluding the danseur, Edgar Degas scrutinized danseuses
from myriad perspectives, whether relaxed, rehearsing, or performing. His painting The
Dancing Class (1870) collected girls in white practice dresses and pink shoes during self-
absorbed study while awaiting the first notes of the violin. In 1871, Degas viewed the rapt
all-male orchestra at the gaslit staging of “Dance of the Dead Nuns” from Giacomo
Meyerbeer’s Gothic opera Robert le Diable, a success that occasioned five hundred
performances. Through the wings and trapdoors, ghosts of nuns emerged from a
tumbledown convent into moonlight under the direction of the mother superior Hélèna,
danced by diva Marie Taglioni. In contrast to Degas’s interest in juxtaposition, Auguste
Renoir’s The Dancer (1874) focused on the rounded sashed belly and girlish chest and
shoulders of a budding beauty. Because of her careful placement of feet in fourth position,
she seems more interested in becoming a dancer than developing into a woman.
 In the biographical painting The Dance Class (1874), Degas featured a diagonal array
of young females before the mirror in a variety of practice poses, an assemblage that
celebrates emerging womanhood for its miscellany. Opposite the girls, Jules-Joseph
Perrot, the Russian Imperial ballet master, then aged sixty-four, leaned on his staff in
contrast to the bumptious activity of students. Advancing to the stage, Degas painted The
Rehearsal (1874) and Before the Ballet (1890), more complex perusals of individuality in
girls dressed alike, yet responding differently to preparation for a performance,
specifically keeping feet in fifth position even at rest.
Degas used color to impart the inclusion of the danseuse in the shadowy morality of the
demi-mondaine. An impressionistic glimpse of footlights revealing the pleats of a stage
costume, Fin d’Arabesque (End of an Arabesque, 1877) contrasts the performer’s elevated
arms and leg with the insouciance of dancers at rest in the background. Similarly lighted,
Ballet Dancers on the Stage implies an exploitation of light on performers, who seem
unaware of the visual grotesquerie or the plunge of their reputation from artists to bordello
fare.
In each of the canvases, Degas characterized an enigma—the variety of attitudes and
motions that preceded precise patterned movements, a dominant theme of Paul Fischer’s
oil painting of Danish pupils in The Ballet Studio (1889). Degas strayed from gauzy white
skirts to primary reds, yellows, and blues for La Danse Grecque (The Greek Dance, 1885),
Dancers in Blue (1890), The Red Ballet Skirts (1895), Two Dancers Resting (1898), Two
Blue Dancers (1899), and Three Dancers (1903). The canvases maintained his
concentration on a variety of bends and stretches, a subtle desexualization of body
mechanics. Unlike the post-impressionist frenzies of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Moulin
Rouge poses of the 1890s, Degas immersed his pictures in physical discipline far removed
from the impudent vulgarity of the cancan. His bronzes from the 1920s turned from studio
warm-ups to the intense single-mindedness of dancers whose musculature displayed the
aligning of head, shoulders, hips, and feet.
Modernism
The twentieth century paired fashion with svelte poses in a show of complementary arts,
attitudes with costumes. In 1909, Belarussian designer Léon Bakst’s Narcisse Bacchante
(Priestess of Narcissus, 1911) unleashed the naked limbs from torpor as the worshipper of
divine frenzy flourishes a sinuous stole and head wrap above her bouffant tunic. Léon
Bakst’s parallel watercolor of the melancholy of Vaslav Nijinsky, then a nineteen-year-old
stage prodigy of impresario Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, showcased an ornate
headdress, arabesque pantaloons, cummerbund, and figured vest for a role in Paul Dukas’s
ballet La Péri (The Flower of Immortality, 1912). In both views, a rich tomato red
suggests the pulsing veins that empower the dancers’ bodies.
In the 1920s, Gallo-Russian designer Erté based haute couture on stage theatricality,
which reflected his sketchbook musings on Diaghilev’s choreography and Chinese, Hindu,
Byzantine, Egyptian, Arabian, and Persian miniatures. Glossy art deco cover art for
Cosmopolitan and Harper’s Bazaar epitomized ebullient androgyny. Balletic harem skirts,
paisley drapes, and whimsical feathered turbans costumed Erté’s drawings of prima
ballerina Anna Pavlova of St. Petersburg, Russia, and Dutch exotic dancer Mata Hari.
Placing the female form at center of his sketches, Erté transformed a static pose into
rapturous, willful figuration consistent with the Greek love goddess Aphrodite, tragic
opera heroine Madame Butterfly, the biblical Delilah, and the Egyptian queen Cleopatra.
During the dance renaissance of the late 1920s through 1940s, still and video cameras
romanced the cult of beauty exalted by divas of the era. Sketches by Vadem Meller
dramatized Russian soloist Bronislava Nijinska in flamboyant arabesque en pointe and the
graceful proportion of Yvonne Patterson, an Australian star from Melbourne. To absorb
the era’s interrelation between staging and art, English choreographer Frederick Ashton
studied the history of art from Persian design and the dash of Goya and El Greco to Edgar
Degas’s obsession with the training of young French ballerinas.
Distinguishing roles for male dancers paired with females, late in the twentieth century,
curvilinear shots of Mikhail Baryshnikov clutching Gelsey Kirkland and Craig Taylor
supporting Janie Taylor delineated the muscular male torso against a lithe female pose.
Chiaroscuro epitomized the artistic tension of classic stage characters, as in the slave Ali’s
gymnastics vs. Medora’s feminine grace in Le Corsaire (The Pirate), as danced in 1955 in
St. Petersburg, Russia, by Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn. Sketches contrasted the
limber female arms and legs against the standard smooth satin bodice and circular net
skirt, a subject of the late twentieth-century pastels of Ukrainian artist Katya Gridneva and
Argentine soloist Paloma Herrera in full extension for an American Ballet Theater
performance in the 1990s.
Giclee prints caught in motion torsos and limbs in expressive acts by live troupes.
Ballet also enriched plastic art, as with John Henry Waddell’s eleven life-size statues of
performers commissioned in 1970 for the city of Phoenix, Arizona; Italo-British sculptor
Enzo Plazzotta’s bronze dancers adorning the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden and
Millbank in London; and the arched back of a dancer framed by rock, sea, and sky in
Budva Harbor, Montenegro. As a vehicle for the media and art posters, photographers
continue to scrutinize the airy steps and theatrical mime of ballets, for example, the mystic
tenderness and magnitude that snapshots set apart from music and rhythm in the Northern
Ballet’s 2011 production of Beauty and the Beast.
See also film, ballet in; photography, ballet in.
Source: Greverus, Ina-Maria, and Ute Ritschel. Aesthetics and Anthropology:
Performing Life—Performed Lives. Münster, Germany: Lit Verlag, 2009.
ASHTON, FREDERICK (1904–1988)
Choreographer and director Frederick Ashton individualized ballet sequences to suit the
artist, mood, and milieu. Born Frederick William Melandine Ashton in Guayaquil,
Ecuador, on September 17, 1904, to Charlotte Georgiana Fulcher and diplomat George
Ashton, he was the fifth and last son of six children. He grew up among British expatriates
in Lima, Peru, and attended a Catholic school.
On viewing prima ballerina Anna Pavlova during her spring 1917 tour of Peru, the
twelve-year-old embraced dance as a career, a choice that dismayed Ashton’s middle-class
parents. While boarding at Dover College in southeast England at age fifteen, he endured
mockery of his homosexuality and South American background. His study of diva Alicia
Markova in a Ballets Russes performance and a 1921 presentation by Isadora Duncan
intensified his desire to dance. Two years later, he began translating orders from French
and Spanish for an import-export firm. After his father’s suicide in 1924, Ashton took
financial responsibility for his mother and thirteen-year-old sister, Edith Margaret
Gertrudis Ashton.
In the mid-1920s, Ashton practiced the Cecchetti method under Russian dance masters
Léonide Massine and Nikolai Legat. Marie Rambert, a Polish-Jewish teacher, accepted
Ashton in class without charge. She encouraged him to study the paintings of Goya, El
Greco, and Edgar Degas and to practice Marius Petipa’s lissome combinations from The
Sleeping Beauty.
Designing Dance
Ashton began designing dance with A Tragedy of Fashion: Or, The Scarlet Scissors
(1926), featuring Ashton as a couturier and Rambert as a mannequin. For a year, he
performed Les Enchantements de la Fée (The Fairy’s Enchantments), La Princesse Cygne
(The Swan Princess), and La Bien Aimée (The Beloved) with Ida Rubinstein’s ensemble at
opera houses in Paris, Brussels, and Milan. He studied character dance with Bronislava
Nijinska before rejoining Rambert.
Employed in revues, musicals, and cabaret acts at London’s Trocadero, Ashton staged
original works at the Mercury Theatre and danced in Masque of Poetry, Music and
Dancing (1930). Simultaneously, he choreographed for Ninette de Valois, director of the
Vic-Wells ensemble, earning his first regular salary. His initial success, the effervescent
Les Rendezvous (The Trysts, 1933), starred Markova in classical enchaînements and
featured a solo by Stanislas Idzikowsky, a career opportunity that the Soviet Arts Ministry
no longer condoned.
Ashton and His Muse
Ashton cultivated the talents of English-Irish-Brazilian diva Margot Fonteyn. Their
collaboration began with his clever mounting of Façade (1931), a sparkling dance suite
that concluded with Ashton and Lydia Lopokova performing the melodramatic “Tango
Pasadoble.” Fonteyn starred with Robert Helpmann in Les Patineurs (The Skaters, 1937),
a visual delight on BBC-TV.
As war swept Europe, Ashton stopped designing light divertissements for the prima
ballerina and pursued representations of prophecy in The Judgment of Paris (1938),
destiny in Horoscope (1938), the Nazi invasion of Poland in Dante Sonata (1940), and
chivalric heroism in The Quest (1943). After service in photography and intelligence for
the Royal Air Force during World War II, Ashton followed Valois’s company to Covent
Garden. At home once more with classicism, he presented the one-act Symphonic
Variations (1946), featuring Fonteyn and Moira Shearer performing to César Franck’s
score, and Scènes de Ballet (1948), a suite of geometric patterns.
 With the postwar demand for neoromanticism, Ashton broke ground for the British in
the genre of narrative ballet. In 1948, he delighted audiences with a droll feminist version
of Cinderella, starring Moira Shearer and Michael Somes. Relying on Fonteyn for
inspiration, Ashton branched out to longer story ballets—the sexually explicit Daphnis
and Chloë (1951), Tiresias (1951), Sylvia (1952), and Ondine (1958), the tale of the water
sprite mis-mated to Prince Palemon.
Ashton reached a pinnacle of renown in 1962 with a knighthood honoring his artistic
excellence. From 1963, he led the newly chartered Royal Ballet and, in 1965, danced a
travesty in Cinderella as an ugly stepsister. In Australia in 1967, his version of La Fille
Mal Gardée (The Poorly Guarded Girl) teamed Bryan Lawrence with star ballerina
Marilyn Jones. Taken as models of the Ashton style, the low-key lyricism, sophistication,
and musicality of Birthday Offering (1956), The Two Pigeons (1961), Marguerite and
Armand (1962), The Dream (1964), and A Month in the Country (1976) defined English
dance.
After Ashton’s severance from the Royal Ballet in 1970, he continued to choreograph,
stripping English dance of pretense and inserting passion in Méditation from Thaïs (1971)
and character development in the whimsical film The Tales of Beatrix Potter (1971).
Laurels crowned his achievements—honorary doctorates, the Order of Merit, and a
citation from the City of London. In retrospect of his sixty ballets, he reached a height
with the masterwork Rhapsody (1980), a vehicle for Mikhail Baryshnikov, followed by La
Chatte Metamorphosée en Femme (The Cat Changed into a Woman) in 1985 and Fanfare
for Elizabeth (1986), honoring the sixtieth birthday of Elizabeth II. He died in his sleep at
home in Eye, Suffolk, on August 19, 1988.
See also The Lady of the Camellias; neoclassical ballet.
Source: Morris, Geraldine. Frederick Ashton’s Ballets: Style, Performance,
Choreography. Hampshire, UK: Dance Books, 2012.
ATTIRE
See image in photospread.
Ballet wardrobes parallel the gradual development of technique and professional
physicality as well as couturier, a merger illustrated by the August 2014 Lincoln Center
production of Acis and Galatea by the Mark Morris Dance Company in arboreal costumes
by Isaac Mizrahi. At the French court of Catherine de’ Medici, the debut of Le Ballet-
Comique de la Reyne (The Comic Ballet of the Queen) on September 24, 1581, influenced
the wardrobe choices of Italian dance master Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx, initiator of
theatrical dance. He balanced the movements of ballerinas with dance skirts and low,
ribbon-tied slippers and costumed male performers in flared brocade coats over everyday
hosiery and shoes.
Decades later, myth and imagination dominated attire. English set designer Inigo Jones
featured fantasy outfits for Virtu, Bellerophon and the Chimaera (1609), a late-
Renaissance mythic ballet, and goat-man and winged costumes for The Masque of
Oberon, the Faery Prince (1611). French instructor Pierre Beauchamp lightened stage
wardrobe and invented flexible slippers to increase dancer turnout for Le Ballet du
Dérèglement des Passions (The Ballet of the Unbalanced Passions, 1648).
In the eighteenth century, wardrobe mistresses began stitching looser gowns and vests
that deepened torsos for bending and steadied dancers for jetés and pirouettes. In northern
Europe, ballet attire featured Belgian diva Marie Camargo and French choreographer
Marie Sallé in diaphanous muslin pantalets and skirts devoid of bustiers and bulky
overskirts. In the 1730s, Camargo made her own slippers in the form of leather or satin
tubes fitted to the arch and sturdily overstitched at the instep. Knit attire further altered
ballet and heightened speed and accuracy. To ensure decorum, in mid-century, Louis XV
insisted that men of the Paris Opera company wear underpants over tights.
Late in the era, French choreographer Charles Louis Didelot introduced women’s
knitted flesh-toned tights that stretched to accommodate the impressionism of ballet
d’action. Victoire Saulnier, the star of Jean-Georges Noverre’s opera Diane et Endymion
(1791), pioneered the tunic, a dramatic reduction of full skirts to a see-through column of
fabric over tights. The outfit freed Saulnier for more soulful characterization and enhanced
the audience view of her virtuosity. Within five years, ballerina Rose Parisot carried stage
attire to greater revelation of the legs for Le Triomphe de l’Amour (The Triumph of Love).
Theatrics dominated the future of ballet costuming. In keeping with Napoleonic
fashions of the early 1800s, the empire lines of the Empress Eugenie inspired a change in
dance attire from heeled shoes and cinched bouffant dress to sandals and the fluttery,
ethereal column gown, modeled by Teresa Monticini in Venice and by Maria Viganò in
her husband Salvatore’s ballets in Vienna.
The Romantic Costume
The romantic era increased the exoticism of stage costume, for example, the Viennese
debut of Salvatore Viganò’s Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus (Creatures of Prometheus,
1801). Constance Gosselin’s accessories in Fernand Cortés, ou La Conquête du Mexique
(Hernan Cortéz, or The Conquest of Mexico, 1817) featured feathered headdress and
anklets and armbands of short feathers, an attempt at sixteenth-century Central American
fashion. For medieval historicity in Gustave III, ou Le Bal Masqué (Gustav III, or The
Masked Ball, 1833), ballerina Lisa Noblet, costumed as a court jester, jingled a wand and
belled cap, typical elements of court entertainment.
For males, ballet attire revealed more musculature below the waist, an essential of
Viking swagger in Vincenzo Galeotti’s Lagertha (1801) for the Danish ballet. Antoine
Paul danced the duke’s part in Clari, ou La Promesse de Mariage (Clari or the Promise of
Marriage, 1820) in pleated trunks and bare legs over slippers tied with bows. At the Paris
Opera, dancer Jules Perrot’s villager costume for Nathalie, ou La Laitière Suisse (Natalie
or the Swiss Milkmaid, 1832) mimicked lederhosen with suspenders over tight short
breeches secured at the knee with ribbons.
Although theorist Carlo Blasis trained in France, he credited Italy with leading the
European development of stage costumes. Italian toe dancer Marie Taglioni modeled the
first waltz-length muslin skirt in La Sylphide (1832), a figure-flattering dress still in use by
the Joburg Ballet in the 2013 production of Giselle. The style prefaced the tulle skirt
paired with strapless or thin-strapped bodice revealing girlish shoulders and upper arms.
Another Italian, Salvatore Capezio of Lucano, equipped the female with wood-enforced
toe shoes, the essential tool of dancing en pointe.
Travesty ballet pleased the sophisticated audiences of London and Paris, for example,
Céline Céleste in a short romper and turban at the Queen’s Theatre in London for The
French Spy (1831). Fanny Elssler displayed a crossover outfit for La Gipsy (1839) in a
military blue skirt paired with braided officer’s tunic, plumed helmet, and red boots. By
the 1840s, the flounced ballet skirts, like umbrellas, enhanced loft and revealed more leg
and technique. Caroline Lassiat carried the breeches role to an extreme in Paquita (1846),
for which she appeared in tight short pants, vest, and cloak, a voluminous prop for Gypsy
dances.
Twentieth-Century Developments
After 1909, the panache of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes raised international standards
of artful attire, body paint, and makeup. For Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade
(1910), artist Léon Bakst liberated the company by baring the female midriff and cloaking
the legs in sheer harem pants. Filmy mantles and exotic turbans and headdress promoted
visual elements of Barabau (1925), as did authentic Bible-era dress for George
Balanchine’s Le Fils Prodigue (The Prodigal Son, 1929).
In 1932, German choreographer Kurt Jooss reprised the medieval danse macabre with
caricatured costume. His use of masks in the opening tableau of The Green Table served
two purposes—heightening belligerent emotions and concealing female dancers in male
roles after the military draft robbed his company of men. By gloving the Profiteer, Jooss
satirized the exploiter who enriches himself on conflict, but limits his contact with danger
and destruction.
The first Azerbaijani ballet, Afrasiyab Badalbeyli’s melodic Qiz Galasi (The Maiden
Tower, 1940), required some moderation to European tights and leotards. Before
presentation at the Baku opera house, costumers fitted the corps de ballet in wispy veils,
sleeves, and peplumed tunics over ankle-length pants. By dressing the folk ensemble in
head shrouds and swirling skirts over pants, wardrobe artists retained folkloric accuracy
while meeting Muslim standards of female modesty during piquet turns and jetés. In
contrast to demure women, the male lead dressed in abbreviated vest and undulating pants
and revealed a bare midriff.
During World War II, the Bolshoi faced the same shortages that beset the rest of the
clothing industry. Manufacturers lacked glittering fabrics for costumes, silk for tights, and
glue for toe shoes. Wartime shortfalls and factory conditions brought complaints from the
Czech National Ballet about low-quality slippers. By the late 1940s, the manufacture of
stretchy, drapey silks and synthetics helped such choreographers as Gerald Arpino of the
Joffrey Ballet to build illusion and to enable dancers to warm muscles to prevent injury.
When nylon became a postwar fashion favorite, British choreographers applied body
stockings and wings to the lithe character dancers in the Grimms’ fairy tale House of Birds
(1955).
 In 1950, Russian seamstress Barbara Karinska reduced the clashes of the corps de ballet
from pancake tutus. She invented the powder-puff skirt, a layering of fluffed net to replace
the wired circular tutu. In 1956, George Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante premiered the
knee-length chiffon dance dress, a graceful, womanly costume appropriate to classic steps.
Later in the twentieth century, designers experimented with Spandex, sports bras, body
stockings, and Lycra unitards, popularized by Paul Taylor’s modernistic leaps and
crouches in Junction (1961) and barefoot partnering in Scudorama (1963), Glen Tetley’s
hybrid ballets, beginning with Pierrot Lunaire (Pierrot by Moonlight, 1962), and Twyla
Tharp’s acrobatics in Re-Moves (1966). Battery-powered leotards that twinkled in time to
the music placed costumes within the domain of scenery or props. The replacement of
wood in toe shoes with gel pads relieved foot and arch stress, reduced noise, and improved
balance.
Into the 2010s, Mesoamerican folkloric ballet troupes banished the pancake tutu and toe
shoes and replicated ethnic costume, notably, swirling handkerchiefs and skirts, cowboy
shirts, sombreros, and bare feet. In the Philippines, Ballet Manila presented a 2008 staging
of Pinocchio in iridescent garments. Pierre Cardin sketched historically detailed garments
for the Shanghai Ballet’s The Last Mission of Marco Polo, which opened the Twelfth
Shanghai International Arts Festival in 2010. For Moc (Simplicity, 2011), Arabesque
Vietnam showcased the ao dai, the national female dress. The Haitian performers of Kriye
Bode, choreographed by Peniel Guerrier, reprised the rags and flimsy tunics of the slave
era.
Performance dress emulated the motivation of dance, for example, the satiric pancake
tutus in the Joffrey Ballet’s debut Son of Chamber Symphony (2012) to the unsettling
score by John Adams. Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin’s Echad Mi Yodea (Who
Knows One, 2012) freed the corps de ballet to vent strong feeling while gradually
stripping from suits and white shirts to underwear. For Journey to Eternity, choreographed
in 2014 by Renato Zanella, the Greek National Opera Ballet wore street clothes, a visual
reminder that all people anticipate death.
The rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Cairo, Egypt, provoked outcries against bare
flesh, actually full body stockings worn for a 2012 production of Malgré Tout (In Spite of
All). In 2013, the Cairo Opera Ballet faced the denunciation of a version of Spartacus for
sexual license and luxury of scenes from Republican Rome. The dancers and their backers
held sit-ins and performed scenes in public to introduce the populace to ballet attire.
See also ballet d’action; Beauchamp, Pierre; en pointe; folkloric ballet; shoes, ballet;
Taglioni, Marie.
Source: Alexander, Carter. Rethinking Dance History: A Reader. New York: Routledge,
2004.
AUSTRALIAN BALLET
Emerging from Russian technique and repertoire, the Australian Ballet (AB) adapted
native themes to original choreography performed by a culturally diverse company. The
ensemble got its start in 1940 from Czech character dancer Edouard Borovansky of
Moravia and his Russian wife, dance coach-choreographer Xenia Krüger, who established
a ballet school in Melbourne. The Borovansky Australian Ballet Company, influenced by
the Russian style of Anna Pavlova, fostered performance and choreography nationwide.
The troupe debuted at the Princess Theatre in 1942 with Laurel Martyn’s Sea Legend and
Sigrid. They toured the island nation, New Zealand, and Tasmania with standard works as
well as Borovansky’s The Outlaw (1951) and Terra Australis (Southern Land, 1946),
Australia’s first native ballet.
Following Borovansky’s death in 1959, London-born dancer-teacher Peggy van Praagh
reformed the dancers as the Australian Ballet. Joined by Australian actor and character
dancer Robert Helpmann, she codirected forty-six members and promoted enthusiasm for
the arts into the 1970s. The company debuted Swan Lake in Sydney in 1962, featuring
prima ballerina Kathleen Gorham, classical dancer Marilyn Jones, and principal performer
Garth Welch. Van Praagh commissioned its first work, Melbourne Cup (1962), designed
by Rex Reid with horse and jockey costumes.
The AB visited New Zealand in 1963 to stage The Lady and the Fool. To strengthen
finances, dancers mounted two truck tours of Australia, followed by stagings in Lebanon
and Hawaii. In Melbourne, the troupe hosted Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn in
Giselle and became the first non-Scandinavian troupe to perform August Bournonville’s
Le Conservatoire, or A Marriage by Advertisement (1849). At the 1964 Adelaide Festival
of Arts, Helpmann introduced The Display, which he based on the mating rituals of
lyrebirds in Sherbrooke Forest and the brotherhood of Australian football teams.
Costumed as the title figure, Kathleen Gorham wore a lyrebird tail of leather and horsehair
attached to bamboo.
Training and Artistry
The opening of the Australian Ballet School in 1967 provided the troupe with young
trainees, notably, award-winning ballerino Ross Stretton of Canberra. The dancers
appeared at the 1967 Montreal Expo and toured South America, Southeast Asia, Korea,
Taiwan, Japan, New Guinea, and Trinidad. A strike for higher wages in October 1970
convinced the public of the financial crises in dancers’ lives.
The 1973 filming of Don Quixote featured Helpmann opposite New Zealand dancer
Lucette Aldous and Rudolf Nureyev as star and director. Helpmann’s 1975 adaptation of
the operetta The Merry Widow into elaborate costume ballet starred Margot Fonteyn as
guest artist. The company earned distinction in 1978 after Marilyn Rose and Kevin Coe
received invitations to dance with the Bolshoi. The ensemble ended 1979 by touring
Spartacus in Russia, Turkey, and Israel, followed by performances in China and Mexico.
With the appointment of Maina Gielgud to artistic director in 1982, the Australian
Ballet gained international renown with international dancer exchanges and tours of
Washington, D.C., New York, and Costa Rica. During Gielgud’s tenure, the troupe
presented classical favorites—Eugene Onegin, Romeo and Juliet, The Sleeping Beauty,
Don Quixote, Coppélia, Manon, and La Sylphide—as well as The Sentimental Bloke and
Stepping Stones. The company enlarged its repertoire to forty works and expanded to two
hundred annual performances, including Stephen Baynes’s Catalyst (1990) and La
Esmeralda, featuring Li Cunxin and Mary McKendry. To enhance an Australian flavor, in
1995, Gielgud appointed Baynes and Stanton Welch as resident choreographers.
Modernizing the Company
The AB collaborated with the Bangarra Dance Theatre, a company of indigenous
Australians, in performances of Stephen Page’s Alchemy (1996) and Rites (1997),
presented at the Melbourne Festival. Under Stretton after 1997, the ensemble ventured
beyond the classics to Baynes’s full-length 1914 (1998), featuring Aussie infantry
uniforms from World War I. Performers incorporated Twyla Tharp’s The Story Teller for
performance at the Melbourne Festival and mounted At the Edge of Night (1999) and
Madame Butterfly in New York and Washington, D.C.
In the role of the Queen of France, Australian Ballet star Kirsty Martin empowered the
2003 debut of Gallo-Russian choreographer André Prokovsky’s The Three Musketeers,
featuring senior dancer Joshua Consandine as D’Artagnan. Partnering with her husband,
Damien Welch, Martin also starred in the premiere of Stanton Welch’s Velocity (2003) and
the 2006 restaging of Raymonda, a medieval Hungarian legend. In 2009, she became the
first Australian to win the Prix Benois de la Danse.
Subsequent productions ranged from Petrouchka and Firebird in 2009 and Krzysztof
Pastor’s Tristan and Isolde in 2010 to Ninette de Valois’s Checkmate in 2011, featuring
Chinese soloist Chengwu Guo as the Red Knight. An adaptation of the opera Madame
Butterfly cast as Pinkerton New Zealand soloist Ty King-Wall, winner of the 2010 Telstra
Ballet Dancer Award. The Winter 2014 season varied the program with Alexei
Ratmansky’s Cinderella, Chroma, and Baynes’s Art to the Sky.
Source: Scott, Kate Rachelle, Lorelei Sashti, Jo Sapie, and Jasmin Tulk. The Australian
Ballet 1962–2012. Southbank, Victoria: The Australian Ballet, 2011.
 • B •
BADALBEYLI, AFRASIYAB (1907–1976)
A proponent of dramatic dance in the Soviet Middle East, Afrasiyab Badalbeyli created
the first Muslim ballet. A native of Azerbaijan, he was born to musicians Rahima Khanim
and Badalbey Badalbeyli in the capital city of Baku on the Caspian Sea on April 19, 1907.
His father taught music at a Tartar academy, promoted stage musicals, and specialized in
mugham, a ninth-century tradition from the Caucasus combining the balaban (reed flute),
tar (lute), kamancheh (violin), and drums. Badalbeyli’s brother, Ahmed Badalbeyli, sang
female operatic roles, as Islamic law forbade women to perform on stage.
With drama training in his teens and a degree in linguistics and Oriental studies from
Azerbaijan State University, Badalbeyli began studying violin in the U.S.S.R. at the
Leningrad Conservatory. During his education, he met and married Russian-trained soloist
Gamar Almaszadeh, the first Muslim ballerina and the founder of an Azerbaijani folk
dance troupe. After his graduation, he translated a Communist newspaper and wrote the
score of the play Od Galini (Galini Fire, 1928).
In 1930, Badalbeyli began leading the Azerbaijan State Opera and Ballet Theatre, a post
he held until his death on January 6, 1976. He composed the first pro-Soviet dance in
Azerbaijani style. After his return to Baku, he wrote ring dances and collaborated with his
brother, Turgud Badalbeyli, in the composition of Tarlan (Field, 1939), a one-act
children’s ballet. In 1939, the state commissioned Afrasiyab to create Nizami Ganjavi, an
opera honoring a twelfth-century Persian lyricist.
An Azerbaijani Ballet
Badalbeyli earned the title “Honored Art Worker” for composing the score and libretto for
the three-act national ballet Qiz Galasi (The Maiden Tower, 1940). The story ballet
debuted at the state theater on April 18, 1940, with Gamar Almaszadeh in the lead role as
the Princess Gulyanag opposite Konstantin Batashov as Polad. The title names a fourth-
century Persian well and twelfth-century astronomer’s lookout buttressed into the Baku
city defensive wall. Lacking mime, the narrative choreography referenced a common
medieval theme—the suicide of a princess who eluded marriage to a suitor chosen by her
father.
In the Soviet propagandist version, the theme shifted to incest, a reprehensible crime
that illustrated the excesses of the ruling class. The protagonist, Princess Gulyanag,
daughter of one of the twenty wives of the khan Jhahangir, grows up unwanted until the
khan sees her at maturity. He isolates her from her lover, Polad, by immuring her in the
tower. After Polad assassinates the khan, he runs to the tower too late to stop Gulyanag
from jumping to her death in the Caspian Sea.
A Resilient Ballet
Although Azerbaijanis saw no more ballets until a decade later, Badalbeyli staged
Gulshan (1951) and Seven Beauties (1952) and continued producing scores for stage and
opera. He revised the orchestrations of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, Gioacchino
Rossini’s Cinderella, Ludwig Minkus’s Don Quixote, Armen Tigranyan’s Anush, and
Zakaria Paliashvili’s Daisi. Badalbeyli’s monograph Talk about Music (1953), his
biography of Azerbaijan musician Gurban Primov, and his Dictionary of Musical Terms
(1956) summarized the history of national ballet and opera. He also edited the music
program for Azerbaijani Radio, staged The Maiden Tower in Moscow in 1959, and wrote
the ballets Golden Key (1957), Black Girl (1965), and Aydin (1968).
Badalbeyli’s Maiden Tower reached film in 1984 featuring puppetry. With funding from
oil companies, on October 24, 1999, a restaging of the nationalistic ballet celebrated the
fifty-fourth anniversary of the United Nations. The dance starred ballerina Madina
Aliyeva partnering with Gulaghasi Mirzoyev alongside one hundred members of the state
corps de ballet. Rewritten by Yulana Alikishizade and pianist Farhad Badalbeyli,
Afrasiyab’s nephew, the adaptation no longer stressed the lust of the khan for his daughter.
Badalbeyli’s eighty-four-year-old widow, Gamar, attended and viewed the new version.
Source: Blair, Betty. “Maiden’s Tower Ballet: New Plot Rids Soviet Propaganda.”
Azerbaijan International 7, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 54–55.
BALANCHINE, GEORGE (1904–1983)
Russian ballet master George Balanchine, the father of American classical ballet,
influenced the arts worldwide for more than six decades. A St. Petersburg native, born
Giorgi Melitonovitch Balanchivadze on January 22, 1904, he claimed an artistic lineage
that included his parents, pianist and dance lover Maria Nikolayevna and Georgian opera
star Meliton Balanchivadze. With his siblings, Andria and Tamara, George studied music.
From 1913 to the downfall of the Romanov regime in 1917, Balanchine studied at the
Imperial Ballet School under Pavel Gerdt. At age thirteen, he was reduced to playing the
piano in nightclubs and movie houses. Before completing his education in 1921, he
danced with the Mariinsky youth ensemble and choreographed La Nuit (The Night, 1920),
introducing a revolutionary overhead lift. He remained wed to Swedish-Tartar concert
ballerina Tamara Geva for only a year.
As Communism reduced artistic freedom, in mid-June 1924, Balanchine fled by boat to
Berlin and Paris with Alexandra Danilova, who became his second wife. He received
training from Enrico Cecchetti and Nikolai Legat. As a dance designer for the Ballets
Russes for the next five years, he introduced formations in nine ballets, beginning with the
arm linkage in Apollon Musagète (Apollo and the Muses, 1928), the first jazz ballet,
featuring Serge Lifar and Felia Doubrovska.
With Lifar’s aid, Balanchine developed a father-son characterization in Le Fils
Prodigue (The Prodigal Son, 1929), a scriptural parable of a man’s forgiveness of his
wayward boy, played by Lifar. While Balanchine recuperated from tuberculosis and a
knee injury, Lifar replaced him in the staging of Les Créatures de Prométhée
(Prometheus’s Creatures). The disbanding of the Ballets Russes preceded Balanchine’s
employment by the Royal Danish Ballet.
Ballet Coach and Designer
In 1932, Balanchine joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and staged four original
works—Jeux d’Enfants (Baby Games), La Concurrence, Cotillon, and Le Bourgeois
Gentilhomme (The Middle-Class Gentleman). For casts, he groomed three apprentices—
Armenian-Polish dancer Tamara Toumanova and Russian beginner Irina Baronova, both
age twelve, and Russo-American dancer Tatiana Riabouchinska, age fourteen. The media
referred to the three as Balanchine’s baby ballerinas.
During the Great Depression, the choreographer moved to New York and, in 1934,
founded the School of American Ballet. With cobbler Salvatore Capezio, Balanchine
reduced the weight and girth of pointe shoes to increase accuracy and security of toe
dancing. Balanchine’s dancers debuted Serenade (1935), a classic ballet blanc in which
dancers wove intricate geometrics.
In the late 1930s, Balanchine created stage works for the musicals On Your Toes (1936)
and Babes in Arms (1937), the Metropolitan Opera, and Hollywood movies as well as the
ballet Jeu de Cartes (Card Game, 1937). His American Ballet Caravan hired Cuban diva
Alicia Alonso for a two-year tour of the Western Hemisphere. He chose Maria Tallchief
for the premiere of Song of Norway (1944). In 1946, he wed his star in a union that lasted
until its annulment six years later.
Experimentation marked Balanchine’s middle years, beginning with La Sonnambula
(The Sleepwalker, 1946), a vehicle for Danilova and Tallchief, and The Four
Temperaments (1946), an early modernist work admired for clean lines. In 1948, he
cofounded the New York City Ballet. For Symphony in C (1950), wardrobe mistress
Barbara Karinska supplied Balanchine’s company with the flexible powder-puff tutu,
worn by divas Tallchief and Tanaquil Le Clercq. In 1951, Le Clercq, Diana Adams, and
South African soloist Yvonne Mounsey debuted La Valse to a score by Maurice Ravel.
Balanchine followed professional tradition in the 1954 mounting of The Nutcracker by
featuring thirty-nine child dancers from the School of American Ballet with himself as
Herr Drosselmeyer. For his Allegro Brillante (1956), he introduced the chiffon dance midi,
an understated feminine costume that created a classical effect. In the patriotic Stars and
Stripes (1958), his dancers performed in parade uniforms to the band music of John Philip
Sousa.
Balanchine’s Protégés
In close daily contact, Balanchine conferred with Suzanne Farrell on phrasing and pointe
work in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Agon, Liebeslieder Walzer (Love Song Waltzes),
Mozartiana, and Davidsbündlertänze (Dances of David’s League). In 1965, he enhanced
Marius Petipa’s Don Quixote with additional satire of the mock heroic, in which
Balanchine played the title role. He hired Peter Martins in 1967 and cast him in leading
parts.
Advancing such talented dancers as Martins, Violette Verdy, Patricia McBride, Jacques
d’Amboise, Jerome Robbins, and Edward Villella, Balanchine continued to fill the stage
with story ballet and spectacular works, notably, the 1972 Stravinsky Festival. In 1974,
McBride, his prima ballerina, danced the crowning role of the village bride in Coppélia.
For the opera Faust, the debut of Walpurgisnacht (Witches’ Night, 1975) showcased
Farrell and Adam Lüders in a Gothic duet. Balanchine reprised the romantic era with
Vienna Waltzes (1977), a salute to a global dance craze that inspired affected manners,
grand couture, hairstyles upswept in tiaras, and men in tuxedos.
Balanchine’s last years reduced his productivity from the effects of vertigo, cardiac
illness, and diminished hearing and sight. During the decline, he received honors from the
PBS series Dance in America, a Kennedy Center citation for the performing arts, a French
Legion of Honor, an Austrian arts medal, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. At his
death from Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease on April 30, 1983, dance companies worldwide
celebrated his long career by performing some of his four hundred ballets.
See also Farrell, Suzanne; Juvenile Companies; Martins, Peter; neoclassical ballet; New
York City Ballet; shoes, ballet.
Source: Horowitz, Joseph. Artists in Exile: How Refugees from 20th-Century War and
Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.
BALLET AFSANEH
See image in photospread.
An ensemble promoting Persian afsaneh (folklore) in San Francisco, Ballet Afsaneh
coordinates a global effort featuring Asians along with dancers and musicians from
Mexico, Germany, Norway, Israel, Morocco, Taiwan, Russia, Syria, and the United States.
Concerts detail the Persian heritage of Afghanistan, Armenia, China, Iran, Mongolia,
Takistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. In 1986, the company director, belly dancer
Sharlyn Sawyer, pioneered Central Asian choreography, including the Balinese work Keep
Her. Safe. Please! (1998) and the artistry of Wan Chao, choreographer of There (2008).
Sawyer spotlighted the historic Silk Road, the culturally diverse trail leading from the
Far East to the Mediterranean Sea. Traveling to endangered ethnic communities, she and
her research assistants viewed music and interpretive dance in remote areas and collected
materials for costumes. Her company’s concerts at the British Museum and San
Francisco’s Asian Art Museum reprised the sacred mysteries of the past, notably
Celebration of the Night Sky and Varan (Rain, 2013).
The transnational dance movement tapped empowered feminists and Asian diasporas to
involve women in improvisational ballets by Tajik soloist Mariam Gaibova, field
researcher-dance coach Kristen Sague, and Belarussian-Finn-American esthetic educator
Hannah Romanowsky. Soloist Miriam Peretz gained renown for the combination of
classical ballet with the swirls and backbends of Sufi, Rom, Kathak, and other heritage
dances from Central Asia, India, and Indonesia. Her performances mesmerized audiences
at the 2010 New Moon on the Silk Road Festival and spring and equinoctial celebrations
with the sanctity and allure of Asia in past centuries.
Using candles, ewers, drums, spangles, fans, shawls, veils, and trains, Peretz
coordinated multicultural gestures and interfaith inspirational and nuptial poses in Me-e-
Raj Darvisham (Ascension of the Darvish, 2009), Safar-e Eshq (Love’s Journey, 2011),
Sohl (Peace, 2011), Strumica (2012), Rags-e-Koshik (Spoon Dance, 2012), the Arabic La
Sirena (2013), Pranam in White (2013), and Little Horse of the Night (2014) and in stage
improvisations. For the seductive Kulobi-style Gulkhor, the corps de ballet performed in
traditional Tajik embroidered tunics and figured veils over braids.
Source: Shay, Anthony, and Barbara Sellers-Young. Belly Dance: Orientalism,
Transnationalism, and Harem Fantasy. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 2005.
LE BALLET-COMIQUE DE LA REYNE
A wedding entertainment presented in Paris at the Louvre on October 15, 1581, Le Ballet-
Comique de la Reyne (The Comic Ballet of the Queen) became the world’s first official
theatrical ballet. The five-and-a-half-hour stage extravaganza amused guests of Henri III
of France and his Italian-born queen, Catherine de’ Medici. A marriage of music and
dance with poetry and fashion, the ballet honored the queen’s sister, Marguerite of
Lorraine, and her groom, the Duc de Joyeuse.
At the Great Hall of the Louvre, director Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx produced the nuptial
ballet in revolutionary style. The verse-dance allegory enacted a familiar Homeric episode
from The Odyssey, the myth of the enchantress Circe, who overcame Odysseus’s crew
with her wand. Among innovations, the choreographer introduced performers from both
sides of the stage instead of a single-file or couples procession.
Geometric Patterns
Similar to the uniform steps performed by the chorus of classical Greek tragedy,
Beaujoyeulx’s experiment combined and recombined twelve-person dances into such
harmonious figures or geometric sequences as chains, circles, triangles, squares,
diamonds, and parallel lines. All represented universal order, which symbolized the
formation of the family under holy wedlock. By following the story of Circe’s
transformation of men into swine and their reclamation by Henri III, Beaujoyeulx alluded
to human blood thirst during the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 and subsequent
peacemaking between Christian sects based on reason, discipline, and allegiance to the
king.
With a budget of 3,600,000 écus, the producers built elaborate sets for the forty-part
dance, set to the music of French basso Lambert de Beaulieu. The production began at
9:00 PM. Both king and queen participated in the scenarios, for which Beaulieu
harmonized with his wife, soprano Violante Doria, in duets. To enhance the choreography,
Beaujoyeulx designed the first professional slippers tied with ribbons.
To suggest a prosperous union, Beaujoyeulx stressed profusion in visual and auditory
effects. Sirens in fishtails escorted sea gods with tritons and a chariot bearing a fountain,
the queen, and her court. Satyrs wearing hairy thigh makeup and cloven hooves
accompanied the royal progress with blasts on horns. The four virtues appeared in
panniered gowns and identified themselves with a lute, scale, chalice, and snake. The
finale concluded at 3:30 AM, when the corps de ballet joined in a reverence to the
audience, a standard finale of stage performances.
Ballet as a Commodity
After Catherine de’ Medici instructed Beaujoyeulx to summarize the choreography, sets,
costumes, libretto, and music, in 1582, she published his work, preserving it for history.
The presentation volume contained illustrations by court painter Jacques Patin and
program notes explaining the triumph of integrated arts over chaotic passions. She sent
copies to European courts as an advertisement for French invention and a glorification of
French monarchy.
The ballet turned into a French enterprise. Within the choreographer’s lifetime,
imitations of the Circe ballet for Shrovetide (present-day Mardi Gras) raised the demand
for French musicians, costumers, makeup specialists, and set designers. Although
violinists and dancers came primarily from Italy, the first ballet established French
terminology as the language of dance.
Source: Brooks, Jeanice. Courtly Song in Late Sixteenth-Century France. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Goldring, Elizabeth, and Sarah Knight. Europa Triumphans. Burlington, VT: Ashgate,
2004.
BALLET D’ACTION
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The introduction of ballet d’action retrieved dance from banal amusement to a form of
narrative included among the imitative arts. The redirection of dance from the frothy
pastimes of the court of Louis XIV to dramatic immediacy began with incremental revolts
against bulky hoop skirts, boned corsets, thick-heeled boots, wigs, and plumed headpieces.
In place of the stereotypical geometric figures of court dance and the cabrioles and
entrechat quatres that displayed virtuosity to amuse a sovereign, dance makers substituted
plots filled with conflict and human emotion. Composers, writing on commission,
supplied each ballet with memorable melodies set to clear rhythms.
In reference to mimed narratives, Jean-Georges Noverre, the founder of ballet d’action
and author of the monograph Lettres sur La Dance, et sur Les Ballets (Letters on Dance
and Ballet, 1756), compared a well-composed dance to a living picture, a tableau based on
human interaction rather than academic rules. In Vienna, Stuttgart, and London, his works
blossomed with imagination rather than the stiff, majestic posturing of opéra-ballet. He
demanded that all elements pertain to the triad of storytelling—introduction, development,
and resolution. In place of the mechanical uniformity of a dance troupe, he sought
individualism in actor-dancers who expressed thought and emotion with eyes, faces,
hands, and postures. Above all, dance sequences interlocked, moving the action toward a
coherent climax and resolution.
Aristocratic control of the arts began to wane with the rise of democratic ideals from the
English Civil Wars (1642–1651) and the American Revolution of 1776. While the French
labored under the set-in-stone precepts of the Paris Opera, more imaginative dancers
found opportunities in England, Scandinavia, Germany, and Russia to develop dance
narration. In Denmark from 1775 to 1816, Italian ballet master Vincenzo Galeotti
extended the range of dance with cosmopolitan flair. Exuberant and muscular, Russian
dancers elevated the physicality of the dance as an integral part of mimed storytelling. At
Milan’s La Scala from 1779 to 1789, ballet master Gasparo Angiolini refined disjointed
court dance with an early form of narrative dance.
Three years before the French Revolution of 1789, Jean Dauberval, the creative director
of the Paris Opera, abandoned mythology and epic as sources of stories. Based on peasant
life, he choreographed La Fille Mal Gardée (The Poorly Guarded Girl, 1786), a story set
to programme (narrative) orchestration and featuring clogging, tambourines, and a ribbon
dance around a maypole. The plot dramatized an age-old contretemps between a girl in
love with a village boy and a mother demanding that the girl wed for money rather than
romance. With gestures celebrating the triumph of love, the dancers displayed Noverre’s
concept of the ballet d’action. Noverre’s ideology flourished into the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries in Amalia Hernández Navarro’s El Son de la Negra (Song of the
Black Woman, 1954) for the Mexican Folkloric Ballet, the Guangzhou Ballet’s Hongse
Niangzijun (The Red Detachment of Women, 1964), Alvin Ailey’s Cry (1972), and Twyla
Tharp’s The Princess and the Goblin (2012).
See also Cinderella; Noverre, Jean-Georges; story ballet.
Source: Nye, Edward. Mime, Music and Drama on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: The
Ballet d’Action. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
BALLET MANILA
An ensemble immersed in Vaganova-style execution, Ballet Manila combines classical
ballet with martial arts and folkloric characterization and lore. Directed by dancer Lisa
Macuja-Elizalde as a democratic ensemble, the company evolved from a summer 1995
workshop and collaborated with the Vaganova Academy in St. Petersburg. Training
curriculum drew on videos particularizing style and technique.
The troupe anchored its performances at the Aliw and Star theaters in Pasay City and
staged Romeo and Juliet, The Nutcracker, The Firebird, Paquita, Swan Lake, and La
Bayadère (The Temple Dancer). Stagings of Giselle, Don Quixote, Le Corsaire (The
Pirate), Carmen, and Sinderela (Cinderella) preceded the 2008 scheduling of La Fille Mal
Gardée (The Poorly Guarded Girl), starring Jennifer Olayvar in a pas de deux directed by
guest choreographer Sergei Vikulov. Regular seasons blended Filipino themes and motifs
into Tatlong Kuwento ni Lola Basyang (Grandmother Basyang’s Three Stories), Paskong
Pista (Christmas Fiesta), and a teen favorite, Hi-skul Musikahan (High School Musical),
which allies classic combinations with pop tunes. Designer Rolando Tagaro supplied
costumes.
Tours have introduced the Ballet Manila in the United States, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania,
Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Cuba, Mexico, Ireland, Great Britain, Cambodia, New
Zealand, China, South Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan. Comanaged by
Osias Barroso, in 2007–2008, the company presented Sonata and restaged Le Corsaire.
For Christmas 2008, the dancers performed Pinocchio, a timeless piece in iridescent
costume. The ballet featured Alvin Santos in the title role opposite Sophia Sancho as
Jiminy Cricket, Zaira Cosico as the Blue Fairy, and Jonathan Janolo as Gepetto. The
2013–2014 season featured Heart 2 Heart, Corvus (Crow), Lune, Shutter, Harlequinade,
and Augustus Damian’s poignant The Last Poem, starring Macuja and Rudy de Dios. A
twentieth-anniversary gala marked 2015.
Source: Requinta, Elka Krystle R. “Christmas Ballets Delight Children.” Philippine
Daily Inquirer (24 December 2007).
BALLET MUSIC
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Ballet music advanced slowly from the background into distinction as a motivator of
atmosphere and mood for classic dance, as with the Andalusian Gypsy melodies that
Madrid composer Manuel de Falla incorporated in El Amor Brujo (Love Bewitched,
1924), the psychological undertow of Morton Gould’s Fall River Legend (1948), and the
Italian Klezmer of Ershter Vals (2010), reminiscent of World War II Jewish ghettoes. In
Renaissance Lombardy, compositions for ballet de cour (court choreography) contributed
to the entertainment factor of intermedi, the interludes set between banquet courses. In
1425, Italian theorist Domenico da Piacenza composed vignettes suiting the tempos of
aristocratic social dance. Under Antonio Cornazzano in Milan in 1460, orchestration
continued to provide incidental ballroom melodies that set the rhythm of floor patterns.
In 1653, Louis XIV conferred the title of court composer of instrumental music on
Florentine Jean-Baptiste Lully. From 1654 to 1686, Lully’s accompaniments for comédie-
ballet took the forms of minuet, rigaudon, sarabande, and gavotte. By 1661, he published
his baroque operas, court processionals, trios, and violin tunes for ballets performed at
Fontainebleau, the Louvre, and the Palais-Royal. In revolt against Lully’s danceable
music, composer Jean-Philippe Rameau composed ornate polonaises for Les Indes
Galantes (The Chivalric Indies, 1735), which suited the promenades of Turks, Inca, and
other American tribes. His scores dominated opéra-ballet for more than two decades.
Romantic Music
Christoph Gluck turned from opera to comic ballet, a forerunner of musical comedy, by
composing Don Juan (1761) and Orfeo ed Euridice (Orpheus and Eurydice, 1762), ballets
designed in Vienna by Gasparo Angiolini. As the fad for romanticism grew following the
French Revolution of 1789, ballet music took on folk elements of local color, folk mores,
and nationalistic themes, such as the Swiss dances that Gioacchino Rossini harmonized for
Guillaume Tell (William Tell, 1829) and the medieval hymn “O Sanctissima” that
highlights Napoli, or The Fisherman and His Bride (1842). Musician Mikhail Glinka
saluted Alexander II the Liberator with folk melodies in A Life for the Tsar (1836), a
presentation celebrating a Russian triumph over Poland. To project an illusion of fantasy,
French musician Adolphe Adam orchestrated fairy music for Giselle (1841).
A stage workhorse who coordinated scores for dance master Marius Petipa, Italian
musician Cesare Pugni composed with ballroom style for La Polka (1844) and Gypsy flair
for La Esmeralda (1844). Flavoring dance with pizzicato strings and harp, he generated
Turkish allure for La Corsaire (The Pirate, 1856) and Egyptian mystery for La Fille du
Pharaon (The Pharaoh’s Daughter, 1862), a ballet set in a desert tomb. In employment at
La Scala in Milan, London’s Her Majesty’s Theatre, the Paris Opera, and the Imperial
Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia, Pugni remained at work until 1869, the year before his
death.
Throughout the 1800s, choreographers demanded more evocative scores—from French
violinist Édouard Deldevez, creator of Napoleonic militarism in Paquita (1846), from
cellist Jacques Offenbach, composer of a waltz for Le Papillon (The Butterfly, 1860), and
from Léo Delibes, who matched the delicacy of dance en pointe (on toe) with an authentic
mazurka for Coppélia (1870) and stirring action for Sylvia (1876). The late romantic
composers, Austrian violinist Ludwig Minkus generated rueful melodies for La Source
(The Spring, 1866) and La Bayadère (The Temple Dancer, 1877), a gripping tragedy. For
Le Poisson Doré (The Golden Fish, 1867), Minkus produced flute solos for Tuscan flautist
Cesare Ciardi. Minkus also orchestrated melodies by Felix Mendelssohn for A Midsummer
Night’s Dream (1876) and received from Alexander II the Order of Saint Stanislaus for
composing ballet scores.
A Minkus competitor, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, an equal collaborator with ballet master
Marius Petipa, set a unique example of composition for ballet with his surreal scores for
Swan Lake (1876), The Sleeping Beauty (1889), and The Nutcracker (1892). His mastery
of leitmotif yielded lithe, gracile strains for swans and the rapscallion regimentation of
mice against toy soldiers. Ballet music attained classic heights with the ethereal femininity
of solos for Aurora and the Sugar Plum Fairy, the epitome of girlish dancers in toe shoes.
The Market for Composers
With the departure of Minkus from St. Petersburg in 1886, the Imperial Ballet retired the
title of court composer and introduced a variety of musicians to collaborate with
choreographer Marius Petipa, including Mikhail Ivanov, who scored La Vestale (The
Vestal, 1888), a vehicle for Elena Cornalba and Pavel Gerdt, and Riccardo Drigo,
composer of Le Talisman (The Amulet, 1889), La Flûte Magique (The Magic Flute,
1893), and Le Réveil de Flora (Flora’s Awakening, 1894). Late to the romantic era,
Alexander Glazunov collaborated with Rimsky-Korsakov to finish The Polovtsian Dances
(1890), a suite left incomplete. Glazunov achieved success with the Hungarian tale of
Raymonda (1898) and an allegorical ballet, Les Saisons (The Seasons, 1899).
In 1901, dance master Alexander Gorsky fleshed out the fool tale The Little
Humpbacked Horse with melodies by Johannes Brahms, Franz Liszt, Glazunov, and
Tchaikovsky. Contemporaneous with Gorsky’s patchwork, modernist Isadora Duncan
danced free style to the Viennese waltzes of Johann Strauss and the compositions of
Frederic Chopin and Ludwig van Beethoven. The centrality of orchestration raised the
reputation of Glazunov for Chopiniana or Reverie Romantique: Ballet sur la Musique de
Chopin (1908). Igor Stravinsky collaborated with Glazunov and Michel Fokine, director
of the Ballets Russes, on a resetting as Les Sylphides (1909) set to mood music rather than
the storybook pieces of Tchaikovsky. Stravinsky elevated his music to a source of emotion
for the ebullient Firebird (1910), the height of Vaslav Nijinsky’s stage career, and the
tragic Petrouchka (1911).
Fokine experimented with the ballerina’s idiosyncrasies, setting The Dying Swan (1905)
to Camille Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals to accompany prima ballerina Anna
Pavlova. Additional pairing of music with the individual dancer placed French musician
Hector Berlioz’s Le Spectre de la Rose (The Spirit of the Rose, 1911) at the disposal of
Nijinsky. In 1916, Fokine again rescored Les Sylphides to Robert Schumann’s Papillons
(Butterflies).
The formation of the Soviet Union posed serious themes for ballet, notably, harbor
labor disputes in Reinhold Glière’s The Red Poppy (1927), Fritz Cohen’s piano suite for
The Green Table (1932), and Afrasiyab Badalbeyli’s melodramatic score for Qiz Galasi
(The Maiden Tower, 1940), the first Azerbaijani ballet. World War II heightened the
political themes of dance with hot tempers on the Armenian border in Russo-Georgian
cellist Aram Khachaturian’s Gayane (1942), performed in Perm during the evacuation of
the Kirov from Leningrad, and the pre-feminist atonalities of Sergei Prokofiev’s waltzes
for Cinderella (1944).
The resurgence of French ballet after the liberation of Paris derived from the musicality
of Roland Petit’s Le Jeune Homme et la Mort (The Young Man and Death, 1946) to a J. S.
Bach fugue. In contrast to classical revivals, the formation of folkloric ballet troupes in the
mid-1900s tended to rejuvenate regional tunes, drumming, chants, and verse. The
grandiose score of Glière’s The Bronze Horseman (1949) extolled the founding of
Leningrad by Peter the Great. For Spartacus (1956), Khachaturian inserted indigenous
Armenian elements to undergird the brash masculinity of a Thracian slave.
In 1956, Jerome Robbins wrung satire from a Chopin polonaise for The Concert, or The
Perils of Everybody (1956), which parodied the pompous processionals of court ballet. A
North African troupe, founded in 1959 by Mahmoud Reda in Cairo, performed to original
Egyptian music composed by Ali Ismail. Postmodern experiments with flexibility and
tone yielded Erik Satie’s piano etudes for Monotones II (1965) and Duke Ellington’s
“Vortex” for Alvin Ailey’s The River (1970).
Innovators set combinations to unusual sources of melody, as with the cello sharing the
stage with two dancers for Valentine (1971), a pas de deux by Gerald Arpino, resident
choreographer of the Joffrey Ballet. Classical composers gained new vigor from
contemporary dance, notably, Francis Poulenc’s “Piano Concerto” for the Scottish Ballet
performance of Greensong (1977) and Sergei Rachmaninoff’s two-against-three rhythms
for Rhapsody, which Mikhail Baryshnikov debuted in 1980. John Neumeier, director of
the Hamburg Ballet, chose symphonic dance to Gustav Mahler’s moody Fifth Symphony,
performed at Lincoln Center in 1998, and the Third Symphony, presented in Paris by the
Opera Bastille in 2009.
Into the twenty-first century, the centrality of melody and chant, background sounds,
and traditional string, percussion, and wind instruments enhanced rhythm, mime, and
emotion, a common strand to Hind Benali’s choreography for Fleur d’Orange in
Casablanca, director Kettly Noel for Danse L’Afrique in Mali, and Serge Aime
Coulibaly’s designs for Faso Danse Theatre in Burkina Faso. In Paris, Roland Petit turned
the Goethe romance Clavigo (1999) into ballet to the score of Lebanese cinema composer
Gabriel Yared. In 2012, the Black Grace Dance Company of New Zealand toured
Germany with an intriguing blend of harp, drums, and traditional Maori and Samoan
percussion and clapping, the driving rhythm of Waka, Fa’a Ulutao, Amata (Begin), and
Gathering Clouds (2009), choreographed by Neil Ieremia.
The melding of arts re-created the atmosphere of rice growing and harvesting for Suong
Som (The Mist, 2014), staged in Saigon and in Nagano and Tokyo, Japan, by the seven-
member ensemble of Arabesque Vietnam. Performed before rice sheaves and palm fronds
to zither strokes and wood clappers in the slow-motion style of temple dance, The Mist
tapped a veneration of food production that dates to the roots of ancient Japanese ritual
and Greek wine festivals.
See also Sergeyev, Nikolai.
Source: Lee, Carol. Ballet in Western Culture: A History of Its Origins and Evolution.
New York: Routledge, 2002.
BALLET NACIONAL DE ESPAÑA
With hybrid works representing centuries of Spanish culture, the Ballet Nacional de
España or National Ballet of Spain (BNE) has generated more than thirty-five years of
Iberian artistry and vitality. In 1978 at the National Institute for the Stage Arts and Music,
the company formed under Antonio Gades, popularized the modern flamenco, and
initiated a wide vision of post-Franco, post-Communist national dance. Contributing
classical elements, Lola de Ávila and other ensemble dance coaches took as models the
theatrical choreography of Manuel de Falla.
To achieve modernism as well as balance, BNE classes stressed turnout and refined
pirouettes as well as staccato stamping, head tilting, and hip thrusting. The repertoire
featured flamenco, Aragonese jota, zarzuela, and bolero as well as popular dance, which
Spanish cinematographer Carlos Saura incorporated into the film Bodas de Sangre (Blood
Wedding, 1981). Creative Spanish choreography undergirded the all-male Farruca,
Medea, Carmen, Ritmos (Rhythms), and El Concierto de Aranjuez (Concert of Oranges),
starring principal Esther Jurado.
Part of the company’s success derived from sophisticated costuming and combinations,
which avoided the tourist kitsch of folkloric stage spectacle. The mounting of Maurice
Ravel’s Bolero featured women in orange trumpet skirts and men in tight black pants and
silk shirts, which mirrored flashing feet and unrelenting heel rhythms. At global
competitions, the BNE has earned the 1988 New York Metropolitan Critics’ Prize, 1991
Japanese Critics’ Prize, 1994 Bellas Artes citation in Mexico City, and a 2002 VI Festival
de Flamenco award for modern balletic choreography.
In London in 2010, the BNE featured Tamara Rojo’s intense variations as well as a
corps de ballet group dance to the strumming of onstage guitarists. The 2012 tour to Sofia
offered a gracious duet, both joyous and moody production numbers, and a spectacular
female solo swathed in ten feet of ruffled train. For 2014, the troupe, directed by Antonio
Najarro, toured Finland and Spain with presentations of the vividly costumed Suite Sevilla
and Sorolla, a liquid, mystical tribute to painter Joaquín Sorolla, who captured the
uniqueness of indigenous Spanish dances.
Source: Grau, Andree, and Stephanie Jordan, eds. Europe Dancing: Perspectives on
Theatre, Dance, and Cultural Identity. New York: Routledge, 2000.
BALLET RUSSE DE MONTE CARLO
A breakaway ensemble dodging the mayhem of World War II, the Ballet Russe de Monte
Carlo (BRMC) profited from the talent and enthusiasm of former members of Sergei
Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Codirected under a variety of names by Lithuanian impresario
Wassily de Basil and René Blum, the company studied under ballet master Serge
Grigoriev. The ensemble debuted Russian technique at the Monte Carlo Opera on April
12, 1932, featuring dancers George Skibine, George Balanchine, André Eglevsky, David
Lichine, Jo Savino, and Frederic Franklin in Gaîté Parisienne, a flashy pastiche exhibiting
cabaret cancan. In June, the program debuted in Paris at the Champs-Elysees Theatre.
Within a year, the BRMC performed in New York with the endorsement of impresario
Sol Hurok and built a repertoire of twenty-eight dances showcasing four by Balanchine—
Jeux d’Enfants (Baby Games), La Concurrence, Cotillon, and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
(The Middle-Class Gentleman). At the Alhambra Theatre, the ensemble’s 1933 London
program—Choreartium, Les Sylphides, Les Présages (Predictions), and Le Beau Danube
(The Beautiful Danube)—influenced ballet worldwide, particularly in Argentina and
Brazil. After the company left Monte Carlo in 1936, members avoided Hitler’s
aggressions by journeying to Pacific islands and Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane, and
Melbourne, Australia. Some chose to expatriate to Australia, where the BRMC made a
return visit in 1938.
The BRMC debuted Gaîté Parisienne (1938) in Monte Carlo and traveled to London’s
Drury Lane Theatre to perform Cendrillon and Paganini (Cinderella and Paganini, 1938).
For the next season, choreographer Léonide Massine created Nobilissima Visione (The
Noblest Vision), Capriccio Espagnol (Spanish Whimsy), and Rouge et Noir (Red and
Black). At his presentation of Coppélia, he cast Franklin, the premier mime-danseur, with
Alexandra Danilova. As European conditions worsened, de Basil canceled his Berlin
schedule in September 1939 and smuggled the company music from Germany to Italy.
During a six-month tour of ninety Australian venues in 1939–1940, de Basil hired an
Australian ballerina, Valrene Tweedie, for the ensemble. He commissioned The Outlaw, a
native ballet based on the life of Irish bushranger Ned Kelly to a score by Melbourne
composer Verdon Williams. To raise money for the war effort, the dancers debuted David
Lichine’s Graduation Ball (1939) at Sydney’s Royal Theatre and added Frederick
Ashton’s The Lover to their repertoire. Skibine and Danilova danced Massine’s Pavane
and Seventh Symphony, one of a series of symphonic ballets that developed company
individualism and characterization in performers Alicia Markova and Igor Youskevitch.
In New York at the onset of U.S. entry into World War II, the BRMC became a refugee
troupe staging Massine’s prophetic ballet Labyrinth (1941). For ballet lovers in their new
American home, dancer-choreographer Alexandra Fedorova performed an abridged
Nutcracker. Still young and inexperienced, Maria Tallchief won the part of understudy to
Nathalie Krassovska in Chopin Concerto. The December 1941 arrest of Blum and his
execution by the Nazis at Auschwitz in September 1942 left de Basil to manage the
company alone.
The BRMC emulated the élan of Agnes de Mille, creator of Rodeo, or The Courting at
Burnt Ranch (1942) and displayed Russian steps in Bronislava Nijinska’s The Snow
Maiden and Ancient Russia. Franklin debuted the part of a sailor in the 1943 staging of
The Red Poppy, the first Soviet ballet. The corps de ballet mastered George Balanchine’s
Danses Concertantes (1944) for a premiere at New York’s City Center Theater and, in
1945, the Mexico City debut of Concerto Barocco, featuring Bernice Rehner. Still
avoiding war-torn venues, de Basil took his company to South America in August 1946.
The BRMC performed Massine’s Capriccio (1948) in Milan to the score of Igor
Stravinsky. The ensemble foundered after de Basil’s death in 1951, when tickets for a Los
Angeles concert cost from $1.25 for the gallery to $3.60 for the front row. In the declining
years, Cuban diva Alicia Alonso made annual guest appearances and teamed with Igor
Youskevitch, who helped her overcome the obstacle of partial blindness. The 1952
production of Scheherazade stressed sparkly costumes, body paint, and ropes of pearls on
Shirley Haynes in the part of Zoiede. Performing up to two hundred concerts per year, the
troupe revived in 1954 from the artistry of partners Yvonne Chouteau and Franklin, who
dramatized the parts of Peep-Bo and Katisha in The Mikado.
A tour of 104 American towns generated new fans for ballet, including masked dancers
in The Woman and the Unicorn (1955) and Miguel Terekhov’s droll characterization of Dr.
Coppelius in the 1957 staging of Coppélia. After the height of success with Igor
Youskevitch and Mia Slavenska in Giselle at the Metropolitan Opera in 1957, the
ensemble withered from lack of new ballets and disinterest in the modernism of
Balanchine’s Ballet Imperial (1958). Insolvent and attacked by unions, the BRMC
disbanded in 1963. The documentary film Ballets Russes (2005) collected memories by
Alicia Markova, Marc Platt, Irina Baronova, and George Zoritch.
Source: Anderson, Jack. The One and Only: The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Alton,
UK: Dance Books, 2010.
BALLETS RUSSES
On an extraordinary path to modernism, the Ballets Russes (BR), a rebirth of Russian art,
liberated dramatic dance of its outdated conventions governing choreography, costumes,
backdrops, and orchestration. Premiering in Paris at the Théâtre de Châtelet on May 19,
1909, during the Russian ballet diaspora, the collaboration of talents from Italy, France,
Spain, Hungary, Germany, Poland, Finland, Egypt, Moldova, Greece, Ireland, and Russia
achieved uniformity and originality from direction by Russian entrepreneur Sergei
Pavlovich Diaghilev. By surrounding himself with early twentieth-century dancers,
painters, scenarists, fashion designers, and conductors, he evolved a production style that
accentuated the synergy of the arts, including the debut of Polish-Ukrainian soloist Vaslav
Nijinsky in Le Festin (1909).
 On an imperial gift of 100,000 rubles ($33,417), Diaghilev strove for perfection by
driving artists to extremes of liberation. The troupe’s first stagings began with Alexander
Borodin’s The Polovtsian Dances (1909), an iconic collection from Cumania, a homeland
for refugees along the Black Sea. The company performed an adaptation of Nikolai
Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade (1910) by choreographer Michel Fokine and abstract
artist Léon Bakst, who experimented with body-freeing costumes.
The BR first found work at music halls—the Mogador in Paris and the Coliseum in
London. On the road in Madrid, New York, Monte Carlo, and Rome, the ensemble strove
to revolutionize ballet kinetics. Essential to their innovation, they performed to ecstatic
librettos by Guillaume Apollinaire and André Gide and compositions by Maurice Ravel,
Claude Debussy, Richard Strauss, Sergei Prokofiev, Manuel de Falla, Erik Satie, Darius
Milhaud, Ottorino Respighi, and Francis Poulenc.
Headlining Stage Success
Critical response to bursts of color and avant-garde characters introduced the terminology
of art nouveau. From incisive media critiques of the odalisques (female slaves) in
Scheherazade, the vocabulary of contemporary dance incorporated sensuality and ardor
alongside technical mastery and sophisticated plots. The media cultivated an intelligentsia
conversant with the ephemeral emotions of Les Sylphides and Cléopâtra (1909), Giselle
and L’Oiseau de Feu (The Firebird, 1910), and Petrouchka (1911).
By 1911, the Ballets Russes maintained a permanent cast under direction of director
Michel Fokine, who furthered soloist Vaslav Nijinsky’s meteoric rise to fame with the
elegiac mode of L’Après-Midi d’un Faune (Afternoon of a Faun, 1912). Diaghilev’s
abrupt firing of Nijinsky as male lead in spring 1914 aroused anger in Bolshoi teacher
Nikolai Legat, but generated opportunities for the short Polish dancer Stanislas
Idzikowski, a protégé of Enrico Cecchetti. The trans-European grounding of the corps de
ballet and soloists bolstered Diaghilev’s reputation.
At the onset of World War I, the art world celebrated the BR’s alliance of dramatic
opera with Cecchetti’s daily instruction, Natalia Goncharova’s sets and costumes, and
Fokine’s mimetic ballet in the achievement of Le Coq d’Or (The Golden Cockerel, 1914).
Unpredictable wartime finances necessitated a tour of the United States and South
America, where donations to the arts remained largely undiminished by combat in Europe.
The troupe’s 1917 presentations of Contes Russes (Russian Stories) and Parade confirmed
Diaghilev’s genius for masterminding productions and for pairing the experimental
character roles designed by Léonide Massine with the abstract backdrops of Pablo Picasso
and Jean Cocteau. Launching Spanish composer Manuel de Falla’s ballet music in July
1919, the one-act flamenco mime-drama Le Tricorne (The Three-Cornered Hat) debuted
at London’s Alhambra Theatre featuring curtain and costumes by Picasso and lead dancer
José Martinez. The choreography showcased English dancer Lydia Sokolova, who
launched a career in character roles that included the evocative Chosen Maiden in a 1920
presentation of Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring). BR faced disappointing
monetary returns from Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty (retitled “The
Sleeping Princess,” 1921), an entrancing fairy tale featuring Olga Spessivtseva as Aurora.
Diaghilev excerpted Act III as Aurora’s Wedding (1922), reducing the four-hour original to
a forty-five-minute series of divertissements.
A Virtuoso Finale
In the last five years of Diaghilev’s sponsorship, the Ballets Russes staged some of its
most influential artistry, enhanced by the innovations of ballet mistress Bronislava
Nijinska. Impressionism permeated performances, including Francis Poulenc’s dance
suites for Les Biches (The Does, 1924); the exoticism of Italo-Egyptian composer Vittorio
Rieti and designer Maurice Utrillo for the Tuscan folk tale Barabau (1925); Vernon
Duke’s musical metaphor for Zèphire et Flore (The Wind and the Flower, 1925); and
orchestral direction by French conductor Roger Désormière and the imagery of Max Ernst
and Joan Miró’s curtain, costumes, and sets for Roméo et Juliette (1926). The performance
of Igor Stravinsky’s Apollon Musagète (Apollo and the Muses, 1928) introduced promise
in George Balanchine’s staging and the magnetic presence of principal dancer Felia
Doubrovska. Le Fils Prodigue (The Prodigal Son, 1929), a biblical parable, combined
Balanchine’s knowledge of dance with the music of Sergei Prokofiev, Doubrovska and
Serge Lifar’s mimetic postures, and sets designed by abstract painter Georges Rouault.
Shortly after Diaghilev’s death on August 19, 1929, at the end of a two-decade
transformation of poster art, fashion, music, and dance, the Ballets Russes disbanded.
Former participants bore their innovations to new venues, notably, Irish dancer Ninette de
Valois’s co-founding of the Royal Ballet, Anton Dolin’s creation of the London Festival
Ballet, Serge Lifar’s direction of the Paris Opera Ballet, and Balanchine’s establishment of
America’s classical ballet. In 1960, Sokolova reflected on the metamorphosis of
modernism in Memoirs Dancing for Diaghilev (1960).
See also Diaghilev, Sergei; Fokine, Michel; Lifar, Serge; Nijinsky, Vaslav; The Rite of
Spring.
Source: Caddy, Davinia. The Ballets Russes and Beyond: Music and Dance in Belle-
Époque Paris. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
LES BALLETS TROCKADERO DE MONTE CARLO
A troupe of male ballerinas in drag, the “Trocks” mock the overly sissified sensibilities of
romantic ballet. Originated in New York City on September 9, 1974, by Peter Anastos,
Natch Taylor, and Antony Bassae, the BTMC first performed in hole-in-the-wall lofts and
late-night comedy shows. As travesties in molting tutus and pointe shoes, the
presentations generated a broad fan base in venues around the world, notably, Ravello
Festival in Salerno, Piacenza’s Teatro Munipale, Hamburg’s Staatsopher, Osnabrücker
Theater, Bangkok’s Royal Paragon Hall, and Leipzig Opera House.
A multinational company consisting of American, Mexican, Israeli, Australian,
Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German dancers, the BTMC performs under the National
Endowment for the Arts Touring Program. The corps parodies precision enchaînements of
such dance staples as Don Quixote, Le Corsaire (The Pirate), Paquita, The Humpbacked
Horse, Le Cage, Gaîté Parisienne, The Nutcracker, Laurencia, Stars and Stripes, and Les
Sylphides and excerpts from El Cid, Raymonda, La Esmeralda, and Giselle. The troupe
also nuances the precious in Go for Barocco, Valpurgeyeva Noch, Lamentations of Jane
Eyre, and La Trovatiara Pas de Cinq. Program notes feature the punning names—
Maipanzarov, Nevasayneva, Doumeifayva, Supphozova, Jacques d’Ambrosia, Lofatkina
—and florid photos of drag specialists in fluffy fake eyelashes and ballerina buns.
Since 1975, the Trocks have perfected incongruous steps and exaggerated courtliness
under a dance coach and scheduled regular rehearsals of solos, partnering, and production
numbers. Contributing zaniness while following the precepts of Marius Petipa, the dancers
add fright wigs to catfights, hip rolls to coquettish footwork, and kazoos, paper bags, toy
swords, fans, and soup pots and ladles as props. Since the 1980s, the chamber company
has toured the globe as far away from headquarters as Australia, South Africa, Singapore,
Israel, and Turkey.
For campy stagings of Swan Lake, BTMC invited actor Shirley MacLaine to join the
corps and diva Leanne Benjamin of the Royal Ballet to take the Swan Queen role. In
2008, English royalty welcomed the Trocks. Stage shows involve the troupe in raising
funds for homeless gay youths, impoverished Thai children, and AIDS patients. The
2014–2015 season took their spoofs en pointe to Puerto Rico, Canada, Serbia, Spain,
Portugal, Japan, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Holland, Sweden, and France. BTMC
honoraria range from a Positano Award to a Critic’s Circle National Dance citation and
Theatrical Managers award.
Source: Summers, Claude J., ed. The Queer Encyclopedia of Music, Dance, and
Musical Theater. San Francisco, CA: Cleis, 2004.
BARRE WARM-UP
See image in photospread.
Preliminary exercise and stretching à la barre begins with fingertips touching a
horizontal support or waist-high handrail. Workouts require lightweight cloth or leather
shoes that conform to the shape of the foot, arch, and sole and nonbinding clothing that
flexes without strain, an essential for splits. A standard routine increases circulation to the
feet and legs for warmth and limbers the body’s core for dance.
As prescribed in Carlo Blasis’s Traité Élémentaire, Théorique, et Pratique de l’Art de la
Danse (Elementary, Theoretical, and Practical Treatise on the Art of Dance, 1820),
regimens build habit strength, starting with the centering of the head over shoulders, hips,
and feet for balance, control, and stability. The dancer tightens the vertical stance to
undergird thigh, pelvis, torso, shoulder, neck, and back carriage with foot, ankle, and
hamstring support. Practice begins with the five foot positions introduced in 1589 by
French clergyman Thoinot Arbeau. Like the octave in music, Enrico Cecchetti advocated
the basic five placements as foundations of dance:
first position—heels aligned back-to-back with legs straight and undersides of knees
touching
second position—first position with feet separated horizontally twelve inches
 third position—front foot slid horizontally against back foot with front heel against the
back arch
fourth position—feet parallel horizontally with the toe of the front foot twelve inches
from the heel of the back foot
fifth position—feet parallel and touching with the toe of the front foot against the heel
of the back foot.
Warm-up advances from elongation of the arms and feet in degagés (repositioning of
the feet) up, out, and down to more complicated toning of the legs at precise angles to the
vertical pose. Tendus (stretches) and elevés (rises) flex, tighten, and lift the body in
readiness for enchaïnements that move the soloist in time to the music and in unity with
the corps de ballet. Practice advances to portes de bras (arm positions):
first position—slightly curved arms reach out between sternum and waist with
fingertips apart
second position—arms reach out from the sides with wrists and shoulders level and
palms facing outward
third position—replication of first position with arms reaching above and slightly ahead
of the face
fourth position—replication of third position with one arm at first position
fifth position—replication of third position with arms curved above the face and
shoulders down and level.
Adagio (slow) movements such as a grand battement (high leg lift) relax the muscles
and tendons to protect limbs from strain. Allegro (rapid) steps enhance the intricacy and
speed of petits battements (small beats), frappés (floor touches), and sautés (leaps). The
most strenuous exercises involve resting the ankle on the barre for reaches toward the foot
and floor and extensions of the leg unsupported at a right angle from the body for rond de
jambe en l’air (elevated leg circles). Repetitions ensure even strengthening of right and
left sides.
For dancing en pointe (on toe), individuals wearing toe shoes perform the basic warm-
up while balancing the body on the tip of one foot. The rigor of arabesque (one-legged)
poses and pliés (knee bends) prefaces partnering with a moving human support. More
important to the total effect, barre warm-up focuses the mind on precise instructions and
concentration on even breathing and clean technique devoid of subjective interpretation.
The dancer observes daily progress in wall mirrors to ensure full turnout (external
rotation) of the hips and feet; synchrony of ports de bras (arm positions) with leg
movements; and correct knee, elbow, and spinal alignment for an attitude (pose with leg
slightly bent). As noted by Igor Moiseyev, founder of Russia’s folkloric dance in 1937,
precise technical elements remained the standard throughout the history of ballet, a tribute
to which was choreographed in 1948 by Danish dance maker Harald Landers in Études.
Moiseyev’s observation failed to predict Twyla Tharp, whose warm-ups to jazz in the
1960s extended the dancer’s range of motion.
 See also attire; technique.
Source: Kassing, Gayle. Discovering Dance. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2014.
BARYSHNIKOV, MIKHAIL (1948–)
One of the most beloved and admired soloists in ballet history, Russo-Latvian ballerino
Mikhail Nikolaievich Baryshnikov has flourished in hybrid dance, film, television, stage,
and popular culture. The son of seamstress Alexandra Kisselova and Colonel Nicholai
Baryshnikov, an air force topography engineer, “Misha” was born on January 27, 1948, in
Riga. While the family shared an apartment for sixteen people, he slept in the same room
as his half-brother Vladimir.
At age twelve, Baryshnikov replaced soccer in his schedule with dance. Although short
and stocky, he excelled at classical ballet and progressed to Leningrad to learn the
Vaganova method under dance coach Alexander Pushkin. Baryshnikov’s mother’s suicide
by hanging in 1960 and his father’s remarriage forced Vladimir into the military. The
colonel’s disapproval of ballet further isolated Mikhail, who missed his mother.
Baryshnikov frequently ran away from home and dedicated himself to perfectionism.
As a soloist at age nineteen, he debuted for the Kirov in Leningrad at a 1967 staging of
Giselle. For precision as premier danseur noble in Oleg Vinogradov’s Gorianka
(Mountain Girl, 1968) and for imitating eighteenth-century postures in Leonid Jakobson’s
humorous Vestris (1969), Baryshnikov generated interest among global critics. Although
he medaled in Varna, Bulgaria, and won for La Bayadère (The Temple Dancer) at the 1969
First International Ballet Competition in Moscow, he felt stifled by Russian tedium and
control.
Baryshnikov on His Own
To increase opportunities in contemporary and modern dance, during a North American
tour on June 29, 1974, Baryshnikov slipped out of Toronto’s O’Keefe Centre and defected
by taxi to a friend’s apartment. The following August, he starred as James Ruben in La
Sylphide for the National Ballet of Canada and, for the American Ballet Theatre (ABT),
danced opposite Natalia Makarova in Giselle. For ABT, he mounted to sellout audiences
The Nutcracker, Cinderella, Raymonda, Romeo and Juliet, and Don Quixote, in which he
teamed with Cynthia Harvey. While his star rose in North America, his name and career
disappeared from the Russian media.
As a guest for London’s Royal Ballet and, from 1978 to 1980, as a soloist for the New
York City Ballet, Misha toured Copenhagen and Austria, premiered Twyla Tharp’s Push
Comes to Shove (1976), and performed George Balanchine’s La Sonnambula (The
Sleepwalker) in Washington, D.C. Because of Baryshnikov’s adaptability, he enjoyed a
heady romance with the public and with dance makers Frederick Ashton, Glen Tetley,
Merce Cunningham, Roland Petit, and Alvin Ailey, who teamed him with Judith Jamison
in the coquettish Pas de Duke (1976) to a Duke Ellington score. Baryshnikov sought
mentoring under Balanchine, who paired him with Patricia McBride for Rubies and
featured him in The Prodigal Son, Apollo, Orpheus, Stars and Stripes, and Afternoon of a
Faun. Jerome Robbins cast Baryshnikov in a duet with Patricia McBride and opposite
Natalia Makarova, a fellow Russian defector, in the theatrical partnering of Other Dances
(1976) and in the brooding Opus 19/The Dreamer (1979).

One of the most beloved and admired soloists in ballet history, Russo-Latvian ballerino Mikhail Nikolaievich
Baryshnikov has flourished in hybrid dance, film, television, stage, and popular culture, as illustrated by his
comic postures in a 1975 production of Vestris. Stars of the American Ballet Theatre

Vital and masterfully paced, Baryshnikov entranced American audiences with his duet
with Gelsey Kirkland for a 1977 CBS-TV broadcast of The Nutcracker, which morphed
into an annual PBS-TV presentation and DVD. A part as a Russian dancer opposite actor-
ballerina Leslie Browne in The Turning Point (1977) won him an Academy Award
nomination. Televised appearances on Great Performances and Live from Lincoln Center
preceded his role as a hoofer opposite Liza Minnelli in Baryshnikov on Broadway (1980)
and his interpretation of Kenneth MacMillan’s comically erotic The Wild Boy (1982). The
dancer’s versatility continued to develop with cinema parts in White Nights (1985), That’s
Dancing (1985), and Dancers (1987), in which he squired Alessandra Ferri.
Mikhail, American Dancer
After six years directing the ABT, in 1986, Baryshnikov sought U.S. citizenship, which he
shared with his five-year-old daughter, Aleksandra Lange Baryshnikova. To escape the
constant fund-raising for ABT, he began a two-year stint as guest star of Martha Graham’s
ensemble. In 1989, he managed his own troupe, the White Oak Dance Project, touring the
works of partner Mark Morris, David Gordon, Paul Taylor, and Twyla Tharp, developer of
Cutting Up (1991), a reflection on the history of social dance.
For Baryshnikov, Erick Hawkins choreographed Journey of a Poet (1994), Eliot Feld
composed Tongue and Groove (1995), and Dana Reitz created Unspoken Territory (1995).
Meg Stuart designed Remote (1997), in which the dancer played the antihero. Scheduling
of Baryshnikov’s democratic form of dance took the ensemble to Paris, Milan, London,
Rome, Hamburg, Stockholm, Caesarea, and Tel Aviv. In 2004, he welcomed performers of
thirty-seven arts to the theater and studios at New York’s Baryshnikov Arts Center. At age
fifty-eight, he married Lisa Rinehart, mother of their children, Peter Andrew, Anna
Katerina, and Sofia Luisa.
Baryshnikov’s versatility delighted admirers with his couturier line, perfume, and comic
appearances opposite Sarah Jessica Parker on Sex and the City, publication of Because …
(2007) for children, and acting in the experimental dramas of Samuel Beckett, for which
the dancer received a Tony nomination. Despite chronic pain in his left knee, he expanded
his film career in 2007 with a starring role in choreographer Mats Ek’s Place opposite
ballerina Ana Maria Laguna Caso. In 2014, Baryshnikov backed Willem Dafoe in an
absurdist vaudeville act, The Old Woman. His honoraria include an Honored Artist of the
Republic, 1976 Nijinsky Award, Kennedy Center honors from President Jimmy Carter, a
National Medal of Arts, a 2003 Prix Benois de la Danse, a 2014 Spotlight Award, and
honorary doctorates.
See also Nureyev, Rudolf.
Source: Baryshnikov, Mikhail. Baryshnikov: In Black and White. New York:
Bloomsbury, 2002.
BEAUCHAMP, PIERRE (1631–1704)
The ballet instructor to Louis XIV of France, Pierre Beauchamp advanced to
choreographer of court divertissements (entertainments). Born at Versailles to a family of
dancers, Beauchamp trained the dauphin in daily lessons for two decades and made his
stage debut in 1648 in Le Ballet du Dérèglement des Passions (The Ballet of the
Unbalanced Passions). Beauchamp recognized the five basic foot positions that French
teachers had applied to classical ballet lessons since their introduction in clergyman
Thoinot Arbeau’s Orchésographie (1589). Beauchamp’s precepts called for light dance
attire and flexible slippers to accommodate the turnout of legs and feet. The French
playwright Molière applauded Beauchamp’s efforts as festive embellishments of staged
performance, especially the mockery of court worthies and their strivings for royal
preferment.

The ballet instructor to Louis XIV of France, Pierre Beauchamp accredited the five basic foot positions as
essential to classical ballet, as demonstrated by members of the Houston Ballet performing The Brahms-
Haydn Variations. Photo by Amitava Sarkar, Kalyn Oden, Houston Ballet, www .houstonballet.org

In collaboration with composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, in May 1651, Beauchamp

introduced the professional opéra-ballet with the opening of Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de
Bacchus (Celebrations of Love and Bacchus), a dazzling stage production of singing and
dancing based on Greek hedonism in the worship of the god of wine. In Le Ballet Royale
de la Nuit (The Royal Ballet of the Night, 1653), Beauchamp appeared on stage with the
king.
In Paris in 1661, Beauchamp supervised the Académie Royale de Danse, the king’s
state-sponsored school directed by composer Jean Baptiste Lully. With Lully’s music and
comedic text by Molière, Beauchamp advanced the comédie-ballet mode with
L’Impatience (1661) and Les Fâcheux (The Bores, 1661), a droll landmark of baroque
artistry. By interspersing dramatic scenarios with balletic intermedi (interludes) performed
by maîtres de danse (professional actors and dancers), the collaborators anticipated
musical theater.
Beauchamp’s work graced a series of stage successes. By 1664, he choreographed
Molière’s troupe as well as royal performances. In March 1671 at the Jeu de Paume, he
presented pastoral dances for Pomone (Pomona), the first French opera. A popular three-
act satire, Le Malade Imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid, 1673), debuted in Paris at the
king’s palace theater. Beauchamp followed in January 1674 by choreographing Alceste, ou
le Triomphe d’Alcide (Alcestis, or The Triumph of Alcides), a five-act musical tragedy
with libretto by Philippe Quinault based on a Greek myth of the struggle between life and
death.
 In his fifties, Pierre Beauchamp invented a form of dance notation that remained in use
by choreographers for a century. Paralleling the five foot postures, he standardized five
arm positions for baroque ballet. He continued to stage dances at Versailles, but, after
1697, directed his talents toward performances for Jesuit Colleges. A rigaudon that
displayed ballroom pairing and a sarabande that depicted a bravura male solo that he
taught protégé Michel Blondi, the instructor of Marie Camargo, survive from his
choreography.
See also Louis XIV; Lully, Jean Baptiste; opera-ballet; Paris Opera Ballet.
Source: Cowart, Georgia. The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of
Spectacle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
BEAUJOYEULX, BALTHASAR DE (CA. 1535–1587)
A court minion risen to fame, violinist Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx achieved royal
acclamation as the court dancing master and director of the world’s first official theatrical
ballet. Born Baldassare de Belgioioso in the Italian Piedmont around 1535, he came under
the patronage of the Marechal de Brissac for his skill at conversation, storytelling, and
knowledge of Greek and Roman classic dance. Beaujoyeulx moved from the western Alps
in Savoy to Paris in 1554–1555 to serve the royal family as violinist in an Italian band.
Royal patronage set the tone, style, and direction of Beaujoyeulx’s career. In 1559, he
served the staff of Mary Stuart during her sojourn in France. Within a year, he received a
bonus of 1,250 livres to finance his marriage to Antoinette de Grenel and subsequent
tuition of 300 livres for the education of their son Charles.
Beaujoyeulx’s skill at training children landed him the job of educating two of the royal
princes, Charles IX and Henri III, the sons of Catherine de’ Medici and Henri II. In 1566,
the dance master advanced to valet to Henri III and his wife, Queen Louise of Lorraine.
Beaujoyeulx held the title until 1581 and passed it to his son Charles. As a chamber
servant, the father earned two hundred livres cash per year plus a piece of property and
garden adjacent to the Louvre. Because he arranged court divertissements, including the
masquerade Défense du Paradis (Vindication of Heaven, 1572), his pay increased by 20
percent to two hundred forty livres.
Beaujoyeulx attained musical renown for choreographing the state dance Ballet aux
Ambassadors Polonaise (Ballet of the Polish Ambassadors, 1573) in honor of Henri III,
the new king of Poland. The organization of ballet into story reduced the importance of
social dance and replaced it with mime and strophic song setting the rhythm for the corps
de ballet. The spectacle of sixteen female dancers weaving numerological patterns on
stage represented celestial harmony and the interrelations of provinces of France with the
rest of Europe. He followed on October 15, 1851, with Le Ballet-Comique de la Reyne
(The Queen’s Comic Ballet, 1581), a five-and-a-half-hour extravaganza honoring the
wedding of Marguerite of Lorraine and the Duc de Joyeuse, the sister and brother-in-law
of Catherine de’ Medici.
In 1585, Beaujoyeulx’s instruction aided Henri III in designing his own ballet
acknowledging his receipt of the Order of the Garter from England’s Elizabeth I. After
retirement in 1584 to substantial land holdings, Beaujoyeulx died in 1587. By 1600,
Italian opera adapted some of Beaujoyeulx’s innovations to dramatic aria and recitative.
See also Le Ballet-Comique de la Reyne.
Source: Brooks, Jeanice. Courtly Song in Late Sixteenth-Century France. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000.
BÉJART, MAURICE (1927–2007)
Radical Swiss-French dancer-choreographer Maurice Béjart tailored some two hundred
ballets to populist tastes. Born Maurice-Jean Berger in Marseilles on January 1, 1927, to
educator and futurist intellectual Gaston Berger, he bore the dark looks of a Senegalese
grandmother. His elegant mother, Germaine Cafeillères Berger, died in 1934. Four years
later, a physician recommended physical activity to strengthen Béjart’s slender frame.
In 1945, Béjart graduated from the school of philosophy in Aix-en-Provence. Impressed
by Serge Lifar’s Ukrainian ballets, he studied in Provence with Russian diva Mathilde
Kschessinska. He joined the resident company of the Opéra de Marseille and continued
his training in Paris before relocating to Brussels in 1946. With Mona Inglesby’s
International Ballet in 1949, he performed the Bluebird variation in The Sleeping Beauty.
Establishing an Ensemble
At La Monnaie, the Brussels royal opera theater, in the mid-1900s in collaboration with
Swedish ballet coach Birgit Cullberg, Béjart founded Ballet de l’Étoile on the principles of
Sergei Diaghilev’s spectacles for the Ballets Russes. After filming Firebird in 1952, Béjart
made arts news with Symphonie Pour un Homme Seule (Symphony for a Man Alone,
1955) set to musique concrète (recorded natural sounds and noise) and with an adaptation
of Jean Paul Sartre’s play No Exit, both based on post–World War II alienation.
Béjart sought a universal dance drama with enhanced mime, notably, an all-male
adaptation of Bolero (1960) featuring postures reflecting athletic bonding on Greek
pottery and mural art. His startling concepts drew Rudolf Nureyev to his ensemble in
1970. Béjart honored the passion of dance by creating a tribute to choreographer Marius
Petipa and Nijinsky, Clown of God (1971), featuring Jorge Donn. For his humanism, Béjart
won the 1974 Erasmus Prize.
For more than a quarter century, Béjart’s Ballet du XXe Siècle (Ballet of the Twentieth
Century) performed contemporary works based on classical technique. He drew dancers to
his company that included Vladimir Vassiliev, Suzanne Farrell, Judith Jamison, Jorge
Donn, and Maya Plisetskaya. British and American critics ridiculed Béjart’s mystic
themes and his appeal to young audiences, but Europeans overwhelmingly applauded his
mixed-media productions.
Nonstandard Creations
An eclectic with a taste for eroticism, expressionism, and revolt against convention, Béjart
created Ring um den Ring (Ring around the Ring) for the Berlin Opera and a version of
Petrouchka for the Paris Opera, but suffered a snub from the French, who favored
Nureyev for the director’s post. Under the patronage of Queen Farah of Iran, Béjart
applied Persian motifs and Sufist themes to Bhakti (1968), Golestan (Rose Garden, 1973),
and Farah (1976) and, in Brussels, introduced Heliogabalus (1976) set to traditional
African music and a score by Giuseppe Verdi. Bejárt’s neoromantic ballet Songs of a
Wayfarer (1982) reflected on Nureyev’s nostalgia for Russia. For Salomé (1986), starring
Patrick Dupond, Béjart turned to scriptural history.
In 1987, Béjart relocated to Lausanne to establish Béjart Ballet and to stage homoerotic
works celebrating the male physique. For soloist Sylvie Guillem, he designed La Luna
(The Moon, 1991), Sissi, the Anarchist Empress (1992), and Racine Cubique (1997); for
Mikhail Baryshnikov, he composed the solo Piano Bar (1997). In reference to the AIDS
pandemic that killed dancer Jorge Donn at age forty-five, Béjart designed Ballet for Life
(1997). The choreographer’s 2000 Freudian adaptation of The Nutcracker retreated from a
female focus to a boy beset by erotic daydreams.
The Japanese Order of the Rising Sun and the 2003 Prix Benois de la Danse honored
Béjart’s long career in experimental dance and the founding of dance academies in Dakar,
Brussels, and Lausanne. He died of coronary and renal failure in Lausanne on November
22, 2007. His art theories influenced choreographers Boris Eifman and Matthew Bourne.
In fall 2007, the thirty-five-member Lausanne company performed his last work, Around
the World in 80 Minutes, a travelogue of Bejárt’s tours.
See also Iranian National Ballet.
Source: Summers, Claude J., ed. The Queer Encyclopedia of Music, Dance, and
Musical Theater. San Francisco: Cleis, 2004.
BENESH NOTATION
An abstraction of pure anatomical movement, Benesh Notation reduces kinetics to a
symbolic script. Compiled in 1947 by English dancer Joan Rothwell Benesh and Rudolf
Benesh, an Anglo-Czech-Italian accountant, the system adapted the five-line horizontal
musical stave to the rhythm and duration of poses, steps, and enchaînements. Vertical
spacing corresponded with head, torso, midline, legs, and feet and synchronized each with
music.
An abstraction of pure anatomical movement, Benesh Notation reduces kinetics to a symbolic script.
https://www.rad.org.uk/study/Benesh/how-benesh-movement-notation-works

Benesh initiated the Benesh Movement Notation in 1955, when Ninette de Valois
applied the science of choreology to staging and recording productions at the Royal Opera
House in London. After Joan and Rudolf Benesh published An Introduction to Benesh
Dance Notation (1956), the Royal Academy of Dance adapted the code to ballet
textbooks. For the first score symbolized in print, in 1957, Joan Benesh reconfigured Igor
Stravinsky’s Petrouchka on the Benesh matrix. The following year, the Brussels Universal
Exhibition displayed the code among England’s technical advances.
Unlike the spatial documentation of Labanotation from the 1920s or the Eshkol and
Wachmann joint movement language of 1959, the Benesh shorthand abbreviated whole
body dynamics. Proponents applied the concept to physiotherapy, zoological study, autism
and cerebral palsy evaluation, couture, ergonomics, and robotics. Codifier Faith Worth and
choreographer Elphine Allen began working for the Royal Ballet in 1960 as its first
codifiers of figures in motion. In 1962, patrons Frederick Ashton, Margot Fonteyn,
Ninette de Valois, Robert Helpmann, Tamara Karsavina, and Marie Rambert founded the
Benesh Institute of Choreology to standardize the history and development of dance.
Before the introduction of video tutorials, teachers at the National Ballet School of
Canada researched historical archives of dance and applied choreology to rehearsals. In
1968, anthropologists, aided by codifier Allen, chose the Benesh system to record the
Aboriginal rites and drumming to the membranophone in the Gulf of Carpentaria, North
Queensland, the first indigenous dance reduced to a codified matrix. Subsequent studies
applied the Benesh shorthand to North Australian folk dance of the remote Gurindji and
Warlpiri peoples of the Tanami Desert and of Tiwi on the Tiwi Islands.
 In 1989, South African dancer Eduard Greyling began notating South African works by
the Benesh ciphers. By 1990, the Benesh Notation Editor software made available a
computerized system for encrypting dance movement, a motion study specialty at York
University in Canada. Elements isolated movements of individual dancers or analyzed the
corps de ballet as a whole.
Source: Saffer, Dan. Designing Gestural Interfaces: Touchscreens and Interactive
Devices. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2009.
BLASIS, CARLO (1795–1878)
See image in photospread.
An Italian arts critic and collaborator with dance theorist Enrico Cecchetti, Carlo Blasis
structured geometric ballet and systematized its rigorous method of daily training. Born
Carlo Pasquale Francesco Raffaele Baldassare de Blasis in Naples on November 4, 1795,
he was the son of Teresa Vincenza Caluzzi and composer Francesco Blasis. During the
Napoleonic Wars, the family fled to Marseilles, where the parents groomed Carlo and his
sisters, Teresa and Virginia, in the arts. The sisters, both singers, later composed music for
Carlo’s ballets, which expressed the neoclassic esthetic.
A master of literature, music, sketching, sculpture, anatomy, geometry, and architecture,
Blasis studied dance under Salvatore Viganò, a former pupil of Jean Dauberval, and
performed in ballets by Gaetano Gioja. Blasis debuted in Marseilles and appeared in
Bordeaux before performing in Paris in 1817 in operas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,
Christoph Gluck, and Antonio Sacchini. Blasis issued Traité Élémentaire, Théorique, et
Pratique de l’Art de la Danse (Elementary, Theoretical, and Practical Treatise on the
History and Art of Dance, 1820), the first comprehensive manual on dance pedagogy. The
text traced performance from the social realm to the stage.
Picturing the male dancer rehearsing in shorts and shoes, Blasis promoted turnout and,
in an art rapidly leaning toward the hyperextensions of romantic ballet, standardized
classical technique. Among his early partners, Italian dancer Amalia Brugnoli performed
in Florence en pointe. An astounding technique for the time, female toe dancing
diminished the role of Blasis and other male dancers.
An Arts Scholar
Blasis researched dance theory from the Renaissance to his own time. His understanding
of equilibrium derived from the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Blasis’s sketched ballet
techniques preserved the precepts of experts Pierre Gardel, Dauberval, Antoine Pitrot, and
Auguste Vestris, a comic character dancer. Among Blasis’s innovations, he recommended
lighter garments to facilitate higher lifts and jumps and faster turns. He earned credit for
connecting Giambologna’s statue of Mercury with the ballet position called attitude, an
elevation of a bent leg to the back or front.
In addition to perusing dance pedagogy in England and France, Blasis trained under
Pierre Gardel at the Paris Opera in natural drama and uniformity. As teacher in residence,
Blasis taught balance and alignment at the dance schools of Russia, Portugal, and Poland.
While performing in 1826 as soloist at the King’s Theatre in London and in St. Petersburg,
he compiled a second dance manual, The Code of Terpsichore (1828), the foundations of
ballet training from primeval mime and classical Greek dance to performing the waltz in
his own era.
In detailed analysis, Blasis guided the trainee from the beginning. He chose age eight as
the ideal time to begin study. His stage commentary differentiated among serious,
melodramatic, and comic or grotesque dance. His manual also specified gendered style,
with men dominating majestic, vigorous steps and women creating voluptuous, lissome
attitudes.
In Genoa, in 1830, Blasis wed Annunziata Ramaccini, an expert on mime. He partnered
with her in energetic performances, including a starring role at La Fenice in Venice in
1831. An accident to the left foot at the San Carlo Theater in Naples ended his dancing
career. Blasis’s work illustrated a belief in dance as a gymnastic endeavor that developed
grace, supple strength, and symmetry and promoted dance as a mainstream art.
Blasis initiated the pirouette en attitude (turn with back leg bent upward at ninety
degrees). He also recommended spotting, a visual focus on a distant spot that enabled the
dancer to turn without getting dizzy by snapping the head faster than the turn of the body.
He developed the role of the ballerina, who sometimes appeared in liberating male dress.
He also set the standards for the comic rustic dancer, a strong, but well-padded performer
of middle height.
Ballet Pedagogy
In his forties and fifties, Blasis codirected the La Scala Theatre Ballet School with
Annunziata and built its reputation to one of Europe’s prime dance academies by
promoting coreodramma, a mimetic element of ballet d’action, introduced in 1804 at
Milan by ballet master Salvatore Viganò. Using the standard lesson beginning with barre
exercises and advancing to center work in adagio, pirouettes, allegro, and enchaînements
(combinations), Blasis educated stars Marietta Baderna, Pasquale Borri, Augusta
Dominichetti, Flora Fabbri, Amalia Ferraris, Sofia Fuoco, Carlotta Brianza, Carolina
Granzini, Giovanni Lepri, Augusta Maywood, and Carlotta Grisi.
Five of Blasis’s ballerinas—Fanny Cerrito, Carolina Rosati, Virginia Zucchi, Maria
Giuri, and Elena Andreyanova—received invitations from Marius Petipa to perform in
Moscow and St. Petersburg. By modeling the Italian style for Russia’s troupes, they
enticed new audiences to Blasis’s brio and technical mastery. One pupil, Marie Bonfanti,
trained Isadora Duncan, who revolutionized stage dress and movement. Another, Filippo
Taglioni, passed Blasis’s expertise to his daughter, Marie Taglioni, who introduced
dancing en pointe (on toe) in Scandinavia and Russia.
Blasis continued summarizing stage technique with Notes upon Dancing, Historical
and Practical (1847), written during an engagement at Drury Lane in London. In 1856, he
directed the Polish National Ballet. Mime Carolina Rosati exhibited his concepts in her
lead role as Medora in the opera-ballet Le Corsaire (The Pirate, 1856). With a blast at
stage vulgarity, Blasis vilified the chica and fandango as examples of pagan degeneracy
performed by voluptuous Africans. While compiling L’Uomo Fisico, Intellectual e Morale
(The Physical, Intellectual, and Moral Human, 1857), he encouraged dancers to emulate
the graceful poses of sculpted figures who appear airborne.
In retirement from Milan, Blasis choreographed the myth Venus and Adonis (1856) and
Two Days of the Carnival in Venice (1857), a production rife with passion, jealousy,
Gothicism, and pageantry. He directed Sergei Sokolov and Praskovia Lebedeva as Faust
and Marguerite in a brilliant Faust, a romance that debuted in Warsaw in 1856 and in
Moscow in December 1861 starring Anna Sobeshchanskaya. From September 1861 to
September 1863, he earned 3,000 rubles annually for training the company of the Imperial
Moscow Theaters.
The Russian segment of Blasis’s career earned mixed reviews, explained in part by his
age. He staged an Icelandic saga, Orfa, Maiden of Fire (1862), followed by Sylvia (1862)
and Pygmalion (1863). Russian critics charged him with overstating his pupils’ grace and
pointe work and with misjudging which performers showed the most promise. As a gift
for Tsar Alexander II, Blasis compiled a scholarly retrospect, Dances in General, Ballet
Celebrities, and National Dances (1864). At his death in Cernobbio on January 15, 1878,
artists revered Blasis as the father of the Italian school of ballet.
See also barre, warm-up; mime.
Source: Chazin-Bennahum, Judith. The Lure of Perfection: Fashion and Ballet, 1780–
1830. New York: Routledge, 2005.
BOLSHOI BALLET
A world model of classical technique and exuberant rendering, the Bolshoi Ballet
perpetuates a preeminent regimen of educating dancers and featuring them in major stage
productions. To ready performers for service to Emperor Paul I, in 1773, the Moscow
Ballet School began training fifty-four orphans and some serfs under the directorship of
Italian dance coach Filippo Beccari. In three years, the first sixty-two dancers—twenty-
four of them soloists—accepted the patronage of Prince Peter Vasilyevich Urusov and
management by Michael Maddox, impresario of a traveling museum and London’s
Haymarket Theatre.
Catherine II established the Bolshoi Ballet in 1776 on the River Neglinka at Moscow’s
Bolshoi Theatre, from which the company takes its name. The troupe thrived on
competition with the Kirov or Mariinsky Ballet in St. Petersburg. In 1778, Leopold
Paradis began staging the Bolshoi’s ballets with an energy reflective of Russian folk
tradition. The company debuted on December 30, 1780, in Alexander Ablesimov’s The
Wanderers and a pantomime, The Magic School, directed by Paridis.
Because debt encumbered the ensemble in 1796, the theater entered government
supervision and direction by Prince Volkonsky, owner of a drama troupe. The Bolshoi
earned the title of imperial ballet school and company in 1806 under the supervision of St.
Petersburg’s theaters. Misfortune and skimpy finances dogged the enterprise at the
Petrovsky Theatre and Arbat Theatre, both of which burned.
 In 1825, architects completed an elegant classic facade on the new Bolshoi Pe-trovsky
Theatre, which surpassed St. Petersburg’s structure in size and proportions. A Russian
debut of Fernando Sor’s Cendrillon (Cinderella) inaugurated the new stage. Exciting
presentations unveiled composer Mikhail Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar (1836), a tragic
dramatization of the assassination of Ivan Susanin, and Ruslan and Lyudmila (1846), both
nationalistic in theme and setting. Still focused on world imperialism, in 1848, the
ensemble performed Paquita, a classic ballet set in Spain during the Napoleonic wars and
choreographed by Frédéric Malavergne and Marius Petipa.
Decades of Growth
By 1850, the Bolshoi troupe of 155 dancers extended its range to classical ballet, folk
dance, melodrama, and comedy. Again in 1853, fire devoured company headquarters,
costumes, musical instruments, and archives. The extensive loss took architect Alberto
Cavos three years to replace. Lit by three hundred oil lamps, the new Petrovsky opened on
August 20, 1856, to coincide with the crowning of Alexander II.
But a nadir in European dance began to assail the Bolshoi. To the detriment of the
company, a failed presentation of Don Quixote in 1869 followed by Czech director Vaclav
Reisinger’s demonic Kastchei (1873), a lackluster Swan Lake (1876), and The
Grandmother’s Wedding (1878) reduced public and tsarist support. Despite the power of
Ekaterina Vazem’s roles in The Butterfly (1874), The Snow Maiden (1879), and Night and
Day (1883), the entertainment for the coronation of Alexander III and Maria Feodorovna,
the Bolshoi Ballet School enrollment fell to eighty. After the demotion of the Bolshoi
Theatre from a state venue for grand ballet, in 1889, the royal treasurer began edging
Moscow ballet out of the imperial budget.
The company entered a golden age in 1900 under choreographer Alexander Gorsky.
The new director liberalized the steps and mime set by classicist Marius Petipa. Energized
by modernist comedy and revivals of Don Quixote in 1900, Swan Lake and Coppélia in
1901, La Bayadère (The Temple Dancer) in 1904, and the Hungarian legend of Raymonda
the next year, the annual program attracted viewers to story ballet. Gorsky excited
balletomanes with the erotic free style of Mikhail Mordkin and Vera Karalli in Nur and
Anitra (1906), the seduction story of an Indian sorceress who enchants a gorgeous soldier.
The Soviet Bolshoi
Until the Russian Revolution of March 8, 1917, the Bolshoi provided Muscovites with an
arts outreach as dynamic as dance in St. Petersburg. Director Mordkin adhered to Marxist
demands for moralistic themes in dram-balet (propaganda ballet), but generated
controversy over accusations of dancer defiance, treason, and defections. In disgust,
Mordkin relocated south with the National Ballet of Ukraine, where Bronislava Nijinska
also fled to teach early twentieth-century innovations.
Following the execution of Tsar Nicholas II on July 17, 1918, prima ballerina
Yekaterina Geltzer rallied Moscow’s remaining arts community to preserve ballet as a
Russian national treasure. Temporarily, the Bolshoi and Kirov merged in 1919 to perform
an experimental version of Giselle. Because the Communist state chose Moscow as its
new capital, on May 18, 1921, authorities announced the formation of the Soviet state
from a newly overhauled Bolshoi stage in Beethoven Hall.
By pushing the Kirov into second place, the Soviet Ministry of Culture inadvertently
centered suppression and requirements for leaden topics and themes in Moscow. Paired
with Aleksei Yermolayev, Geltzer starred in Ukrainian composer Reinhold Glière and
scenarist Mikhail Kurilko’s The Red Poppy (1927), a didactic labor melodrama set in an
Asian port by her husband, choreographer Vasily Tikhomirov. Communist ideologues,
taken with the ballet’s pro-Soviet heroism of Tao Hoa against the villain Li Shan-fu,
supported a second staging two years later by the Kirov.
During the reign of terror and citizen torture and assassination, Josef Stalin maintained
a bulletproof viewing booth off the Bolshoi’s stage left. In 1930, he intervened in the arts
by transferring his favorite dancer, Marina Semyonova, and her husband, Viktor
Semyonov, from the Kirov to the Bolshoi. Semyonova coached a clutch of divas, notably
Nina Sorokina and Ludmila Semenyaka.
The Bolshoi ensemble complained about the success of dram-balet at the Kirov Ballet,
which succeeded at Soviet realism with Alexander Pushkin’s The Fountain of
Bakhchisarai (1934), based on a khan’s double loss of harem wives. In 1938, when serious
deterioration of the Bolshoi Theatre required a thorough renovation, Russia lacked
manpower for construction, factories for bricks and girders, and male performers, many of
whom were drafted from the stage into the military. German bombing on October 28,
1941, forced more restoration, which Russian builders initiated in winter 1942.
A 1943 presentation of A Life for the Tsar welcomed new audiences to the Bolshoi
Ballet and built unfounded hopes for better times. Near the end of World War II, Stalin
again exercised tyrannical muscle over artistic expression. He made company changes by
moving Galina Ulánova from the Kirov to the Bolshoi, where, as prima ballerina
assoluta, she teamed with soloist Nikolai Fadeyechev. Immediately, she learned the title
role for Zolushka (Cinderella, 1944), choreographed by Rostislav Zakharov, the ballet
master of the Bolshoi from 1936 to 1960. At Stalin’s request, in 1946, she reprised the
principal role in Romeo and Juliet following its successful debut in Leningrad and
performed in Life (1948), a melodrama extolling a brave war widow on a collective farm.
To appease Soviet manipulators, in 1950, the Bolshoi readied another Marxist piece,
composer Andrei Balanchivadze’s Ruby Stars, a direct reference to the adornments on the
Kremlin. The cast featured Maya Plisetskaya in a doomed Russo-Georgian love tale set in
the Caucasus during war. Officials angered by viewing the dress rehearsal removed the
production from the program. The company immediately received another state
assignment, production of the Bladimir Yurovsky ballet Under the Banner of Peace
(1951), a commentary on the Cold War.
The Bolshoi on Tour
To showcase Soviet funding for the arts, the Bolshoi made its first post-revolution tour of
the United States and of England’s Covent Garden in October 1956. As the pure, innocent
lead in Giselle, The Dying Swan, and Romeo and Juliet, Ulánova served as a goodwill
emissary, receiving an emotional welcome from English diva Margot Fonteyn.
Plisetskaya, who had come under suspicion by the KGB for her raw, brash style, remained
in Moscow at the command of Soviet authorities.
A disciple of Ulánova, Ekaterina Maximova, performed the fairy tale The Stone Flower
(1959) as prima ballerina opposite her husband, popular leading man Vladimir Vasiliev. In
the wake of the grim clashings of We Stalingraders (1959), Maximova again came under
Ulánova’s coaching in 1960 for a performance of Giselle, a relief from pro-Soviet cant. In
the same season, Kasyan Goleizovsky choreographed Leili and Madjnun, a tragic love
story drawn from the sixteenth-century epic of the Persian poet Ferdawsi. In 1960, the
Bolshoi hosted Maria Tallchief, the first American soloist with the company, and
welcomed eight Egyptian pupils in an effort to win Egypt to Communism through a
dissemination of Russian ballet.
The production and a restaging of composer Aram Khachaturian’s Spartacus in 1962
profited from the opening of a larger rehearsal hall. On October 9, the New York City
Ballet performed Jerome Robbins’s cowboy salute Western Symphony. Unlike the jolly,
fractious American westerners, Vasiliev’s Spartacus flaunted soldierly muscle and the
airborne athleticism of Russian folk dance. The ballet captured audiences in Europe and
North America and in cinema.
From 1962 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1995, Yuri Nikolayevich Grigorovich
directed the Bolshoi in obedience to Communist dogma as the Kremlin’s state theater. The
grandiose schedule reached eleven programs per month in 1962 and increased to twenty
per month in 1965. To foster Communist influence in Egypt, artistic director Leonid
Lavrovsky guided the neophyte Cairo Opera Ballet in the 1966 presentation of The
Fountain of Bakhchisarai.
By casting Azerbaijani character dancer Anna Antonicheva and such commanding
soloists as Tartaro-Russian Irek Mukhamedov, Latvian Maris Liepa and wife Natalia
Bessmertnova, and Chuvashian ballerina Nadezhda Pavlova, Grigorovich restaged The
Nutcracker, Romeo and Juliet, Raymonda, and Swan Lake and debuted Arif Malikov’s A
Legend of Love (1961), based on a legend of the unrequited love of Farhad and Shirin.
Grigorovich chose Plisetskaya to portray a Gypsy seductress opposite Alexander Godunov
as José in Cuban choreographer Alberto Alonso’s smoldering Carmen Suite (1967). A
temporary Soviet ban on the adaptation of Georges Bizet’s music ended in time for the
Bolshoi to perform Carmen in 1968 on a tour of Great Britain.
In 1975, Grigorovich directed passionate dancers in a staging of Ivan the Terrible, but
failed to invest the historical ballet with an appealing nationalism. He reclaimed pointe
work for a resetting of Spartacus, a depiction of bloody rebellion that accorded classic
status to the ballet tragedy. Mukhamedov, the youngest soloist to portray Spartacus, won a
1988 Hans Christian Andersen Prize for Best Dancer in the World.
New Directions
Rapid changes in supervision left the Bolshoi Ballet vulnerable to the modernization of the
Kirov. The loss of Soviet sponsorship in 1995 placed Russian dance arts under serious
financial strictures. Unwilling to intersperse neoclassical or contemporary dance with up-
to-date choreography, Grigorovich lost his post in 1995 to Vasiliev.
Under the new director, Maximova and Svetlana Adyrkhaeva, a past soloist in Swan
Lake and Spartacus, returned to the Bolshoi to coach. Vasiliev boosted the career of male
lead Dmitri Gudanov, who danced in Romeo and Juliet, Giselle, La Sylphide, and The
Nutcracker opposite prima ballerina Yelena Andrienko. Under Viennese arts director Boris
Akimov during the early 2000s, construction of a new stage in 2002 preceded a
presentation of The Snow Maiden, a title character based on a Russian fairy tale.
After Alexei Ratmansky began directing the Bolshoi, between 2003 and 2005, he
reclaimed a comic Cossack farm dance, The Bright Stream, and a factory satire, The Bolt,
as well as The Flames of Paris, a dramatization based on the French Revolution of 1789.
As assistant to director Yuri Burlaka in 2008, Ratmansky staged Le Corsaire (The Pirate),
starring Maria Alexandrova. He restored Esmeralda to the repertoire in 2009 and gained
respect in 2011 for choreographing a narrative ballet, Lost Illusions, danced by two
emerging stars, Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev. Ratmansky’s revival of retro story
ballet won new supporters of Bolshoi artistry.
In 2011, David Hallberg of South Dakota became the first American hired by the
Bolshoi. A classical perfectionist, he won accolades from the New York Times for refined
lines and pure delivery of character. He danced as principal opposite Ukrainian diva
Svetlana Zakharova in The Sleeping Beauty and performed Romeo and Juliet and Giselle,
for which he partnered Natalia Osipova.
The 2014 schedule aligned Giselle, Don Quixote, Spartacus, and Le Sacre du Printemps
(The Rite of Spring) alongside John Cranko’s Eugene Onegin and Marco Spada, featuring
Kristina Kretova and Hallberg. A new version of The Tempest, set to the music of Jean
Sibelius, starred Herman Cornejo as Caliban and Marcel Gomez as Prospero. A favorite
tragedy, The Lady of the Camellias, presented Zakharova opposite Edvin Revazov dancing
to the music of Frederic Chopin. The choice of a French story written by Alexandre
Dumas healed long-term fractures between Gallic and Russian art lovers.
See also Cairo Opera Ballet; en pointe.
Source: Ezrahi, Christina. Swans of the Kremlin: Ballet and Power in Soviet Russia.
Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012.
BOSTON BALLET
New England’s first professional ensemble, the Boston Ballet (BB) vigorously pursues
timeless narrative dances from the past and state-of-the-art innovations. The founders,
dance coaches Ellen Virginia Williams and Sydney Leonard, formed the company in 1963.
The troupe debuted The Nutcracker in John Hancock Hall on January 25, 1965, to music
conducted by Arthur Fiedler.
The BB welcomed guest ballerina Carmen De Lavallade to star in John Butler’s
interpretation of the Greek goddess Aphrodite (1967). He contributed a new work in 1970,
The Minotaur, a more lurid Mediterranean myth. The ensemble grew to include members
from France, Spain, Italy, Cuba, Canada, Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, Mongolia, Georgia,
Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Hungary, Albania, Armenia, South Korea, and Japan. A year later,
Columbia University’s New York Rock Ensemble completed a BB commission for En
Couleur de Mouche (In the Color of a Fly, 1971).
Heightened Aims
Beginning in 1980, the artistic management by popular French dancer Violette Verdy, a
former member of the New York City Ballet, instituted high standards of precision and
artistry. BB pioneered American dance tours to China and extended its range to Mexico
and southern Europe. Guest stars Rudolf Nureyev and Ghislaine Thesmar energized the
1980 reception by performing La Sylphide. In 1981, a disgruntled South African dancer,
Augustus Van Heerden, charged the BB with racial discrimination for stifling his
advancement, a complaint that recurred in 1985 from black dancer Joan Gittens. To honor
the memory of Virginia Williams, in May 1984, the BB debuted Choo San Goh’s Romeo
and Juliet.
Outsiders continued to influence the Boston dancers. In February 1983, Nureyev made
a guest visit to produce Don Quixote, costarring Laura Young, Stephanie Moy, and
Cynthia Tosh. During the tenure of director Bruce Marks, the ensemble authorized
choreographer Elisa Monte’s VII for VIII (1985), Mark Morris’s Mort Subite (Sudden
Death, 1986), Susan Marshall’s Overture (1987), Ralph Lemon’s Punchinello (1988), and
John Waring’s Scintilla (1990). For the mounting of a “Glasnost Swan Lake” in May 1990,
Marks’s assistant, Anna-Maria Holmes, directed company visitors Natalia Dudinskaya,
Konstantin Sergeyev, and members of the Bolshoi and Kirov. In November, Marks
collaborated with Danish dance masters in staging August Bournonville’s Abdallah, the
thwarted romance of an Iraqi shoemaker and a neighbor’s daughter, Irma. The director
contracted with Twyla Tharp in mid-1991 to perform two successes, Brief Fling and In the
Upper Room, costumed by Norma Kamalli.
In the mid-1990s, BB added to its repertoire Val Caniparoli’s Lady of the Camellias and
Lambarena, a suite set to African music, and celebrated a thirtieth anniversary by
commissioning Merce Cunningham’s Breakers (1994) and Twyla Tharp’s Waterbaby
Bagatelles (1994), featuring fluorescent lighting by Jennifer Tipton and the athleticism of
Jennifer Gelfand. After a bold presentation of Nine Lives: Songs of Lyle Lovett, the
company anticipated a new millennium on April 2, 1999, at the Wang Center with the
ensemble’s tribute to works by George Balanchine. Marks sparked the new year with The
British Are Coming, featuring English dancer Paul Thrussell in the lead role of Kenneth
MacMillan’s Winter Dreams, set in provincial Russia.
In September 2001, Finnish dancer Mikko Nissinen began leading the BB and
emphasized member adaptation to varied styles. He also headed the Boston Ballet School,
the largest academy of its kind in the Americas, which contributed dancers to the annual
staging of The Nutcracker extravaganza from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day. He
commissioned Helen Pickett’s Etesian (North Winds, 2005), a shift of classical poses into
unexpected body shapes by soloist Kathleen Combes. In 2007, Nissinen revisited
Balanchine by staging Ballo della Regina (The Queen’s Ball). A year later, he introduced
South Koreans to George Balanchine’s canon as well as the ballets of Twyla Tharp and
Christopher Wheeldon.
Prolific resident choreographer Jorma Elo of Helsinki, Finland, premiered In on Blue
(2008), Sacre du Printemps (Rite of Spring, 2009), and Sharper Side of Dark (2012). A
personal piece, Elo Experience (2011), headlined principal Jeffrey Cirio and Larissa
Ponomarenko, the BB ballet master. In 2013, Japanese principal Misa Kuranaga paired
with Daniel Sarabia to win a gold medal from the International Ballet Competition in
Moscow for presenting in competition Elo’s Basic Three Minutes, Viktor Plotnikov’s Two,
and selections from Marius Petipa’s 1886 version of La Esmeralda. In spring 2013, the
BB focused on Wayne McGregor’s Chroma and choreographer Jir˘í Kylián by dancing
Wings of Wax, Tar and Feathers, and Symphony of Psalms.
Source: Temin, Christine. Behind the Scenes at Boston Ballet. Gainesville: University
Press of Florida, 2009.
BOURNE, MATTHEW (1960–)
English storyteller-dance maker Matthew Bourne exhilarates ballet fans worldwide with
startling, provocative narrative dance and parody. A native of Hackney, born on January
13, 1960, he is the son of a civil servant of the Thames water department and a star-struck
secretary. At age five, he adored the musical The Sound of Music.
In his teens during his years at a London boarding school, Bourne haunted West End
theaters for autographs. At age eighteen, he sought clerical work for the BBC and as
theater ticket seller and usher. In 1982, he took coursework in ballet theater at the Laban
Centre for Movement and Dance in Deptford and performed with the Featherstonehaughs.
A Career in Choreography
Influenced by Fred Astaire movies and Frederick Ashton and George Balanchine ballets,
Bourne formed Adventures in Motion Pictures, his introduction to ballet choreography. He
found the project sensually arousing and mounted a string of popular successes. He began
with Spitfire (1988), a hilarious parody of men’s underwear advertisements and of prim
females dancing Jules Perrot’s 1845 masterful divertissement Pas de Quatre (Quartet).
Bourne followed with a mélange of stage works—As You Like It (1989), Show Boat
(1989), Town & Country (1991), Oliver! (1994), Highland Fling (1994)—a revision of La
Sylphide. He created an ominously mod Cinderella (1997), starring Adam Cooper and
Sarah Wildor dramatizing romance during World War II. His stage dancing ended in 1999,
when he performed on Broadway in the psycho-sexual tragedy/parody Swan Lake, the
longest running ballet in London and New York.
Replete with nightmare, madness, and incarceration, the Bourne Swan Lake paired two
male swans in a love plot featuring dancers Dominic North, Richard Winsor, Adam
Cooper, and Lynn Seymour. The libretto concluded act four with the reunion of male
lovers after death in a world where homosexuality is not forbidden. The innovative ballet
won six Drama League awards, five Drama Desk awards, three Outer Circle Critics
awards, three Tonys, an Astaire Award, Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle citation, and
Time Out Dance Award.
Adapting Ballets
A dynamic creator, Bourne designed dances for the award-winning The Car Man (2000)—
a revision of Georges Bizet’s Carmen—and South Pacific (2001) and surveyed the history
of male roles on the televised program Bourne to Dance (2001). He earned a 2002 Olivier
Award for choreography of My Fair Lady, a second Olivier in 2005 for Mary Poppins, and
a best entertainment citation for Nutcracker! (1992) and Play without Words (2002), which
received two Drama Desk nominations. Into the early 2000s, his New Adventures
ensemble presented Swan Lake and Highland Fling across North America, Europe, Asia,
and Australia.
Awards continued honoring Bourne’s dash and pop culture savvy. Dancer Dominic
North created a flurry with Edward Scissorhands (2005), a Gothic fantasy that opened at
the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, where Bourne held an artistic residency. The performance
earned Bourne’s third Drama Desk honor, a 2007 Drama Desk nomination for
choreography, and presentation at the Kennedy Center and the Sydney Opera House.
Continuing to delight dance lovers with spoofs and adaptations, in Edinburgh, Bourne
perused the obsession with staying young in Dorian Gray (2008), a sinister take on
modeling and high-fashion photography. He outfitted Lord of the Flies (2010) with pig-
masked islanders and ritual circle dances and, in 2012, replaced the prince with an angel in
Sleeping Beauty. His 2014 revision of Swan Lake featured all male dancers led by Marcelo
Gomes for debut in Tokyo and Melbourne, Australia. For Bourne’s quarter-century stream
of “Re-Bourne” works, he won the 2014 De Valois Award.
Source: Bourne, Matthew, and Alastair Macaulay. Matthew Bourne and His Adventures
in Dance: Conversations with Alastair Macaulay. London: Faber and Faber, 2000.
BOURNONVILLE, AUGUST (1805–1879)
See image in photospread.
Gallo-Danish soloist August Bournonville fostered grace and eclecticism in Danish
ballet. A prodigy in a family of dancers, he was the son of Swedish domestic servant
Lovisa Sundberg and Antoine Bournonville, the French dance master of the Royal Danish
Ballet and an innovator of Scandinavian performance. Born in Copenhagen on August 21,
1805, he studied from age eight under Florentine teacher Vincenzo Galeotti at Denmark’s
ballet school, then in its thirty-fifth year.
Galeotti cast Bournonville as a Viking prince opposite a female shield bearer in an 1813
revival of Lagertha (1801), the first ballet to present Scandinavian themes on the stage. He
performed at the Danish Court Theatre, where his father took the place of Galeotti in
1816. As a teen, August continued to play juvenile roles because of his immature looks
and physique.
In Paris in 1820, Bournonville began Europeanizing his range by training under
Auguste Vestris at the Conservatoire. In a Gallic environment, he absorbed the fervor of
French ballet and the innovation of French, Italian, and Austrian composers.
In the 1820s, Bournonville designed a black slipper for men to increase mobility. He
topped the leather sole with a white V-shaped vamp that emphasized men’s long pointed
feet. From this invention came temps lie (connected time), a practice set of graceful,
stylized movements that glide left-right, front-back as the dancer shifts weight from one
leg to the other.
After two seasons with the Royal Theatre ensemble, in 1824, Bournonville mastered
pirouettes, balance, and port de bras at the Paris Opera and achieved certification by the
Académie Royale de la Musique. He partnered with diva Marie Taglioni and, in 1827,
performed to Gioacchino Rossini’s score for Mosè in Egitto (Moses in Egypt). On return
home in 1830 to wed Swedish fiancée Helena Fredrika Hakansson, Bournonville
established a large family while advancing his career from ensemble parts to solos.
The Bournonville Style
From experience with the French classic dance La Sylphide (1832), Bournonville
choreographed a Danish version in 1836 starring himself as James, the Scots dreamer,
opposite his pupil Lucile Grahn as the title figure. The Danish adaptation, marked by low
cabrioles and quick bourrées, survives into the present as the epitome of the romantic
quest to possess the ideal. Subsequent stage successes gained him guest appearances in
1840 in Norway at the Christiana Theatre and a hero’s return to Copenhagen for the
opening of The Toreador (1840).
For forty-seven years, Bournonville designed divertissements, idylls, pantomimes, and
three-act productions for the Royal Danish Ballet that raised artistic standards. In an era of
stage flamboyance and artificiality, he harmonized the roles of male and female dancers in
pas de deux featuring a fluid grace and healthy vitality devoid of the erotic or
disharmonious, particularly the polonaise in Napoli, or The Fisherman and His Bride
(1842). His modest style refashioned classical French dance with canted head movements,
precise footwork encircling the ankle, and understated vigor and sensuality. His framing of
steps with lowered shoulders and hands focused audience attention on choreography rather
than on the dancer’s flair.
Bournonville’s broad span of subject matter ranged from the mythic Graces, Muses, and
Valkyries and the heroics of Don Quixote, Aladdin, and William Tell to peasants,
fishermen, and Nordic celebrants of midsummer. For ballerinas, the dance master evolved
less saccharine roles to express the inner thoughts and desires of females, as modeled by
the naive Hilda in A Folk Tale and Louise, the mature woman in The King’s Volunteers on
Amager. He varied portraits of the multifaceted woman to include the hag Madge, the
temptress Rosita, and Muri, queen of trolls, all embodiments of female power and
autonomy. His multifaceted woman-heavy casts elevated the international stardom of
ballerinas Lucile Grahn, Betty Hennings, and Juliette Price, Bournonville’s favorite.
Champion of the Arts
In an attempt to resuscitate Scandinavian lyricism, Bournonville ignited a Danish mania
for ballet in March 1842 with the premiere of Napoli, an exuberant work sparked by
nationalism and an unabashed love of life. The debut redeemed Bournonville for scolding
King Christian IX the previous year, when the ballet master went into exile and supported
his family by performing in Naples and Milan. In 1843, he danced for his dying father the
lead in Polka Militaire, which reprised the elder Bournonville’s success at Hungarian
figures. Following August’s retirement from the stage at age forty-three after his farewell
performance in Waldemar, more notoriety followed stagings of Pas de Trois Cousines
(Dance of Three Cousins, 1849) and La Ventana (The Window, 1854), a showpiece
commissioned for commercial theater.
Bournonville’s cachet in Europe brought him summer residencies in Vienna in the mid-
1850s. At the height of Danish romanticism, his philosophy of dance required students to
coordinate mime with rhythm and to conceal technical feats under a calm exterior and
subtle variations, a highlight of Abdallah (1855). His duet in The Flower Festival in
Genzano (1858) synthesized theory and simplicity in his most emulated choreography. He
rehearsed his corps de ballet with an eye toward lyricism and joy in normal, everyday
behaviors, the hallmark of his three-act vaudeville-ballet Far from Denmark (1860), filled
with yearning and regret.
Bournonville’s three-year sojourn in Sweden as artistic director of the Stockholm Royal
Theatre enabled him to test his theories on raw material. His more publicized clashes
pitted him against stubborn ballerinas. A lover of clarity, he loathed affectation and
abstruse symbolism. He replaced coded gestures with informational flags, banners,
placards, and tablets expressing ethnic customs and celebrations, as with Shrovetide
(Mardi Gras) masking in The King’s Volunteers on Amager (1871). His championing of
dance as an art derived from his pity for humble girls who received limited education, the
disrespect of libertines, and pitiful salaries while they toughened themselves for the stage.
Bournonville extended his expertise to directing operas by Richard Wagner. In 1874, he
established pensions for the royal dance company before setting out for a tour of European
performances in Vienna, Venice, Milan, Florence, Rome, Naples, and Paris. At the
Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, he promoted Swedish theories of structured,
disciplined dance with French ballet master Marius Petipa. During a year and a half of
retirement, Bournonville completed the third volume of his memoir, My Theatre Life
(1878), which detailed his humanistic observations of the arts. He died suddenly in a
Copenhagen street on November 30, 1879, leaving behind classic dance pedagogy that
celebrated realism and the Danish identity.
See also Martins, Peter; Taglioni, Marie.
Source: Bruhn, Erik, and Lillian Moore. Bournonville and Ballet Technique: Studies
and Comments on August Bournonville’s Études Chorégraphiques. Alton, IL: Dance
Books, 2005.
 • C •
CAIRO OPERA BALLET
An irrepressible branch of the Academy of Arts, the Cairo Opera Ballet (COB) has
weathered political upheaval and survives as the only classical ballet company in the
Middle East. The Egyptian love of story ballet dates to the pharaonic era of narrative
dance and infuses intrinsic motifs into dance. During the Soviet courtship of Egypt as an
ally in 1958, Minister of Culture Tharwat Okasha envisioned importing Russian ballet to a
complex of stages and studios for educating Egyptians.
Formed during the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Cairo ensemble consisted of
three boys and five girls, who studied at the Bolshoi in Moscow for two years.
Recruitment of a resident company through media ads prompted a deluge of applications
from males and females, from whom the company director, Enayat Azmi, selected thirty-
five. Students from age eight to fifteen studied at an academy that coordinated dance
classes with basic education. Five superior pupils received scholarships to the Bolshoi to
learn character dance.
With the aid of the returning scholars, in 1966, the COB debuted a stage version of
Alexander Pushkin’s tragic poem The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, featuring Magda Saleh as
Maria. Dancers performed Russian style under the management of Leonid Lavrovsky, the
artistic director of the Bolshoi. Nasser attended the ballet and awarded orders of merit to
the management, lead dancers Abdel Moneim Kamel and Aleya Abdel Razek, and other
soloists. The company carried the show south to Aswan, their first away-from-home
venue.
A Professional Company
At the eight-hundred-seat Cairo Opera House, the COB restaged classics from European
repertoires—Don Quixote, Paquita, Francesca da Rimini, Hamlet, Scheherazade, Le
Corsaire (The Pirate), Swan Lake, and Giselle, featuring Abdel Kamel in the lead roles. At
Giza in 1969, the ensemble hosted London’s Royal Ballet at a performance of Swan Lake
outdoors before the pyramids and sphinx. In 1970, Ukrainian guest instructor Serge Lifar
introduced the ensemble to neoclassic technique for a concert of the erotically stirring
Daphnis and Chloe.
The Royal Opera House burned in 1971, leaving Cairo’s dancers without a headquarters
for the next seventeen years. The arts community speculated that the fire avenged
antigovernment forces against President Anwar Sadat, who ended Egypt’s affiliation with
the Soviet Union. Destruction of scenery for seven ballets and the ballet shoe workshop
increased the need for government funding. More serious to the dancers, loss of the stage
ended scheduling of visiting companies, a training experience in global dance.
The incorporation of North African mythic themes and motifs produced choreographer
Abdel Kamel’s nationalistic El Somoud (Steadfastness, 1973) and Ballet El Nil (The Nile
Ballet), danced to the music of Omar Khairat. Folk spectacle featured props, headdresses,
jewelry, and costumes from ancient Egypt. By 1973, the COB visited both the Bolshoi and
Kirov companies in Russia and toured Tunisia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Germany, France,
Italy, China, Korea, and the United States.
The 1973 war between Egypt and Israel forced dancers to emigrate to more promising
employment in the Soviet Union, Germany, and the United States. At the end of combat,
the ballet reunited and acquired foreign members from Russia, Cuba, Spain, and the
Ukraine. The revived company performed Majnoun Laila (Mad for Laila) at the Tokyo
Concorde.
Upon the repatriation to Cairo of Abdel Kamel and his Italian wife, Erminia
Gambarelli, a former dance coach at Milan’s La Scala, a burst of programming extended
the Cairo season. The company performed Gamal Abdel Rahim’s Isis and Osiris (1984) as
well as the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh and teamed with the German Dance Theatre
for Fire Fell into the Heart. In 1991, the COB performed Three Nights of the Sphinx, a
Napoleonic scenario staged by Lebanese dance master Walid Aouni in the new opera
house, rebuilt by Japan in 1988.
In 1991, director Kamel choreographed original versions of Bolero, Cinderella, Le
Corsaire, Carmina Burana, Nutcracker, Hamlet, and Zorba. The expansion of focus to
modern dance in 1992 resulted from the formation of the Egyptian Modern Dance Theatre
Company. Aouni, the artistic director, scheduled a variety of debuts—The Fall of Icarus
(1993), The Excavation of Agatha (1993), The Desert of Shady Abdel Salam (1997), and
Elephants Hide to Die (1995), winner of a scenography award from the Festival of
Experimental Theatre. The dancers carried their experimental repertoire to Germany,
Korea, Belgium, and Tunisia and, in 1999, received the Greek National Opera Ballet as
guests.
Innovation and versatility set the Cairo ensemble apart from conventional European and
American companies. The realism of Egyptian life in the ballet Oriental Steps
characterized socioeconomic stresses on families. In 1998, the dancers staged Aida among
the pyramids. Abdel Kamel also presented an Arab masterwork featuring celebration of
the birth of saints and the prophet Mohammed in El-Leila El-Kebira (The Big Night,
2001). For the folkloric carnival, puppets transformed into real dancers performing to the
verse of Salah Jahin set to music by Sayed Mekawy.
In 2004, manager Erminia Kamel hired more foreign dancers and broadened COB tours
to include Canada, Mexico, England, the Czech Republic, Mauritius, Japan, Jordan, and
Syria. Students enrolled at the Cairo dance academy for nine years of Russian-style
training, followed by a four-year advanced course in anatomy, theater, and choreography.
The next seven years yielded a golden age of dance.
Ballet and Censorship
Fundamentalist leaders of the Egyptian Revolution of January 25, 2011, sliced the budget
for dance and threatened to ban ballet for displaying men and women dancing together.
Culture minister Alaa Abdel-Azia repressed modern works such as Malgré Tout (In Spite
of All) and Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) and ousted Abdel Kamel, the
troupe’s “spiritual father.” Because radical Muslims forced foreign performers out of the
country, the exodus left a full program of Swan Lake and Rasputin to an Egyptian cast of
eighty.
Outside the culture ministry in June 2013, COB members protested repression of the
arts by chanting anti-censorship slogans. The cast performed scenes from Greek author
Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba, which the ensemble had previously toured in Austria,
Germany, Greece, and Turkey. Amid cheers, the protest brought a crowd into the syrtaki
(drag dance), a Greek circle dance.
In defense of dance, director Ines Abdel-Dayem defied the Shura Council’s
denunciation of the work as “nude art,” a violation of Shari’a law. She threatened to sue
the Muslim Brotherhood for infringement on artistic expression. A successful debut of
Zorba on September 24 concluded with an offer by sculptor Ossama El-Serwi of a bronze
statue of Cairo star Hany Hassan in the role of the exuberant, life-affirming Greek.
In 2014, the COB presented folkloric ballet alongside Kathak classical story dance from
India and a reprise of Don Quixote, Romeo and Juliet, Cleopatra, and Spartacus, a
historical ballet about a slave uprising in Republican Rome. Because the Muslim
Brotherhood and members of parliament ruled Spartacus too erotic for public
presentation, Erminia Kamel abridged the scenes of Roman luxury and eroticism that
fueled controversy. A restoration of freedoms in spring 2014 allowed the company to
dance the entire ballet on stage and at sit-ins launched by intellectuals and artists.
Source: Bar’el, Zvi. “Cairo Opera Presents: The Rite of the Arab Spring.” Haaretz (4
June 2013).
CAMARGO, MARIE (1710–1770)
A Belgian pioneer of abbreviated ballet attire and vigorous female technique, Marie Anne
de Cupis de Camargo heightened ballet professionalism. Born on April 15, 1710, to
Brussels residents Marie-Anne de Smedt and Ferdinand Joseph de Cupis de Camargo, a
Hispano-Italian dance teacher and violinist, she reflected Spanish ancestry in her swarthy
complexion and dark eyes. In 1720, she received the patronage of Princesse Marie Anne
Antoinette de Ligne and performed under the surname of her maternal grandmother.
Camargo initiated more energetic, accented moves for the danseuse. After she
performed in Brussels and Rouen, admirers insisted that the stage manager of the Paris
Opera bring her to France as an étoile (star). A vocal fan base cheered Camargo’s novel,
spirited execution of the gavotte and the rigaudon and tambourin, two Provençal social
dances that infused theatrical performances, dethroning the more sedate minuet,
sarabande, and courant. Admirers wrote accolades to her nimble steps.
A Belgian pioneer of abbreviated ballet attire and vigorous female technique, Marie Camargo heightened
ballet professionalism. Four Centuries of Ballet

Camargo adopted full turnout for dynamic temps d’élevation (leaps), pas de basque
(gliding steps), and allegro battus (beats). During a gap in a performance, she startled the
stage manager by taking the place of absent soloist François Dumoulin and improvising
combinations. Critics extolled her mastery of the intricacies and speed of the entrechat
quatre, the Basque double crisscrossing of the feet en l’air, an accomplishment typically
reserved for male virtuosos.
A Teen Ballerina
At age sixteen, Camargo soloed on April 22, 1727, with the Paris Opera Ballet in Les
Caractères de la Danse, a collection of divertissements surveying amours, choreographed
by her first teacher, Françoise Prévost. The glamorous parts that followed depicted the
dancer as a shepherdess, bacchante, and sailor, all roles that showcased the intricacy of
dance. Her teacher became so envious that she demoted Camargo to the corps de ballet.
During her training by Prévost’s replacement, the sixteen-year-old ballet master Michel
Blondi, he taught her the masculine dance traits that he had learned from his own teacher,
Pierre Beauchamp.
Although Camargo lacked physical beauty, her effect on roués of the ballet generated a
round of duels and anecdotes. In May 1728, Jean Alexandre Théodose, Count of Melun,
abducted the dancer and her thirteen-year-old sister Sophie to his hotel until Cardinal
Richelieu intervened on behalf of the girls’ father. In 1872, the incident inspired French
dance master Marius Petipa to choreograph the scandal into the ballet Camargo.
In her twenties, “La Camargo” sat for painter Nicolas Lancret, who posed her in
chiaroscuro—white dress festooned with flowers before musicians, who faded into a dark
background. In the 1730s, she performed in flexible ballet slippers, heelless leather or
satin tubes pleated at the toe for a tight fit and darned or overstitched at the instep. The
innovation freed her foot and ankle of obstructions and supported her during changements
(jumps repositioning feet).
For convenience and weight reduction, Camargo jettisoned the wig, boned corset, heavy
skirt, and panniers of court dance and performed in a calf-length muslin ballet skirt to free
the lower limbs for cabrioles and arabesques. Her drawstring muslin calçons de
précaution (modesty pantalets) prefigured ballet tights. Although she dared to perform
like a man, one step, the gargouillade (double leg circles), she considered too masculine
for her repertoire.
Because Camargo’s innovations increased the speed of battements (beats) for a four-
beat jump, theorist Jean-Georges Noverre mused aloud that she stressed speedy footwork
to obscure her unattractive female form. Perhaps because of her respect for technique, she
favored the complicated music of Jean-Philippe Rameau, author of Nouveau Système de
Musique Théorique (New System of Music Theory, 1726), which touted mathematically
inventive suites for the harpsichord. In his opera-ballet Les Fêtes d’Hébé (Celebrations of
Hebe, 1739), Camargo danced and sang the title role, revealing a vocal talent.
To please a lover, Abbot Louis le Bourbon-Condé, the Count of Clermont, Camargo
abandoned her career at age twenty-six and bore two children. At the Chateau de Berny
near Fresnes south of Paris, where she lived in extreme seclusion, he built an indoor
theater and assembled a dance troupe to accommodate her career. Her demands for luxury
imposed debts, which he requited by selling one of his prize estates.
Renowned Performances
On December 28, 1741, Camargo resumed stage work in Les Fêtes Grecques et Romaines
(Greek and Roman Celebrations) and became the first danseuse to dominate a company
repertoire. She remained in demand for the next decade and partnered with ballet theorist
Jean-Georges Noverre in 1750 in Lyons. From 1750 to 1754, her star power increased
during London appearances, where she soloed in John Rich’s Anacreontic ballet Apollo
and Daphne (1751).
Camargo retained her ascendency in popular culture. In addition to mastering a total of
seventy-eight roles, she influenced female dress, bustles, slippers, bonnets, folding fans,
and hairstyles. Her performance in German composer John Frederick Lampe’s mock
heroic Pyramus and Thisbe (1752) popularized a song and dance known throughout
France as “The Camargo.” Both Voltaire and Casanova became fans, Voltaire for a
technical brilliance that rivaled male partners and Casanova because she dared perform
without pantalets.
 At Camargo’s retirement, the French government paid her 1,500 francs, a larger stipend
than any previous dancer had received. She died on April 28, 1770, leaving a collection of
pet dogs to her heir. Charles Le Cocq immortalized her in opera, La Camargo (1879),
which he premiered in London; Enrico de Leva reprised the title in a subsequent opera, La
Camargo (1898), which debuted in Turin. In 1912 at the London Coliseum, Anglo-Danish
dancer Adeline Genée presented La Camargo, an original divertissement that emulated the
vivacious ballerina’s performance of steps usually relegated to men.
See also shoes, ballet.
Source: Brooks, Lynn, ed. Women’s Work: Making Dance in Europe before 1800.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007.
CAPE TOWN CITY BALLET
A devoted body of dance, the Cape Town City Ballet (CTCB) promotes the arts as well as
racial inclusion. Sponsored by the Performing Arts Council of the Transvaal, the ensemble
got its start in 1934 from prima ballerina Dulcie Howes, a dance facilitator native to
Mossel Bay, South Africa. At her school in the Rondebosch sector of Cape Town, she
taught people of all races Spanish flamenco, ballroom, and classical ballet.
Students gained insight into Russian and Italian technique from Howes’s experience in
the Anna Pavlova Company in the 1920s and membership in the Cecchetti Society. As a
professor of higher learning, in 1934, she joined the faculty at the University of Cape
Town to found the world’s first university ballet academy. Students immersed themselves
in a range of courses, from dance history to musicology and anatomy, all required for an
instructor’s certificate.
The growth of dance in South Africa derived from public support, beginning with
scholarships in 1950 from a trust fund set up by Howes and her husband, newspaperman
Guy Cronwright, managing director of the Cape Times. Sponsorship of guest ensembles
introduced Cape Town dancers to varied techniques. Howes initiated creative dance with
the first South African ballet, Vlei Legend (1952), based on the rape and murder of a
fifteenth-century Khoi San princess by white marauders at the Vlei River.
A Professional Company
The Cape Town City Ballet received its official launch in 1965 with Howes as artistic
director and principal of the dance academy. She groomed notable professionals—John
Cranko, Pamela Chrimes, David Poole, and Johaar Mosaval, who became the first black
dancer to perform at the Nico Malan Opera House and on South African television. The
troupe performed Howes’s original La Famille (The Family, 1967) at Cape Town’s Baxter
Theatre and in Durban and Johannesburg and toured Mozambique, Rhodesia, and Zambia.
Under David Poole, a Howes protégé, Frank Staff, the resident choreographer, staged
new works, such as Spanish Encounter (1965) and Five Faces of Eurydice (1965),
featuring ballerinas Marijan Bayer and Sandra Lipman. The performance of Raka (1967),
a defiant Afrikaans horse epic written by poet Nicolaas van Wyk Louw and scored by
Graham Newcater, became the subject of a film by 20th Century Fox. In 1969, Poole
collaborated with staff to extend the CTCB range to works by Kurt Jooss, August
Bournonville, Frederick Ashton, John Cranko, and Ninette de Valois. After Staff’s death in
1971, Poole staged Madrilene (1971), an excerpt of Jules Massenet’s Le Cid, Bacchanale
(1973), a drunken revel from Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser, and Czech
choreographer Jir˘í Kylián’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night, 1981) to Arnold
Schoenberg’s score.
During the tenure of choreographer-director Veronica Paeper, Staff’s widow, she won
awards for Herrie-Hulle (The Uproad, 1977), commemorating the life of author Cornelis
J. Langehoven, and Concerto for Charlie (1980). She originated stage works Drie Diere
(Three Animals, 1980) and Still Life with Moonbeams (1981) to the music of Peter
Klatzow, The Return of the Soldier (1982), Abelard and Elouise (1985), and Vespers
(1985). Her sixteen full-length ballets ranged in subject matter from Nell Gwynne (1984)
and The Merry Widow (1988) to the Limpopo folk tale The Rain Queen (1995), and The
Story of Manon Lascaut (1997).
A Determined Effort
In 1991, CTCB suffered severe fiscal cutbacks that reduced their number by half to
twenty-four and limited their repertoire. The financial situation inspired former soloist
Philip Boyd and his wife, Phyllis Spira, a former principal ballerina at the Cape Town City
Ballet, to open Dance for All, a juvenile ballet academy at Athlone for three hundred poor
students at Gugulethu, Nyanga, and Khayelitsha. The troupe presented its first program in
2005 by combining neoclassical steps with contemporary African dance in such works as
The Lion King (2010). The award-winning company named Archbishop Desmond Tutu its
honorary patron.
In 2000, the ensemble joined the Jazzart Dance Theatre for innovative staging. At the
2003 Cricket World Cup, cohosted by South Africa, Kenya, and Zimbabwe, the Cape
Town troupe performed Ocean-balle for the opening ceremony. On August 24, 2008,
dancer-instructor Andrew Warth organized the CTCB and volunteers into the world’s
largest ballet class, consisting of 989 dancers.
Twenty-first century scheduling featured CTCB and the Cape Town Philharmonic
Orchestra at Artscape, the urban arts center. Programs varied from Swan Lake, Peter Pan,
Raymonda, and Giselle to the olio Poetry in Motion and Cole Porter’s Night and Day
(2012). Dance in the City, performed by the juvenile company, presented pupils educated
at the Cape Ballet Centre by the Vaganova method.
The 2013–2014 season for CTCB celebrated eighty years of artistry. Artistic director
Keith Mackintosh scheduled The Sleeping Beauty, Paquita, and Camille, or The Lady of
the Camellias, featuring the pairing of Laura Bösenberg with Thomas Thorne as
Marguerite and Armand. For the April 2014 presentation of Swan Lake, Mackintosh
invited two stars of the Covent Garden ballet, Federico Bonelli and Hikaru Kobayashi.
The company debuted works by South African choreographers as well as Yarisha Singh’s
Serendipity (2014) and Kirsten Isenberg’s neoclassical dance Of Gods and Men (2014), a
muscular dramatization of the power struggle between deities and humankind. Outdoor
presentations at the Maynardsville Open Air Theatre broadened the company’s outreach.
 Source: Women Marching into the 21st Century. Pretoria, South Africa: Human
Sciences Research Council, 2000.
CECCHETTI, ENRICO (1850–1928)
Famed Italian character dancer and theorist Enrico Cecchetti formalized ballet pedagogy
that built confidence from strength and muscle memory. Born to dancers Serafina Casagli
and Cesare Cecchetti on June 21, 1850, in a dressing room at Rome’s Teatro Tordinona, he
rejected law and commerce as careers in favor of dance. Trained by their father, Enrico
and siblings Pia and Giuseppe toughened themselves for agile stage roles requiring leaps,
battements (beats of the feet), and pirouettes.
Cecchetti played a juvenile role in Il Giocatore (The Jester, 1855) and an ensemble part
in a La Scala tour group at the 1857 opening of the Philadelphia Academy of Music. Both
Enrico and his sister Pia performed in Theresa, the Orphan of Geneva (1858). At age
thirteen, he left private school to learn dance basics in Florence from Giovanni Lepri,
former pupil of Italian dance master Carlo Blasis. Cecchetti performed in his father’s
ballet Nicolò di Lapi (1866). Additional apprenticeships under Cesare Coppini at La Scala
and Filippo Taglioni in Vienna readied him for a stage debut at age nineteen.
Becoming a Primo Ballerino
In 1874, Cecchetti toured Germany, Denmark, and Norway, with his siblings. His skill in a
production of Excelsior (1881) and Le Pouvoir de l’Amour (The Power of Love) in 1887
impressed Marius Petipa, the director of the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, and won
for Cecchetti the position of principal dancer in Lev Ivanov’s The Tulip of Haarlem
(1887), costarring Carlotta Brianza. By age thirty-eight, Cecchetti commanded respect
throughout the dance world.
With performances of Les Caprices du Papillon (The Whims of a Butterfly, 1889) and
Kalkabrino (1891), Cecchetti immediately began relieving male dancers of the static task
of props for females en pointe. In Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty (1890), Cecchetti gained
recognition for playing contrasting parts—the Bluebird and wicked Carabosse, an envious
fairy who curses Princess Aurora to prick her finger on a spindle and sleep away her life.
At the Imperial Ballet School, Cecchetti directed rehearsals of Tamara Karsavina and
Vaslav Nijinsky, who reprised the role of Bluebird.
During Petipa’s lengthy bout with pemphigus, a disfiguring autoimmune disease of the
skin, Cecchetti began restaging and enlarging standard works, beginning with Cendrillon
(Cinderella, 1893) and Coppélia (1894) and including Raymonda (1898), a medieval
Hungarian tale. For the imperial court of Nicholas II and Alexandra, in 1900, Cecchetti
danced the role of Casandré in Les Millions d’Arlequin (Harlequinade), a love story based
on stock characters from Italy’s commedia dell’arte. His mastery of comic peasant
behavior invigorated Marius Petipa’s Don Quixote, which paired Cecchetti’s Sancho
Panza with Aleksei Bulgakov as the idealistic crusader. Pressed by Tsar Nicholas II to
become a Russian citizen, in 1902, Cecchetti retired from the Russian Imperial Ballet and
directed a similar academy in Warsaw, Poland.
 The Italian opened the Cecchetti Academy in 1905 at St. Petersburg and limited his
coaching to one pupil, diva Anna Pavlova. In 1910, impresario Sergei Diaghilev added
Cecchetti to the Ballets Russes as instructor and mime in parts created specifically for
him, notably, the greedy merchant Pantaloon in Le Carnaval (1910). At the height of
Diaghilev’s artistic experiment, Cecchetti mentored Vaslav Nijinsky, Bronislava Nijinska,
Tamara Karsavina, Michel Fokine, Mathilda Kchessinska, George Balanchine, Alicia
Markova, Alexandra Danilova, and Léonide Massine.
For The Firebird (1910), Cecchetti enacted the plot of Kaschchei the Immortal to turn
the hero into stone. In the same season, he performed the chief eunuch’s role in
Scheherazade and collaborated with harem wife Zobeida to release slaves from captivity.
More character roles followed in 1911 with Cecchetti’s parts as the cruel charlatan in
Petrouchka. Diaghilev reprised Firebird in New York City in 1916 and again tapped
Cecchetti to play the wizard.
Master Teacher
After World War I, Cecchetti grieved the death of his son, a combat veteran. Enrico and
his wife, Giuseppina de Maria, settled in London and taught classical technique. He
continued to accept stage roles, including the doddering Marquis di Luca in Les Femmes
de Bonne (The Good-Humored Ladies, 1917). In London in June 1919 and again in Paris
on December 24, 1919, he danced the part of the shopkeeper in choreographer Léonide
Massine’s La Boutique Fantasque (The Magic Toyshop).
In collaboration with pupil Stanislas Idzikowsky and arts historian Cyril William
Beaumont, the dance master compiled Manual of the Theory and Practice of Classical
Theatrical Dancing (1922), which separated weekly exercises into individual sets for each
of six days. The text regimented instruction to five arm and leg positions and seven
fundamental movements and stressed the balance of slow and fast tempos with a legato
(smooth) transition. A second volume, The Theory and Practice of Allegro in Classical
Ballet (1930), incorporated commentary by Ballets Russes star Margaret Craske and a
schedule for weekly training.
In 1923, Cecchetti retired to Turin and handed his post to German-Swedish-Russian
ballet master Nikolai Legat before accepting a plum position in Milan at La Scala. For the
training of Kiev dancer Serge Lifar, Cecchetti’s instruction synchronized pure postures
with musical interpretation. Still teaching, he collapsed during a class and died on
November 13, 1928.
Beaumont’s biography Enrico Cecchetti: A Memoir (1929) and ballet textbooks
disseminated worldwide the Cecchetti method of daily barre work and unchanging
combinations. The training style guided teachers Dulcie Howes at the Cape Town City
Ballet and Ninette de Valois at the Royal Ballet School and staff of the Australian Ballet
School and National Ballet of Canada. Standardization enabled dancers to practice their
art worldwide.
See also mime.
 Source: Racster, Olga. The Master of the Russian Ballet. Hampshire, UK: Noverre
Press, 2013.
CHARACTER ROLE
A subset of professional dance, the character role emphasizes individualism and humor
and stylizes heritage movements and steps for dramatic presentation, a focus of the Apsara
dance of Khmer companies of Cambodia. Unlike the pretentious myths in sixteenth-
through eighteenth-century court or noble dance, such as Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx’s Le
Ballet-Comique de la Reyne (The Comic Ballet of the Queen, 1581) and Pierre
Beauchamp’s spectacular opera ballet Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus (Celebrations
of Love and Bacchus, 1651), professional casts of ballet d’action pictured complex
persona and empathetic human behaviors in believable interaction. After the flowering of
narrative or story ballet, distinctive group patterns and dorsal foot flexions injected into
ballet l’ecole (textbook dance) the vigor and symbolism of the Scots sword dance,
tarantella, jig, hula, Mexican hat dance, hora, flamenco, rigaudon, czardas, Caribbean
juba, and mazurka as representations of ethnic rhythms.
A vernacular contrast in romantic ballet since the French Revolution of 1789, touches
of nationalism added uniqueness. Dancers incorporated local color, humor, and relevance
to settings, hairstyles, props, costumes, attitudes, and moods, for example, in the historical
dance of Gaspare Spontini’s Fernand Cortés, ou La Conquête du Mexique (Hernan
Cortéz, or The Conquest of Mexico, 1817). For the face-off at Tenochtitlan, the
comparison of ethnicities required character actors to improvise interaction between the
primitive Aztec and greedy, racist conquistadors. Disparities accounted for an
international clash resulting in genocide for the Aztec and an empire for Spain. In similar
fashion, character acting and idiosyncratic posturing generated deadly militarism between
Poles and Russians in A Life for the Tsar (1836), a Hungarian pride in Danish
choreographer August Bournonville’s Polka Militaire (1843), and stylized Gypsy
scenarios in Paquita (1846), set among Spaniards during the Napoleonic wars.
The Trials of the Individual
Based on the democratization of former monarchies and empires, the enhancement of
emotion exploited drama, for example, the rescue of a damsel in Le Corsaire (The Pirate,
1856), a standard work worldwide. Grotesquerie required intense mime, the focus of the
burial and resurrection scene in La Fille du Pharaon (The Pharaoh’s Daughter, 1862).
Ghoulish lore in Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le Diable (1871) reached beyond
death to the wraiths of a convent cemetery and the stirrings of vengeance and longing in a
nun and her charges who drift beyond the grave.
Expressive dance idealized the freedom and unity of villagers, such as the Spanish
marketers in Don Quixote (1869). Mating motivated the gendered melodrama of
entertainments at weddings and saints’ days, as with lyric peasant dances and nuptial
music for Arthur Saint-Léon’s Coppélia (1870) and doomed amours in Marius Petipa’s La
Bayadère (The Temple Dancer, 1877). Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky rounded out collaborative
character roles in The Nutcracker (1892), which progresses from a family Christmas to
surrealistic extremes in the war between mice and toy soldiers.
 Twentieth-century realism placed greater demands on dancers, for example, the
homesickness of Cumanian refugees in Sergei Diaghilev’s The Polovtsian Dances (1909),
a nightly eluding of execution in Michel Fokine’s Scheherazade (1910), and the sorcerer’s
repression of a puppet in Igor Stravinsky’s Petrouchka (1911). Modernist Isadora Duncan
donned historically authentic tunic and bare feet for Greek tragedy in her 1914
reenactment of Oedipus Rex. Globally, performers adopted the facial expressions, makeup,
wigs, and body language attendant on character flaws and dire situations, notably, the
pathetic gestures of George Balanchine’s Le Fils Prodigue (The Prodigal Son, 1929), a
biblical parable of filial rebellion and parental forgiveness.
Characters from World Events
During the rise of the Soviet Union, political didacticism coerced post-Romanov Russian
dram-balet (propaganda ballet) into compliance with the doctrines of Marxism.
Presentations such as Ukrainian composer Reinhold Glière’s jarring labor melodrama The
Red Poppy (1927), the first Soviet dance drama, increased the focus on acting and “being”
the characters Tao Hoa and the villain Li Shan-fu rather than “dancing” the characters.
German choreographer Kurt Jooss satirized warmongering in The Green Table (1932), a
character scenario that individualized the foibles of potentates of foreign affairs and
combat. Czech choreographer Joe Jencik revived the image of the heroic outlaw and his
followers in Robin Hood (1935), a retreat to medieval England alluding to Eastern
European tyranny. William Christensen, comic soloist and director of the San Francisco
Ballet, satirized Russian militarism with American Interlude (1940), an adaptation of
Aristophanes’s sex play Lysistrata.
Feminism placed increasing demands on ballerinas to jettison the smiling tutu-and-
pointe-shoes roles for the human struggles of real women. Agnes de Mille invested classic
ballet with Americanisms, notably, the cowboy strut and horsemanship of Rodeo (1942),
saving for herself the emerging femininity of Cowgirl. De Mille’s ebullience lampooned
the male jockeying for a likely wife in Oklahoma! (1943).
In Russia, Sergei Prokofiev’s atonal waltzes for Cinderella (1944) implied more at stake
than a simple happily-ever-after for the title figure and her prince. A layered study of the
impulsive, but troubled female empowered Samian composer Manolis Kalomiris’s
symphonic poem La Mort de la Vaillante (The Death of the Valiant Woman, 1948),
concert dancer Carmen De Lavallade’s biblical solo Salomé (1953), and Shang Yi’s intra-
species pantomime Fish Beauty (1959). Finnish composer Tauno Pylkkänen blended
history with scandal for Karin, Magnus’s Daughter (1961), a popular sixteenth-century
tale of a market girl wooed by an unlikely potential mate, Finland and Sweden’s king Erik
XIV.
The progression of the Communist ideal from Russia to China influenced a survey of
martyrdom in composer Aram Khachaturian’s Spartacus (1956), an allusion to the Nazi
invasion of Russia in 1941. Additional historicity marked Birgit Cullberg’s ridicule of the
führer’s gullible lackeys in Kulturpropaganda (1941) and the anticapitalism depicted in
The White-Haired Girl (1965), an Asian classic about the impoverished peasant Xi’er. In
Cambodia in the 1970s, the purge of artists by the Khmer Rouge involved the
imprisonment and execution of Apsara character dancers, leaving Southeast Asia without
skilled performers.
Less homiletic historical roles dominated later choreography—Frederick Ashton’s
rabbits and squirrels cavorting in the film The Tales of Beatrix Potter (1971), the May Day
dance of the dead by Suzanne Farrell and Adam Lüders in George Balanchine’s debut of
Walpurgisnacht (Witches’ Night, 1975), and mountain natives chanting in Filipina
choreographer Agnes Locsin’s Igorot (1987). Into the twenty-first century, dance design
enhanced drama with personalized roles—the comic Cossack farmers in Alexei
Ratmansky’s The Bright Stream (2003), the poignant survivalism of a feral child in India
in the Czech presentation of Mowgli (1996), and cabaret spectacle in Moulin Rouge: The
Ballet (2009), a reprise of fin de siècle gaiety and overindulgence.
For Arabesque Vietnam, Suong Som (The Mist, 2014) codified into art the nation’s farm
folk, a bucolic tradition that turned the corps de ballet into field planters and reapers and
housewives into storers of rice.
During the coercion of Egyptians by the Islamic Brotherhood, the Cairo Opera Ballet
battled Muslim fundamentalists over the censorship of character dance. At the heart of
dancer contention lay religious denunciation of costuming for the character roles in
Pyramids (2011), a detailed examination of overseers and slave laborers. In rebellion
against suppression of tights and leotards worn by presenters of Spartacus in 2013, Cairo
company members performed scenes of character dance in a public square outside the
Ministry of Culture.
See also Apsara dance; Cecchetti, Enrico; de Mille, Agnes; folkloric ballet; Petrouchka.
Source: Royston, Darren. Dramatic Dance: An Actor’s Approach to Dance as a
Dramatic Art. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.
CHOREOGRAPHY
The art of dance making, choreography synchronizes body poses, motions, symbolic
gesture, facial expression, and transitions with sound and light. A three-dimensional form
of composition, dance design arranges and rearranges soloists, partners, and/or the corps
de ballet to stage a story or representation of social issues or mood, notably, German
choreographer Kurt Jooss’s prediction of World War II in The Green Table (1932) and
Gerald Arpino’s erotic Round of Angels (1983), a subtle commentary on the AIDS
epidemic. Kinetic art forms generate a non-verbal performance that impacts the viewer’s
eyes and ears with a significant theme, for example, rescue, patriotism, wooing, courage,
or worship, the purpose of Apsara dance in the early ninth-century Angkor Empire in
Cambodia and of Jerome Robbins’s Siamese dance scenario inserted in The King and I
(1951).
Archives of tempos, steps, and enchaïnements (combinations) preserve the musicality
of the giants of dance construction, from fifteenth-century Italian ballet theorist Domenico
da Piacenza of Lombardy to Agnes de Mille’s Broadway show Rodeo (1942), Gelsey
Kirkland and Mikhail Baryshnikov’s 1977 film The Nutcracker, and the airy acrobatics of
Robert Lepage’s Ka (2004) for the Cirque du Soleil. In 1581, Parisian choreographer
Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx directed Le Ballet-Comique de la Reine (The Comic Ballet of
the Queen), the first authentic ballet. Patterns altered over the next three centuries with the
development of professional training and dance design for juvenile companies at the court
of Louis XIV. Creativity of the 1700s and early 1800s added nonverbal stage narrative and
the polonaise in Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Les Indes Galantes (The Chivalric Indies, 1735)
and Danish choreographer August Bournonville’s Napoli, or The Fisherman and His
Bride (1842).

For the dancer, choreography sets the pattern of movements among stage décor and lights, the elements of a
production for the Swedish Ballet of Stockholm. Photo by Carl Thorborg, Jens Rosen,
http://www.stockholm59north.com.
 In the golden age of ballet, dance masters splashed the stage with innovation,
particularly Arthur Saint-Léon’s inclusion of folk patterns in Coppélia (1870) and the
rising of ectoplasmic nuns from the grave in Robert le Diable (1871). For “The Kingdom
of the Shades,” an underworld scene in La Bayadère (The Temple Dancer, 1877), ballet
master Marius Petipa advanced the title figure’s ghost in profile with a three-step line
dance begun by a grand arabesque. The three-step phrasing by sixty-four ghosts formed
an emanation of spirits, a cavalcade of souls engulfed by the afterlife.
For The Sleeping Beauty (1890), Petipa turned from the theme of death to a woman’s
role in romance. He staged the wooing scene with the Princess Aurora balanced en pointe.
The lengthy pose presented her as a single woman free of coercion as she made her choice
of suitors. The twentieth century increased the choreographic liberation of women through
hybrid ballet that inserted jazz, blues, folkloric patterns, improvisation, and abstractions of
Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Gamar Almaszadeh, Amalia Hernández Navarro, and
Twyla Tharp. The choreography of the multi-art Cirque du Soleil wooing scenes in the
spectacular Ka (2004) increased the importance of synchrony to design.
See also classical dance; contemporary ballet; folkloric ballet; polonaise; technique;
Totentanz.
Source : Burrows, Jonathan. A Choreographer’s Handbook. New York: Routledge,
2010.
CINDERELLA
See image in photospread.
One of the enduring persecution and rescue motifs, from ninth-century China to
Algonquin and Ojibwa tribal versions, Cinderella’s story has been adapted worldwide in
some fifteen hundred historic and ethnic pantomimes, plays, and dances. Cinderella first
emerged as fable in Greece in Strabo’s Geographica (23 CE), which pictured a Greek
slave serving an Egyptian family. The ballet féerie (storybook dance) echoed previous folk
dance, notably Aschenbrödel in Germany and Cenerentola in Italy.
A performance in 1822 at the King’s Theatre in London showcased a Fernando Sor
Spanish score as a vehicle for Gallo-Italian ballerina Émilie Bigottini and Ferdinand
Albert, who appeared in a Renaissance hat and skirted tunic from classical ballet. Bigottini
also starred in the debut of a version of Cinderella in 1823 in Paris. The fairy godmother
appeared in flowing gown accessorized with feathered headdress and a wooden wand.
Critics applauded a divertissement featuring twelve attendants performing French and
Spanish contra dance for the title character. A Moscow debut of Cinderella in 1825
opened the new Petrovsky Theatre, home of the Bolshoi Ballet.
The Russian Cinderella
Created in Russia at the height of the career of French dance master Marius Petipa,
Cendrillon (Cinderella, 1893) captivated audiences with fabulist Charles Perrault’s fairy
tale from Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé (Stories or Tales of Long Ago, 1697). The
Kirov version of Cinderella lacked the master’s control because of Petipa’s year-long
suffering from pemphigus, a blistering autoimmune illness. His assistant, Lev Ivanov,
aided by Italian teacher Enrico Cecchetti, choreographed the work for presentation at the
Mariinsky Theatre on December 17, 1893, in St. Petersburg. Boris Fitinhoff-Schell
composed unimpressive music.
The ballet introduced Petipa’s favorite ballerina, Pierina Legnani, teamed with Pavel
Gerdt as the cavalier who liberates her from misery. Legnani set a record for athletic
precision with thirty-two fouettés en tournant (whip turns). The stage design captivated
audiences with Matvey Shishkov’s perspective of a grand ballroom decked with
entablatures, classical statuary, and ranks of chandeliers, the trappings of the Romanov
dynasty.
At the end of World War II, a definitive Russian Zolushka (Cinderella) incorporated the
brooding orchestral score of Sergei Prokofiev for a long-lived model of classic ballet
theater. The libretto, replete with audacious characterizations, took shape during an era of
Soviet meddling in the arts to generate propaganda for the Socialist state. The German
invasion of Russia in June 1941 and the bombing of the Bolshoi Theatre forced Prokofiev
to restructure the time schedule.
The realistic choreography of actor-dancer Rostislav Zakharov of Astrakhan, professor
of Moscow’s State Institute of Theatrical Art, went into production in February 1944 at the
House of the Red Army. Following a series of delays, the Kirov debuted the narrative
ballet on November 21, 1945. Starring Galina Ulánova, the production coincided with
celebration of a state victory, the May 9 defeat of German invaders. The troupe’s
empathetic mime of Cinderella’s wretched life captured the yearning of a people huddled
in peasant squalor under the tyranny of Josef Stalin. The symbolic clock represented
coercive deadlines that controlled artistic output.
The Tale of the Glass Slipper
In spring in a female-dominant milieu, Cinderella’s wistful mood contrasts with
preparations for a spring ball by her stepmother and two invidious stepsisters, comic
figures named Khadïshka (Skinny) and Kubïshka (Dumpy). Anticipating the engagement
of the royal prince, the raucous trio is insensitive to Cinderella’s bouts of mother hunger
for her deceased parent. She tends a poor beggar woman by seating her at the hearth,
feeding her a crust of bread, and warming her with secondhand slippers, emblematic acts
of domestic selflessness. With namby-pamby father in tow, the pompous female household
exits to the ball, leaving Cinderella with only a broom as dancing partner.
The beggar, transformed into a fairy godmother with a warm stirring of orchestral
strings, illustrates a standard motif of wonders sprung from humble origins. She changes
the gift slippers into glass dancing shoes, the fundamental idealism that guides
Cinderella’s steps. Mice and a pumpkin morph into a horse-drawn carriage. A wave of a
magic wand readies Cinderella for the evening in a ball gown. Before the departure, the
benefactor warns that the spell will disintegrate at midnight, a standard caveat in myth and
fairy lore.
 Act two presents an effervescent example of ballet d’action, a dance floor mobbed with
male courtiers seeking preferment and girls vying for the prince’s attention. Tension arises
from the arrival of a nameless beauty, whose loveliness has the power to elevate her above
the greed of clamoring toadies. Significantly, the family fails to recognize Cinderella,
whom they envision as a downtrodden drudge engaged in humbling kitchen chores in
apron and rags.
With bubbly chaînés (rotations), Cinderella instantly attracts the prince, who leads her
in the grand pas de deux, an emblematic duet prefiguring a loving relationship. In a
fantasy garden free from family and state manipulation, the couple waltz blissfully until
the clock strikes twelve after a portentous tick-tock raised by percussion. As Cinderella
races into the dark, she drops behind a glass slipper, the prince’s souvenir of a potential
bride.
The concluding act details royal detective work to find the maker and owner of the
slipper, an intimate bit of sleuthing requiring male handling of bare female feet. The
prince dominates the performance in the first scene as he questions cobblers far and near.
At Cinderella’s fireside in scene two, the prince interrupts a family breakfast. After both
stepsisters and their mother fail the test of fitting into the petite slipper, Cinderella
inadvertently drops the matching shoe, proof that the prince has located his mystery
partner. The fairy godmother orchestrates a private tryst in a magic garden. Cinderella
dances to “Amoroso” as she accepts the prince’s marriage proposal, the fulfillment of her
life’s dream.
A Classic Fairy Tale
Cinderella continued to morph into new stagings and scores, including a 1901 Berlin
version composed by Johann Strauss the Younger and, in 1938, choreographer Michel
Fokine’s Cendrillon and Paganini (Cinderella and Paganini), debuted in London’s Covent
Garden by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Two days before Christmas 1948, English
choreographer Frederick Ashton’s full-length narrative for Sadler’s Wells rejuvenated the
French-Russian model of narrative ballet. Ashton paired English-Irish-Brazilian dancer
Margot Fonteyn with danseur noble Michael Somes, a traditional leading man who
dominated headlines for his precision and command of romantic roles. Ashton set a satiric
tradition of males dancing the part of the stepsisters.
After a host of productions at La Scala, Strasbourg, and Sarajevo, the Prokofiev
Cinderella reached Russian cinema in 1960 with the dancing of Muscovite Raisa
Struchkova, a Bolshoi soloist. On Thanksgiving 1981, Maria Tallchief directed Suzanne
Farrell in the fairy tale role with the Chicago City Ballet. Rudolf Nureyev reset Cinderella
in 1986 for the Paris Opera Ballet with updated conflicts—a drunken father and a daughter
enraptured by dreams of a screen test opening the way to a Hollywood career. After the
collapse of Soviet Russia, in 2004, a touring company introduced the Prokofiev Cinderella
to the United States in eighty-eight cities.
At the Hippodrome at Christmas 2010, the Birmingham Royal Ballet premiered ballet
master David Bintley’s adaptation for the company’s twentieth anniversary. By enlarging
the dark struggle between the title figure and her spiteful stepsisters, he exaggerated the
heroine’s need to escape and find acceptance and love in the outside world. A return to the
original libretto in 2014 by the fifty-member Moscow Festival Ballet toured North
America, Europe, and Asia.
Source : Morrison, Simon. The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2009.
CLASSICAL DANCE
Classical ballet grounds its art on demanding technique and visual presentation. Initiated
during the Italian Renaissance, each carnival season preceding Mardi Gras, formalized
choreography derived allegorical ballets de cour (court ballet) from social dance. After
1425, theorist and musician Domenico da Piacenza founded the Lombard dance method
and outlined the forerunners of geometric ballet steps in four surviving balli (ballet plots).
His De Arte Saltandi et Choreas Ducendi (On the Art of Dancing and Directing Choruses,
ca. 1425) supplied the first ballet glossary and stage notation.
French director Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx introduced graceful precision on October 15,
1581, with Le Ballet-Comique de la Reyne (The comic ballet of the queen), a work
honoring Catherine de’ Medici, wife of Henry II of France. For performers, Beaujoyeulx
designed slippers tied at the ankles with ribbons to facilitate the speed and intricacy of
footwork. Venetian ballet master Fabrito Caroso da Sermoneta surveyed late Renaissance
dance in two handbooks, Il Ballarino (The Dancer, 1581), and Nobiltà da Dame (Courtly
Dance, 1600), a compilation of dances and steps.
Royal Ballet
Under Louis XIV in the mid-seventeenth century, French classical ballet evolved from
amateur productions into the art of professional dancers and the king himself. Court
intermedii (filler between acts) and divertissements (entertainments) consisted of patterns
skits and dances, beginning with Les Fâcheux (The Bores, 1661), composed by Jean
Baptiste Lully. Actors mimed the behaviors and actions of Greek and Roman gods and the
allegorical figures of the seasons. The themes and performance style impacted baroque
opera, which interspersed recitative and aria with dance to yield opéra-ballet.
Louis created a royal step, the Basque entrechat-deux (two interweavings), a leap and
change of foot positions in the air that set professional execution apart from social dance.
At his seizure of absolute power in 1661, the French king elevated ballet to an
independent dramatic art set apart from singing. To standardize footwork, he built the first
Salle de la Comédie (playhouse) at his country estate at Versailles. He hired his teacher,
Pierre Beauchamp, to head a professional staff in Paris at the Académie Royale de Danse,
the world’s first ballet school. He began instructing dancers in turnout of the feet and legs
to facilitate the five basic foot positions and ballon (bounce), an ethereal lift from the
floor.
In the style of Louis’s court, in 1669, French nobles made serious studies of dance and
attended lengthy presentations of the Académie d’Opéra featuring stage lighting,
backdrops, makeup, and costumes. The appeal of ballet filtered down to the bourgeois,
who emulated court dance aesthetics in extensions of the limbs and port de bras (arm
positions). By 1681, Lully’s Le Triomphe de l’Amour (The Triumph of Love, 1681) added
women to all-male troupes.
Evolving Classicism
Across Europe, disparate techniques continued to evolve the definition of classicism from
the original French. At the Lyons Opera, French innovator Jean Georges Noverre boosted
classical mime with the English acting techniques of Shakespearean performer David
Garrick. In recognition of Greece and Rome of antiquity, in the 1700s, Anacreontic ballet
featured mythic themes and bucolic settings as well as fifth-century BCE chitons and
tunics.
At the Paris Opera in the mid-1700s, dancer Gaëtano Vestris promoted realism by
jettisoning masks and projecting physiognomy to mimic character emotion. His son,
teacher Auguste Vestris, blended gesture and facial expression with dance technique, the
beginnings of theatrical dance. The addition of the polonaise to court and ritual scenes in
the 1790s promoted the ballon (bounce), a light-footed promenade.
In the nineteenth century, romantic ballet embraced storybook tales as sources of
classical dance. In 1820 at La Scala in Milan, Italian theorist Carlo Blasis’s Elementary,
Theoretical, and Practical Treatise on the Art of Dance anthologized a glossary of
neoclassic ballet nomenclature covering comic or grotesque dance, demi-caractere
(melodrama) or mime, and dans classique (serious ballet). In mid-century, Gallo-Danish
choreographer August Bournonville reduced the exhibitionism of romantic dance and
restored classical understatement.
In the 1870s, the Gallo-Russian dance master Marius Petipa championed the strictures
of classicism, which he modeled by partnering with Fanny Elssler and Marie Taglioni, the
most disciplined ballerinas of the era. Their work en pointe elevated the stage presence of
female dancers by generating audience enthusiasm for toe dancing. In 1892, Petipa
blended classical steps and pointe work with mystery and fantasy in Peter Ilyich
Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, which became America’s traditional Christmas ballet.
Twentieth-Century Innovation
In 1908, Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev introduced aesthetic innovation to Russian
ballet. In a redefinition of classicism, his Ballets Russes energized the colors and vibrancy
of Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (1907), Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s
Scheherazade (1909), and Les Sylphides (1909), performed to the music of Frederic
Chopin in toe shoes and long tutus, two visual elements of romantic ballet. A relaxing of
classical standards encouraged hyper-expression in the suggestive physical postures of
soloist Vaslav Nijinsky. In contrast, dancer Anna Pavlova rejected Diaghilev’s alterations
and retained the classicism of the pas de deux that she learned from Marius Petipa and
Enrico Cecchetti, proponent of Italian method.
The collapse of the Romanov dynasty in 1917 preceded the formation of a Soviet state
in which severe censorship and suppression of classical ballet reduced the programs of the
Bolshoi and Kirov troupes. To rescue the classics, within the year, archivist Nicholai
Grigorovich Sergeyev immigrated to France with notations of Petipa’s choreography. The
Russian mode influenced English choreographer Frederick Ashton, who designed Les
Rendezvous (The Trysts, 1933) for the Vic-Wells Ballet. In 1965, Russian dance master
George Balanchine, founder of American classical ballet, retrieved Petipa’s Don Quixote,
which the National Ballet of Canada alternated with classic story-dance—Coppélia, The
Sleeping Beauty, Giselle, and Swan Lake. The five works introduced young audiences to
the precision of steps, allegro and adagio pointe work, variations, and the synchrony of the
corps de ballet.
See also Beauchamp, Pierre; Louis XIV; Sergeyev, Nicholai.
Source : Cowart, Georgia. The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of
Spectacle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
CONTEMPORARY BALLET
See image in photospread.
A mid-twentieth-century hybrid, contemporary ballet began with typically lyric
classical ballet and incorporated a less mannered style, athletic movements, attire,
subjects, and music suited to unencumbered dance. Choreographers abandoned the search
for the perfect dancer and emphasized variance in physical ability, sexuality, and race, the
aim of Maurice Béjart’s countercultural works, Nacho Duato’s Compañía Nacional de
Danza in Madrid, William Forsythe’s stage works in Frankfurt, and the Boris Eifman
Ballet in St. Petersburg, Russia. Freeing the head, torso, and limbs from bulky costuming,
conventions, and pantomime, contemporary design liberated conservative stage
vocabulary to express a full range of human responses, even to formerly unacceptable
themes, such as childbirth, sexual arousal, and homoerotic fantasy.
The historic hierarchies categorizing soloists and principals gave place to dance
egalitarianism. Scenarists stripped stages of fussy backdrops, papier-mâché animal heads,
and floor-length costumes and postural constraints. The corps de ballet progressed from
little more than scenery to individual contributors to the dance, a concept that Michel
Fokine applied to the Ballets Russes’s early twentieth-century performances of Les
Sylphides (1909), an abstract fantasy. In equalizing troupe members, Fokine ended the
obsession with the prima ballerina en pointe and the prince’s pursuit of his female ideal.
Humanistic Dance
By mobilizing cultural variety over time and place, early contemporary dancers smashed
storybook stereotypes and encouraged a holistic view of humankind, the focus of female
sacrifice in Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring, 1913). Avant-garde staging of
controversy jolted viewers accustomed to prim programming, for example, Darius
Milhaud’s bluesy Le Création du Monde (The Creation of the World, 1923), the first
Negro ballet, and Kurt Jooss’s condemnation of Nazism in The Green Table (1932).
Broadway premiered On Your Toes (1936), a hybrid of ballet and jazz that featured
stalking and pistols; Agnes de Mille elevated prairie scenes and cowboys in Rodeo (1942)
and Oklahoma! (1943).
 As Communist China and Russia strong-armed ballet into a vehicle for socioeconomic
propaganda and Islam banished dance for its candor, the nineteenth-century conventions
continued to tumble as free style gained credence. Choreographer Edouard Borovansky
showcased Australian natives as the subjects of Terra Australis (Southern Land, 1946). In
1958, Alvin Ailey revisited African slavery in Blues Suite. Judith Jamison introduced
black feminism to Cry (1971).
The AIDS pandemic of the 1980s further challenged society to view dance as a force
for demolishing homophobia and for retrieving the gay dancer from scorn. In another act
of iconoclasm, a 1987 performance of Filipina choreographer Agnes Locsin’s Igorot
legitimized a pre-Columbian mountain chant with classical and modern choreography. San
Francisco visionary Alonzo King’s Soothing the Enemy (2000) confronted dancers with
terrors; Chinese dancer-choreographer Xing Jin’s Shanghai Tango (2007) explored
transsexual issues.
Dancing Complexities
Contemporary choreography avoided the personal and literary confines of narrative ballet
and concentrated on emotional expressions, spoofs, and satire illustrated by angular,
jutting body mechanics. Under Polish choreographer Krzysztof Pastor of Gdansk, the
Polish National Ballet harnessed the stage machinery and kaleidoscopic lighting of
Warsaw’s Teatr Wielki to create postmodern mixed media. His athletic company, adept at
abstract stagecraft, counterpoint, and intricate pas de deux, achieved modern aesthetics, as
with the piston-thrum pace of Ashley Page’s Century Rolls (2008), set to a piano concerto
by John Adams.
In 1994, Dwight Rhoden and Desmond Richardson, both former members of Alvin
Ailey’s troupe, collaborated on establishing Complexions Contemporary Ballet. The
multicultural dancers broke size and racial barriers while winning ballet critics to their
brand of sinuous, gymnastic performance. In autumn 2010 in Sydney, Perth, and Canberra,
Australia, they performed Moon over Jupiter to strains by Sergei Rachmaninoff. The
ensemble earned citations from arts commentators in New Zealand and professionals in
New York, New Orleans, Seattle, Dallas, and Los Angeles. Later in the twenty-first
century, the Mark Morris Dance Company celebrated Ovidian myth with a barefoot corps
de ballet performing the opéra-ballet Acis and Galatea (2014) in leafy chitons designed by
Isaac Mizrahi.
See also Baryshnikov, Mikhail; Béjart, Maurice; Cullberg, Birgit; Duato, Nacho;
Eifman, Boris; Naharin, Ohad; Nijinsky, Vaslav; Skibine, George.
Source : Banes, Sally, and Mikhail Baryshnikov, eds. Reinventing Dance in the 1960s:
Everything Was Possible. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
COPPÉLIA
See image in photospread.
A classic comic ballet about a wooden-headed dancing doll, Coppélia, ou La Fille aux
Jeux d’Émail (Coppélia, or The Girl with Enamel Eyes) has anchored the repertoire of
dance companies worldwide. To Léo Delibes’s music, the clockwork girl acts a jerky,
puppet-style role created by choreographer Arthur Saint-Léon and French librettist
Charles Nuitter, who proposed to entitle the opus La Poupée de Nurnberg (The
Nuremberg Doll). The story derived from Prussian author Ernst Theodor Amadeus
Hoffmann’s folk tales “Der Sandmann” (The Sandman, 1816), anthologized in Die
Nachtstücke (The Night Pieces, 1816) and from Die Puppe (The Doll, 1818), a marionette
ballet filmed in 1919.
Presented before the Emperor Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie, the premiere of
Coppélia at the Paris Opera on May 25, 1870, starred Milanese teenager Giuseppina
Bozzacchi as Swanhilde, a part she danced eighteen times. Essential to the crowd scenes,
enactments of the Polish mazurka, Austrian waltz, Scots jig, French galop, Spanish bolero,
and Hungarian czardas established cultural verisimilitude and legitimized folk repertoire.
The reception of the village bell, a symbol of folk unity, introduced its significance to
scheduling peasant life. As the voice of God, the bell regulated parish religiosity. An
epithalamium honoring marriage as a cornerstone of civilized life preceded a satisfying
finale congratulating bride and groom and the peasants themselves for perpetuating
tradition and family.
Coppélia’s premiere introduced a droll stage convention—the girlish androgyne. Unlike
fairy tale Sylphides and Giselles of standard ballet fare, Eugénie Fiocre, a snub-nosed
beauty, played Franz, the village lad. She appeared en travesti (in a “breeches part”) by
dressing in men’s clothes and mimicking a beardless teen. The neutering of cavalier roles,
an element of the exaltation of the danseuse en pointe, liberalized female parts based on
women’s disempowerment and submission to fathers, lovers, and husbands. The
diminution of the roguish danseur further distanced ballet from the courtly manifestations
of Louis XIV’s retinue, from the governance of the arts by self-important bureaucrats, and
from the exploitation of the female body for decoration and sexual gratification.
A Storybook Dance
Entwined motifs—the power of women to make men obsess over them and the attempt of
human intelligence to mimic God—foreground the plot of Coppélia. During a village
festival in Galicia, Franz, a lad engaged to the spunky Swanhilde, seeks a monetary
reward offered to all couples who marry during the unveiling of a new bell. Franz
becomes fascinated with a doll displayed on a nearby balcony by its designer, the
menacing Doctor Coppélius. Significant to her static role is her perusal of a book with
sightless painted-on eyes. Swanhilde tests Franz’s fidelity by shaking a wheat spike. To his
claim that he heard it rattle, Swanhilde stalks away to rescue her deluded love from folly.
The presentation of the agrarian superstition precedes an updated test of love emanating
from a scientist’s laboratory. As Coppelius departs his house, he loses his keys during a
confrontation with rowdy boys. Swanhilde locates the keys, emblems of autonomy and
self-assertion. Undaunted by the perverse scientist, she leads her friends into the spooky
residence to examine Coppélia woman to woman. At the same time, Franz reaches the
balcony by ladder, a more physical approach than the girls’ cerebral choice of unlocking
the door.
 The action reflects a pervasive theme of the Industrial Revolution, the contrast between
automata and humans, as well as the age-old censure of practitioners of science who
emulate God’s creative powers. In the second act, the girls intrude on Coppélius’s studio
and set in motion a company of life-size mannequins. Dressed as a Chinaman, juggler,
astronomer, harlequin, and soldier, the dolls dance to the “Musique des Automates”
(Robots’ Music). At the climax, Swanhilde discovers that Coppélia is a wind-up doll
rather than a real girl.
Artifice clashes with realism after Coppélius surprises the snoopers in his workroom.
Before he can eject them from his house, Swanhilde scatters his library and attacks his
experiments, the source of the robotic assemblage. Recognizing Franz at the window,
Coppélius lures him inside to become a blood sacrifice to provide a soul for Coppélia. The
substitution suggests the replacement of the copy with the live model in the Greek myth of
Pygmalion and Galatea as well as the problematic Abraham-Isaac scenario before the altar
in Genesis.
Halfway through the ballet, the female principal demonstrates womanly curiosity and
guile, qualities that connect Swanhilde with the disobedience of the biblical Eve, the
Talmudic Lilith, and the Greek Pandora. Concealed behind a drape, Swanhilde observes
Coppélius drugging Franz with a potion to transfer his life force to Coppélia. Swanhilde
disguises herself in the doll’s dress and pretends to quicken to life. To free Franz from the
devious inventor, she sets the mannequins in motion. The flurry distracts Coppélius. His
experiment thwarted, he sorrows over Coppélia, who remains naked and lifeless behind
the curtain.
The ballet reaches resolution in divertissements sanctioning wedlock as the basis for
village life. Act three depicts the corps de ballet in a “Dance of the Hours” mimicking the
passage of time with a clock face and Franz and Swanhilde approaching the altar.
Coppélius intrudes and demands repayment for damage to his workshop and experiments.
Again, Swanhilde becomes the facilitator by agreeing to part with her dowry until her
father intercedes with the price that Coppélius names. In a third proposed resolution to the
contretemps, the mayor, a beneficent ruler, presents the inventor a bag of coins. After the
union of human male with human female, villagers frolic in celebration.
Coppélia’s History
Despite its popularity, Coppélia lost precedence in headlines on July 19, 1870, with the
outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. The next month, choreographer Saint-Léon died of a
heart attack in a Paris cafe. Because of the closure of the Paris Opera, Bozzacchi received
no salary, suffered malnutrition, and died of smallpox the following November on her
seventeenth birthday. Her demise contributed to the mythos of ballet and its performers
and to the cult of willowy female beauty.
Revivals in Paris in 1871 and later in Brussels, Vienna, Budapest, Moscow, St.
Petersburg, London, and Copenhagen buoyed the fame of Coppélia. An operatic version,
Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann, 1881), reprised the
plot of the mechanical doll. In the style of the medieval fool tale, the opera featured male
aptitude in inventors Coppélius and Spalanzani, who destroy their doll to ridicule the
gullible Hoffmann. In 1910, diva Anna Pavlova chose the mechanical girl as her debut
role in the United States. For a staging by Léonide Massine, dance master of the Ballet
Russe de Monte Carlo, Alexandra Danilova paired with Frederic Franklin as the Galician
naifs.
Balletomanes buoyed Coppélia to classic status for its depiction of female resilience
against the cult of skin-deep beauty cloaking mental inertia. In token of the relationship
between dance mentor and neophyte company member, a Danish dance film, Ballerina
(1966), depicted both the rehearsals and staging of Coppélia in Copenhagen by the Royal
Danish Ballet. A male-dominant film, Dr. Coppélius (1968), cast Walter Slezak in the title
role opposite the company of the Gran Teatro del Liceo of Barcelona, featuring Claudia
Corday and Cal Selling as Swanhilde/Coppélia and Franz.
Subsequent productions of Coppélia brought fame to the San Francisco Ballet and to
George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. In 1974, Balanchine’s prima ballerina,
Patricia McBride, danced the crowning role of village bride. The following year, the
National Ballet of Canada chose Coppélia as the showpiece of its 1976 program. In 1991,
Margot Fonteyn, one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable dancers, published a
children’s book recounting Coppélia’s story.
Source: Dils, Ann, and Ann Cooper Albright. Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A
Dance History Reader. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.
CORPS DE BALLET
The rhythmic and thematic support for soloists and partners, the corps de ballet serves as
the literal foundation or “body of the dance.” Based on the undifferentiated chorus of
classic Greek tragedy, the ensemble may form a precise geometric figure or break into
individual groups of identical lines, circles, or squares. Led by the coryphée, the corps
performs roles that frame, intensify, or explain the focus, for example, presenters of gifts
to the newborn princess in The Sleeping Beauty (1890), ghostly agents entering the
underworld in La Bayadère (The Temple Dancer, 1877), or coolie laborers in Mikhail
Kurilko’s The Red Poppy (1927), the first Soviet ballet.
In narrative ballet, the organized ensemble suits a need for such character groups as
witnesses, vendors, servants, or soldiers. Examples range from nymphs or troops of
harmonized collectives, such as village rebels in Laurencia (1939), the urban dancers on
the square in Reinhold Glière’s The Bronze Horseman (1949), a slave requiem concluding
Spartacus (1956), and a cabaret spectacle in Moulin Rouge: The Ballet (2009). In
preparation for synchrony, dancers practice in front of mirrors and rehearse as a group, an
essential of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo and Cirque du Soleil.
Corps History
From the 1630s at the courts of Louis XIII and Louis XIV of France, each divertissement
(amusement) integrated group performances with the audience. Louis XIV, a dancer
himself in eighty productions, showcased the skill of the first professional corps de ballet,
directed by composer Jean Baptiste Lully. As elements of balanced geometric figures, an
even number of participants formed V’s, S’s, and X’s that coalesced into circles, triangles,
diamonds, squares, and parallel lines for the polonaise or processional. The choreography
became so stultifying that Françoise Prévost used demotion to the corps as a punishment
for her prodigy, Marie Camargo, who outshone her teacher.
In 1756, the philosophy of French dance theorist Jean-Georges Noverre lessened the
mechanical mosaics of the choeur de dance (dance chorus) and encouraged anatomical
strengths, gestures, and facial expressions that heightened storytelling. Because of the
difference in casting and prestige, lead dancers received more coaching and more attention
from prominent instructors than ensemble members. Nonetheless, the term corps clarified
the role of the company in movements en masse, for example, groups of Egyptians and
Romans in Noverre’s Cleopatra (1765), which epitomized the clash of cultures and
political expectations.
A French translation of the Italian corpo di ballo, in 1818, the term corps de ballet
came into use in the Paris media to describe a scenic force distinguished by symmetry and
linear movement. For practical reasons, the company’s sequences gave principal dancers a
rest while energizing crowd scenes, rituals, and celebrations suited to romantic ballet, such
as ballroom dancers in Cendrillon (Cinderella, 1815). In 1822, installation of gas lighting
enhanced ensemble movement, both in unison and counterpoint. By grouping ensembles
in tight rows, choreographers stressed coordinated rhythm and color, as with the Gypsies
in Les Huguenots (1836), grape harvesters in Giselle (1841), crowd scenes in Napoli
(1842), the four graces in Pas de quatre (Quartet, 1845), and ballet students in disguise in
Le Conservatoire (1849).
Mid-nineteenth-century headlining of principal dancers further reduced the
individuality of cadre members, as with the sword-wielding toreros in Don Quixote (1869)
and the identically costumed mice and snowflakes in The Nutcracker (1892). At the Paris
Opera, preteen corps apprentices bore the insult of being “les petits rats.” Stage machinery
relieved the tedium of group dance, elevating ensembles to aerial movements on wires to
represent heavenly bodies or angels. As Russian dance evolved into contemporary ballet,
Michel Fokine, choreographer of the Ballets Russes after 1900, determined not to waste
troupe energies, but to integrate the corps into character dances.
Corps Significance
Late nineteenth-century dance increased the value of the corps to productions. In 1887,
cobbler Salvatore Capezio began streamlining pointe shoes. The improvement increased
the amount of time that company dancers could balance on their toes. The development of
ensemble complexity rescued choreography from two stereotypes—character dancers and
the decorative company, who performed the same role as scenery.
For the Imperial Ballet of Moscow, dance master Alexander Gorsky pressed the corps
into the action. In 1900, he broadened the variety of steps and patterns in productions of
Don Quixote, thereby pulling extraneous figures into the ridicule of a bumbling old
crusader by ballerinas Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina, and Olga Preobrajenska. English
dance instructor Alexandre Genée made a similar shift toward realism in Coppélia (1906)
and The Dancing Master (1910). For L’Oiseau de Feu (The Firebird, 1910), composer
Igor Stravinsky relieved the ominous good-versus-evil suite with the khorovod (circle
dance), a melodic promise of renewal performed by thirteen enchanted princesses. A
looser interpretation of crowd scenes in Petrouchka (1911) required French extras to
improvise festival action and mood as a framework redolent with national character and
peasant elán.
German choreographer Kurt Jooss collected an ensemble of the damned for The Green
Table (1932), a pacifist ballet featuring eight tableaus. Premiered a year before the election
of Adolf Hitler to the chancellorship of Germany, the modernist dance featured refugees
imitating the wave-like movements of people in flight and young soldiers goose stepping
across the stage in anticipation of Nazi fascism. Violent gestures and regimented advances
warned audiences that soullessness generated obedience to a hellish vision.
Mid-twentieth-century costumer Barbara Karinska relieved the female corps of pancake
tutus, which wobbled and vibrated during tight choreography. For George Balanchine’s
Symphony in C (1950), she replaced stiff skirts with a wireless powder puff tutu that
enable ballerinas to lessen the distance between them. In 1956, the debut of composer
Aram Khachaturian’s Spartacus put the ensemble to use as a slave army facing
annihilation by Roman legionaries, a stage allusion to the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941.
Variant uses of the corps de ballet reached a peak in the 1960s and 1970s with crossover
ballet, which interspersed classical steps with jazz and modern dance. Alvin Ailey’s
Revelations (1960) illustrated the rise of the African American diaspora through faith,
symbolized by hymn singers. The muscular flow and electrifying fluidity of the corps in
Ailey’s The River (1970) set the tone and atmosphere of water in its many modes.
Simultaneous with the abandonment of academic choreography, company repertoires
continued to perform masterworks for corps de ballet, for example, Judith Jamison’s
Emmy-winning one-act reverie Hymn (1993), a tribute to Alvin Ailey danced to
drumbeats with libretto by playwright Anna Deavere Smith. In 2008, the Royal Swedish
Opera Ballet staged a masked ball and regicide in Gustav III, in which the ensemble’s
reaction to the shooting of the king reprised the scurrying of attendees in consternation. In
2011, the Cairo Opera Ballet performance of Pyramids applied the dance corps to the
slave labor in a state construction project. Movement theorist Ohad Naharin developed
group response in Echad Mi Yodea (Who Knows One, 2012), a study of undulating
movement by dancers seated in a semicircle of chairs.
See also polonaise.
Source: Volynskii, A. L. Ballet’s Magic Kingdom: Selected Writings on Dance in
Russia, 1911–1925. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.
LE CORSAIRE
A ballet-pantomime showcasing vigor and artistry, Le Corsaire (The Pirate, 1856)
developed into an orientalist showpiece for male dancers. Based on the heroic verse of
Lord Byron from 1814 and composed in three acts by Adolphe Adam, the opus brought
seventy-year-old Joseph Mazilier out of retirement to stage it. Le Corsaire opened at the
Paris Opera on January 23 before the Emperor Napoleon III and Empress Eugenie, who
requested a repeat presentation for the French Army of the East.
 Arts historians identify Le Corsaire as the greatest and one of the most expensive of the
French opera-ballets. Audiences applauded the machinery of technician Victor Sacré,
which wrapped the stage in a realistic panorama to create Gothic illusions of thunder,
lightning, and a shipwreck at sea. Gas lamps, still new to theatergoers, dramatized perils
with flares and shadows.
Despite the dominant European flavor of the libretto, the depiction of white slavery
amid eunuchs and harem dancers generated sell-out audiences. Upper-class viewers
clamored to witness interracial pas de deux before the painted sets of Édouard Despléchin.
More intriguing, the Continental male fantasy of sexual dominion in a Turkish seraglio
echoed popular novels, opera, paintings, and fashions featuring exotic transparent silk
pants, bra-vests, and gilt slippers.

A ballet-pantomime showcasing vigor and artistry, Le Corsaire (The Pirate, 1856) developed into an orientalist
showpiece for such male dancers as Rudolf Nureyev. Stars of the American Ballet Theatre, p. 19, #39.

The ballet advanced the career of Italian mime Carolina Rosati, a student of Carlo
Blasis. The cast featured Claudina Couqui as Gulnare and Victorine Legrain as his slave.
As Captain Conrad, Domenico Segarelli appeared in Byzantine tunic with full pleated
skirt under a bolero vest. A fringed sash, gold and red shin guards, sweeping cloak,
tasseled cap, pistol in the belt, and handlebar mustache completed the illusion of the
dashing pirate.
Stage Exoticism
The picturesque melodrama opens along the Mediterranean Sea, where a storm threatens
Captain Conrad, First Mate Birbanto, and the slave Ali after their ship sinks. Male
camaraderie implies a carefree life beset by adventure and free of domestic or
governmental sovereignty. Act One pictures two Greek peasant girls, Gulnare and
Medora, encountering the survivors on shore. Because Conrad captivates Medora, the
attraction foregrounds a lasting relationship, an alliance “without benefit of clergy” that
contrasts the binding Christian wedlock of bourgeois Europe.
When a cadre of Turkish merchants and the slave trader Isaac Lanquedem scout the
shore for women in scene two, the Turks seize Medora and Gulnare and sell them to the
enslaver. The women cower from their captors, who hustle them toward a Turkish slave
auction in the Islamic milieu of Adrinople along the Greek border. While Seid Pasha
combs the bazaar in search of beauties to add to his harem, the pirates vow to retrieve the
victims.
The second act opens on a subterranean palace—a coastal grotto filled with swag, a
cache of jewels and precious metals reminiscent of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.
Conrad and his companions restore the Greek captives to freedom. In a pas à trois (trio),
Conrad woos Medora, whom the bare-chested Ali promises to serve. The slave’s dance
reharmonizes Medora’s relationship with males, who become her champions in the
medieval chivalric sense. The Greek women’s demand for freedom incites a squabble
between Birbanto and Conrad, who sets the captives free.
In the nineteenth-century stereotype of villainy, opportunism calls for guile. A plot
between Birbanto and Lanquedem introduces a soporific elixir that will separate Conrad
and Medora without harming the hero. When Conrad smells flowers sprinkled with the
potion, he lapses into sleep. Birbanto helps Lanquedem seize Medora. Upon awakening,
Conrad joins Ali in a rescue plan.
The first tableau of the third act returns to Gulnare, who joins the harem of Seid Pasha,
an Ottoman sybarite accustomed to a choice of pleasures. Lanquedem presents the pasha
with three dancers, who perform a trio. At a thrilling moment, Lanquedem displays his
best merchandise—Medora, who enjoys a brief reunion with Gulnare.
In “Le Jardin Animé” (The Animated Garden), the harem odalisques lead Gulnare and
Medora in a dance around magic fountains. The tribute to peace and harmony precedes the
acme of the ballet d’action. The third tableau opens on evening prayers, where Conrad,
disguised among Muslim pilgrims bound for a hajj in Mecca, overwhelms the pasha and
Lanquedem. In the epilogue, Medora and Gulnare sail away with Conrad and Ali.
An Enduring Drama
Although Le Corsaire entered dance history during the ebb of story ballet, throughout the
mid-1800s at St. Petersburg, Marius Petipa revised the score and choreographed excerpts
for the Imperial Ballet. The Bolshoi performance in 1858 featured Ekaterina Friedbürg as
Medora, Petipa as Captain Conrad, and Jules Perrot as Seid Pasha. Petipa hired Léo
Delibes to add a divertissement to the original score and painter Andreas Roller to create a
backdrop of the shipwreck. In the 1890s, the role of Conrad enhanced the career of Pavel
Gerdt.
 Still popular in the 1900s, Le Corsaire established the dance credentials of top
performers, including Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Vasily Tichomirov and
Yekaterina Geltzer starred as Conrad and Medora in composer Hector Berlioz’s Le
Corsaire (1912), staged by Alexander Gorsky. In Beijing in 1959, Peter Gusev introduced
European classics, including Giselle, Swan Lake, La Sylphide, and Le Corsaire to east
Asian repertoires. The National Ballet of China reprised the ballet in 2008.
Source: Ziter, Edward. The Orient on the Victorian Stage. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2003.
CRANKO, JOHN (1927–1973)
A South African performer and dance maker, John Cyril Cranko influenced narrative
ballet across Europe and Australia. A native of Rustenburg in Transvaal, he was born on
August 15, 1927, to Grace and Herbert Cranko. At the University of Cape Town, he
studied under ballet coach Dulcie Howe, a former member of the Pavlova ensemble, and
debuted at age sixteen in The Soldier’s Tale.
In London after 1946, Cranko gained recognition for innovation with his witty
melodrama Pineapple Poll (1950), a staging of the music of Arthur Sullivan for a debut on
March 13, 1951, at Sadler’s Wells Theatre. Teaming with Australian musician Charles
Mackerras, Cranko composed the libretto and characterized Moondog and Bootface for
The Lady and the Fool (1954), set to a score by Giuseppe Verdi and featuring soloist
Kenneth MacMillan. The choreographer followed in 1955 with a popular revue, Cranks,
and a sequel, New Cranks (1960). He advised New York City Ballet on productions and
debuted La Belle Hélène (1955) at the Paris Opera, The Prince of the Pagodas (1957) with
the Royal Ballet, and Secrets (1958) for the Edinburgh International Ballet.
In his thirties, Cranko shifted to substantial works, beginning in 1960 with A
Midsummer Night’s Dream. As founding director of the Stuttgart Ballet in 1961, he
recruited Egon Madsen, Richard Cragun, Birgit Kell, Ray Barra, and Marcia Haydée. The
Stuttgart ensemble presented Cranko originals—Romeo and Juliet (1962) and Eugene
Onegin (1965), a Russian stage classic that entered repertoires worldwide.
Within a dozen years, Cranko energized West German ballet by opening the state-
supported Stuttgart dance academy, performing in Carmina Burana in 1965, and mounting
The Taming of the Shrew (1969), Orpheus (1970), Bruillards (Fog, 1970), Carmen (1971),
and Spuren (Traces, 1973). For the Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv, he composed
Song of My People (1971) to the Hebrew poem “Let My People Go.” On June 26, 1973,
he choked to death on a flight home from the United States. His legacy includes the
development of creativity in choreographers Jirí Kylián and John Neumeier. British dance
maker Kenneth MacMillan honored Cranko with a dance ode, Requiem (1976).
See also Eugene Onegin.
Source: Grau, Andree, and Stephanie Jordan, eds. Europe Dancing: Perspectives on
Theatre, Dance, and Cultural Identity. New York: Routledge, 2000.
CUBAN NATIONAL BALLET
A project incorporating multicultural islanders in dance, the Ballet Nacional de Cuba
(BNC) introduces young performers worldwide. A concept initiated on October 28, 1948,
by prima ballerina Alicia Alonso, her husband, instructor Fernando Alonso, and
Fernando’s brother, choreographer Alberto Alonso, the BNC began as the Alicia Alonso
Ballet Company. The Havana-based ensemble acquired panache from multinational
training of members by guest professors and subsidized tours to world arts capitals.
Director Fernando Alonso managed a classic and Romantic repertoire including Swan
Lake, Les Sylphides, Coppélia, Fiesta Negra, Petrouchka, and A Voyage to the Moon, a
staging of Jules Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon (1865) to the music of Jacques
Offenbach. Alicia Alonso retained Latin exuberance in her classes, but engaged dance
masters from New York to teach classical execution consisting of footwork from the
Cecchetti method, muscular extensions and leaps in the Vaganova style, and the
uniqueness of Ibero-Caribbean dance heritage.
State Subsidy
The Cuban ballet school went bankrupt in 1956, and three years later Fidel Castro
promised islanders an equal chance at professions in dance, costuming, set design,
orchestral music, and lighting. He extended $200,000 to fund the Escuela Nacional de
Ballet, which began enrolling children from age five the following year. In the aftermath
of the Cuban Revolution, the student body rose to four thousand fifty out of fifty-two
thousand applicants, making the Havana academy the largest in the world.
Although Alicia Alonso won the 1958 Dance Magazine award, company ties to Soviet
Communism limited exposure outside the Caribbean to Latvia, China, Vietnam, and other
pro-Marxist nations. Despite the U.S. embargo of artists from Communist countries,
Puerto Rico and Canada welcomed the Cuban ensemble. Havana-trained stars carried
Cuban-style dance to varied companies, including Daniel Sarabia to the Béjart company in
Lausanne, Switzerland, Lorna Feijoo and Nelson Madrigal to the Boston Ballet, Cervilio
Amador and Gema Díaz to the Cincinnati Ballet, fan heartthrob Rolando Sarabia and
Carlos Acosta to the Houston Ballet, instructor José Chavez to the Cairo Opera Ballet, and
teacher Jorge Esquivel and Lorena Feijoo to the San Francisco company.
During a lessening of Cold War tensions, the state-sponsored BNC performed
Spartacus for U.S. audiences in 1975 and Swan Lake in 1990. In San Francisco, Alonso’s
troupe debuted Middle of the Sunset (1995), but the loss of Soviet subsidies curtailed
extensive future tours. In 1998, Castro acknowledged the value of ballet to island culture
by presenting Alicia Alonso and the ninety-member company the Lazaro Pena Order.
Loyalty vs. Freedom
The twenty-first century extended the troupe’s notoriety as well as that of octogenarian
director Alicia Alonso, who staged Coppélia at the Kennedy Center in 2001. The tour of
Havana by the Washington Ballet became the first face-to-face meeting with Cuban
dancers in forty years. In 2003, Joel Carreño and Viengsay Valdés starred in a New York
staging of Don Quixote.
 A signal honor, José Manuel Carreño’s 2004 citation from Dance Magazine recognized
the first Cuban to win the award. At the time, male dancers earned from thirty to fifty
dollars per day for their expertise. To ensure the school’s treasury, Cuban authorities began
recruiting paying pupils from foreign countries.
Alonso censured artists who used tours as opportunities to defect from Cuba to Mexico,
the Dominican Republic, Spain, and the United States, the choice of Adiarys Almeida,
Violet Serrat, and Luis Valdés in 2003 and Vanessa Franco, Alihaydée Carreño, and
Octavio Martin in 2005. Defectors rationalized their escape from Cuba as a career advance
in financially viable venues. They insulted the elderly director by seeking dance
companies operated by those who were younger and less politically doctrinaire than
Alonso, especially the Sarasota Cuban Ballet School, which echoed the philosophy of the
Havana academy.
Into the 2010s, scouts for the Cuban ensemble search the island for promising dancers.
Ballet master Ramona de Saá coaches thirteen free programs at the state academy for
performances in the Gran Teatro de la Habana. Participants earn $66 per month and an
annual stipend of $300.
Source: Roca, Octavio. Cuban Ballet. Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 2010.
CULLBERG, BIRGIT (1908–1999)
A proponent of psychological dance enriched with comedy, satire, and humanism, Birgit
Cullberg melded modernism with classical technique as a means of social protest. She was
born in Nykoping, Sweden, to financier Carl and Elna Westerström Cullberg on August 3,
1908. After graduating from the University of Stockholm with concentrations in painting
and literature, in the 1930s, she studied the elements of Tanztheater for four years under
Kurt Jooss at England’s Dartington Hall at Totnes.
Cullberg embraced Jooss’s German expressionism without surrendering her
individuality. As a member of the Clarté underground, she protested Nazi fascism and the
expulsion of refugees from neutral Sweden. After a five-year stint with the London Royal
Ballet, Cullberg repatriated to Sweden in 1939 and experimented with variations based on
bestial movements. In open defiance of German aggression, she mounted
Kulturpropaganda (1941), which ridiculed Hitler’s underlings.
A Full Life
Married to actor Anders Ek in 1942, Cullberg ventured into arts criticism for Dagens
Nyheter (Today’s News) while rearing three children, dancer Niklas Ek and fraternal twins
Malin and Mats Ek. With Swedish choreographer Ivo Cramér, Cullberg launched the
Swedish Dance Theater in 1946. The ensemble introduced The Road to Klockrike (1948),
which depicted an entourage of hobos and social pariahs.
After viewing a 1949 production of Carmen, the choreographer assessed the contrast of
male and female in the pas de deux. To memorialize the anger of the betrayed woman,
during a separation from Anders, Cullberg interpreted Euripides’s Medea (1949) with
provocative, vengeful characterization. She achieved global respect for creating The Stone
Portal, a fifteen-minute version of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, and Miss Julie (1950), a
contemporary ballet based on August Strindberg’s drama. Companies reprised the
passionate Miss Julie in Japan, Iran, Iceland, England, and Chile.
At age forty-three, Cullberg served the Royal Swedish Ballet as choreographer of eight
presentations, including The Lady from the Sea (1951), based on Henrik Ibsen’s dramatic
examination of the Romantic ideal. For the Royal Danish Ballet, she accepted a
commission to choreograph the 1957 debut of The Moon Reindeer, which dramatized the
metamorphosis of a Lapp siren. Cullberg’s post-Victorian views of sexuality introduced
the New York City Ballet to evocations of passion, sexual satisfaction, and betrayal.
Cullberg’s radical ballets impacted the repertoires of mid-twentieth-century stars. In
1958, she directed Medea, featuring Violette Verdy and Jacques D’Amboise, and Miss
Julie, which became a vehicle for Cynthia Gregory and Erik Bruhn. Frank themes and
execution drew sophisticated viewers to the abstract choreography of Richard Wagner’s
Bacchanal in 1965 and readers to her dance treatise Ballet: Flight and Reality (1967).
Career Rewards
As a gesture to Scandinavian artistry, in 1967, the Swedish government established the
Cullberg Ballet, which featured soloists from Canada, Yugoslavia, the United States,
Scandinavia, and New Zealand. Mats Ek recruited dancers for his mother’s production of
Romeo and Juliet (1969). Birgit performed in Tehran and contracted with TV2 to produce
ballets for broadcast. She won the 1970 Prix Italia and a gold medal from the Paris
Autumn Festival for the public television presentation of love play in Red Wine in Green
Glasses and for the filming of Jooss’s The Green Table.
Cullberg achieved global renown for performances in London and Paris. She continued
protesting injustice with Rapport (1976) and performing in the work of her son, Mats Ek,
as the anti-Apartheid earth mother in Soweto (1977) and as a crone in The Old Woman and
the Door (1991). In later years she suffered from diminished hearing; she died in
Stockholm on September 8, 1999. Alexander Ekman hosted a salute to Cullberg in
February 2007, which reprised her role in Soweto.
Source: Karina, Lillian, and Marion Kant. Hitler’s Dancers: German Modern Dance
and the Third Reich. New York: Berghahn Books, 2003.
CZECH NATIONAL BALLET
A European ensemble with a century-and-a-half history, the National Theatre Ballet of
Prague (CNB) maintains a balance of global ballets and folk classics. The Prague ballet
academy opened in 1835 at the Estates Theatre and, in the 1850s, contributed dancers to
performances of Romantic successes Giselle, La Esmeralda, and Catarina, ou La Fille du
Bandit (Catarina, or The Bandit’s Daughter). At the opening of the National Theatre in
1883, CNB derived training and organization from dance master Vaclav Reisinger, the
father of Czech professional ballet and, in 1860, the first Czech to choreograph dances in
Prague.
 Within months, the twenty-member CNB and Moravian soloist Augustin Berger
debuted Hashish (1884), scored by Karel Kovafovic. The following year, Berger took
charge of the Czech company and superintended its dance academy. At Berger’s direction,
the troupe acquired professional members as well as a chorus of figurants (auxiliary
dancers), an essential to stagings of Excelsior (1881), a spectacular tableau encompassing
the Industrial Revolution.
A Varied Repertoire
In addition to presentations of Giselle, Swan Lake, Sylvia, and Coppélia, the CNB
programmed child-friendly story ballets: A Christmas Eve Dream (1886), A Fairy Tale
about Happiness Found (1889), Rakos Rakoczy (Scenes from Moravian Slovakia, 1891),
and Bajaja (1897), a peasant tale about an orphaned prince that featured a mazurka. When
artistic director Achille Viscusi introduced Italian style in 1900, he added his original
From Fairy Tale to Fairy Tale, Antonín Dvorak’s Slavonic Dancer in 1901, and a 1908
restaging of The Nutcracker. The hiring of Remislav Remislavsky in 1923 raised Russian
style to prominence for productions of Scheherazade and Petrouchka and for the Czech
premieres of Bohuslav Martinu’s love story Istar (1924) and Who Is the Most Powerful in
the World? (1927), a surreal mouse fable.
Into the 1930s, choreographer Joe Jencik staged The Bartered Bride (1933) and Robin
Hood (1935). He collaborated with director Jaroslav Hladik in dance education, which
focused on Russian method. Soviet exotic dancer Elizaveta Nikolska began managing the
Czech ensemble in 1936.
Dance arts lapsed throughout World War II, when the arrival of the Germans in March
1939 preceded a ban on Russian ballet. The Nazis took a massive toll on Jewish artists
during the Holocaust. Because of the widespread loss of personnel and official
disapproval, the Czech ensemble abandoned pantomime, a skill anathematized by
Socialist culture czars.
A Czech Revival
Sasa Machov, a former combat soldier, brought the Czech National Ballet out of its
wartime slump with vigorous variations and appealing visuals that set theatrical dance
apart from opera. In addition to Bronislava Nijinska’s Russian peasant nuptial from Les
Noces (The Wedding), Cinderella, Swan Lake, and Romeo and Juliet from the classical
canon, Machov mounted indigenous works: Janácek’s Moravian Dances and Zbynek
Vostrak’s The Philosopher’s History (1949) and Viktorka (Victory, 1950), a dance ballad
with a national flair, starring Zora Semberova. Because of political persecution, Machov
killed himself in 1951.
The Czech ensemble make a vigorous push into dramatic ballet after 1957 under Jir˘í
Nemecek, who adhered to the Soviet prototype of realistic dance. He directed The Servant
of Two Masters (1958) and Othello (1959), featuring stage settings by scenographer Josef
Svoboda. While competing for audiences against the Prague Ballet’s Hiroshima (1963),
Nemecek advanced to modern staging with The Prodigal Son (1963) and Conscience
(1964). Guest choreographer Yuri Grigorovich imported Arif Malikov’s Legend of Love
(1963), a fable of sacrifice set in a Middle Eastern palace and among Arab peasants. An
upsurge in Communist paranoia in 1968 shut off Czech observation of global innovations
in dance and reduced standards of stage artistry.
Moravian choreographer Emerich Gabzdyl, who managed the CNB in the early 1970s,
revived The Rite of Spring in 1972 and, two years later, presented Ondrás (Andrew, 1974),
a Silesian wooing story. For the sake of variety, the next director, Miroslav Kura, began
with The Sleeping Beauty and The Creation of the World. He directed original works—the
Slovak fairy tale Radúz and Mahulena (1976) and the premiere of Ecstasy of Spirit (1989)
to the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In 1990, Vlastimil Harapes continued to
please audiences with Little Friedemann and Psycho (1993), Isadora Duncan (1998), and
a children’s special, the dance version of Rudyard Kipling’s jungle tale Mowgli (1996), the
adventures of a feral child in India. Harapes followed in 2000 with Czech choreographer
Jirí Kylián’s The Child and Magic.
In the twenty-first century, the CNB, a troupe of eighty-two dancers led by Petr Zuska,
combined the strengths and international backgrounds of members from the United States,
England, France, Italy, Russia, Ukraine, Slovakia, Moldova, Hungary, Japan, and New
Zealand. Their repertoire perpetuated a renown for variety with presentations of The
Taming of the Shrew, La Bayadère (The Temple Dancer), and Eugene Onegin, paralleling
Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Glen Tetley’s Sphinx, Daniel Wiesner’s Macbeth,
and Jan Kodet’s Goldilocks and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Scheduling incorporated
modern works by William Forsythe, Jerome Robbins, John Cranko, Kenneth MacMillan,
George Balanchine, Itzik Galili, Conny Jansen, Mats Ek, Nacho Duato, Jan Kodet, Stijn
Celis, Christopher Bruce, and Jean-Christophe Maillot. In 2005, principal dancer Tereza
Podarilová became the first ballerina to receive a third Thalia Award.
Source: Tyrrell, John. Janácek: Years of a Life. London: Faber and Faber, 2010.
 • D •
DANCE MAGAZINE
A critical source revered for recognizing the best in American and European ballet, Dance
Magazine honors top performers with annual awards. Founded in New York City in 1927,
the publication built a reputation for solid, comprehensive coverage of the dance world in
print and photography. The staff issues an annual directory of dancers and a guide to more
than six hundred college BFA programs. A memorial column lists losses to ballet,
including Gloria Fokine, Fernando Alonso, Frederic Franklin, and Maria Tallchief, who
had graced the cover in July 1961. One photo of George Balanchine filled teen dancer
Suzanne Farrell with career longings to join the New York City Ballet.
Beginning in 1954 with recognition of choreography on Omnibus (CBS-TV), the staff
isolated greatness in performers. Early winners included 1955 awardees Jack Cole, known
as the “father of jazz ethnic ballet,” and Moira Shearer, the Scots ballerina who entranced
a generation of would-be divas with the film The Red Shoes. Subsequent citations
showcased Cuban arts promoters Alicia Alonso and José Manuel Carreño, dance
hybridizers Ohad Naharin and Carmen De Lavallade, choreographers Mats Ek and Alvin
Ailey, Joffrey Ballet innovator Gerald Arpino, folkloric ballet choreographer Amalia
Hernández Navarro, and Peter Martins, artistic director of the New York City Ballet.
In 1970, editor William Como, former editor of After Dark, began an eighteen-year
survey of key theater arts and archival histories. Commentary examined the evolution of
dance from its beginnings with particular attention to the rise of women in choreography.
In 1979, Como cofounded the USA International Ballet Competition in Jackson,
Mississippi, based on similar global events in Moscow, Tokyo, and Varna, Bulgaria. The
contest boosted the prominence of Australian-Chinese dancer Li Cunxin, Georgian arts
director Nina Ananiashvili, Japanese dancer Kayo Sasabe, and Spanish ballerina Zenaida
Yanowsky.
In a current issue, edited by Jennifer Stahl, arts analyst Elizabeth Kendall’s “Artistry’s
Delicate Balance” (May 2014) critiqued dancer Tiler Peck’s ability to meld with the music
of Coppélia in plaintive phrasing and effortless technique. Attention to nonprofessional
dancers investigated fitness equipment, warm-ups, and diet trends, such as incremental
calisthenics, marathons, cave man meals, nutritional supplements, and food fasts. Health
and psychology mavens debated perfectionism, summer camps, burnout, rehabilitation
from injury, and bunion surgery.
Dance Magazine maintains its influence with timely, energetic cover art. For prodigies
on the rise, such as soloist Carla Körbes of the Pacific Northwest Ballet, “Choreography
Knocks” lists vacancies at workshops and festivals as well as magazine internships for
budding critics and art historians. To meet the interests of varied pre-professionals and
working dancers, the magazine expanded its outreach by publishing Dance Spirit, Pointe,
Dance Teacher, Dance 212, and Dance U10.
 Source: Adshead-Lansdale, Janet, and June Layson, eds. Dance History: An
Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2006.
DE LAVALLADE, CARMEN (1931–)
Creole dance hybridizer-choreographer Carmen Paula De Lavallade broke color barriers
for nonwhite performers with her lyric theatrical roles. She was born on March 6, 1931, in
New Orleans, Louisiana, to Grace Grenot and mail carrier Leo de Lavallade. Because of
her mother’s poor health, De Lavallade grew up in racially diverse East Los Angeles with
her aunt Adele Young, who taught her piano.
Like her groundbreaking older sister, actor-concert dancer Yvonne De Lavallade, and
her cousin, Janet Collins, a dancer at the Metropolitan Opera, Carmen De Lavallade began
debunking stereotypes about black dancers being inept at ballet. In 1947, De Lavallade
progressed on scholarship to the studio of Lester Horton, a choreographer for cinema and
stage known for fluid rhythms and themes of social injustice. Until Horton’s death in
1953, she performed as a principal in his dance theater, notably, in Medea, The Beloved,
and Brown Country, a racial drama scored by Kenneth Klauss. For the sensual solo
Salomé, she throbbed to bells, drums, and rattle.
On the East Coast
In company with black pioneer Alvin Ailey, De Lavallade migrated to New York City to
learn method acting and take voice lessons to strengthen breathing. She mastered the elán
of Italian concert dancer Carmelita Maracci, a promoter of ballet hybridized with Spanish
flamenco in the style of Carlotta Grisi. Within months, De Lavallade paired with Ailey
and Geoffrey Holder on Broadway. The trio danced Banda (Mexican) style to Trinidadian
and Tobagonian steel pans in Harold Arlen and Truman Capote’s Haitian musical House of
Flowers (1954).
After marrying Holder in 1955 and producing son Leo Anthony Lamont Holder, De
Lavallade designed a dance solo to the vocal Come Sunday, sung by folk diva Odetta
Gordon. De Lavallade joined the Metropolitan Opera Ballet under choreographer Zachary
Solov as principal for athletic roles in Samson and Delilah, Aida, and Faust and in John
Butler’s ballet Flight (1956). She performed the role of Madame Zajj in Duke Ellington’s
A Drum Is a Woman (1957), a rhythmic summation of the history of jazz for the television
series U.S. Steel Hour. The program saluted Congo Square in New Orleans, America’s
oldest creole gathering spot, famous for preserving African drumming, costume, and
dance.
Acting dominated De Lavallade’s creativity in her early twenties, when she performed
on stage in Othello and Death of a Salesman and in the films Carmen Jones (1954),
Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954), and Odds against Tomorrow (1959). On a tour of
Asia and Europe, she shared billing in Ailey’s Blues Suite (1958). In 1960, John Butler
created Portrait of Billie for De Lavallade to present at Jacob’s Pillow. She performed in
Jamaican dancer Donald McKayle’s modern suite Rainbow Round My Shoulder (1959),
danced the part of the Countess in District Storyville (1962), and appeared with the New
York City Center Opera in Butler’s Carmina Burana (1959) and Jack Cole’s Gothic opera
Bomarzo (1968). Her duet with Butler in the 1961 revue Impulse! failed to save the show.
In her early thirties, De Lavallade joined Agnes de Mille’s American Ballet Theatre and
performed in Ailey’s Roots of the Blues (1961) in Boston and New York. For Josephine
Baker’s Broadway revue on March 31, 1964, De Lavallade interpreted “Anya” and
partnered with Holder in “Let’s Dance” by Quincy Jones and in London cabaret acts
featuring the music of Cole Porter. She played the lead opposite ballerino Royes
Fernandez in The Frail Quarry (1965) and collaborated with McKayle in Echoes of Jazz
(1965). In one of the title roles opposite Judith Jamison, De Lavallade performed The
Four Marys (1965), a dismal tale of a black woman who drowns her mixed-race infant.
Educator and Choreographer
The Yale University drama department hired De Lavallade in 1965 for a five-year stint as
choreographer and dancer-in-residence to teach movement fundamentals. On staff, she
acted with the Yale Repertory Theater. In 1966, she joined the Glen Tetley Company to
present In Search of Lovers. Dance Magazine acknowledged De Lavallade’s rising
prestige with its 1966 award.
After the New Year in 1967, De Lavallade danced with the Boston Ballet in Portrait of
Billie. A year after receiving the Actors’ Equity Award, she starred as Titania in a 1979
production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Harvard, danced the role of Anna in The
Seven Deadly Sins (1980), and choreographed Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Berlin
Requiem (1982), a musical survey of death’s frontier. For Jacob’s Pillow in 1987, she
enacted the solo Sarong Paramaribo, a sensual fusion of African and Balinese dance that
Horton wrote for her in 1950 to gamelan percussion.
In the 1990s, De Lavallade designed Metropolitan Opera performances of Porgy and
Bess, Lucia di Lammermoor, and Die Meistersinger and reprised Portrait of Billie at
Jacob’s Pillow with Ulysses Dove, the dazzling principal of the Alvin Ailey ensemble. In
1994, De Lavallade directed performing arts at Adelphi University in Garden City, New
York. In her seventies, De Lavallade took reading and acting parts in Evening Primrose
and A Streetcar Named Desire and a dancing role in Gray Study (2000), which she
performed in New York City at Symphony Space.
De Lavallade choreographed the solo Sweet Bitter Love (2000) to a Roberta Flack
ballad and Donny Hathaway’s “For All We Know.” The dancer-choreographer’s honoraria
include a 2004 Black History Month Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2006 New York
Dance and Performance Award and Rosie Award, honorary degrees, and the 2007 Capezio
Dance Award. In 2011, she aided the filming of “Dances for an iPhone.”
Source: Teck, Katherine. Making Music for Modern Dance. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011.
Character dancer and choreographer Agnes de Mille wrested unique scenarios and
production numbers for Rodeo from the history of the American West. Stars of the American
Ballet Theatre, pp. 90–91, #171.

DE MILLE, AGNES (1905–1993)

Character dancer and choreographer Agnes de Mille wrested unique scenarios and
production numbers from the history of the American West. Her birth in a Harlem flat on
September 18, 1905, to theatrical New Yorkers initiated her passion for performance.
When her parents, Anna Angela George and cinema mogul William Churchill deMille,
rejected her choice of dance as a career, she accepted their ruling but continued treating
herself to concert performances by diva Anna Pavlova and modern dance pioneer Ruth St.
Denis.
After graduating from UCLA with a degree in English, with her younger sister,
Margaret George, Agnes de Mille studied dance and surveyed ballet on movie sets. Her
career began with a solo, “Stage Fright” (1928), based on a dancer sculpted by Edgar
Degas. She traveled to Paris, Copenhagen, and London in 1932 and choreographed Cole
Porter’s Nymph Errant. In 1934, she designed dances for the Egyptian corps de ballet in
the film Cleopatra. Outraged at the uninspired combinations of choreographer LeRoy
Prinz, she abandoned the project.
In England, de Mille danced with Polish teacher Marie Rambert’s company and the
London Ballet before joining the American Ballet Theatre. She earned renown for
adapting Giovanni Boccaccio’s comic temptation tale Three Virgins and a Devil (1934)
and for guiding her character from prudish steps to satanic bumps and grind. In 1936, she
retired to California to design dances for film and created dances for Ballets Jooss.
American Musical Genius
During World War II, de Mille astonished the balletomanes at the Metropolitan Opera
House with Rodeo, or The Courting at Burnt Ranch (1942), an exuberant hybridized hit
for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. In defiance of European snobbery, she affirmed the
Colorado ranching life by staging a Western square dance to the music of Aaron Copland.
As the homely character Cowgirl in boots and Stetson, she took the lead opposite Frederic
Franklin and developed narration through dance. The panache of her choreography for
“Buckaroo Holiday,” “Old Paint,” and “Hoe-Down” impressed Richard Rodgers and
Oscar Hammerstein.
About the time of de Mille’s wartime marriage to talent manager Walter F. Prude, she
cinched her reputation for bumptious frontier dance with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first
collaboration, Oklahoma! (1943). America’s first smash folk musical developed into what
arts historians termed the nation’s most influential blend of story, music, and dance. De
Mille choreographed the five-year run on Broadway, a 1951 revival, and a film adaptation,
screened in 1955.
In the midst of involvement with the New York stage, de Mille’s pregnancy produced
invalid son Jonathan Prude, whose care ate into her time for career expansion.
Nonetheless, she designed production numbers—feminist choices during the Civil War for
Bloomer Girl (1944), a pantomime in heaven for Carousel (1945), and a Scots folk dance
and bagpipe funeral dirge for Brigadoon (1947), which won her a Tony. She turned the
crimes of Lizzie Andrew Borden into Fall River Legend (1948), a psychological probe of
criminal retribution. The ballet featured Alicia Alonso as the unidentified Accused
dancing to the unsettling music of Morton Gould.
Varied Talents
De Mille’s career flourished with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949); Paint Your Wagon
(1951), featuring the ballet “Gold Rush”; and Juno (1959), showcasing soloist Glen
Tetley. At a contemplative point in her rise to fame, she compiled personal triumphs in an
autobiographical novel, Dance to the Piper (1953). In 1956, she broached television with
“The Art of Ballet” and “The Art of Choreography,” two serious demonstrations of
eclectic artistry for Omnibus. For the beginner, she wrote To a Young Dancer (1962) and
The Book of the Dance (1963).
In 1973, the choreographer premiered individualized work at the Agnes de Mille Dance
Theatre, a touring troupe executing her most successful dances. After recuperating from a
cerebral hemorrhage in 1975, she turned to writing about childhood longings in Where the
Wings Grow (1987), colloquial gesture in America Dances (1981), rehabilitation from
stroke in Reprieve (1981), and memorable dancers in Portrait Gallery (1990). With
passionate speeches, she lobbied Congress for more state and federal arts programs.
De Mille reaped a variety of honoraria—election to the Theater Hall of Fame in 1973,
the 1976 Handel Medallion, a 1980 Kennedy Center citation, an Emmy in 1980, and, in
1986, a Drama Desk Special Award and National Medal of Arts in addition to fifteen
university degrees. Shortly after her publication of Martha: The Life and Work of Martha
Graham (1991) and the presentation of the horror ballet The Other (1992), a subsequent
stroke killed de Mille on October 7, 1993.
See also Fall River Legend.
Source: Hasday, July L. Agnes de Mille. New York: Chelsea House, 2004.
DIAGHILEV, SERGEI (1872–1929)
Arts sponsor and producer Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev established the Ballets Russes,
amalgamating painting, music, fashion, and lighting to revolutionize dramatic dance. The
son of Pavel Pavlovich, a major-general of the imperial army and vodka distiller,
Diaghilev was born in Novgorod, Russia, on March 31, 1872, and grew up in the Ural
Mountains in the factory town of Perm. After the death of his mother, Yevgeniya
Diaghileva, of puerperal fever, he developed a loving relationship with his stepmother,
Yelena Valerianovna Panaeva, who arranged his lessons in painting, piano, music
composition, and singing, particularly the melodies of Mikhail Glinka.
After a family bankruptcy in fall 1891, Diaghilev sent cash to his parents and supported
his two half-brothers on proceeds of an inheritance from his mother. He studied the law at
St. Petersburg University while immersing himself in the writings of Henrik Ibsen, Guy de
Maupassant, Leo Tolstoy, and Emile Zola. In the company of fellow university students,
he shifted his major to music, but lacked the talent to compose for voice, piano, or violin.
Converging Talents
Diaghilev advanced his knowledge of theatrics through association with creative
companions, who began challenging outmoded sentimentality of art. With royal
patronage, Diaghilev, editor Dmitry Filosofov, watercolorists Konstantin Somov and
Alexander Benois, and graphic artist Léon Bakst cofounded a radical monthly review, Mir
Iskusstva (World of Art, 1898–1904). By redefining classicism and promoting
aestheticism and Art Nouveau, a forerunner of modernism, the journal imploded Russian
creative torpor by energizing young artists.
Diaghilev’s career in cataloging art and stage production began in St. Petersburg in
1899, when he aided Prince Sergei Volkonsky in supervising the theaters of Tsar Nicholas
II and in advising productions of the Mariinsky Theater. In 1900, Diaghilev staged Léo
Delibes’s Sylvia until arguments with Volkonsky cost the impresario his job. He then
involved himself in an exhibition of modern Russian art. At the Théâtre National de
l’Opéra in 1907, he introduced French audiences to composers Alexander Glazunov,
Sergei Rachmaninoff, Alexander Scriabin, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Diaghilev’s
boyhood piano teacher. He followed with Modest Mussorgsky’s beloved Russian opera
Boris Godunov (1874), performed for the first time in Paris in 1908.
An International Art Community
At the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris in 1909, Diaghilev formed the Ballets Russes, which
debuted the choreography of Michel Fokine enwrapped in a color riot of sets and
costumes. The genius of Diaghilev’s radical troupe lay in his selection of Tamara
Karsavina, Anna Pavlova, and siblings Vaslav Nijinsky and Bronislava Nijinska as lead
dancers. Audiences raved over the modern touches of Les Sylphides (The Sylphs, 1909),
for which Bakst introduced the long tutu.
In 1910, the impresario shaped modernism with the adaptation of Nikolai Rimsky-
Korsakov’s Scheherazade to paisley set and costume designs by Bakst. By ridding the
stage of “breeches roles” for ballerinas and by training a virile, athletic corps of danseurs,
Diaghilev reset the proportions of female to male more in keeping with nature. In New
York, Rome, Madrid, and London, the dancers performed to librettos by Guillaume
Apollinaire and André Gide and compositions by Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy,
Richard Strauss, Sergei Prokofiev, Manuel de Falla, Erik Satie, Darius Milhaud, Ottorino
Respighi, and Francis Poulenc.
Critics headlined Karsavina’s lead roles opposite Nijinsky in Giselle and the dazzling
L’Oiseau de Feu (The Firebird, 1910) and the tragic showpiece Petrouchka (1911), which
designer Alexandre Benois and composer Igor Stravinsky based on medieval puppetry.
Poster art by Jean Cocteau elevated Petrouchka into a mythic being brought to life by the
mimetic improvisations of acting coach Konstantin Stanislavsky. Diaghilev’s pairing of
Nijinsky with the romantic ballerina Olga Spessivtseva and the marriage of ballet to opera
in Le Coq d’Or (The Golden Cockerel, 1914) fostered innovation throughout the art
world.
Following a penniless residency in Spain in 1914 during World War I, Diaghilev took
the Ballets Russes on tour in the United States in 1916–1917. After the 1917 Russian
Revolution, Diaghilev endured the condemnation of Soviet chroniclers as a state enemy.
Adversity ignited his will to generate newer, more engaging stage spectacles. On self-exile
in England, he engaged Pablo Picasso to paint scenes for Parade (1917), choreographed
with folk vigor by Léonide Massine.
 At Rome’s Teatro Costanzi, the addition of a dancerless light show by Giacomo Balla
ensured the popularity of Feu d’Artifice (Fireworks, 1917). Mounting political pressures
forced Diaghilev to move to Madrid in spring 1918 and on to London to sponsor
productions at the London Coliseum. For Cuadro Flamenco (Flamenco Scene, 1921), the
impresario hired authentic Spanish dancers. Although Diaghilev cast the popular
Spessivtseva as Aurora in Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty, the 1921
performance proved a monetary failure.
In 1922, Diaghilev continued garnering talent for the Ballets Russes, including exiled
character dancer Alexandra Danilova, scenarist Boris Kochno, and Spanish painter Juan
Gris, who made sets for La Fête (The Party, 1923) a divertissement presented at Versailles
in the Hall of Mirrors. For Le Renard (The Fox, 1922), Les Biches (The Does, 1924), and
Le Bal du “Lac des Cygnes” (Dances from “Swan Lake,” 1925), Diaghilev pushed his
company to consistently higher standards of innovation. He hired fashion designer Coco
Chanel, painters Maurice Utrillo and Georges Braque, principal dancer Serge Lifar, and
twenty-year-old choreographer George Balanchine, the era’s leading dance master and
stager of Igor Stravinsky’s Apollon Musagète (Apollo and the Muses, 1928).
As Diaghilev’s health declined, he entrusted more creative decisions to Kochno. The
year of Diaghilev’s death in Venice from diabetes on August 19, 1929, the Ballets Russes
spring production of The Prodigal Son epitomized the impresario’s collaborative genius
by engaging the diverse gifts of Kochno, composer Serge Prokofiev, painter Georges
Rouault, and choreographers Balanchine and Lifar. With the company’s approval,
Prokofiev dedicated the performance to Diaghilev.
See also Ballets Russes; eurythmics; Fokine, Michel; Lifar, Serge; Nijinsky, Vaslav; The
Rite of Spring.
Source: Scheijen, Sjeng. Diaghilev: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
DIVERTISSEMENT
A seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French theatrical term for “amusement” or
“entertainment,” the divertissement (divertimento in Italian) interjected songs and dances
in court ballet, opera, opera-ballet, and ballet-pantomime or added them at the finale.
From the 1630s and 1640s at the courts of Louis XIII and Louis XIV of France, the
divertissement built audience interest and spotlighted the skill of the first professional
corps de ballet. Composer Jean Baptiste Lully and his librettist, Jean-Philippe Quinault,
coordinated these stage showpieces with a controlling theme, for example, majesty for his
first production, Le Ballet Royal de la Nuit (Royal Ballet of the Night, 1653), and noble
sacrifice in the five-act musical tragedy Alceste, ou Le Triomphe d’Alcide (Alcestis, or The
Triumph of Alcides, 1674).
Small ensembles, chamber quartets, or sinfonias enacted the diversions as informal
dances or instrumental suites in the form of serenades, nocturnes or Nachtmusik, and after-
dinner music. The demand for divertissement in operas increased from 1700 to 1725 as a
rest from arias and recitatives, as demonstrated by Alessandro Scarlatti’s Decio y Eraclea
(Decius and Heraclea, 1708), which debuted in Madrid for Carnival. In 1727, diva Marie
Anne Camargo made her debut in Les Caractères de la Danse, choreographer Françoise
Prévost’s collection of entertaining ballets depicting the topic of love. In Sweden, Antoine
Bournonville collaborated with the staff of the royal ballet to add incidental ballet to the
epic opera Armide (1787).
Plot Enhancement
Nineteenth-century dance maker Gaëtano Vestris added flair to La Dansomanie (The
Dance Craze, 1800) with the “Vestris Gavotte,” a light duet that entertained audiences in
Paris and London and became an instructional model of dégagés and changements. French
ballet master Marius Petipa and his imitators positioned the naive divertissement at the
climax of story ballet as a celebration of the plot resolution through masquerades, trysts,
military triumphs, nuptial promenades, ritual sacrifices, reunions, national dances, village
festivals, and entertainments of royalty. Examples include a royal dance in Fernando Sor’s
ballet-pantomime of Cendrillon (Cinderella, 1823), the masked ball in act two of
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1834), and the harvest thanksgiving in act
one of Giselle (1841), a Romantic ballet choreographed by Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot.
For transition, a joyous peasant dance often ceased abruptly at the sound of gunfire,
thunder, religious objection to frivolity, church bells, or an angry mob.
The divertissement, a specialty of Swedish dancer Christian Johansson, served as the
framework for a shift in performance tone and atmosphere. Throughout the period,
amusements marked significant points in ballets, as the bell toll in Giacomo Meyerbeer’s
Les Huguenots (1836) that presaged a sectarian massacre, the introduction of a Bohemian
syncopated dance in Denmark in August Bournonville’s Polka Militaire (1842), and Jules
Perrot’s Pas de Quatre (Quartet, 1845), an airy delight that Marie Taglioni danced for
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The insertion of incidental dances with as many as four
hundred performers showcased promising pupils and also gave principals a rest and
opportunity to change shoes and costumes. Stage managers used the time to shift sets and
place props, giving dancers like Johansson, the male lead in La Sylphide, an opportunity to
command the stage. Dance master Jules Perrot used short pieces as showpieces for
melodic music and exquisite costumes, the focus of La Rose, la Violette, et le Papillon
(The Rose, the Violet, and the Butterfly).
As elements of entr’actes or intermezzi (interludes), incidental songs and entrées (short
dances) provided ambience and transition from one scenario to another, a source of
continuity in Leo Delibes’s Coppélia (1870) and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake
(1877), the nuptials in The Sleeping Beauty (1890), and a royal court scene in act two of
The Nutcracker Suite (1892). Through juxtaposition of adagio and allegro presentations,
the divertissement displayed balletic virtuosity and mimetic gestures as reinforcements of
character development and as elements of nationalistic or ethnic dance. In Moscow in
1901, ballet master Alexander Gorsky employed divertissement as a theatrical display of
the Bolshoi dancing to the music of Franz Schubert, Frederic Chopin, and Edvard Grieg.
The entertainments continued in the twentieth century, notably, with the abstract one-act
reverie Les Sylphides (1909), Adeline Genée’s biographical La Camargo (1912), the
reduction of The Sleeping Beauty to Aurora’s Wedding (1922), and La Fête (The Party,
1923), a short opus that Sergei Diaghilev directed at Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors. In 1919,
Venetian dancer Rosina Galli, an alumna of La Scala, took the role of ballet mistress of the
Metropolitan Opera, for which she designed divertissements for Carmen (1924) and La
Traviata (The Fallen Woman, 1925). Throughout the 1920s, Anna Pavlova made
divertissements the focus of her world tour.
In the 1930s, Edward Johnson, manager of the Met, dispensed with traditional
European amusements when he installed the American Ballet. At the Mercury Theatre in
London, divertissements filled gaps in silent film, a new genre for which Frederick Ashton
created dances, beginning with Façade (1931). He continued choreographing frothy,
plotless amusements for the Vic-Wells Ballet, including Les Patineurs (The Skaters,
1937), a BBC presentation that featured Margot Fonteyn partnered by Robert Helpmann.
Mid-twentieth-century choreography steered intercalary dance away from spectacle and
triviality toward plot, notably, the teen partnering and flirtation in David Lichine’s
Graduation Ball (1940) and the booted men’s ensemble that performs a handkerchief
showpiece in Afrasiyab Badalbeyli’s Qiz Galasi (The Maiden Tower, 1940), the first
Muslim ballet. American choreographer Agnes de Mille improvised the hoe-down in
Rodeo (1942) and a dream sequence for Oklahoma! (1943). After formation of the London
Festival Ballet in 1950, director Anton Dolin adapted Jules Perrot’s classical
divertissement Pas de Quatre (Quartet, 1845) for twentieth-century use. In 1974,
choreographer Kenneth Macmillan revived the divertissement in act two of Manon, which
reflects a medieval story of unrequited love and martyrdom from composer Jules
Massenet’s Le Roi de Lahore (The King of Lahore). Late in the century, English innovator
Matthew Bourne turned a men’s underwear commercial into Spitfire (1988), a comic
“advertisement divertissement.”
In 1994, the Guangzhou Ballet presented Mei Lanfang, a biographical dance honoring a
Chinese opera singer who refused to perform for Japan’s occupation forces. In the last act,
a divertissement of flowers featured female members of the corps de ballet clad in red to
underscore classical purity. The concept of the inter-ballet amusement flourished in the
twenty-first century in the Jalisco and cowboy sequences of the Ballet Folklorico of
Mexico and the New York City Ballet’s Bournonville Divertissements (2015).
See also Beauchamp, Pierre; corps de ballet; intermedio; Louis XIV; Lully, Jean
Baptiste; Ménestrier, Claude François.
Source: Harris-Warrick, Rebecca. The Grotesque Dancer on the Eighteenth-Century
Stage: Gennaro Magri and His World. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005.
DON QUIXOTE
See image in photospread.
For an international coup and model of ballet d’action, French dance master Marius
Petipa excerpted from Miguel de Cervantes’s satiric 1615 novel Don Kikhot (also known
as Don Quichotte, 1869), an innovative, highly pictorial four-act ballet. Presentation at the
Mariinsky Ballet Theater followed a century and a half of versions beginning at Versailles
in 1720 and in Vienna under Franz Hilverding in 1740. Subsequent revivals include Jean-
Georges Noverre’s performance in 1768 and subsequent versions choreographed by
Charles Didelot in St. Petersburg in 1808 and Paul Taglioni in Berlin in 1839. The early
two-act renditions lacked the color and satire of late-romantic-era performances.
Set to music by Austro-Czech composer Ludwig Minkus at the Imperial Bolshoi
Theatre in Moscow on December 26, 1869, the mock epic ballet packed scenes with folk
dancing to the zingara, lola, morena, and jota, an Aragonese circle dance featuring
extensive foot work to the clacking of castanets. The exoticism engaged the imagination
of audiences across Europe and kept the ballet in demand. In 1873, the collaborators
refined and restaged Don Quixote by enhancing the delusions of the picaresque anti-hero
with an enlarged dream cycle. The Petipa/Minkus reissue earned for choreographer and
composer imperial appointments from Tsar Nicholas II.
The Petipa/Minkus Version
Following late romantic conventions, the prologue of Don Quixote pictures the title
character engulfed in stories of medieval knights errant. His fantasies of Dulcinea, his
idealized love, give the artistic director a pretext for fluttery white visions of the prima
ballerina Anna Sobeshanskaja. Protected by a shaving basin on his head, Don Quixote and
his squire, the chicken thief Sancho Panza, require the acting styles of mature character
dancers.
Synergy invests the dance of the two lead males. The duo calls up slapstick lazzi (set
sketches) of the commedia dell’arte by packing the steed Rocinante and a donkey and
setting out on an adventure. Essential to stage comedy, the role of the servant Antonina
and faithful friend Sancho Panza triangulate the contrasting faults, namely, Antonina’s
ineffectual advice, Sancho’s panza (paunch), and the don’s impracticality and gullibility.
Act 1 places the two wanderers at a market plaza in Barcelona, a likely place for
colorful provincial costumes and backdrop. The arrivals complicate a typical rustic love
plot. Don Quixote vows fealty to Lorenzo, the innkeeper, who tries to circumvent his
daughter Kitri’s love for the barber Basilio by interesting her in Gamache, a wealthy
aristocrat. The fiery female role as Kitri, the soubrette, enhanced the reputation of
Mathilde Kschessinska, the prima ballerina assoluta of the Imperial Russian Ballet and, in
the twenty-first century, set new challenges for Ukrainian star Irina Dvorovenko.
Act 2 dramatizes a fool tale by picturing the tricking of Lorenzo, a comedic ploy dating
to Greek drama. At an inn, Basilio’s pretense to stab himself sets up a plum role laced with
mugging and bravura steps. He begs for a deathbed marriage to Kitri, but Lorenzo and
Gamache refuse. After Gamache rejects Don Quixote’s challenge to a duel, the nobleman
flees tormentors in the inn. Lorenzo relents and unites Kitri to Basilio, who celebrates his
successful deception. The light tone of act 2 endeared the sequence to twentieth-century
composers of light opera, epic drama, and tragicomedy as well as to convincing actor-
dancers, notably, Miyako Yoshida of England’s Royal Ballet School.
The second scene of act 2, a classic audience pleaser, places the delusional Don Quixote
before the Gypsy chief, who poses as a king on his throne before a band in full-tilt
celebration. Confused by a puppet scenario that implies a military attack on Dulcinea, Don
Quixote protects the moon by jousting with windmills, which knock him unconscious. To
develop ballet d’action, Petipa’s vigorous, intricate choreography to Minkus’s
melodramatic fight music contrasts with the dream states of the prologue. Dominating the
scenario is the mechanical aggressor, a stage device requiring considerable engineering
and lighting.
Don Quixote manipulates mood by following exertion with retreat into nature. The third
act places the would-be knight and his groom out of harm’s way in a forest, a quiet
change-up in tone and atmosphere. Italian character dancer Enrico Cecchetti empowered
the part of Sancho Panza by stressing the good-natured humanity of the Spanish peasantry.
The second scene depicts a dream in which the foolish don kills a spider, splits its web,
and briefly envisions Dulcinea in a garden. Russian companies embellished the
presentation with lofty jetés à la seconde (leaps with feet apart) opposite the technically
demanding Italian fouettés (whip turns).
The final act puts Don Quixote in service to the Duke, who invites him to a festival.
Amid corps de ballet gaiety, the lovers Kitri and Basilio celebrate a formal engagement in
a gala pas de deux. The evocative part of winsome lover suited the talents of Ukrainian
soloist Maxim Beloserkovsky and Madrid-born feature dancer Angel Corella, who
performed the barber’s part in the 1990s for the American Ballet Theater. The second
scene, set at the duke’s castle, builds animosities between a knight and Don Quixote.
Defeated by the learned Sanson Carrasco, Don Quixote promises to forgo knight errantry
for a year.
The Enduring Don
For the universal appeal of confrontations between love and death, Don Quixote passed
through more adaptations to stage and showpiece than any other nondramatic work. The
Petipa/Minkus version survived the Soviet purge of classical ballets and upgraded the
repertoires of both the Bolshoi and Kirov companies, which excelled at grand phrasing
and graphic color. At Covent Garden in 1924, director Mathilde Kchessinska pared
Gorsky’s adaptation down to Kitri’s solo finale as a vehicle for Anna Pavlova, who had
been honing the part since her introduction to the ballet in 1903. In the 1930s, Anglo-Irish
choreographer Ninette de Valois directed a lopsided adaptation of Don Quixote.
After defection from the U.S.S.R. in 1961, Rudolf Nureyev incorporated Don Quixote
into the repertoires of the Vienna State Opera Ballet and the Australian Ballet. True to his
elevation of male dancers, he diminished female roles, deleted the introduction, and
truncated mimetic plot sequences, leaving his part as Basilio open for flashier stagecraft.
In 1965, director George Balanchine lengthened the Petipa Don Quixote by collaborating
with Suzanne Farrell on adding episodes from Cervantes’s mock heroic satire.
In a subsequent flight to the West, Russo-Latvian soloist Mikhail Baryshnikov left the
Kirov Ballet and, in 1980, performed Don Quixote for the American Ballet Theatre with
the aid of artistic director Elena Chernysheva. The tailored depiction cast him at center
stage, to the diminution of drollery and folklore. The gallant classic served the National
Ballet of Canada and American Ballet Theatre repertoire to 2011, during which period
Baryshnikov set a standard of height and precision for his variations.
 Source: Mancing, Howard. Don Quixote: A Reference Guide. Westport, CT:
Greenwood, 2006.
DUATO, NACHO (1957–)
See image in photospread.
A Spanish modernist choreographer of the Compañía Nacional de Danza in Madrid,
Nacho Duato experiments with ethnic Iberian, contemporary, and fusion ballet. Born Juan
Ignacio Duato Bárcia on January 8, 1957, in Valencia, he taught himself ballet at age
sixteen. He studied in a variety of settings—Marie Rambert’s academy in London;
Maurice Béjart’s Brussels studio; the Mikhailovsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia; and
Alvin Ailey’s American Dance Theatre in New York.
Moving from the Cullberg Ballet in Stockholm, for a decade, Duato found a home at
The Hague with the Nederlands Dans Theater under the direction of Czech mentor Jirí
Kylián. Duato earned recognition for designing Jardí Tancat (Closed Garden, 1983), a
rhapsodic suite set to Majorcan music. He advanced to company choreographer and
designed works for companies in Canada, Australia, England, France, Spain, Monte Carlo,
and the United States.
In 1990, the Spanish Ministry of Education and Culture invited Duato to form a
classical troupe and create new works, notably, Na Floresta (In the Forest, 1993), a
glorification of refuge in nature. His sensual, fluid Por Vos Muero (For Your Death, 1996)
contrasted with the drollery of Romanso (Still Water, 1997). His silken pas de deux in
Without Words (1999) for the American Ballet Theatre’s Paris tour featured Desmond
Richardson, Parrish Maynard, and Vladimir Malakhov.
Duato feels comfortable setting steps to a variety of composers, from Ottorino Respighi
and Antonio Vivaldi to Enrique Granados, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Frederic Rzewski,
Vangelis, and Henryk Górecki. For Multiplicidad: Formas de Silencio y Vacío
(Multiplicity: Forms of Silence and Emptiness, 1999), a comic pair—a musician and a
dancer posing as a stringed instrument—performed pieces by J. S. Bach. Duato’s
Herrumbre (Rust, 2004) probed the morality of the U.S. offshore prison in Guantanamo,
Cuba.
Three of Duato’s works have received international notice at Jacob’s Pillow—Arenal
(Sands, 2004) danced to the music of Maria del Mar Bonet, the complex rhythms of
Gnawa (Ghana, 2007), and Kaburias (2012), an Afro-Cuban solo and vehicle for Bolshoi
principal David Hallberg. Duato rounded out the 2010 Chekhov Theatre Festival in
Moscow with presentations of Multiplicidad and The Infinite Orchard, scored by Pedro
Alcaide and Sergio Caballero. In 2013, Duato created an unnamed kinetic piece for the
Martha Graham ensemble. In 2015, he directed the Staatsballet Berlin. His honors include
the Prix Benois de la Danse and the National Dance Award of Spain.
Source: Lee, Carol. Ballet in Western Culture: A History of Its Origins and Evolution.
New York: Routledge, 2002.
DUNCAN, ISADORA (1877–1927)
A stage adventurer and iconoclast, Angela Isadora Duncan shook the foundations of
European dance by improvising the rudiments of modern dance. A Californian from San
Francisco, she was born on May 27, 1877, to pianist Mary Dora Gray and Joseph Charles
Duncan, a mine supervisor and financier at the Bank of California. Six-year-old Isadora
and her older sister Elizabeth left school and educated themselves with books from the
public library while Isadora taught dance to neighborhood children.
 A stage adventurer and iconoclast, Angela Isadora Duncan shook the
foundations of European dance by improvising the rudiments of modern
dance, a break from structured ballet demonstrated in 1976 by Lynn Seymour
in Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora. Stars of the American Ballet Theatre, p.
132, # 242.

By age ten, Duncan presided over a growing troupe. Loss of the family income from
Joseph’s arrest in a banking scandal caused the parents to divorce in 1889, creating
mistrust in Isadora of religion and the institution of marriage. For her daughters, Mary
Duncan made a living in Oakland as a piano teacher and accompanist.
In 1893, Duncan increased studio time as both pupil and teacher. At the San Francisco
Barn Theatre in 1895, she danced stylized ecstasy. At Chicago’s Masonic Roof Garden, at
age nineteen, she joined the failing acting company of theater manager Augustin Daly. She
performed her version of pantomime in The Geisha and as a fairy in A Midsummer Night’s
Dream and interpreted Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat in New York.
Disillusion with theater in 1898 turned Duncan to free-spirited solo dance consisting of
natural movements and self-dramatization. With the encouragement of composer Ethelbert
Nevin, she performed danse pour danse (dance for the sake of dance) in Newport, Rhode
Island. She costumed herself in revealing tunics and bare feet for free-form ballet to the
Viennese waltzes of Johann Strauss.
European Experiments
In 1898, Duncan traveled with her mother and siblings to London, Paris, Berlin, Munich,
and Warsaw, where she performed at the Polish Teatr Wielki. In Athens, she studied Greek
iconography, religious ritual, and myth and danced on the Acropolis. Impressions of
antique dance from Greek pottery and Italian Renaissance paintings at the British Museum
and Louvre became the impetus for avant-garde dances, which she performed for the
upper class to the compositions of Frederic Chopin and Ludwig van Beethoven.
Idealism and spontaneity drove Duncan to spread an esthetic concept, “The Dance of
the Future,” which she predicted would blend movement with worship. In collaboration
with modern dancer Loie Fuller, in 1902, Duncan interpreted dance music for unscripted
concerts in Budapest, Rome, and Vienna. In 1904, she choreographed a bacchanal for the
opera Tannhäuser. Her sinuous stretches and backbends influenced Alexander Gorsky’s
choreography of Nur and Anitra (1906), the erotic tale of an Indian princess who enchants
a gorgeous soldier, a libretto executed by Bolshoi principals Vera Karalli and Mikhail
Mordkin.
With money from Paris Singer, the son of the sewing machine inventor, in 1908,
Duncan opened a school in Grunewald, Germany, enrolling eight students whom the
media dubbed the “Isadorables.” With maternal concern, Duncan shielded young female
pupils from the deformities caused by toe shoes and barre exercises. She encouraged the
lifting of the chest from the solar plexus and rhythmic breathing in a pattern emulating
ocean waves.
 Peripatetic moves over the next three years kept Duncan before the public eye in
France, Russia, Scandinavia, and Greece. Her two children, six-year-old Deirdre and two-
year-old Patrick, drowned in a car accident on the Seine River in 1913. A third child died
at birth. Friendship with actor Eleanora Duse encouraged Duncan to overcome sorrow and
return to dance. At the outbreak of World War I, she ended presentations by wrapping
herself in the French flag and singing the “Marseillaise.” She achieved notoriety and
admiration from artists and dancers who promoted her wholesome attitude toward the
beauty of the unfettered body.
In 1914, Duncan adopted six students and reared them in Bohemian style. She located
her studio in New York and staged performances at the Century Theatre, notably, a version
of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and a 1915 adaptation of Euripides’s Iphigenia in Tauris. For
her advocacy of Communism, she lost her American citizenship and briefly returned home
to California.
On return to Europe, in 1921, Duncan performed in London, where neophyte dancer
Frederick Ashton described her movements as “galumphing around.” At the request of the
Russian education commission, she headquartered dance classes at a school in Moscow,
where she received Soviet citizenship and the patronage of Vladimir Lenin. At St.
Petersburg, her philosophy impressed two ballerinas, Tamara Karsavina and Anna
Pavlova. In 1922, Duncan entered a year-long marriage to Russian poet and publisher
Sergei Yesenin.
During a presentation in Boston on a North American tour, Duncan exposed her breast
and proclaimed her dedication to Communism. Her unconventional drapes and exuberant
limbs inspired kinetic poses by French sculptors Antoine Bourdelle and Auguste Rodin,
French muralist Maurice Denis, and Siberian-Jewish painter Abraham Walkowitz, who
made five thousand drawings of Duncan in motion. Anti-Bolshevism drove Duncan from
America.
Duncan’s Decline
Exhibitionism, abandonment, debt, and alcohol dominated Duncan’s last years. Her
husband returned to Moscow in 1924 and committed suicide the next year. Because her
career waned in Russia, she moved to Nice, France, and lived on a stipend from a friend.
Cloaked in a silk shawl, Duncan died on the Riviera on September 14, 1927, when the
ends of her shawl tangled in the rear wheel and axle of a convertible and dashed her onto
the cobblestone pavement.
Obituaries extolled Duncan’s spiritual dance for rejecting the regimentation of classical
ballet and for uniting pagan myth, classical music, and free movement into abstract
modern dance. Her autobiography, My Life, published posthumously, presented her
unorthodox views on the body as an artistic instrument. Three former pupils, Irma, Maria
Theresa, and Anna Duncan, continued teaching free-form dance, which influenced Michel
Fokine, Martha Graham, Agnes de Mille, and Ruth St. Denis.
See also eurythmics.
Source: Duncan, Isadora. My Life. New York: W.W. Norton, 2013.
 • E •
EIFMAN, BORIS (1946–)
A purveyor of mental, spiritual, and carnal turmoil, Russian dancer-choreographer Boris
Yankelevich Eifman evolves ballet theater from global literature and packs it with
exuberant physicality and vivid sexuality. A native of Rubtsovsk in southwestern Siberia
born on July 22, 1946, he educated himself while his parents, physician Klara Markovna
Kuris and Yankel Borisovich Eifman, a tank factory engineer, spent World War II and its
aftermath in exile. The choreographer married dance coach Valentina Nikolayevna
Morozova, mother of their son.
Eifman trained at the Leningrad Conservatory and debuted his first work, Icarus, in
1966, followed in 1972 by an adaptation of Gayane, Firebird (1975), and, in 1976, Three
Compositions, filmed for television. In 1977, he began three decades of directing the
Leningrad Ballet Ensemble before rebelling against the predictability of the Bolshoi and
Kirov traditions. He initiated the Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg and debuted his
choreographic noncompliance with Soviet philosophy in Bivocality (1977) to the music of
Pink Floyd, diva Alla Osipenko’s starring role in Two Voices (1977), and the experimental
rock ballet Boomerang (1979).
Because of Eifman’s deviation from classical plots and themes, Soviet officials tried to
oust him from Russia along with other Jews. A proponent of ballet d’action, he directed
his dancers toward plot-motivated dance with The Idiot (1980), a tribute to Russian
novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The Communist hierarchy remained stodgily against
Eifman, particularly his comedic revolution in Mad Day, or The Marriage of Figaro
(1982), a ballet bouffe starring Sergei Fokin and Valentina Ganibalova as Figaro and
Susanna.
Eifman continued combing literature for the plots of The Legend (1982), Twelfth Night
(1986), The Duel (1987), The Master and Margarita (1987), Thérèse Raquin (1990), and
The Murderers (1991). Recognition came slowly but steadily to the rogue artist, who
stripped Soviet stage art of its obligatory state-crowned hero and replaced him with the
buffoon as Everyman. Eifman’s theatrical Tchaikovsky (1993) enraged the fastidious
Russian intelligentsia by acknowledging the homosexuality of the tormented composer
and by concluding that nonstandard carnality offered the composer a unique view of
human conditions.
Directing stage artistry toward Russian fiction, Eifman choreographed The Karamazovs
(1995), a contrast of sybaritism and spirituality. He won kudos for directing ballerina Nina
Zmievets in Red Giselle (1997), which reprised the life of Olga Spessivtseva, one of the
dissidents who fled Russia to join the Ballets Russes. In 1998, Eifman debuted a dance
allegory, My Jerusalem, which blended ethnic and techno music to track the spiritual
journey from lost faith to revival.
Muscovite dancer Dimitry Gudanov earned global notice for the role of the Heir
opposite Maria Alexandrova as the Empress in A Russian Hamlet: The Son of Catherine
the Great (1999), a bio-drama on Prince Paul and his murdered father, Czar Peter III,
commissioned by the Bolshoi. Eifman continued probing controversy in the arts with Don
Juan and Molière (2001), Pinocchio (2002), and Who’s Who (2003), a perusal of Russian
dancers who fled to the West after the 1917 fall of the Romanov dynasty. By designing
some forty works, Eifman perused humanistic questions about love, honor, and sensuality,
earning for himself state medals, the Golden Mask, the Order of Merit for the Fatherland,
and citations from France and Poland. Apollo and the Muses (2004) and Eugene Onegin
(2009) exhibited his triumphs on tours from San Francisco to Hong Kong.
In 2007, the forty-five Eifman dancers toured Israel, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles,
Costa Mesa, and New York to perform Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull (2007). In 2009, the
city of St. Petersburg constructed a ballet school, the Boris Eifman Dance Palace. The
2009 tour of Eifman’s Eugene Onegin generated mixed responses to his intense eroticism
and explosive emotions, which found more favor in Los Angeles than in New York. A
Chicago critic charged the ballet with Gothic excess. For presentations of Don Quixote, or
Fantasies of the Madman (1994) over 2010–2011, Eifman’s company received positive
feedback from France, Lebanon, Chicago, Cleveland, and Los Angeles.
A commemoration in 2013 of the end of the Nazi siege of Leningrad welcomed
veterans, citizens, and President Vladimir Putin to a revival of Eifman’s Requiem (1991),
an acrobatic masterwork. The ensemble, now consisting of sixty dancers, made significant
progress in Armenia with the heart-pumping Beyond Sin (2013) and in Uruguay with
Russian Hamlet. In April 2014, the Eifman troupe celebrated its thirty-seventh year by
starring Ukrainian ballerina Lilia Lishchuk in Anna Karenina (2005) and debuting Rodin
(2011) at the London Coliseum to a standing ovation. The study of the sculptor’s creativity
paralleled the mental deterioration of his soul mate, Camille Claudel.
Source: Barnett, Dennis, and Arthur Skelton. Theatre and Performance in Eastern
Europe: The Changing Scene. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2008.
EK, MATS (1945–)
Swedish dancer and ballet designer Mats Ek applies drama training to his theatrical
situations and characterizations. The son of cinema actor Anders Ek and modernist
choreographer Birgit Cullberg, he was born in Malmö on April 18, 1945, the twin of
actress Malin Ek and younger brother of dancer Niklas Ek. After training at Stockholm’s
Royal Dramatic Theater in modern dance by Russian diva Lilian Karina and Donya Feuer,
an American protégé of Martha Graham, Ek entered the drama department of Marieborg
Folks College in Norrkoping and produced drama with Ingmar Bergman.
Before dancing with his mother’s company, the Cullberg Ballet, in 1972, Ek gained
staging experience at Stockholm’s Marionette Theater and as ensemble member of the
Düsseldorf Ballet. Upon resuming a dance concentration, he gained insights from
choreographers Maurice Béjart and Jir˘í Kylián. Ek designed The Officer’s Servant (1976)
and performed as a guest of the Nederlands Dans Theater.
Influenced by his mother’s style and the social consciousness of choreographer Kurt
Jooss, Ek coordinated psychic trauma with wit and parody. He displayed virtuosity by
dancing the lead in Saint George and the Dragon (1976) and by directing Soweto (1977),
an abstraction of racial tensions in South Africa. He gained international recognition for
The House of Bernarda (1978), a gendered ballet based on the novel by Federico García
Lorca. Ek’s original work Antigone (1979) introduced the anguish of Greek tragedy to
dance. He widened his scope to the Bible with Cain and Abel (1982).
The Cullberg Ballet appointed Ek manager in 1985, a post he held for eight years. His
canon of twenty in-house adaptations—Giselle, The Rite of Spring, Swan Lake, Carmen,
and a drug culture version of The Sleeping Beauty—overturned the gauzy romantic
expectations of nineteenth-century story ballet. With the autobiographical Old Children
(1989), he inserted details of his relationship with his mother, a pattern he repeated with
glimpses of his father in Light Beings (1991). In 1993, Ek freelanced for global ensembles
and created A Sort of (1997) for the Nederlands Dans Theater.
Creativity marked Ek’s vigor in the twenty-first century. For the Paris Opera, he staged
Apartement (2000), a study of immaturity and sexual vulnerability. In 2007, Sylvie
Guillem and Niklas Ek performed the emotive duet Smoke. Mats Ek designed Aluminum
(2005) for the Compañia Nacional de Danza de Madrid, Black Radish (2008) for the
Royal Swedish Ballet, and Casi-Casa (Almost Home, 2009) for Danza Contemporanea de
Cuba.
Ek earned critical kudos for a version of Don Giovanni (1999), Jean Racine’s
Andromaque (2001), starring his Spanish wife, Ana Maria Laguna Caso, and the
existential solo Fluke (2002), an ominous piece set in an impersonal world that premiered
at Stockholm’s Dansens Hus. Arts analysts typified his overall style as an elision of
lunges, head rolls, flexed feet, and grand pliés à la seconde (knee bends with feet spread
apart), a dominant pose in Swan Lake. For expressionism and fluid movement, he holds
honoraria ranging from two Emmys for televised ballets, a Dance Screen citation, and a
2006 Prix Benois de la Danse. His filming of Place (2008) paired Laguna with Mikhail
Baryshnikov. Wet Woman (1995) and the dance film Ajö (Bye, 2010) featured Sylvia
Guillem.
Source: Poesio, Giannandrea. “Choreographers Today: Mats Ek.” Dancing Times 94,
no. 1118 (October 2003): 22–26.
ENGLISH NATIONAL BALLET
A pillar of English dance arts, the English National Ballet (ENB) claims sixty-five years of
visits to areas unacquainted with the arts. Known as the London Festival Ballet, the
company formed in 1950 from the collaboration of Anton Dolin of Sussex, a former
dancer with the Ballets Russes and Vic-Wells Ballet, and Alicia Markova, the pioneer
prima ballerina of England. With backing from Polish philanthropist Julian Braunsweg,
the company immediately scheduled extensive tours to neglected British institutions,
especially hospitals and rehabilitation centers.
John Gilpin, a founding member and lead dancer, replaced Dolin as premier danseur
and director in 1962 and recruited more performers. By the 1970s, ballerina-director Beryl
Grey demanded more precision and collaboration with guest choreographers Léonide
Massine and Rudolf Nureyev. Grey’s management steadied the advancement of danseuse
Eva Evdokimova, who performed Jules Perrot’s Pas de Quatre (Quartet, 1845) with Alicia
Alonso, Ghislaine Thesmar, and Carla Fracci. Evdokimova also paired with Nureyev in
his 1975 version of The Sleeping Beauty.
To advertise the London Festival Ballet’s uniqueness as the nation’s only classical
troupe, the ensemble changed its name in 1989 to the English National Ballet. In a tell-all
memoir, Czech dancer Daria Klimentová described the directorship of Derek Deane, who
began his term in 1993 with harsh demands on troupe members. During the period, the
ENB hired Dmitri Gruzdyev from the Kirov Ballet, Yat-Sen Chang and Aroniel Vargas
from the Cuban National Ballet, Elena Glurdjidze from the Tbilisi Choreographic School
in Georgia, and Fernanda Oliveira from the Chilean National Ballet, who played the lead
in stagings of Manon and Coppélia.
The appointment of Director Wayne Eagling in 2005 also advanced him to principal of
the ENB’s academy, the alma mater of Erina Takahashi of Japan, who played Clara in The
Nutcracker and the sacrificial victim in The Rite of Spring. Eagling expanded the
international flavor of the ensemble by acquiring Czech lead principal Zdenek Konvalina
and Bridgett Zehr from the Houston Ballet. In 2007, the spring program scheduled
contrast with Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost and Sinfonietta Giocosa (Fun
Symphony), scored in 1940 by Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu.
In 2012, dancer Tamara Rojo, a Spanish prima ballerina, progressed to ENB director.
The position tapped performance strength from her company roles in Paquita, The
Sleeping Beauty, Don Quixote, Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella, Le Corsaire (The Pirate),
and choreographer Ben Stevenson’s Three Preludes (1979). The ENB drew new talent in
Czech principal Zdenek Konvalina, star of Romeo and Juliet, and Alina Cojocaru, the
Romanian lead in The Lady of the Camellias and Eugene Onegin.
Source: Klimentová, Daria. Agony and Ecstasy: My Life in Dance. London: John Blake,
2013.
EN POINTE
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An adjunct to grace and uplift, dancing on the toes distinguishes the agility and
elevation that sets romantic dance apart from classicism. Wearing soft slippers, French
ballerina Geneviève Gosselin introduced a high demi-pointe at the Paris Opera in 1817 in
the revival of Fernand Cortès, ou La Conquête du Mexique (Hernan Cortéz, or The
Conquest of Mexico, 1809), but the steps lacked coordination of torso and arms. Critics
reported the phenomenon as an athletic trick to impress audiences.
When Milanese ballerina Amalia Brugnoli reprised toe dancing in Vienna in 1823 for
Paolo Samengo’s Die Fee und der Ritter (The Fairy and the Knight), nineteen-year-old
Marie Taglioni observed the ballerina’s rise to the front of the slipper and determined to
perfect dance sur la pointe. Under the instruction of her father, Filippo Taglioni, she
achieved balance by framing her face with slightly curved arms and head tilted forward in
relaxed effacé pose. The posture aligned head, torso, hips, and feet to buoy her light
movements en pointe for a fairy-like title role in La Sylphide at the Paris Opera on March
12, 1832, a crowning moment in the rise of Romantic ballet.
As pictured in Richard James Lane’s lithograph of Taglioni, Marie Taglioni in “Zephire
et Flore” (The Breeze and the Flower, 1831), ballet sur la pointe presented a buoyant
illusion of floating on air. In productions throughout Europe and North America, mid-
nineteenth-century ballerinas emulated Marie Taglioni’s multiple roles in satin and kidskin
toe shoes. The famous ranged from a peasant girl in Nathalie, ou La Laitière Suisse
(Natalie, or The Swiss Milkmaid, 1832) to the metamorphosis of a fairy in La Fille du
Danube (Daughter of the Danube, 1836).
By 1839, Fanny Elssler rivaled Marie Taglioni and developed her own fan base across
the United States and in Moscow for Catarina, ou La Fille du Bandit (Catarina, or The
Bandit’s Daughter, 1846). Russian dance coaches emulated French training. As a result,
ballet en pointe anchored the paintings of French balletomane Edgar Degas and permeated
narrative dance. Feats of balance generated such stars as the Kirov’s Carolina Rosati in La
Fille du Pharaon (The Pharaoh’s Daughter, 1862) and Ekaterina Vazem’s role in The
Butterfly (1874) for the Bolshoi.
See also shoes, ballet; Taglioni, Marie.
Source: Lee, Carol. Ballet in Western Culture: A History of Its Origins and Evolution.
New York: Routledge, 2002.
ERTÉ (1892–1990)
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The Gallo-Tartar founder of art deco costuming and theatrical design, Erté set a
standard of opulence and majesty for ballet. The son of Natalia Mikhailova and Admiral
Pyotr Ivanovich Tyrtov, born on November 23, 1892, in St. Petersburg, he received the
baptismal name of Romain de Tyrtov. Boyhood perusals of Persian, Indian, Greek,
Chinese, and Middle Eastern art filled his imagination with ethnic symbolism and ritual
dress for odalisques, goddesses, Gypsies, and harem girls.
Entranced by opera and Ballets Russes dancer Vaslav Nijinsky in L’Après-Midi d’un
Faune (Afternoon of a Faun, 1912) and Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring, 1913),
Erté chose ballet as his future career. Moved permanently to Paris by age twenty, he
educated himself in design at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts. After
turning the French pronunciation of his initials into Erté, he apprenticed with couturier
Paul Poiret of the House of Worth and sketched flowing dresses, robes, and paneled skirts
for the Russian magazine Damsky Mir (Lady’s World) and La Gazette du Bon Ton
(Newspaper of the Elite).
Fabrics Expert
Erté specialized in gyneography, the sketching of the female body. For such ballerinas as
Russian diva Anna Pavlova and Marseilles-born dancer Gaby Deslys, he originated
costumes for the roles of Firebird, Manon, Medea, Beauty and the Beast, Salomé,
Cleopatra, Juliet, Scheherazade, and Madame Butterfly. In sensuous lamé, tricot, moiré,
and silk jersey, his visionary wardrobes romanticized the tunic, kimono, and princess and
empire lines.
In Art Nouveau style, Erté became expert at texture and adornment of satin, chiffon,
chinchilla, chamois, burn-out and cut velvet, and eyelet lace. For finished outfits, he
learned to appliqué glyphs, guipure (cut-out) lace, medallions, tassels, frog closures, and
cording in the style of ancient and Renaissance court apparel. For added allure to the
bodies of dancers, he blended flashes of nudity and gendered details, heightening
masculinity on female dress and androgyny on men’s attire.
Coordinated Costuming
The mystic Erté wardrobe required coordinated accessories and jewelry. Toques and hair
bands, stoles, trains, fans, and veils offset black basics with carmine, purple, gilt, and
electric blue trim. For mythic deities, sheikhs, princes, and monarchs, he decked male
character dancers in paisley capes, sashes, draped sleeves, armlets, Turkish slippers, and
feathered headdress, a standard topping for the Ballets Russes Le Coq d’Or (The Golden
Cockerel, 1914). Beginning with the Chicago Opera Company’s mounting of Jules
Massenet’s Manon in 1922, the couturier costumed the Ziegfeld Follies troupe, Radio City
Music Hall dancers, cabaret drag shows, and performers in the films Ben-Hur (1925),
Bright Lights (1925), The Oriental Ballet (1925), The Mystic (1925), La Bohème (1926),
and Dance Madness (1926), which featured masked performers.
Until 1930, the Folies Bergère exported Erté’s design fantasies worldwide as a U.S.
commodity. Into the 1940s, he focused on ballet, opera, and theatrical couturier and
invented the collective theme. His coordinated wardrobes costumed an entire corps de
ballet in a single style and color, a technique governing a showing of The Barber of Seville
on French television in 1945 and Der Rosenkavalier in 1978.
Erté collapsed with renal disease in Mauritius and died in Paris on April 21, 1990. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased his dance and stage designs in 1967. In England,
France, Japan, and the United States, his extravagant concepts of stage wardrobe continue
to impact ballet on stage, television, and cinema.
See also Pavlova, Anna.
Source: Vassiliev, Alexandre. Beauty in Exile: The Artists, Models, and Nobility Who
Fled the Russian Revolution and Influenced the World of Fashion. New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 2000.
EUGENE ONEGIN
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Eugene Onegin advanced narrative ballet to a modern social analysis of idealism from
contrasting perspectives. Adapted from Alexander Pushkin’s 1833 verse novel of class
snobbery, the story appeared serially in magazines, giving glimpses of the era’s ballet and
ballroom art, especially that of prima ballerina Avdotia Istomina, star of the Imperial
Russian Ballet. In the composition of the opera version in 1879, composer Peter Ilyich
Tchaikovsky incorporated the polonaise, a processional that captured the grandeur and
hauteur of the Napoleonic era.
When South African choreographer John Cranko adapted Eugene Onegin for the
Stuttgart Ballet in 1965, he wrote it for Brazilian star Marcia Haydée, who danced
opposite Ray Barra, Egon Madsen, and Richard Cragun. Cranko passed over
Tchaikovsky’s score in favor of German pianist Kurt-Heinz Stolze’s choice of
Tchaikovsky’s piano pieces and segments of Francesca da Rimini (1876). The
orchestration replicated the self-importance of aristocrats and the aridity of Imperial
Russia.
Love’s Disappointment
Pushkin’s plot is a story of opposites. In the 1820s, the vain, cynical Eugene Onegin, a
Byronic bon vivant from St. Petersburg, indulges in unfulfilling musicales, soirees, and
balls held in lavish stage settings. After inheriting his uncle’s country estate, he befriends a
credulous poet, Vladimir Lensky, his young neighbor. While dining at the home of Olga
Larina, Lensky’s fiancée, Onegin meets Olga’s sister, Tatyana Larina, a model of rural
naiveté fed by absorption in unrealistic novels.
Smitten in one meeting, Tatyana writes a heady billet doux to Onegin and dispatches it
by her duenna. In romantic ecstasy, she dances a duet with her dream lover. Rude and
lordly, he ignores Tatyana’s sincere avowal and, in Act II tears up her profession of love.
He declares that marriage to her would bore him and advises her to be less candid about
heady crushes lest she fall for a cad. At a subsequent celebration of Tatyana’s saint’s day,
Onegin recoils from rustic jollity and matchmaking. To repay Lensky for involving him in
a bucolic social event, Onegin flirts with Olga, who enjoys their frivolous badinage.
The social scenario degenerates into insult and pistol dueling. At the first round, the
idealistic Lensky falls dead from Onegin’s bullet. Onegin flees the mansion and travels to
forget his poor judgment and anguish at losing a friend. In his absence, Tatyana peruses
his library and concludes that Onegin imitates fictional protagonists rather than cultivate a
true self.
On return to Russia several years later, Onegin, in Act III, mixes with the St. Petersburg
elite at a ball given by Prince Gremin. Onegin spies Tatyana, who has developed into a
beautiful sophisticate and married the elderly prince. In a buoyant mazurka, Onegin courts
her and attempts to revive their former attraction. Tatyana chooses to remain respectably
wed to Gremin rather than involve herself in a scandal with Onegin, the lonely voluptuary.
Although he humbles himself and pulls at her hand, Tatyana refuses his pleading.
Costumes and Manners
A spectacular role for the danseur noble, the story ballet Eugene Onegin rapidly received
media billing as a classic. The title figure became a stage vehicle for males from
Romanian dancer Dragos Mihalcea and Houston Ballet’s Simon Ball to Hungarian star
Zoltán Nagy, St. Petersburg dancer Oleg Gabushev, and National Ballet of Canada
principal John Alleyne, who partnered with Natalia Makarova. In spring 1971, the
Stuttgart Ballet scheduled a bicoastal U.S. tour of Eugene Onegin, beginning at New
York’s Metropolitan Opera House. Critics acknowledged the work’s success as both dance
and psychological drama.
As social commentary, the opening act of Eugene Onegin contrasts the peasant saint’s
day felicity with the social conventions and pomposity of Act II. As class contrast, the
country celebration exemplifies how far Tatyana has come in her rise to an elite station by
the final act. In presenting the married princess of Gremin overdressed in ball gown and
tiara, the drama hints that she, too, risks succumbing to infectious cynicism.
To set an emotional outcry to music, Cranko’s choreography calls for scissoring leaps,
the equivalent of hysteria. The interpretive score dominated the 1993 presentation in New
York by Evelyn Hart and Peter Jolesch of the Bavarian State Ballet. St. Petersburg
choreographer Boris Eifman received praise for technique at the 2013 Italian debut of his
version of Eugene Onegin at La Fenice in Venice and in Turin in 2015.
Source: Aloff, Mindy, ed. Dance Anecdotes: Stories from the Worlds of Ballet,
Broadway, the Ballroom, and Modern Dance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
EURYTHMICS
From the early 1910s, eurythmics unified humanism, dance, and music with healing and
education. By patterning natural gestures and speech rhythms to integrate with mood
lighting and colored costumes, performers freely expressed artistry. Visibly soulful,
eurythmy rid the body of stress and aggression by acting out movements suited to mood
and the needs of self, spirit, and life forces.
Croatian philosopher Rudolf Steiner ventured into visceral physiology in 1907, when he
applied mysticism to drama and an instinctive knowledge of deity as a spiritual purifier. In
1911, he formalized his ideas about attuning anatomic organs to positive vibration. When
he counseled a client, Lory Schmidt, on a career choice, she echoed his beliefs in
eurythmics. She began outlining human steps depicted in ancient sculpture and dance and
evolving gestures and actions equivalent to the pitch and timbre of speech.
During cultic summer workshops in Dornach, Switzerland, by the Anthroposophical
Society, actor Marie Steiner-von Sivers formed a stage troupe that practiced eurythmy as a
sacred art form and therapy for handicapped children. Performers achieved
psychophysical balance by involving the whole being in the interpretation of verse and
music. In 1919, the ensemble presented its works throughout Switzerland, Germany, and
Holland.
In 1924, Rudolf Steiner trained disciples in eurythmy, an ideal that influenced the
hybrid ballets of Ukrainian choreographer Serge Lifar. In Geneva, harmonics expert Émile
Jaques-Dalcroze applied eurythmics to the music profession. By formulating the Dalcroze
technique, he bypassed extensive barre training by the Cecchetti method and moved young
pupils directly into modern dance.
Dalcroze trainee Marie Rambert worked with Serge Diaghilev and Vaslav Nijinsky and
helped dancers to rehearse the pagan rhythms of Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of
Spring, 1913). The alternative to Cecchetti’s precisely structured ballet workout inspired
fans of Isadora Duncan to study eurythmics and impacted the style and performances of
Ruth St. Denis, Katherine Dunham, and Michio Ito, a choreographer of Broadway revues.
In Paris at Montmartre, instructor Caryathis tutored dancers in eurythmic ballet set to the
music of Maurice Ravel and Erik Satie and arranged salon performances.
The study of instinctive, whole-body coordination and relaxation influenced the holistic
treatment of cancer and improved the concentration of twentieth-century professionals,
notably, Alvin Ailey ballerina Judith Jamison, Royal Ballet dance master Ninette de
Valois, and Sergei Diaghilev, impresario of the Ballets Russes. In Seattle, Washington,
eclectic teacher Mary Ann Wells influenced the individualistic style of Ben Vereen, Robert
Joffrey, and Gerald Arpino. Other pure dance regimens increased the flexibility of
gymnastics coach Annelene Michiels, mime Étienne Decroux, and dancers Mary Wigman,
Doris Humphrey, and Hanya Holm. In Seattle, eurythmics imparted timing and rhythm at
the 2015 SHAPE America Convention and Expo.
Source: Morris, Gay. A Game for Dancers: Performing Modernism in the Postwar
Years, 1945–1960. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006.
 F
• •

FALL RIVER LEGEND

A graphic post–World War II theatrical choreographed by Agnes de Mille, Fall River
Legend revisited the axe murders allegedly committed by Lizzie Andrew Borden. The
ambiguous title suggested both the subversion of the loving family of cabinet maker
Andrew Jackson and Sarah Anthony Morse Borden and the consuming bitterness that
goaded a tormented spinster to slaughter. In de Mille’s version of history, Lizzie’s brutal
assault retaliated against her 64-year-old stepmother, Abby Durfee Gray Borden, and the
70-year-old father who allowed constant domineering of his youngest daughter.
The premier, created to Morton Gould’s score, featured Cuban dancer Alicia Alonso as
the nameless Accused, whose family kept her emotionally immured in the Massachusetts
house where she was born. Alonso, filling in for Nora Kaye, learned the part in less than a
week. The performance opened on April 22, 1948, at the American Ballet Theatre against
designer Oliver Smith’s stylized backdrop of a nineteenth-century gibbet, stark
architecture, and Victorian clothing and social customs.
Unlike the abstractions that filled George Balanchine’s choreographies, the unresolved
Fall River crimes intrigued de Mille, who researched the August 4, 1892, massacre of
Lizzie’s father and stepmother. De Mille viewed the harpy-like Abby Borden and a petty,
gossipy town as causes of Lizzie’s insanity. For focus, the family structure diminished the
role of Lizzie’s forty-one-year-old sister, Emma Lenora Borden.
De Mille’s application of classic movements to psychological disturbance generated
new possibilities for ballet. As a Freudian clue, the dance revealed Lizzie’s spasmodic
gestures and compulsive finger snapping as foreshadowings of her eventual mental
breakdown. In parallel, Muriel Bentley danced the calculated atrocities of the stepmother
against the idealized vision of Sarah Borden, played by Diana Adams. One of two
unassertive males, the minister, originated by American ballerino John Kriza, encircled
the protagonist with snippets of pastoral authority and a suitor’s attentions, but neither the
father nor the minister redeemed Lizzie from her self-destructive arc.
 A minister from the Central Congregational Church briefly reclaims Lizzie, protagonist of Fall
River Legend, who senses in him both earnest compassion and the sexual magnetism of a
possible suitor, portrayed by James Mitchell opposite Nora Kaye. Stars of the American Ballet
Theatre, p. 27, #52.

Psychological Phases
The ballet opens on a prologue, waltzes, and an elegy revealing the taut emotions that
beleaguer thirty-two-year-old Lizzie as she faces a jury of twelve white males who decide
her fate. A flashback pas de deux pictures Andrew and Sarah Borden as amicable and
content during Lizzie’s toddlerhood. A dirge symbolizes family loss, forcing Lizzie into
frozen resignation as she replaces two-year-old Young Lizzie in the ballet chronology.
Through recaps of the death of her thirty-nine-year-old birth mother from uterine cancer
in 1863 and the widower’s marriage in 1865 to a hostile second wife, the ballet moves
inexorably from dirge to lullaby, a sardonic stifling of volition symbolized by three
rocking chairs. As Young Lizzie matures, constant conflict generates rage. The anger
goads her to strike back against psychic abuse and her stepmother’s insinuation that Lizzie
is insane. The adult Lizzie ponders the contrast between her girlhood happiness and the
ongoing battle with her father’s new wife.
A twitchy agitation besets Lizzie, an easy dupe for the manipulative stepmother. A
minister from Fall River’s Central Congregational Church briefly reclaims Lizzie, who
senses in him both earnest compassion and the sexual magnetism of a possible suitor. The
father quashes a budding courtship and forces Lizzie back into the family triad.
At the climax, “Axe,” the introduction of the murder weapon and the parents’ fear of
Lizzie’s empowerment furnish her with a possible escape from the claustrophobic house.
De Mille inserts a serenade as the basis for Lizzie’s fantasies of a normal romance and a
tender respect for the axe. She mimes manic laughter, a barely controlled hysteria.
The religious and recreational elements of a New England congregation and hymn
singing welcome Lizzie into a tight microcosm, where members dance with the folk vigor
of de Mille’s community in Oklahoma! The minister’s presentation of flowers and an
invitation to the church social reignite jealousy in Abby Borden. Lizzie prevails by
returning home to the parlor, seizing the lace shawl that once belonged to Sarah, and
wearing it to the social.
Stylistically rigorous, the struggle to rescue Lizzie from despair involves her in an
intense waltz with the minister. The cotillion with its barn dance exuberance raises hopes
that the two can become a couple. Nonetheless, the stepmother bests the minister in the
duel for Lizzie’s soul. By spreading a whispering campaign, Abby wrests control and
returns Lizzie to the misery of home confinement.
Lacking defense by either her father or wooer, Lizzie seizes the male prerogative. The
loss of a potential lover permeates her dance around the axe, a menacing phallic symbol
that she sheathes in her skirt. The confrontation of assailant and victims precedes a
blackout, a retreat to the decorum of Greek tragedy. Release from a weak-kneed father and
vicious stepmother precedes the “Death Dance,” in which Lizzie reunites with Sarah’s
spirit.
The grim conclusion pictures the birth mother slapping Lizzie for the telltale blood that
stains the girl’s petticoat and the parlor rocking chairs. Alone before townsfolk, Lizzie
voices a silent shriek and flees, leaving the curious to probe two clues—the axe and the
lacy scarf, a stark dyad of masculine agency and period femininity. The minister returns to
guide Lizzie to the gibbet. The ballet ends with an epilogue revisiting the musical themes
of her life.
Revivals
Inspired in 1942 by the provocative movements of Martha Graham and Antony Tudor’s
Pillar of Fire, de Mille’s one-act ballet won kudos for choreographic effects and ensemble
unity. The dance reset orthodox maidenly dance en pointe with the frenzy of human
dilemma during investigation of an unsolved domestic atrocity. Critic Marie Rambert
extolled the compact ballet drama as the most important of the era because of its sincerity
and simplicity.
Analysts remarked on the work’s suspense, even though it opens and closes with the
gallows. The lead role became a landmark in the career of Nora Kaye, who suffered
nervous collapse while rehearsing the part of Lizzie. When the American Ballet Theatre
toured Russia in 1960, the artistic director deleted Billy the Kid and Fall River Legend
from de Mille’s repertoire because they appeared to sensationalize felons. The work found
more appreciative audiences in 1971 at London’s Covent Garden and at the 1982 debut in
Brisbane, Australia.
Revivals kept de Mille’s modern, pre-feminist choreography and Gould’s discordant,
jangled score before the public. The ambiguous role of the spinster added luster to the
careers of ballerinas who interpreted the jittery Lizzie. In 1990, the Dance Theatre of
Harlem mounted Fall River Legend with Virginia Johnson depicting Lizzie. The American
Ballet Theatre’s 1999 revival featured Juliet Kent in the lead role; a subsequent staging by
the same company in 2007 starred Gillian Murphy.
In February 2014, the Paris Opera Ballet paired de Mille’s short work of dance
Americana with Birgit Cullberg’s Miss Julie. French dancer Laetitia Pujol starred as
Lizzie, a maimed spirit barely controlled by a fragile ego and Sunday School sensibilities.
The female roles of the contrasting ballets turned drama into a hyperrealistic survey of
women’s choices.
Source: Hasday, July L. Agnes de Mille. New York: Chelsea House, 2004.
FARRELL, SUZANNE (1945–)
A renowned technical master, Suzanne Farrell epitomized an era’s adoration of the prima
ballerina’s grace and form. An Ohio tomboy born Roberta Sue Ficker in Cincinnati on
August 16, 1945, she rounded out a family of three daughters of meat truck driver Robert
F. Ficker and nurse’s aide Donna Holly, who divorced Ficker in 1954. Farrell studied at
the Ursuline Academy and the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music with her older sister,
pianist Donna Ficker.
Suzanne pondered a photo of George Balanchine in Dance Magazine as a future
mentor. At age fifteen, she earned a Ford Foundation scholarship to the School of
American Ballet at Lincoln Center in New York. Her mother and sister roomed with her in
a one-room apartment paid for with the mother’s wages as a night nurse. In 1961, Farrell
entered the New York City Ballet sixty-member ensemble.
Becoming a Star
Farrell advanced to soloist by age eighteen, replacing pregnant diva Diana Adams in the
debut of Russian musician Igor Stravinsky’s Movements for Piano and Orchestra (1959).
Working one-on-one with Balanchine conceiving such ballets as A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, Agon, Liebeslieder Walzer (Love song waltzes), Orpheus, Mozartiana, and
Davidsbündlertänze (Dances of David’s League), she explored pointe work and evolved
classical phrasing based on his direction. Together, they developed passages by Stravinsky
that suited her talent, physique, speed, and drive. The composer admired her
interpretations, which presented his music with urgency and relevance.
Farrell welcomed varied subjects and partnered with Arthur Mitchell in Toshiro
Mayuzumi’s Japanese nuptial ballet Bugaku (1962). In 1963, Ukrainian-American ballet
master John Taras designed Passage for Farrell, the beginning of dynamic creations that
included works of Jerome Robbins and Stanley Williams. She teamed with Jacques
d’Amboise for Meditation (1963), and with Peter Martins in Diamonds and Apollo.
Balanchine cast himself in the title role for a 1965 restaging of Don Quixote, a turning
point in Farrell’s career. To develop her weaknesses, he increased stress on the bourrée. To
the choreography of Maurice Béjart’s Romeo et Juliette (1966), Balanchine teamed her
with Argentine ballerino Jorge Donn.
From principal in Swan Lake, Farrell progressed to the jazz ballet On Your Toes and the
1968 premiere of Pithoprakta (Action by Probabilities) an artistic vision of molecular
movement set to orchestrations by Gallo-Greek composer Iannis Xenakis. Her marriage to
Peruvian dancer Paul Mejia ended Balanchine’s fascination with his compliant “Suzi.”
Paul and Suzanne moved to the Adirondacks. Under Béjart, the couple danced in Brussels
with Ballet of the 20th Century in Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil, 1968), Rite of
Spring, Bolero, Nijinsky, Clown of God, and Le Triomphe.
Farrell mended the breach with Balanchine in 1975 and again danced compelling roles
and variations that he designed for her, including the 1976 U.S. bicentennial special Union
Jack, Tzigane (Gypsy, 1975), Chaconne (Dance Song, 1976) opposite Peter Martins, Le
Bourgeois Gentilhomme (The middle-class gentleman, 1979), and a 1980 revival of
Walpurgisnacht (Witches’ Night) with Danish character dancer Adam Lüders. In the
1980s, arthritis began to reduce articulation in her knee and right hip, which required
replacement in February 1987. After post-surgical rehabilitation, in January 1988, she
returned to the stage in Balanchine’s Der Rosenkavalier Waltz. In 1989, she chose
Sophisticated Lady and Vienna Waltzes (1977) as her last concert pieces, the end to one
hundred roles in two thousand concerts.
Writer and Teacher
In retirement, Farrell issued an autobiography, Holding On to the Air (1990), and mounted
Balanchine dances in Moscow, Copenhagen, St. Petersburg, Paris, Berlin, Vienna,
Toronto, Buenos Aires, Seattle, Boston, Miami, Cincinnati, and Fort Worth. She coached
dancers at the New York City Ballet until 1993, when director Peter Martins fired her,
ending her annual $30,000 salary. She moved to Washington, D.C., to teach teen dancers
at the Kennedy Center.
A documentary, Suzanne Farrell—Elusive Muse (1997), summarized the diva’s
extraordinary contributions to dance. In an interview with BOMB magazine, Farrell
revered the arts as the soul’s hospital. Following a divorce from Mejia, in 2000, she joined
the faculty of Florida State University and held the Francis Eppes Chair in the Arts. For
the George Balanchine Trust, she began archiving nine of the master’s lost creations and
collecting authentic costumes.
Under the aegis of the U.S. Department of Education, Farrell launched the Suzanne
Farrell Ballet Company as the resident ensemble of the Kennedy Center Opera House, for
which she directed more than forty ballets. Her visionary career earned a Mademoiselle
Merit Award, Presidential Medal of Honor in the Arts, 2005 Kennedy Center Honors,
University of Cincinnati merit award, New York City cultural honorarium, Brandeis
University citation for creative arts, and Capezio Dance Award. She holds university
doctorates from Georgetown, Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard.
Source: Acocella, Joan. “Second Act.” New Yorker (6 January 2003): 48–49.
FILM, BALLET IN
The ephemeral nature of dance makes filming invaluable to dancers, teachers, historians,
and balletomanes. For restagings of Don Quixote (1900), Swan Lake (1901), La Bayadère
(The temple dancer, 1904), and Raymonda (1905), Moscow’s Bolshoi ballet master
Alexander Gorsky advanced the use of black-and-white photography as a teaching tool,
preservation method, and separate art form. For Russian diva Vera Karalli, Gorsky
originated dances for roles that made her an early silent film star in Do You Remember?
(1914), Chrysanthemums (1914), War and Peace (1915), and The Dying Swan (1917), for
which close camera angles preserved her delicate footwork.
Dance movies enable more people to view classics, as with modernist Martha Graham’s
troupe in The Flute of Krishna (1926), a film for the Eastman School of Music, and Walt
Disney’s comic animated ballet in Fantasia (1940), a colorful application of the music of
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The 1940s yielded more screen hits in color—Agnes de Mille’s
Oklahoma! (1943), Roland Petit’s dance tutorial Symphonie en Blanc (Symphony in
White, 1942) and the children’s special Alice in Wonderland (1948), and Moira Shearer’s
role in Robert Helpmann’s The Red Shoes (1948), a British dance fable originated by Hans
Christian Andersen. Directors produced movie house specials, including French ballerina
Colette Marchand in Moulin Rouge (1952), Swiss-French dance maker Maurice Béjart’s
Firebird (1952), Carmen De Lavallade in Carmen Jones (1954), Galina Ulánova and Yuri
Zhdanov in the Russian cinema Romeo and Juliet (1955), Rudolf Nureyev in a Russian
staging of Le Corsaire (The Pirate, 1958), and the Royal Danish Ballet’s Ballerina (1966),
which incorporated a production of Coppélia that starred Kirsten Simone.
Far beyond North Africa, two Egyptian films, Igazah Nisf as-Sinah (Leave Half, 1961)
and Gharam fi al-Karnak (Gram in Karnak, 1963), spread the fame and influence of the
choreographers Mahmoud Reda and Farida Fahmy and their folkloric ensemble, the Reda
Troupe. British choreographer Frederick Ashton enticed children to enjoy dance with the
filming of The Tales of Beatrix Potter (1971). Tartar dancer-director Rudolf Nureyev
captured on film his pas de deux with New Zealand dancer Lucette Aldous in Don Quixote
(1973) and cooperated with Louis Jourdan’s production of A Dancer Named Nureyev
(1973), a cinema biography that also contained the entire Nureyev-Margot Fonteyn duet
Marguerite and Armand (1963).
Thrilled in boyhood by Fred Astaire dance movies, Russo-Latvian star Mikhail
Baryshnikov added to the ballet film canon his partnering with Gelsey Kirkland in The
Nutcracker (1977), a holiday favorite. Baryshnikov contrasted classic and hybrid styles in
White Nights (1985) by performing stage works and by mimicking the American soft shoe
of Gregory Hines. Baryshnikov’s colleague, Peter Martins, Danish successor to George
Balanchine at the New York City Ballet, contributed to major ballet movies: The Turning
Point (1977) and Living a Ballet Dream: Six Dancers Tell Their Stories (2001). In
addition, Martins created animated doll dances for Barbie in the Nutcracker (2001) and
Barbie of Swan Lake (2003).
To archive world dance, Aragonese cinematographer Carlos Saura demonstrated
Spanish peasant dance in the film Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding, 1981). Likewise,
Tartar dancer Afrasiyab Badalbeyli perpetuated a Muslim legend, Qiz Galasi (The Maiden
Tower, 1984); Maria Tallchief and fellow divas preserved Balanchine’s coaching in
Dancing for Mr. B (1989). As biography, Mao’s Last Dancer (2009) recorded the
sacrifices of Li Cunxin to defect from China to join an American ensemble. Glimpses of
the emotional aspects of a ballet career also permeate a string of cinemas—the National
Ballet of Canada’s Making Ballet (1995), English choreographer Peter Darling’s Billy
Elliot (2000), the Brazilian documentary Only When I Dance (2009), French dancer
Benjamin Millepied’s Black Swan (2010), Mats Ek’s Ajö (Bye, 2010), La Scala Ballet’s
Notre-Dame de Paris (2014), and Justin Peck’s designs in BALLET422 (2015).
See also De Mille, Agnes; Erté; photography, ballet in.
Source: Mitoma, Judy, Elizabeth Zimmer, and Dale Ann Stieber, eds. Envisioning
Dance on Film and Video. New York: Routledge, 2002.
FINNISH NATIONAL BALLET
A companion to the national opera in Helsinki, the Finnish National Ballet (FNB) imparts
the fundamentals of their classical and contemporary repertoire to young dancers. Under
Russian imperial possession from 1809 to 1917, Finland at first had no native company,
but relied on tours of dancers from St. Petersburg. Public interest in ballet flourished in
1879, when the first Helsinki ensemble contributed to operas and operettas.
 The advance of artistry and technique at the end of the nineteenth century brought new
experiences to Finland. Avant-garde dance introduced by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes
promoted cosmopolitanism. The Finns applauded the diverse choreographic styles of guest
stars Anna Pavlova and Isadora Duncan, both of whom visited in 1908.
A fad for tango introduced Argentinian dance in Helsinki in 1913, when the Latin beat
dominated national Finnish dance. Also in the 1910s, native dancers Toivo Niskanen and
Maggie Gripenberg attuned their concerts to the era’s experimentation. In 1917, Niskanen
and Margaret Lilius became the first Finns to execute a classical pas de deux. Gripenberg,
the first Finnish choreographer to seek global acknowledgment, based her performances
on the nationalistic compositions of Jean Sibelius.
A Liberated Ballet
Four years after Finland gained independence following the Russian Revolution of 1917,
true Finnish ballet history began. At the 540-seat Alexander Theatre, the first permanent
company presented Swan Lake. The program, featuring Mary Paischeff and George Gé in
the lead roles, slowly won Finns to story ballet. For authenticity, artistic director Edward
Fazer graced the initial presentation with the panache of the St. Petersburg creator Marius
Petipa.
In 1931, the FNB sponsored the first full-length ballet, composer Erkki Melartin’s
Sininen Helmi (The Blue Pearl), on the same program with composer Väinö Raitio’s urban
dance suite Vesipatsas (Waterspout, 1929). However, as the Soviet Union encroached on
Scandinavian liberty, the arts retreated. Into the 1930s, Finnish soloists sought less
totalitarian mentors by immigrating to central Europe. The company hired graduates of the
Finnish National Opera Ballet School and gained broader experience from a guest
appearance by the ensemble of German pacifist Kurt Jooss, who fled rising Nazism in
1933.
After World War II, FNB director Alfons Almi managed musical tours to more than two
hundred communities. By 1956, the ensemble received a state subsidy for training troupe
members. Aided by his wife, dancer-actor Doris Laine, from 1957 to 1971, Almi
encouraged television broadcasts and visits to schools as well as the establishment of an
international music festival in 1957. The FNB staged Swedish choreographer Birgit
Cullberg’s Miss Julie, featuring lead dancer Erik Bruhn, and composer Tauno Pylkkänen’s
Karin, Magnus’s Daughter (1961), a popular sixteenth-century tale of a market girl wooed
by Finland and Sweden’s king Erik XIV and starring Laine and dancer-choreographer Uno
Onkinen.
To balance the one hundred females in the troupe, Almi ceased recruiting girls to the
Finnish ballet academy and opened a male dance class in fall 1959. He advertised the
centrality of athletic achievement, a campaign strategy that “desissified” male training.
Within the year, the ballet school acquired twenty boy pupils and hired dance coach
Onkinen to educate them. In 1964, Lithuanian artistic director Nicholas Beriosoff filled
two seasons with Les Sylphides, La Esmeralda, Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, and Le
Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring).
 At the same time that Almi produced the bumptious Finnish ballet Seven Brothers
(1980), he hosted cultural exchanges that introduced modern and neoclassical dance by
stars Margot Fonteyn, Alvin Ailey, Yvette Chauviré, Merce Cunningham, Maya
Plisetskaya, Donald McKayle, Martha Graham, and Galina Ulánova. Under artistic
director Jorma Uotinen from 1982 to 1991, staging took on visual drama through
movement, costume, makeup, and lighting. Choreography and symphony management by
Ilkka Kuusisto supported composer Eero Hämeenniemi’s folk love story Loviisa (1986)
and Leonardo (1992), Marjo Kuusela’s satiric Ronja Robbersdaughter (1989), and Kalevi
Aho’s orchestration of the ballet Pyörteitä (Whirls, 1988), an episode of the Kalevala, the
Finnish epic.
A Global Presence
In 1988, under ballet mistress Doris Laine, FNB sampled dance styles from all of
Scandinavia, Paris, and London and from Japanese butoh, a post–World War II
dramatization of distress. In the same time period, the Finns toured Sweden, Norway,
Scotland, Paris, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the United States, Canada,
and Cuba, displaying the creative costumes of Seppo Nurmimaa. After retirement, Almi
continued to support musical concerts and, in 1993, guided Finland’s completion of a new
opera house northeast of Helsinki at Töölö. From 2001 to 2008, the modernized structure,
seating 1,350, enabled ballet mistress Dinna Bjørn to promote the Bournonville Method
imported to Finland from the Royal Danish Ballet.
Artistic director Kenneth Greve, a Danish protégé of George Balanchine, began guiding
the Finnish ensemble in 2008. He gained the public trust by elevating standards, offering
free outdoor productions, and broadening FNB contacts with the global arts. His exacting
management yielded a striking version of Swan Lake in 2009, Scheherazade and Cathy
Marston’s tragic Blood Wedding in 2010, and Australian choreographer Terence Kohler’s
Cinderella—A Tragic Tale in 2011.
In 2012, the eighty-five members gave twenty performances of a Hans Christian
Andersen fairy tale, The Snow Maiden, which drew 26,000 ticket holders to a dance salute
to Scandinavian lore. To enhance immediacy, dancers performed over the orchestra pit on
a platform that brought them closer to viewers. FNB made history in 2013 with its first
full company invitational to the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow and extended its range with
cooperative projects in Australia, Japan, and Korea. In an ambitious series, the ensemble
performed Jir˘í Kylián’s Bella Figura, William Forsythe’s In the Middle, Somewhat
Elevated, Jorma Elo’s Double Evil, and Johan Inger’s Walking Mad, set to Maurice
Ravel’s “Bolero” and compositions by Arvo Pärt.
For 2014, the FNB schedule juxtaposed A Midsummer Night’s Dream, La Sylphide, and
Don Quixote, starring Maria Baranova, with interpretations of Argentinian and Finnish
tango and a survey of macho swaggering in Tero Saarinen’s Morphed. A spring gala
coordinated the cream of the dance world from the Stuttgart Ballet, San Francisco troupe,
Paris Opera, Royal Ballet, and Romanian National Ballet. For Finnish talent, FNB
honored choreographer Elina Pirinen for her award-winning Personal Symphonic Moment,
set to Dimitri Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony.
 Source: Lehikoinen, Kai. Stepping Queerly? Discourses in Dance Education for Boys
in Late 20th-Century Finland. New York: Peter Lang, 2006.
THE FIREBIRD
See image in photospread.
In the era of Ballets Russes glory, L’Oiseau de Feu (The Firebird, 1910) showcased the
dance design of Michel Fokine to orchestrations by Igor Stravinsky. An evocation of
Caucasian folklore of the Zshar-Ptitsa (firebird), the one-act, fifty-minute ballet, featured
authentic folk melodies previously collected by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Librettist
Alexander Benois adapted the story to parallel fairy tales of the Phoenix from the
Mediterranean, Persia, India, Arabia, New Guinea, and China.
A prodigy of impressionism, Stravinsky produced The Firebird in St. Petersburg over
six months. It was the first score especially composed for Sergei Diaghilev’s radical
company. When the pages arrived in Paris in May 1910, Fokine accepted the male lead.
Because Anna Pavlova immediately refused to dance to such stirring orchestrations,
Tamara Karsavina took the role of the bird-woman. Fokine’s wife, Vera Fokina, depicted
Sublime Beauty.
Handbills evoked images of the tender, feminine bird embraced in erotic pose by a
forceful male. The prima ballerina, clad in the golds and reds of tsarist Russia, portrayed
the power of a magic bird to confer both blessing and doom. Key to the appeal, her elusive
avian nature limited Tsarevitch Ivan’s aspirations to snare and possess her resplendent
beauty and protection from harm. Upon capture, she altered flighty motions and presented
the prince a gentle, submissive face.
Performed at the Grand Opera House in Paris on June 25, 1910, the neoclassical
extravaganza captured awe at the sun’s rays, the source of the firebird’s glow. Critical
elation over The Firebird credited impresario Diaghilev for synthesizing music and ballet
with shimmering red-gilt sets and costumes depicting imperial pomp and folk magic. The
visual effects, designed by Alexander Golovin and costumed by Léon Bakst, initiated a
craze throughout the West for art deco paisleys and corded vests, tunics, harem pants, and
soft boots.
The Hero’s Quest
The narrative, a quest motif inciting heroism against wickedness, pictures Prince Ivan
searching for a lost love, the Tsarevna (princess). Ivan breaches boundaries of the
supernatural kingdom of a wizard, Kashchei the Immortal, depicted by character dancer
Enrico Cecchetti. Stravinsky applied a leitmotif (identifying melody) for each appearance
of Kashchei and for elements of sorcery and mystery.
Russian staging placed Ivan in an enchanted garden opposite the star performer, whose
dizzying flight takes musical form in quickly bowed strings. Her embroidered skull cap,
decked in feathers, held long braids, a token of the naive rustic people who nourished
superstitions of magic spells. Fokine, similarly clad in Russian finery, danced in
embroidered shirt, calf-length tunic, and Turkish boots marked with assertive symbols.
 Having captured the Firebird, Ivan bargains to let it live if the bird promises to help
him. For his act of mercy, she leaves a magic feather, by which he can summon her. Upon
viewing a scherzo and hearing the rhapsodic oboe theme in the khorovod (circle dance) in
which thirteen beguiled princesses toss golden apples, Ivan chooses one of the corps de
ballet for a wife. After forcing his way into the castle, Ivan quarrels over the proposed
marriage with Kashchei, who threatens to turn the prince into stone.
The director let details epitomize Ivan’s peril. Costuming echoed elements of
Scheherazade, from Kashchei’s draped turban, full beard, billowy pants, and broad
cummerbund to the glint of a finely curved scimitar. At the height of confrontation, the
palace security force faces the Firebird, which hexes the master’s guardians with the
“Danse Infernale,” a frenzy that reduces them to a stupor.
In the second tableau, for a battle with Kashchei, the bird again bests evil with sorcery
and disembodies the villain’s entourage, leaving the stage in darkness. The Firebird, like
an intercessory Virgin Mary, shields Ivan permanently against Kashchei’s vengeance. By
confiding to Ivan that an egg harbors the villain’s soul, Ivan smashes the egg and kills the
villain.
Stravinsky commutes the menacing atmosphere with the Firebird’s “Berceuse”
(lullaby), a divine promise of safety. The destruction of Kashchei rids the stage of the
demonic palace and its petrified inhabitants. A joyous finale celebrates release from terror.
To sweeping strings, the princesses exult over Kashchei’s defeat and, to a stroke of the
harp, join in a wedding march as the Tsarevna marries Ivan.
Firebird’s History
In the wake of the The Firebird’s success, Stravinsky scored both Petrouchka (1911) and
Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring, 1913) as well as a shortened concert suite of
Firebird. On January 17, 1916, Diaghilev brought Firebird to the Century Theatre in New
York City featuring Xenia Maclezova as the bird and Leonide Massine as Ivan. Cecchetti
reprised the wizard’s part. When the Fokine production moved on to the Colon Theatre in
Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1931, designer Ivan Bilibin made papier-mâché heads for the
monsters in the enchanted garden. In 1934, the Ballets Russes reprised The Firebird in
London using the 1910 costumes and set. Two years later, the troupe’s Firebird premiered
in Melbourne, Australia, scoring rave reviews for star dancer Valentina Blinova.
Revivals of Firebird have stripped the design of Russian setting and placed the fairy
tale as far away as the Caribbean Islands and Venezuela as well as fantasy locales.
Subsequent choreographies have exalted the stars of the dance world, beginning with
Alicia Markova in 1945 and advancing to Maria Tallchief, who made the title sorcerer her
signature role. Tallchief garnered media accolades for her mimetic skill with the New
York City Ballet in George Balanchine’s 1949 production, featuring scenery painted by
Marc Chagall and Barbara Karinska’s detailed purple and crimson skirts and headpieces.
The 1970 revival featured Gelsey Kirkland in choreography designed especially for her.
In 1965 at the Kremlin Palace, Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater performed Fokine’s
choreography with Maya Plisetskaya in the title role. The Geoffrey Holder vision of The
Firebird, performed in 1982 by the Dance Theater of Harlem, moved the setting farther
from Russia to an equatorial jungle. Contributing to the startling avian movements in a
September 2000 production by Dance Theater of Harlem, star Kellye A. Saunders kept the
Firebird in constant motion. The Australian Ballet’s revival of Firebird in 2009 featured
Lana Jones as the bird-woman, for which she won the Helpmann Award.
Source: Terry, Paul, and David Bowman. Student’s Guide to A2 Music. London:
Rhinegold, 2005.
FOKINE, MICHEL (1880–1942)
See image in photospread.
German-Russian expressionist Michel Fokine transformed static stage conventions and
choreographed eighty-one story ballets for radical twentieth-century productions. The
namesake of a St. Petersburg merchant and youngest of five children, he was born Mikhail
Mikhaylovich Fokin on April 24, 1880, to Ekaterin Kind Fokina, a German devotee of the
arts. His education shaped broad interests in antique art, painting, piano, mandolin, and
balalaika. His prodigious memory captured whole scores.
With nine years of preparation at the Imperial Ballet School under instructor Nikolai
Legat, in 1898, Fokine danced the part of Lucien d’Hervilly opposite Anna Pavlova in
Paquita. By age twenty-two, he served the Mariinsky Theatre as first soloist and youngest
teacher. During a journey to the Caucasus in 1900, he encountered Azerbaijani poet
Ferdowsi’s sixteenth-century epic Leila and Madjnun, the subject of a romantic 1908
Persian ballet by Azerbaijani composer Uzeyir Hajibeyov.
Fokine advanced to instructor of Austro-Hungarian star Desha Delteil and Russian diva
Bronislava Nijinska. In 1904, he wrote a first ballet, a libretto for the Greek myth of
Daphnis and Chloe to the sensual string and oboe melodies that Maurice Ravel completed
in 1911. For Anna Pavlova, Fokine composed the showpiece The Dying Swan (1905), an
interpretation of Camille Saint-Saens’s cello ballad. Fokine’s pupils adored him, but
cowered at his bursts of disapproval. In 1905, he married one of his pupils, Vera Antonova
Fokina, his lifetime partner.
The Rebel Master
Fokine’s theories of thematic performance, called ballet contemporain, owed their drive to
modern dancer Isadora Duncan, who toured Russia in 1905. To rid stage presentations of
acrobatic exhibitions, he unified mime and costume with choreography, a revolt that
angered Tsarist traditionalists. The fusion suited the prodigality of soloist Vaslav Nijinsky
in Acis and Galatea (1905) and Chopiniana (1903), a suite originally intended for piano.
From Fokine’s innovations, the artistic director, Peter Gnedich, rejected a performance of
“Eunice” (1907) in tunics and bare feet, a radical Duncanism. In defiance, the
choreographer created the effect by having toes painted onto tights for diva Mathilde
Kshessinska’s dance around eight daggers impaled in the stage.
By 1909, Fokine moved on to Paris as dance master for impresario Sergei Diaghilev’s
Ballets Russes. He collaborated with designer Alexander Benois, costumer Léon Bakst,
and composer Igor Stravinsky in staging one-act suites, beginning with Les Sylphides
(1909), a resetting of Chopiniana, and including Prince Igor (1909), with its whirling
mass of pagan Polovtsian dancers and star Maria Kuznetsova as Yaroslavna. A string of
performances featured Nijinsky in Le Pavilion d’Armide (Armida’s Pavilion, 1907),
Scheherazade (1910), The Firebird (1910), Le Spectre de la Rose (The Spirit of the Rose,
1911), L’Après-Midi d’un Faune (Afternoon of a Faun, 1912), and Petrouchka (1912).
Because of a break with Diaghilev over his sexual obsession with Nijinsky, Fokine and
Fokina relocated to Russia. Meanwhile, Pavlova introduced American viewers to Fokine’s
genius, which shared parallels with silent film. On July 6, 1914, Fokine issued a letter to
the Times of London containing an artistic manifesto calling for balanced presentation of
static, kinetic, and auditory stimuli. In 1914 at the Royal Opera House in Stockholm, he
partnered with his wife in a Swedish production of Cleopatra.
During his career as character dancer and head of the Royal Swedish Opera Ballet,
Fokine choreographed Le Coq d’Or (The Golden Cockerel, 1914) and played the wizard
in The Firebird and a harlequin in Carnaval (1910). The chaos following the Russian
Revolution forced the choreographer to Denmark. In lieu of trained professionals, at the
Century Theater in New York in August 1919, he staged Aphrodite: A Romance of Ancient
Egypt with ballroom performers and amateurs. On Broadway in 1920, he originated
Mecca, a Middle Eastern mosaic he patterned after Middle Eastern art. The ballet, under
the name Cairo, flourished in London the following year in 287 performances.
Fokine in New York
To fill the dearth of dance in the American arts, Fokine headquartered in New York City in
1923 and reprised the masterworks of the early 1900s. A period of dance frenzy
preoccupied Western Europeans with the eroticism of Russian dancers, particularly Fokine
as the Greek hero Perseus opposite his wife as the title character in Medusa (1924). At
Riverside Drive, he opened a dance studio and debuted a student troupe in February 1924
at the Metropolitan Opera House. He democratized presentations by performing at country
clubs and movie and vaudeville theaters.
In 1936, Michel, Vera, and their son, dancer Vitale “Talia” Fokine, settled in Yonkers
and toured with the Covent Garden Russian Ballet. Michel ventured back to the Ballets
Russes with L’Epreuve d’Amour (The Proof of Love, 1936), Don Juan (1936), and the
surreal Paganini (1939), which he wrote in collaboration with composer Sergei
Rachmaninoff for a debut by the Royal Ballet. For the commercial arts, he trained groups
for the Ziegfeld Follies and Jerome Kern’s musical Show Boat (1938).
The rise of Nazism in Germany forced Fokine to abandon European tours. While
teaching in Manhattan, he mentored Cuban émigrés Alicia and Fernando Alonso, new
members of the American Ballet Theatre. For the Boston Opera House company, Fokine
designed The Russian Soldier (1942), a dual-stage presentation of a dying infantryman’s
reflection on his life. His fairy tale dance, Bluebeard (1942), debuted as a comedy-satire in
Mexico City to the music of Jacques Offenbach.
 At Fokine’s death from pneumonia on August 22, 1942, he was choreographing a
comedic Helen of Troy for the American Ballet Theatre. Around the globe, seventeen
troupes honored the dance master with simultaneous presentations of Les Sylphides, his
most memorable ballet miniature. In St. Petersburg, his granddaughter, choreographer
Isabella Fokine, produced The Return of the Firebird (1993) in his memory.
See also ballet music; modernism; Scheherazade.
Source: Garafola, Lynn. Legacies of Twentieth-Century Dance. Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 2005.
FOLKLORIC BALLET
See image in photospread.
A hybrid art, folkloric dance applies traditional gestures, facial expressions, and steps to
the costuming and choreography of indigenous troupes, such as Danse L’Afrique in Mali,
African diaspora dance by Tamboula d’Haiti, Faso Danse Theatre in Burkina Faso, and
Black Grace Dance Company, a Maori and Pacific Islander ensemble based in Mount
Eden, Auckland. Historically, influential archivists began disseminating folk culture to
urban areas, as with Bavarian dancer Alina Frasa in Helsinki in 1850. By 1866, dance
buffs staged Finnish folk performances on Helsinki stages.
The notion of a permanent grassroots national ballet began in the early 1930s with the
choreography of Igor Moiseyev, a Gallo-Romanian-Russian from Kiev who combed the
cycle-of-life celebrations for athletic steps. Classically educated at the Bolshoi school, he
considered precise barre training the “grammar” of technique and the basis of aboriginal
character dance. His philosophy contrasted with other bucolic dance ensembles, notably,
Zvonko Ljevakovic’s LADO, the Ensemble for Folk Dances and Songs of Croatia, which
banned French and Russian aesthetics from performances.
After the Kiev Ballet won a gold medal at the 1935 London International Folklore
Dance Festival, Moiseyev advanced native dance at the Theatre of Folk Art. Under patron
Josef Stalin in 1937, the pioneer began directing the State Academic Ensemble of Popular
Dance, the world’s first professional national ballet. The company instituted folkloric
ballet as an amalgamated dance genre and the introit to cultural exchange with Baku,
Azerbaijan, where Gamar Almaszadeh, the first Muslim ballerina, founded a state folk
dance troupe. Searching for high-energy material to perform at the Kremlin, Moiseyev
rode horseback over Pamir, Belarus, Ukraine, and the Ural and Caucasus Mountains to
survey village gatherings. He instructed fashion designers to imitate folk costumes, but to
downsize or eliminate any element that would impede stage movement.
Over a goodwill tour of sixty countries, the Moiseyev folkloric troupe became the first
Soviet arts propagandists to perform outside the Iron Curtain and the first indigenous
ballet to dance at the Paris Opera. The director’s Belarusian concert piece Bulba (Potato,
1937), portrayed agrarian figures planting and harvesting. In Russian Suite (1951), he
coordinated varied folk influences from Bessarabian Gypsy circle dance, Cossack
acrobatics, Croatian drmes (shaking dance), and Kalmyk and Crimean Tartar celebrations
with theatrical refinements.
 The popularity of folk ballet spread south and east from Kiev. In 1948, the
Czechoslovak State Song and Dance Ensemble, a traveling company masterminded by
choreographer Libuse Hynkova, retrieved from obscurity the folk arts heritage that had
languished during World War II. A decade later, Iran made its move to preserve Qajar
heritage by forming the National Folkloric Music, Song, and Dance. By 1964, Ballet
Prague carried folk ballet to European venues.
Latino Dance
Latin American baile folklórico began in 1952 at Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City
with the research of arts scholar Amalia Hernández, founder of the Ballet Folklorico de
Mexico. Sensual suites—Sones de Michoacan (Melodies of Michoacan), Tlacotalpan’s
Festival from Veracruz, Quetazles of Puebla, Jalisco, Tlaxcala’s Carnival—enhanced
vernacular figures with the sounds of traditional stringed instruments, Aztec and Spanish
racial icons, stagecraft, and modalities adapted to a professional corps de ballet. The
director grounded authentic movements with classical balletic turnout, attitude, and
polonaise with pointed toes.
Essential to indigenous ballet fervor, costumes in primary colors replicated national
dress. Men in black charro (cowboy) shirts and spangled pants, red bandanas, and
sombreros partnered women in china poblana outfits—peasant blouses, expansive skirts,
and hair dressed in ribbons and flowers. Dancers stressed rhythms with zapateado toe-
and-heel footwork from Andalusian flamenco as they formed processions, concentric
circles, and geometric figures and concluded with the “Jarabe Tapatío” (Mexican Hat
Dance). The ensemble developed into two companies, one resident and one touring, and
spread the exhilarating Latino heritage from Mexico across Central and South America
and the Southwestern United States.
From 1952, Pacific Island ballet by the Bayanihan Philippine National Folk Dance
Company dramatized musical theater productions through rural scenarios from the
highlands performed with ballet strategies. Inspired by the troupe in the 1960s,
preservationist Ramón Arevalo Obusan formed thirty Manila dancers into the Ramón
Obusan Folkloric Group in 1972. Based on his research into fifty ethnic life cycles, he
refined the Bayanihan approach by replacing sequined costumes with scarves and banners
and reducing stereotyped characters and spectacle to authentic processions and tableaux.
Defining Indigenous Ballet
Folkloric ballet stands apart from subsequent efforts that supplant traditional steps and
poses with theatrical choreography. In 1951, folklorist Dora Stratou observed a
performance of the Yugoslav Folk Ensemble, which performed dances from Croatia,
Hungary, Macedonia, and Serbia, including “Kalimanko” and the vigorous czardas. The
passion and national essence of the presentations influenced her to found the Greek
Dances Theatre. Based in Athens, the company performed centuries-old dances in regional
costumes, which she described in Greek Traditional Dances (1979). Unlike the Russian
and Latino touring ensembles, including the Moiseyev Folk Dance Ensemble that the
Soviet Ministry of Culture dispatched from the Kirov Ballet in 1952–1953, Stratou’s
troupe lacked grounding in pure balletic technique.
 With more attention to ballet’s basics, Egyptian choreographer and soloist Mahmoud
Reda initiated the Reda Troupe in Cairo. He immersed himself in the dances of Fred
Astaire and Gene Kelly in American movies and later made films of his own featuring
Hindu and Oriental concepts enhanced by the female hip scarf and male jetés (leaps).
While working for Royal Dutch Shell, he and partner Farida Fahmy recruited their dancers
from rural villages in 1959 and taught classic pirouettes, relevés, bourrées, and port de
bras. The troupe grew to one hundred and fifty members and carried their artistry to the
United States, Germany, England, France, Russia, and China and to International Dance
Day venues for UNESCO.
A force for heritage dance since 1967, Ballet Folklorico en Aztlan promoted the
humanism of ballet artistry. The creation of freedom fighter Herminia Acosta Enrique, the
company interpreted Chicano lore, instrumental music, song, and fashion, which Enrique’s
daughter, director Viviana C. Enrique Acosta, blended with contemporary choreography.
Sponsored by Harvard University since 1971, the company scheduled workshops, lectures,
and school assemblies. Research into traditional movements and rhythms reclaimed the
cultural uniqueness of Baja, Campeche, Chiapas, Chihuahua, Guerrero, Jalisco,
Michoacan, Nayarit, Nuevo Leon, Oaxaca, Puebla, San Luis Potosí, Sinaloa, Tabasco,
Tamaulipas, Veracruz, and Yucatán.
In 2008, the company accepted residency in San Diego, California. A varied repertoire
included “Toro Mambo” and “El Sauce y La Palma,” featuring partnering to the music of
trumpet and guitar. Fiesta Poblana consisted of festive dances from Puebla
commemorating the Mexican victory over French invaders in Cinco de Mayo. The 2014
schedule offered Sunday Zapateado, skirt dancing in Floreo, Mitotili Poblana, and The
Night Sky: A Revolutionary Rebozo, a recap of one family’s survival of the Mexico
Revolution.
At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, Alvin Ailey’s company performed Revelations
for the opening ceremony. A tribute to the indomitable spirit of the underclass, the dance
reenacted the elevation of the African diaspora through spiritual uplift. Danced by Loretta
Abbott, Lucinda Random, and Alvin Ailey, the suite enhanced the themes of ethnic
inclusion and human equality. In 2008, Peniel Guerrier, a dancer with Tamboula d’Haiti,
mounted Kriye Bode, a Haitian celebration of human community in song, drumming, and
dance. Costuming depicted Caribbean adaptation to a humid climate and female pride in
the tignon, a traditional head wrap.
In 1984, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, leader of the Unification Church,
collaborated with the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad to open a satellite academy in
Washington, D.C. A Korean peasant tale, Shim Chung (The Blind Man’s Daughter),
supplied the Shen Yun Performing Arts with folkloric material for its 2001 tour, followed
in 2014 with The Love of Chunhyang, a story of rescued virtue. An Asian extravaganza,
Shen Yun toured the United States in 2014 with a colorful, athletic folk survey covering
five thousand years of Chinese culture.
See also Ballet Afsaneh; Hernández Navarro, Amalia; Nagy, Zoltán, Jr.
 Source: Shay, Anthony. Choreographic Politics: State Folk Dance Companies,
Representation and Power. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.
FONTEYN, MARGOT (1919–1991)
One of the twentieth century’s most beloved and admired dancer-actors, Brazilian-Irish-
English ballerina Margot Fonteyn won audiences with her graceful, genteel duets. Born
Margaret Evelyn “Peggy” Hookham in Reigate, England, on May 18, 1919, she and her
older brother Felix claimed a Brazilian grandfather, Antonio Fontes, as the source of her
stage surname. Her parents, Irish-Brazilian mother Hilda Acheson and English engineer
Felix John Hookham, promoted ballet instruction for both children.
During a six-year residency in Tientsin and Shanghai, Fonteyn attended a Chinese
ballet school taught by Russian coach George Goncharov. With her mother and brother, at
age fourteen, she lived in London apart from her father, whom the Japanese had
imprisoned. At the Vic-Wells Ballet School, she thrived on the expertise of director
Ninette de Valois and dance masters Olga Preobrajenska, Vera Volkova, and Mathilde
Kschessinska.
A Teen Ballerina
Fonteyn realized her career goal as Frederick Ashton’s protégé and star of Façade (1931),
a scintillating ballet. Upon the departure of Alicia Markova in 1935 to form the Markova-
Dolin Company, Fonteyn moved into the roles of Odette/Odile, Aurora, and Markova’s
favorite, Giselle. To Igor Stravinsky’s music, Fonteyn starred in Le Baiser de la Fée (The
Fairy’s Kiss, 1928), choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska. For BBC-TV, Fonteyn and
Robert Helpmann partnered in a production of Frederick Ashton’s Les Patineurs (The
Skaters, 1937), a witty suite of pointe work and pas de deux based on Victorian ice rink
parties.
After the onset of World War II in England, Fonteyn and Helpmann led the Sadler’s
Wells ensemble in The Sleeping Beauty, a command performance before soldiers and
Queen Mary, and continued their troop entertainment in Brussels. By 1939, Fonteyn
progressed to prima ballerina. She joined Moira Shearer for Ashton’s post–World War II
Symphonic Variations (1946) and performed a duet with romantic soloist Michael Somes
in a Christmas 1948 presentation of Cinderella. In the same year, she executed a duet with
dance designer Roland Petit for Les Ballets de Paris in Les Demoiselles de la Nuit (The
Ladies of the Night).
Nureyev’s Partner
Opposite Tartar defector Rudolf Nureyev, Fonteyn reached a second height of fame. In
1955 in St. Petersburg, Russia, she danced Medora’s part in Le Corsaire (The Pirate), a
narrative heroic ballet the duo repeated in Tehran in 1969. In 1959, she initiated a
freelance schedule. A guest appearance in Warsaw again paired Fonteyn with Somes in
Swan Lake. A 1963 performance of Les Sylphides teamed her with Hungarian soloist Iván
Nagy, but Nureyev dominated her performances for fifteen years.
 At the height of her career with the Royal Ballet, Fonteyn tailored slipper bodies of silk
and satin attached to a leather insole to accommodate feathery battements and
changements. In 1962, she dramatized Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand with Nureyev,
forming the era’s most famous pas de deux. The Australian Ballet featured Nureyev and
Fonteyn in a 1963 production of Giselle; in Marseilles, Roland Petit’s ensemble welcomed
the pair as Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost (1967). She took a frothy costume role in
Helpmann’s 1975 version of The Merry Widow and another duet with Nureyev for Martha
Graham’s Lucifer (1975).
At the Royal Opera House, the venerable ballerina retired from dance at age sixty. At
age seventy-seven in Florida, she returned to the character role of the Queen Mother in
The Sleeping Beauty. She served the University of Durham as chancellor. As cancer
invaded her pelvis, she underwent hip replacement.
In dire financial straits, Fonteyn settled on a Panamanian cattle ranch at El Higo to care
for her invalid husband, former diplomat and newspaper editor Roberto Emilio Arias, and
his three children, Rosita, Roberto, and Querube. Fonteyn’s lifetime of dance earned
accolades from the British Empire and honorary doctorates. Shortly before her death from
bone cancer on February 21, 1991, she recounted a ballet in a children’s book, Coppélia
(1998).
See also The Lady of the Camellias.
Source: Daneman, Meredith. Margot Fonteyn: A Life. London: Penguin, 2005.
FORSYTHE, WILLIAM (1949–)
American contemporary soloist-choreography theorist William Forsythe creates darkly
dynamic ballets that have entered repertoires in New York, San Francisco, Canada,
England, Paris, and St. Petersburg. A New Yorker born on December 30, 1949, he came of
age in Manhasset, Long Island, during the era of rock and roll on the TV series American
Bandstand. He danced the twist and mashed potato and appeared in high school musicals.
American contemporary soloist and dance theorist William Forsythe creates darkly dynamic ballets, such as
Steptext, performed by Yolanda Correa and Aarne Kristian Ruutu of the Norwegian National Opera & Ballet.
Photo by Erik Berg, Lene Jacobsen, Norwegian National Opera & Ballet, operaen.no

At Jacksonville University in Florida, Forsythe studied art history and drama while
performing with a modern dance troupe. He trained at age twenty-one with the Joffrey
Ballet during its creative height. He performed in Gerald Arpino’s Olympics (1966) and in
ballets by Léonide Massine and Kurt Jooss. On private time, Forsythe studied the works of
his idol, George Balanchine.
European Career
In 1973, Forsythe and his wife, soloist-costumer Eileen Brady, moved to Germany to
dance with the Stuttgart Ballet under director Marcia Haydée. Within three years, he
advanced to company choreographer, a post he held until 1983. The pioneering moves of
his original works—the duet Ulricht (1976); Daphne (1977) to an Antonin Dvorak
symphony; Dream of Galilei (1978), scored by Krzysztof Penderecki; Love Songs (1979)
to the pop ballads of Aretha Franklin and Dionne Warwick; and the two-act Orpheus
(1979)—made his reputation as an iconoclast.
During four years of freelance dance making and rearing his two sons and daughter,
Forsythe married Tracy-Kai Maier and mounted ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1980) in Italy,
followed by commentary on child rape in Say Bye-Bye (1982), Gänge (Gears, 1983), and
France/Dance (1983) to a Bach fugue. The sound collage of the avant-garde Artifact
(1984), his first full-length ballet, intrigued audiences across Northwestern Europe and in
New York and San Francisco. He directed the thirty-five-member Ballet Frankfurt for the
next two decades, achieving global interest in the musical comedy Isabelle’s Dance (1986)
and New Sleep (1987), set to an experimental light design that quartered the stage along
diagonals.
Forsythe wrote more heavy-handed works in the late 1980s, notably, In the Middle,
Somewhat Elevated (1987), an apocalyptic work prized for its shock value at its debut by
the Paris Opera Ballet. Dance critics mused over the heavily percussive Impressing the
Czar (1988), a satire of romantic ballet, the misogyny of Behind the China Dogs (1988),
and Herman Schmerman (1992), which appealed to a young audience. After the struggle
of watching his wife die of cancer in 1994, he choreographed Duo (1996) in part to
silence, Steptext (1997) as a vehicle for Dana Caspersen and Stephen Dalle, and the droll
One Flat Thing (2000) to tabletop movements.
Master of Experiments
The disbanding of the Frankfurt ensemble in 2004 inspired the choreographer to form the
Forsythe Company (FC), a downsized state arts program funded by Hesse, Saxony,
Dresden, and Frankfurt. Headquartered in Dresden and Frankfurt, the FC staged White
Bouncy Castle (1997), City of Abstracts (2000), Kammer/Kammer (Room/Room, 2000),
Scattered Crowd (2002), and You Made Me a Monster (2005). His collaboration with artist
Peter Welz, airdrawing/whenever on on on nohow on (2004), overlapped dance kinetics
from five camera angles. In his last nine years as director in Frankfurt, Forsythe produced
Heterotopia (2006), Yes We Can’t (2008), and The Returns (2009).
In May 2014, Forsythe progressed from choreographer to discordant music collages and
teacher at Dresden’s Palucca Schule to professor at the Glorya Kaufman School of Dance,
University of Southern California–L.A. At the International Dance Center, his initial USC
students will consist of the department’s first dance majors. He carries with him honoraria
—four Bessie Awards, three Olivier Awards, a Wexner Prize, and a 2010 Golden Lion
from Venice for lifetime achievement.
Source: Spier, Steven, ed. William Forsythe and the Practice of Choreography: It Starts
from Any Point. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2011.
 • G •
GISELLE
The two-act storybook classic Giselle reflected the height of Romantic ballet. From Paris
and Russia to the United States, Caribbean, and South Pacific, it pleased audiences with its
gentle ghost story about the transcendent power of love over vengeance. The story derived
from Victor Hugo’s poem “Fantômes” (Ghosts, 1829) and a description of the Wilis in
Heinrich Heine’s De l’Allemagne (On Germany, 1833). Set to music composed by French
musician Adolphe Adam, the debut at the Paris Opera featured the choreography of Jean
Coralli and Jules Perrot and the libretto of Jules Saint-Georges and Théophile Gautier.
For the first time in ballet history, a story with universal appeal swept theaters
worldwide. First danced by principals Carlotta Grisi opposite Lucien Petipa on June 28,
1841, the romantic lead as an unearthly fairy maid flattered Grisi and her stage strengths.
A layered skirt, flowered headband, and wings added femininity to the delicate
choreography, which Perrot personalized with a leitmotif of steps. Lucien countered her
innocence with the willful insouciance of an aristocrat sampling the naïveté of the agrarian
class. Arts historians posed another characterization of the male role as a tragic nobleman
who meets a soulmate too low in social class to make marriage feasible.
The Gothic rudiments of retaliation beyond death derived from the Slavic term vila, a
female vampire beset by rage at her mistreatment on Earth. The motif of the accursed
maiden permeated east European lore. The Bulgarian samovily, a girl who died before
baptism, paralleled the Serbian female cursed by God. A Polish version pictured airy,
floating female spirits who lacked substance because of their shallow behaviors on Earth.
The Polish ghost came closest to the ballet’s depiction of Wilis as phantom night dancers,
specifically Giselle, who ignored her mother’s advice and depleted her body by dancing to
extremes, a lethal fault. As characters in Giselle, the title figure and the other Wilis
appeared in virginal bridal dresses with flower circlets in their hair, a deliberate disguise of
vengeful hearts.
The Love Rectangle
A model of early nineteenth-century Gothicism, the story, set in the medieval Rhineland,
parallels the era’s operas for its sincere love plaint and motifs of doom-laden predictions,
hellish dangers, and regret. The plot turns on the cruel deception wrought by Albrecht of
Silesia, a duke who lives in a German village and poses as the peasant Loys. During the
fall grape harvest, he flirts with Giselle, a local girl who enters waltzing. Her delicacy
suggests the ballet blanc, the plotless ballet showcasing innocence as the realm of the
young, untried female.
 The storybook classic Giselle reflected the height of Romantic ballet and provided a
1943 vehicle for the New York debut of Alicia Alonso opposite choreographer Anton
Dolin. Stars of the American Ballet Theatre, p. 39, #75.

Ignorant of Albrecht’s engagement to the Princess Bathilde, the splendidly dressed

daughter of the Duke of Courland, Giselle vows to marry Loys/Albrecht. Both Berthe,
Giselle’s prescient mother, and Hilarion, a gamekeeper, fail to dissuade Giselle from
trusting Albrecht, a reckless playboy. Berthe prefers Hilarion as future son-in-law as a
means of shielding Giselle from early death and incorporation in the Wilis, the ghosts of
jilted females. Ironically, the triad of Berthe, Giselle, and Albrecht suggests the backstage
mothers who protected young ballerinas from despoilers, the lecherous roués who posed
as arts buffs while combing troupes for unsuspecting naifs.
When wealthy hunters stop by the village for refreshments following la chase royale,
their social prominence symbolizes the upper class stalking the rural social orders for
amusement and debauchery. In the tradition of the lower class, the peasants dance to
entertain the aristocrats. Giselle dominates Loys to prevent his consorting with other girls.
Bathilde rewards Giselle’s dancing with a necklace.
The first evidence of trickery shocks the onlookers. Hilarion presents Albrecht’s
jeweled sword as proof that he is noble. Giselle’s emotional response to deception results
in madness, the passion-driven furor that consumes Ophelia and Lucia di Lammermoor in
tragedy and opera. As fragile as the fairy in La Sylphide, Giselle suffers heart failure
brought on by the dawn chill and collapses in Albrecht’s arms.
The second act pictures Wilis on the lookout for duplicitous males, an empowerment
that they lacked on Earth as women. A vampirish enchantress, Myrtha, the queen of the
Wilis, leads the hunt for two-timing males, whom the Wilis force to dance themselves to
death, a poetic punishment for roués. Too late, Hilarion, grieving for Giselle, flees the
cemetery. The Wilis summon Giselle’s ghost to initiate her into their forays in the woods.
Critics admired dancer Adèle Dumilâtre as Myrtha for her seeming weightlessness, a
characteristic suggesting William Shakespeare’s Ariel and Puck.
An oboe solo voices how sincerely Albrecht graces the plot with flowers and tears of
remorse. At his repentance for tricking Giselle, her ghost forgives him. When she departs
to join the Wilis, Albrecht pursues her. As ineluctable as the Greek Medusa, the Wilis
locate the oafish Hilarion, force him to dance, then drown him in the lake. When the
spirits choose Albrecht as their next victim, he pleads for reprieve, which Myrtha refuses
by tapping him with her wand.
The resolution accords double strength to affection, which saves both the Duke and
Giselle. Albrecht dances until dawn, when his strength ebbs. At the stroke of the village
bells, Giselle’s love breaks the spell and rescues Albrecht from death. Released from the
spite of Myrtha and the Wilis, Giselle slips peacefully back into her resting place.
Albrecht, who pays the price for breaching caste boundaries and loving a plebeian girl,
remains alive and bowed with sorrow.
An Immortal Role
Giselle received its Russian premiere in 1842 and 1843, when Elena Andreyanova danced
the title part opposite Marius Petipa in St. Petersburg and Moscow. As a vehicle for
Carlotta Grisi, productions of Giselle quadrupled her salary from 5,000 to 20,000 francs
plus performance bonuses. A statue of Grisi at the Paris Opera preserved her stardom. The
popular ballet eventually passed to troupes in Milan, Boston, London, Stockholm,
Copenhagen, Melbourne, Stuttgart, and Havana.
In 1903, ballet master Petipa directed Anna Pavlova in a performance of Giselle in St.
Petersburg. Russian stage manager Nicholas Sergeyev arranged the Imperial Ballet
production in 1910, the second year of the Ballets Russes. The restaging stressed
ephemeral emotions and the craft of the danseuse en pointe, whose delicacy suggested the
malaise of young female victims of consumption. Vaslav Nijinsky, playing the aristocratic
Albrecht of Silesia, created scandal by wearing no pants over the tights that stretched over
his groin. Subsequent Sergeyev performances at the Paris Opera in 1924 and in London in
1934 standardized the ballet.
For the Dance Theatre of Harlem, in 1988, British choreographer Frederic Franklin
created ethnic interest with Creole Giselle, a merger of European romanticism with
African American voodoo superstitions. Set in Louisiana during the 1840s, the Creole
version layered the Rhineland folk tale with the social rise of freedmen over slaves. The
American Giselle, played by Virginia Johnson, lacked the class advantages of blacks far
removed from slavery’s stigma and thus died of heartbreak. Franklin’s staging elevated
black dancers in the art world and opened opportunities for mixed-race companies.
Prima ballerina Alessandra Ferri and Massimo Murru reprised the starring roles in 1996
with the La Scala Ballet. In 2006, a revival by the Paris Opera Ballet complicated the plot
by presenting Berthe as the former lover of the Duke of Courland. Her adultery made
Giselle a half-sister of Bathilde. The convoluted family tree suggested a doppelgänger
with Giselle and Bathilde presenting two halves of the same persona.
Source: Smith, Marian Elizabeth. Ballet and Opera in the Age of Giselle. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2000.
GORSKY, ALEXANDER (1871–1924)
A pathfinder of dramatic twentieth-century choreography, Russian dance master
Alexander Alexeyevich Gorsky directed the Bolshoi away from athletic solos to realistic
characterization. Born to an accountant near St. Petersburg on August 6, 1871, he entered
training with his sister at the Imperial Ballet School at age eight. Educated by Marius
Petipa and Enrico Cecchetti, the boy advanced to character dancer in The Nutcracker and
the opera Tannhäuser and, in 1885, to soloist in productions of La Fille Mal Gardée (The
Poorly Guarded Girl), La Flûte Magique (The Magic Flute) in 1893, and the debut of the
Anacreontic ballet Le Réveil de Flore (Flora’s Awakening, 1894).
By 1896, Gorsky worked at the Mariinsky Theatre as dancer, instructor, and archivist of
choreographic notation, a project begun by Vladimir Stepanov in 1893. Central to
Gorsky’s creativity was the advancement of the career of diva Ekaterina Vasilievna. Two
years later, he moved to Moscow to become stage manager for the Bolshoi company’s
production of The Sleeping Beauty. In his mid-twenties, Gorsky systemized stage manager
Stepanov’s dance coding in A Table of Signs and Notation (1899). The text organized
movement of legs, arms, and torso before discussion of turns to left and right, back and
front, and a differentiation between gymnastics and dance.
Gorsky applied the shorthand to the Imperial Ballet’s staging of Chlorinda, Queen of
the Mountain Fairies (1899), which he chose as a final examination for students. His code
preserved a wealth of archival dance plans alongside program notes, music, settings,
costumes, and photos. Influenced by the free-style dance of Isadora Duncan and method
acting of Konstantin Stanislavsky, Gorsky established dramatic relevance by resetting
picturesque ballets to a less rigid pattern of steps and mime imposed by aged dance master
Marius Petipa. Because of unfavorable critical response to Petipa’s Le Miroir Magique
(The Magic Mirror, 1902), Gorsky moved into the directorship.
Starting Afresh
Gorsky’s leadership of Moscow’s Bolshoi ballet cleansed a clichéd arts program and
restored its vigor with embellishments and avant-garde comedy that rivaled the Kirov
Ballet. A stir in the ballet world attracted Vaslav Nijinsky and Mathilda Kschessinska to
Moscow to witness the vivid staging of Gorsky’s early ballets. The most successful
variations under the Moscow ballet style broke the symmetry of the corps de ballet in Don
Quixote in 1900 and added character dancing to Swan Lake the next year, La Bayadère
(The Temple Dancer) in 1904, and Raymonda in 1905.
Gorsky’s innovations included excerpting Gudule’s Daughter (1902) from the 1831
novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame and employing ballet photography both as a
teaching tool and a separate art. For a favorite student, Vera Karalli, the dance master
added Asian touches to Nur and Anitra (1906), in which she employed unconventional
gestures that eroticized the entwining of her limbs with those of male lead Mikhail
Mordkin. Gorsky also designed cinema performances for Karalli. At London’s Alhambra
Theatre on May 29, 1911, he directed Vasily Tikhomirov and Yekaterina Geltzer in The
Dance Dream in celebration of the coronation of George V.
Progressive Reform
Gorsky revolutionized modern ballet one element at a time, as with Geltzer and
Tikhomirov’s robust interpretation of Medora and Conrad in composer Hector Berlioz’s
1912 restaging of Le Corsaire (The Pirate). The director summoned expressive acting in
Eunice and Petronius (1915), a harmonious rendition of Glazunov’s Fifth Symphony
(1916), and the costuming of shades in saris for a 1917 reworking of La Bayadère. For
The Nutcracker, in 1919, Gorsky imagined the action as a dream rather than fantasy. He
removed the Cavalier’s pas de deux with the Sugar Plum Fairy and retained the
choreography as an adult flirtation between Masha and the Prince.
In the year following the 1917 Russian Revolution and the pirating of the Stepanov
archive to London, Gorsky’s impact on Russian ballet established a second creative center
at Moscow. His last recreations removed static performances from Salome’s Dance (1921)
and The Venus Grotto (1923), set to the compositions of Richard Wagner. For Giselle in
1922, Gorsky garbed the Wilis in nightgowns, a visual symbol of their nocturnal
wanderings. At his death in an insane asylum on October 20, 1924, his variations
established a canon of modern ballets reprised by the Bolshoi in 2015.
See also Bolshoi Ballet.
Source: Volynskii, A. L. Ballet’s Magic Kingdom: Selected Writings on Dance in
Russia, 1911–1925. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.
GRAHAM, MARTHA (1894–1991)
The founder of American modern dance, Martha Graham honored the eternal magic of
movement to music by choreographing two hundred ballets. A native of Allegheny,
Pennsylvania, she was born on May 11, 1894, to Scots-Irish mother Jane Beers. Her
father, physician George Greenfield Graham, illustrated the healing power of relaxed
tensions on sufferers of nerve ailments, a cure that impacted the style and technique of
Martha’s canon.
While the family lived in Santa Barbara, California, Dr. Graham exerted Presbyterian
proprieties and denied Martha’s request to take ballet lessons. Upon graduating with an art
degree from Cumnock Junior College, in 1916, she entered training under Ted Shawn and
Ruth St. Denis. Within two years, she joined the staff of the Denishawn School. She
performed as an Aztec maiden in the ballet legend Xochitl (1920) and flaunted Hispanic
fashions in Serenata Morisca (Moorish Serenade, 1916) and Spanish Suite I (1922).
In the 1923 Greenwich Village Follies in New York, Graham performed Michio Ito’s
The Garden of Kama, poet Adela Nicolson’s imitation of Sufist verse. Graham formed a
multiracial dance troupe in 1925 and taught her unique style in Rochester at the Eastman
School of Music. At the Martha Graham Company premiere on April 18, 1926, her flair
for slinky, clingy costumes, eloquent ballets, and her solos—Intermezzo, Portrait, Deux
Valses (Two Waltzes), Désir, From a XII Century Tapestry, Maid with the Flaxen Hair,
Masques, Novelette, and Danse Rococo (Ornate Dance)—received critical nods for
versatility and a fresh perspective on mime and postures. She originated a stagy
Orientalism for A Study in Lacquer, for which she wrapped herself in a voluminous satin
robe.
Dance Design
Immersed in the romantic fashions of the day, Graham featured company stars Thelma
Biracree, Evelyn Sabin, and Betty Macdonald in The Flute of Krishna (1926), a film for
the Eastman School of Music. At a 1927 staging, Graham only directed the ensemble and
left the dancing of Arabesque and Five Poems to pupils. By 1929, media commentary
proclaimed Graham a contributor to psychoanalytic modernism.
After inaugurating the Dance Repertory Theatre in 1930, Graham concentrated on
showcasing American talent, who executed steps to scores by Arthur Honegger, Zoltán
Kodály, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Tibor Harsányi, and Igor Stravinsky. For her audacious revolt
against primly structured ballet, in 1932, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which
enabled her to commission scores from composer Louis Horst for Frontier (1935) and
Horizons (1936), set against an oversized mobile. She soloed as the Virgin Mary in Six
Miracle Plays (1933), a unique medieval suite that preceded her invitation to dance at
Carnegie Hall in 1935.
With stage artistry, Graham supported liberal causes, particularly labor unions, poverty
relief, and Spanish independence. In 1938, she began adding male dancers to her
ensemble, initially soloists Merce Cunningham and Erick Hawkins, her future husband,
who took the lead in the droll comedy Every Soul Is a Circus (1939). Her productions
continued throughout World War II, including Lamentation (1943), a full-body solo
depicting grief. The 1944 premiere of Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring was an
evocation of the pioneer spirit starring Hawkins and Graham. In peacetime, she mounted
Cave of the Heart (1946), featuring the story of Jason and Medea danced to the music of
Samuel Barber.
Graham commissioned music by Norman Dello Joio for Diversion of Angels (1948) and
Seraphic Dialogue (1955) and hired Gian Carlo Menotti to write music for Errand into the
Maze (1947) and William Schuman to score three pieces—the trials of Oedipus Rex in
Night Journey (1947), the murder of the scriptural villain Holofernes in Judith (1950), and
The Witch of Endor (1959), created for CBS-TV with Gus Solomons in the role of a giant.
After recovering from a knee injury, Graham ventured to Paris in July 1955 and hired Paul
Taylor, a pioneer of ballets depicting incest, rape, and other sexual transgressions.
Career Satisfactions
Graham’s astute development of a hybrid wing of ballet won her a second Guggenheim
Fellowship, a 1956 citation from Dance Magazine, and a 1960 Capezio Award, which
followed the success of Clytemnestra (1958), her only full-length ballet, in which she
played the vengeful wife of Agamemnon from Greek tragedy. During her mentoring of
choreographer Glen Tetley, she engaged Spanish musician Carlos Surinach to write music
for Embattled Garden (1958), an Edenic pairing of Eve with a seductive Stranger, and
Acrobats of God (1960), a witty tribute to professional dance. In Israel in 1965, Graham
directed Greek tragedies for the Batsheva Dance Company, a project of former student
Bethsabée de Rothschild, and oversaw Glen Tetley’s Mythical Hunters (1965), a fusion
ballet of atavistic seekers.
Because Graham gave up dance after performing scenes from the Trojan War in
Cortege of Eagles (1970), depression and drinking destabilized her health, thrusting her
into a coma and suicide attempts. After defeating alcoholism in 1972, she concentrated on
choreography, which won her a 1976 Medal of Freedom from President Gerald Ford. She
died of pneumonia in New York on April 1, 1991. Colleague Agnes de Mille recorded
evidence of her genius in the biography Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham
(1991), dances reprised at California State in 2015.
See also modernism; Naharin, Ohad.
Source: De Mille, Agnes. Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham. New York:
Random House, 1991.
GREEK NATIONAL OPERA BALLET
The professional artistry of the Greek National Opera Ballet (GNOB) provides the city of
Athens with a tourist magnet. A force for classical dance since 1939, the company gained
momentum from the discipline and technical skill of Czech dancer Sasa Machov.
Functioning as a limb of the opera, corps de ballet performed at the Olympia Theatre in
opera and operetta, but rarely staged full-length works.
At the company’s official premiere on March 5, 1940, Ukrainian dancer Tatiana Varouti
Mamaki opened the Johann Strauss operetta Die Fledermaus (The Bat) as lead dancer.
The arrival of Axis soldiers in Athens on October 28, 1940, drove Machov out of ballet,
into the Czechoslovakian military, and, in 1950, to suicide in Greece. After study at the
Preobrajenski School in Paris, in 1951, Mamaki settled in Athens to choreograph in
Machov’s place and cofounded the Athens School of Ballet.
Nationalistic Dance
Following World War II, the GNOB focused on indigenous works, notably, Samian
composer Manolis Kalomiris’s symphonic poem La Mort de la Vaillante (The Death of the
Valiant Woman, 1948) and Giorgios Sklavos’s L’Aigle (The Eagle, 1956). At the Theatre
du Champ de Mars in Paris, the company debuted Panegyris and Idyll in Cephalonia
(1953), which choreographer Jean Fleury set to the music of Greek composer Argyris
Kounadis. Dance critics for Ballet Today applauded the brilliant costuming of romantic
dance, which promoted escapism from memories of bombs and fascist occupation. In
1959, the company took their all-Greek program of ancient song and dance to Heidelberg,
another area tormented by memories of combat.
By 1980, the artistic director fleshed out programs with story ballet—Giselle, Romeo
and Juliet, The Nutcracker, Cinderella, The Sleeping Beauty, La Bayadère, Raymonda,
The Snow Maiden, and Les Sylphides. Anna Petrova, a native of Thessalonika and
principal with the GNOB, performed key roles in Night on Bald Mountain, La Boutique
Fantasque (The Magic Toyshop), and Le Miroir Magique (The Magic Mirror, 1903), a
staging of Snow White as ballet. Key to the company’s technique and execution, principal
dancer Anthony Vassiliades set an example of discipline and accuracy. Director-musician
Leonidas de Pian, a promoter of choreodrama, choreographed Le Corsaire (The Pirate)
and Don Quixote and established the Athens Ballet Center.
Analysis in the 1990s revealed organizational faults in the Greek ballet as well as the
need for a Friends Society. Pian’s successor, Petrova, a distinguished educator, began
restructuring with the aid of dancer Yannis Metsis, a proponent of neoclassical dance and
founder of Athens Experimental Ballet. In 1999, Petrova directed the ensemble and
returned programs to the classical canon by staging Don Quixote. In 2000 to 2004, she
organized tours under the Cultural Olympic Program and performed at the Olympiad Gala.
Into the twenty-first century, choreographer Irek Mukhamedov and artistic director
Lynn Seymour staged three works for the Greek ensemble’s 2008–2009 season: Giselle,
Eugene Onegin, and Aida. To invigorate the 2010 schedule, artistic director Christiana
Stefanou chose from the neoclassic canon Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Snow
Maiden, Le Corsaire, and Giselle. Touring introduced the group to viewers in Turkey,
Egypt, Australia, and France.
A Balanced Repertoire
In 2012, austerity budgeting by the Greek treasury slashed 35 percent of funds for training
and performance. Cost cutting affected major works, including a richly costumed version
of The Nutcracker, choreographer Renato Zanella’s Everybody Waltzes (2011), and Canto
Generale (1974), featuring Albanian soloist Danilo Zeka performing to an oratorio by
Mikis Theodorakis. Amid swirling ball gowns and tuxedos, Romeo and Juliet featured
Evrydiki Issaakidou and Zeka, both veteran presenters at the Festival of the Aegean, an
international celebration of music on the island of Syros in the Cyclades.
To retain a semblance of concern for the underfunded arts, the Greek National Opera
initiated the Dancebox Project, which trained free for two years eleven unemployed
dancers, including Marina Courti and Emilia Gaspari. After lengthy debate of treasury
shortfalls, in November 2012, Eurogroup, a transnational management forum, financed the
salaries of ballet company members. At the time, dancers were doggedly rehearsing Swan
Lake for the upcoming season on less than a living wage.
The 2013–2014 Greek National Ballet program included Cinderella, The Nutcracker,
and Yannick Boquin’s debut of Chopin in Love (2014), based on Wolfgang von Goethe’s
novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. A breakthrough in existential dance, Zanella’s
Journey to Eternity (2014) gave a stark glimpse of the afterlife costumed in street dress.
For a summer performance in the ancient Roman agora, Greek ballerina Maria Kousouni
starred in Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 5. On Young Choreographers Night 2013,
Kousoni’s Don’t Forget to Play (2013) grouped four performers in outdoor clothes
imitating youthful fun and self-discovery. In 2015, performances moved to the Stavros
Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre, designed by Renzo Piano as a waterfront venue.
Source: Dubin, Marc. Greece, Athens, and the Mainland. London: Dorling Kindersley,
2013.
GUANGZHOU BALLET
A product of Maoist philosophy, the Guangzhou Ballet (GB) has enjoyed more than a half
century of artistic excellence. In the 1920s, Russian visitors to China introduced stage
dance in Harbin, Tianjin, and Shanghai and opened dance academies. By 1954, Beijing
founded the indigenous Beijing Dance Academy, the impetus to incremental training in
ballet and mentoring of professional dancers. Early choreography featured such Chinese
works as composer Shang Yi’s pantomime Fish Beauty (1959), a Gothic fable of thwarted
love between a mermaid and hunter.
Established in Canton on December 31, 1959, Beijing’s arts community formed
National Ballet of China some three centuries after Western dance initiatives and profited
from European advances in technique, attire, musicality, and design. The people of
Guangzhou welcomed a classical dance troupe, the Central Ballet of China, which
modeled a fusion of classical steps with authentic East Asian folk gestures and
sensibilities. A series of city companies followed the Beijing example—in Shanghai and
Hong Kong in 1979, Liaoning in 1980, Tianjin in 1992, and Suzhou in 2007.
The Guangzhou Ballet emulated the Soviet Ministry of Culture’s programming of
Communist propaganda for the Bolshoi and Kirov companies by embracing yangbanxi
(revolutionary model works), the stereotypical motifs imposed by Jiang Qing (Madame
Mao) that ossified and stagnated the arts. The Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976
prompted composer Ma Ke’s Maoist dance drama Baimaonü (The White-Haired Girl,
1965), which concludes with the overthrow of a wealthy land owner and the reunion of
parted lovers in a more equitable society. Into the 1980s, Chinese artists communicated
with foreign dancers and incorporated Western techniques and narratives. A notable
addition to the Guangzhou repertoire, John Cranko’s 1965 version of Eugene Onegin
adapted a novel by Alexander Pushkin that shamed prestigious families for rejecting
intermarriage with the peasant class.
Russo-Chinese Ballet
In the 1960s, Peter Gusev, the distinguished director of the Kirov Ballet, led a cadre of
dance masters to introduce Russian technique and discipline. At the Guangzhou Ballet
Academy, boarding students learned the Vaganova method, a technique that encouraged
artistic exchange with other Russian-trained dancers in the Soviet Union, Germany,
France, Sweden, England, Canada, and the United States. In 1964, the company premiered
Hongse Niangzijun (The Red Detachment of Women), a Chinese tale of revolutionary
martyrdom of female soldiers. To depict the liberation of peasants and the distribution of
free grain, dancers studied sword fighting in army camps. For a performance for President
and Mrs. Richard Nixon on February 22, 1972, the Western-style symphony, China’s first
and only orchestra, incorporated musicians from Tianjin, Shanghai, and Beijing.
Mastery of European dance won the GB dancers the 1993 National Lotus Cup contest
for debuting Dancing over the Xiaoxiang River. In cooperation with Guangzhou
University and the Xinghai Conservatory of Music, in January 1994, the ensemble
acquired the current name Guangzhou Ballet. The ensemble passed to founding director
Dan Dan Zhang, a ten-year veteran of the company who distinguished herself by
choreographing Cao Xueqin’s mid-eighteenth-century saga The Dream of the Red
Chamber (2008), a saga of jealousy and debauchery in a royal family. For performers,
Zhang recruited members from the Beijing Dance Academy.
The repertoire moved from story ballet—The Sleeping Beauty, Don Quixote, Coppélia,
Cinderella, and Giselle—to Chinese folk tales, the sources of Raise the Red Lantern
(1991), Lan Huahua, Goddess of the Luo River (1991), and composer Du Mingxin’s
Human Sentiment and Yellow River (1992), a series of tableaus honoring the Yangtze
River. In addition, the GB performed ballet dramas—Anna Karenina, Romeo and Juliet,
and La Traviata (The Fallen Woman). In 1997, the group extended their range with the
Chinese folk tale The Black Phoenix, which won Zhang a China Drama Plum Blossom
Award. Two dancers, Guo Fei and Qiu Lu, earned honoraria from the National Taoli Cup
contest.
In 1998, the GB formed an East-West alliance with the Long Beach Ballet and artistic
director David Wilcox. He staged an abridged version of The Nutcracker in January 1999,
when the ensemble reprised their Christmas success in Los Angeles. Wilcox facilitated
more tours of the Guangzhou Ballet to Hong Kong, Australia, Canada, the United States,
Europe, and Russia, encompassing twenty countries.
An Integrated Repertoire
Globally, twenty-first century tastes demanded multicultural diversity. In 2003, the
Chinese ensemble mounted La Bayadère (The Temple Dancer), featuring ballerina Fu Shu
paired with soloist Wang Shiwei. For Chinese-Canadian choreographer Fu Xingbang’s
nationalistic hero story, Mei Lanfang (2002), lyric dancer Chao Lemeng honored the 1941
self-exile of a Chinese opera singer who refused to perform for Japan’s occupation forces.
The following year, senior soloist Xuan Cheng won a silver medal at the 2004 Shanghai
International Ballet Competition. In 2006, the sixty-three-member company restaged the
classic Cinderella to the music of Leo Delibes. The following season, Zhang scheduled
the recovered classic La Sylphide.
In autumn 2011 in Ottawa and Toronto, the GB performed ballet master Fu Xingbang’s
tragic love story Return on a Snowy Night (2010), an adaptation of Xu Zuguang’s stage
drama. In Vancouver, British Columbia, the company danced The Butterfly Lovers (1981),
a fable of metamorphosis set to Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. The fall program also
offered Swan Lake, Le Corsaire (The Pirate), and the sprightly That Day, This Moment
(2011), choreographer Long Yunna’s contemporary Chinese dance. For carrying native
artistry to the Western Hemisphere, the company earned an award for best ballet from the
China Culture Bureau.
At Guangzhou Opera House, the Hong Kong Ballet contributed presentations of Swan
Lake to the 2013 Guangzhou Arts Festival. In 2014, the GB began the new year with a
three-day showing of The Nutcracker. The company performed The Little Mermaid, a
1952 Ukrainian children’s ballet, and a twentieth anniversary special, Shaolin in the Wind
(2004), a blend of tragic love and kung fu combat by Shaolin monk Tian Yuan. At present,
the ensemble maintains a repertoire of sixty-five works. The dance academy teaches two
thousand pupils with a staff-student ratio of one to four. In 2015, GB toured with a revival
of Return on a Snowy Night in Canada and the United States.
Source: Ng, Kevin. “Guangzhou Ballet: Mei Lanfang.” Ballet Magazine (December
2003).
 • H •
HERNÁNDEZ NAVARRO, AMALIA (1917–2000)
Mestizo arts scholar Amalia Hernández Navarro applied archival research to the
establishment of baile folklórico (folkloric ballet) as a global model of the people’s dance.
Born in Mexico City to Amalia Navarro and Colonel Lamberto Hernández on September
1, 1917, Amalia grew up in luxury. From training in music, singing, and art, she
progressed to a love of anthropology, pre-Columbian art and dance, Spanish sarabands and
flamenco, and buoyant Mexican polka, fandango, bolero, zapateo, zambra, and the
Aragonese jota, a complex ring dance to castanet rhythms.
In 1925, Hernández acquired grounding in French ballet. Her father provided an in-
house studio and tutors Hipolite Sybine, a ballerina with the company of Anna Pavlova,
and Nesly Dambré, a dance mistress at the Paris Opera. More instruction followed with
dance mistress La Argentinita (Encarnación López) and American choreographer Waldeen
Falkenstein and with folklorist Luis Felipe Obregon, a collector of Mexican dances.
In 1934, Hernández enrolled at the Mexican Academy of Dance and specialized in
Mexican art at the National School of Anthropology. After marriage, she taught
contemporary dance at the Fine Arts National Institute. From standard choreography she
moved into Central America’s indigenous dance motifs of the Totonac, Zapotec, Jarocho,
Orozco, Maya, and Olmec.
A pioneer of folk dance, in 1952 at Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, Hernández
introduced the Ballet Moderno de México, a hybridized folk ballet. The company debuted
her first work, Antiguos Sones de Michoacán (Ancient Melodies of Michoacan). She
focused her objectives more clearly after studying under dramatic Japanese choreographer
Seki Sano and teaming with dancer-artistic director Felipe Segura, a technical specialist.
Ballet Research
For accurate representation of the provinces, Hernández compiled a repertoire of
ethnically and geographically Mesoamerican ballet suites—Tlaxcala’s Carnival, Fiesta
Veracruzana (Festival from Veracruz), and Quetzales of Puebla (Birds of Puebla). She
costumed an eight-member ensemble in vernacular Aztec and Hispanic dress, masks,
ribbons, stilts, feathered headdress, and hair garlands and choreographed ballets to
Colombian flutes, lutes, guitarróns, Indio-Spanish sonajas (rattles), guiros (scrapers), and
drumming. Applying theatricality to her professional ensemble, she coordinated heritage
steps and the tossing of paper streamers with classical balletic posture, attitude, and
polonaise with pointed toes. Her programs incorporated heightened sexuality and
concluded with mariachis joining a procession for the Jalisco.
With a 1954 televised gala sponsored by media mogul Emilio Azcárraga Milmo,
Hernández succeeded in building an audience of supporters and increased her troupe to
twenty dancers. A regular Wednesday night and Sunday morning and evening schedule
required Hernández to design sixty ballets, including a Yaqui Venado y Las Pascola
(Hunter’s Deer Dance), Danza de los Viejitos (Dance of the Old Men), and mojigangas
(oversized puppets). She built a program of historically diverse scenarios from the cowboy
heritage of Danza de la Reata (Lasso Dance) to El Son de la Negra (Song of the Black
Woman). Employing some seventy dancers, she staged legends of the sun god, Aztec
sacrifices, Basque and Afro-Cuban influences, and harvest and nuptial customs as well as
Mexican archetypes and revolutionaries.
Commercial Success
The ideology of ethnic ballet appealed to promoters of Mexican tourism, corporations, and
President Adolfo López Mateos, who held ballet in high regard. He envisioned a world-
class dance company as a means of unifying Central Americans and boosting national
pride. When the Mexican Folkloric Ballet represented Mexico in the 1959 Festival of the
Americas in Chicago, the ensemble consisted of sixty dancers skilled at seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century staples—geometric patterns, intricate symmetry, and ballet d’action.
The company regularly toured the Western Hemisphere, Europe, Asia, and North Africa
with a repertoire of seventy ballets, including Los Hijos del Sol (Children of the Sun), El
Cupidito (Lust), Pocho (Tiger Dance), The Tarascans, and Navidad en Jalisco (Christmas
in Jalisco).
By performing visually and emotionally satisfying spectacles filled with complex
rhythms, allegory, and brilliant color, Hernández’s ensemble continued to flourish. Her
dancers performed in Paris at the 1961 Festival of Nations, but without Segura, who
turned his attention to concert ballet. In November 1963, the innovation of folk ballet
caught the attention of Donald Duncan, a writer who featured the company in Dance
Magazine. In 1965, the ensemble received an invitation to appear on a U.S. television
variety show, The Hollywood Palace, and a short film, Mexican Watercolor.
In 1968, Hernández opened a ballet school that trained 25,000 professionals. She gave
up performance in the 1970s, but continued touring, presenting her balletic scenarios at
Carnegie Hall in October 1990. She adapted aboriginal dance with The Olmecs (1992),
which toured California with glimpses of the first civilization in the Americas. Although
Hernández influenced the folk research of Rafael Zamárripa, Miguel Belez, Javier De
León, and Roy Lozano, founder of Ballet Folklorico de Texas, media critics charged her
with favoring tourism over authenticity.
Hernández died of respiratory arrest on November 5, 2000, leaving unperformed a
North Mexican rope dance, Sugar Harvest in Tamaulipas (2001), completed by her
daughters, Norma Lopez and Viviana Hernández. For Amalia’s dedication to indigenous
ballet, she received the French Prize of Nations, Tiffany citation for lifetime achievement,
Hispanic Women’s Council International Woman of the Year, and Mexico’s National Prize
of Culture. Amalia’s lifelong project passed to Norma and Viviana and to set designer
Guillermo Barclay, who introduced tango, waltz, and funereal dance in Carnival in
Tlaxcala (2001). Additional help came from Viviana Hernández, the lead dancer and
ballet mistress, and granddaughter, choreographer Viviana Alvarez, who continue
directing the two hundred performers. In 2003, the company premiered A Christmas
Spectacular Navidades and continued presentations into 2015.
 See also folkloric ballet.
Source: Gonzalez, Anita. Jarocho’s Soul: Cultural Identity and Afro-Mexican Dance.
Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004.
HONG KONG BALLET
A versatile Asian company, the Hong Kong Ballet (HKB) maintains a reputation for
classic and contemporary programs that enthrall balletomanes as well as young audiences.
Established in November 1978, the Hong Kong Academy of Ballet escaped the obligatory
yangbanxi (revolutionary model works) that Jiang Qing (Madame Mao) had employed
during the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976 to turn Chinese arts into political tools.
The vibrant new company drew members from the Beijing Dance Academy, Philippine
High School for the Arts, Shenyang Conservatory of Music, and Goh Ballet Academy as
well as from the United States, Ukraine, Italy, Brazil, Canada, England, Holland, Belgium,
Japan, and Korea.
For presentation at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts and the Cultural
Centre, the HKB adopted the standard European canon, including Giselle, The Sleeping
Beauty, The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, The Merry Widow, Coppélia, and Romeo and Juliet.
For balance, in 1993, the company performed a special program with Mango Groove, a
South African troupe. To recruit young members, in 1986, the HKB began hosting
lectures, workshops, school programs, dance camps, and ballet balls that have drawn
22,000 participants.
An International Success
After 1997, the HKB exported its vibrant dance in tours of Macau, Singapore, Korea,
Germany, France, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Australia, Colombia, Chile, Canada, and the
United States. Managed by pianist Paul Tam, directed by Madeleine Onne, a former
dancer for the Swedish Royal Court, and coached by Liang Jing and Tang Min, the forty-
member troupe scheduled debuts of original East Asian work. They earned fame for
performing choreographer Yuri Ng and Japanese dancer Yuh Egami’s emotive Firecracker
(1997), a tale of homesick Jews set to Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker suite that
earned Ng an artist of the year award. The two dance designers also created The Frog
Prince (1997), a Qing dynasty love narrative set in a crumbling empire.
Art photographer Siu Wang-Ngai, a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, collected
still photos of the ensemble’s work in The Hong Kong Ballet (2003). The anthology
created a photographic record of the dancers at practice, in costume, and immersed in
dance spectacle for Butterfly Lovers, Mulan, The Snow Queen, and Anna Karenina. U.S.
audiences welcomed a poignant biography, Wayne Eagling’s The Last Emperor (1997),
which follows the historic figure Pu Yi from child prince to prison to reduction to an
ordinary citizen.
Contemporary Challenges
The Hong Kong Ballet set higher goals by commissioning new works. In 2008, the troupe
performed American choreographer David Allan’s version of Cinderella for a television
film. Dance maker Kinsun Chan introduced dance symbolism with Black on Black (2011),
a perusal of the abstract indications of the color black as it impacts gestures and body
language. Fei Bo’s A Room of Her Own (2011) examined the vortex of jealousy and
suspicion that endangers a marriage. Peter Quanz’s Luminous (2011), a suite of duets,
details affection from teen puppy love to separation of an elderly couple by death.
Critiques acknowledged the growing precision and visual glamour of the Hong Kong
troupe. In 2012, the company received media compliments for the aesthetic grace of Tan
Yuan Yuan in Lady of the Camellias, the complexity of Egami and Ricky Hu’s White Lies
(2012), the touching repentance by dancer Kostyantyn Keshyshev in Giselle, and the
fluency of principal Li Jun in Dancing with the Wind (2012) to the music of Ah Yan.
Soloist Ye Fei-fei achieved raves for her virtuosity and partnering in Turandot, Egami’s
Oioio (2011), and Liu Miao-miao’s Fin (2012).
The 2013–2014 season featured the international premier of choreographer Wang Xin
Peng’s The Dream of the Red Chamber, novelist Cao Xueqin’s mid-eighteenth-century
saga of royal intrigue. Beijing authorities censored a twelve-minute segment dramatizing
the Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976, particularly the humiliation of a capitalist by Red
Guards, book burning, and art destruction. The rest of the varied program included Les
Sylphides, Le Corsaire (The Pirate), choreographer Edwaard Liang’s Finding Light
(2012), and the world debut of Jorma Elo’s Shape of Glow (2013), an interpretive ballet to
the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. In April 2014,
company members Liu Yu-yao and Shen Jie received nominations for the Prix Benois de
la Danse.
Source: Liu, Jingzhi. A Critical History of New Music in China. Hong Kong: Chinese
University of Hong Kong, 2010.
HOUSTON BALLET
See image in photospread.
A Southern anchor of American dance, the Houston Ballet (HB) graces audiences with
a lengthy annual program. Evolved from the Houston Ballet Academy from 1955, the
company grew from the plan of Ballets Russes diva Tatiana Semenova, a victim of World
War II crippled in the knee and arm by a fall during a USO “Foxhole Ballet” show in
Rome. The Houston Ballet Academy supplied juvenile dancers, who performed in La
Cenerentola (Cinderella, 1957) and Romeo et Juliette (1966).
The formation of a professional ensemble began in 1969 by Russian-born director Nina
Popova, former head of New York’s High School for the Arts and a Ballets Russes
veteran. Guest appearances by Ivan Nagy, Natalia Makarova, Edward Villella, and Margot
Fonteyn improved ticket sales, as did the 1976 debut of the rock ballet Caliban, based on
the monster in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Led by British soloist Ben Stevenson,
HB progressed after 1976 from an on-the-road Texas troupe to a global arts medium
performing Marie Taglioni’s Le Papillon (The Butterfly, 1860), Prodigal Son in Ragtime
(1978), and the satiric Peer Gynt (1981), a Norwegian fairy tale featured at the Bergen
Festival.
 Stevenson commissioned Paul Taylor’s jitterbug classic Company B (1991) for
presentation at the Kennedy Center. To build for the future, the artistic director drew
interested students to the Houston dance school, more than doubling enrollment from three
hundred to six hundred fifty. In an original 2001 version of Cleopatra, Stevenson
welcomed Chinese defector Li Cunxin and spotlighted principal Lauren Anderson,
championing her as the first black ballet principal in a major ensemble. Over a sixteen-
year career, Anderson developed a fan base for her duets with Carlos Acosta.
The hiring of choreographer Trey McIntyre in 1989 supplied the ensemble with
imaginative works—Like a Samba (1997), White Noise (1998), High Lonesome (2001),
and loveCRAZY (2004). In this period, Glen Tetley created a commissioned work, Lux in
Tenebris (Light in Shadows, 1999), an elegy for dance master Scott Douglas. Australian
director Stanton Welch and manager Cecil Connor recruited younger, more energetic
members, notably, principals Sara Webb, versatile artist Ian Casady, and muscular soloist
Simon Ball.
As principal, Ball starred in Carousel, Eugene Onegin, The Taming of the Shrew, The
Merry Widow, and Welch’s Tales of Texas (2004) to the music of Patsy Cline, Aaron
Copland, and Matthew Pierce. Webb performed the standard roles of The Sleeping Beauty,
Coppélia, Manon, and Giselle as well as Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Kenneth
Macmillan’s Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth, 1965), and Dracula,
choreographed by Mark Godden in 2002. Casady made his mark as Romeo, Cinderella’s
prince, Madame Butterfly’s Pinkerton, and King Louis opposite Melody Mennite as the
doomed French queen in Marie Antoinette (2009).
After HB’s bravura tour in New York, Mexico, Spain, Canada, and Hungary, the year
2011 brought 50 percent more rehearsal space in America’s largest dance studio and the
naming of the academy for Ben Stevenson. The receipt of the 2011 Rudolf Nureyev Prize
for New Dance ($25,000) funded purchase of the witty ONE/end/ONE by Finnish
choreographer Jorma Elo to Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 4. The premiere, presented in
black and gold costumes, incorporated Jir˘í Kylián’s Falling Angels and starred Sara Webb
in Christopher Bruce’s Hush (2006), a jazzy reprise of circus clowning in gymnastic pas
de deux.
Source: “Houston Ballet Announces New First Soloists, Jared Matthews and Yuriko
Kajiya.” Houston News (8 May 2014).
HYBRID BALLET
See image in photospread.
The organic nature of dance allows movement to express cultural, religious, and
personal aims by any combination of attire, props, gestures, and patterns of steps, for
example, the expressionism of the Boris Eifman Ballet performing the experimental rock
ballet Boomerang (1979) and the postmodern shrugs, slithers, and wiggles in Twyla
Tharp’s Waterbaby Bagatelles (1994). Diasporas and the juxtaposition of ethnicities have
historically synthesized ballet phenomena, as with the primal pas de deux of Jules Perrot
and Carlotta Grisi in La Esmeralda (1844) and diva Caroline Lassiat’s flourish of a Gypsy
cloak in Paquita (1846). Even when dance designers mistook stereotypes for folk reality,
as with Sicilian superstitions of the tarantella, such exotica emphasized the role of the
unexpected sorcery, seduction, and courtship in romantic dance.
Like dialect, a localized language, twentieth-century hybrid ballet created opportunities
to vary tradition with ethnic heritage dances, as with the Andalusian Gypsy melodies that
Madrid composer Manuel de Falla incorporated in El Amor Brujo (Love Bewitched, 1924)
and the flamenco postures that concert dancer Carmelita Maracci taught Creole ballerina
Carmen De Lavallade. Authenticity derived from cross-cultural upbringing, such as the
boyhood of Gallo-Romanian-Russian choreographer Igor Alexandrovich Moiseyev, who
programmed in Bulba (Potato, 1937), a Belarusian concert piece; the Bessarabian Gypsy
circle dance; Cossack acrobatics; Croatian drmes (shaking dance); and Kalmyk and
Crimean Tartar celebrations.
The amalgamation of gymnastics and movement training with ballet generated a
separate branch of variation, notably, eurythmics, a harmonizing of soul and body that
influenced Serge Lifar and Marie Rambert. Hollywood choreographer Agnes de Mille
incorporated vernacular cowboy praxis in Rodeo (1942) and muscular square dance for
Oklahoma! (1943). For the Joffrey Ballet, Twyla Tharp’s hip Deuce Coupe (1973)
introduced a fusion of ballet with modernism, a breakthrough in the history of concert
dance.
For the New York City Ballet, dance master Peter Martins designed The Barber Violin
Concerto (1988), a revealing contrast between classical combinations and modern
enchaînements. In choreographer Nguyen Tan Loc’s Tick Tack (2013), a twenty-first
century ballet performed by Arabesque Vietnam, partnering involved swinging the female
dancer on a trapeze. The company mounted monthly shows that coordinated lighting and
smoky effects with evocative costuming and choreography. Another Asian kinetic blend,
the Hong Kong Ballet’s heartbreaker story in Shaolin in the Wind (2004) depicted Shaolin
monk Tian Yuan in kung fu combat. A Pacific model, Sérye at Sayaw (Dance Series,
2014), a Romeo and Juliet story performed by the Philippine Ballet Theatre, exhibited a
populist theme, the fusion of soap opera with ballet and symphonic music.
See also Eifman, Boris; eurythmics; folkloric ballet; Hernández Navarro, Amalia; jazz
ballet; Joffrey Ballet; Tetley, Glen; Tharp, Twyla; Tokyo Ballet.
Source: Midgelow, Vida L. Reworking the Ballet: Counter-Narratives and Alternative
Bodies. New York: Routledge, 2007.
 I
• •

INTERMEDIO
At processionals; tournaments; banquets; and celebrations of weddings, anniversaries, and
political advancements, the intermedio (also intermezzo or entr’acte) filled the time
between scene changes of Italian Renaissance drama. As the glorification of a sovereign,
the play-within-a-play showcased costly spectacle, mime, acting, music, and dance. A
forerunner of the English court masque and the Italian operas of Jacopo Peri, the
intermedio began in Ferrara in the late 1400s as between-the-acts filler during revivals of
the Greek comedies of Roman dramatists Plautus and Terence, such as the stage
presentation at the union of Alfonso d’Este and Lucrezia Borgia on February 2, 1502.
Like the variety of entremets (palate cleansers) served between main courses of a
banquet, extravagant stage spectacle offered a visual-aural feast ranging from poetry
recitation to madrigal choruses, burlesques, torch dances, and costumed instrumentals and
moreschi (Moorish dances). In Florence, early sixteenth-century intermedii acquired
allegory, a baroque visualization of a theme or concept, such as the passage of time in
Florentine playwright Antonio Landi’s comedy Il Commodo (Home-like, 1539), a pastoral
bridge or time filler for a five-act play at the wedding of Eleanor of Toledo and Cosimo
di’Medici. Directors distributed verses and refrains to viewers to encourage their
participation in song and dance.
A half century later, shutter sets, costumes, and stage engines augmented the ingenuity
of presentation toward the refined arts of ballet de cour (court ballet) and opera. At the
Uffizi Palace in Florence, visual effects framed the dance and mime, elements of myths or
pastoral idylls honoring a ruling dynasty or a military or ambassadorial triumph, as with a
betrothal between members of great households or the birth of a male heir. To audiences of
three thousand, the initial performance of six intermedii for scene designer Bernardo
Buontalenti’s La Pellegrina (The Pilgrim) at the wedding of Christina of Lorraine to
Ferdinando di’Medici, Duke of Tuscany, on May 3, 1589, preceded more presentations of
precise geometric steps to include more viewers.
The intermedio dwindled following Milanese festivities at the wedding of Archduke
Albert of Austria to Isabella of Spain and Portugal on April 18, 1599. For the Paris Opera,
librettist Philippe Quinault supplied the tragic Cadmus et Hermione (1673) with
interludes. In Vienna in 1710, the Emperor Joseph I erected the Kärntnertortheater, the
royal court venue for intermezzi and Italian comedy, the forerunner of opera. Jean Georges
Noverre engaged Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to write twelve pieces for Les Petits Riens
(The Little Nothings, 1778) as an entertaining interlude at the Paris Opera presented by
four couples.
During the early years of the Bolshoi Ballet in the 1780s, the fledgling company
extended Italian and Russian comedies with ballet interludes. Carlo Blasis, dance master
of the Moscow theater, revived the filler presentation in February 1864 with La Maschera
(The Mask). The genre continued to influence dance in music halls and cabarets, including
the entr’actes between skits at the Moulin Rouge in Paris.
In the twentieth century, the term began to apply to stand-alone dances. Pioneer
modernist Martha Graham soloed in Intermezzo at her 1926 debut performance in New
York City. The second half of the century perpetuated revivals of interludes, notably
George Balanchine’s Agon (Contest, 1957), a series of court dances from the 1600s. For
the Stuttgart Ballet, director John Cranko choreographed Intermezzo (1959). In 1974,
choreographer Kenneth MacMillan returned to the original purpose of the intermedio in
act 1 of Manon, which contained an entr’acte featuring the medieval Griselda, a paragon
of virtue.
See also Jones, Inigo; Moulin Rouge.
Source: Balthazar, Scott L. Historical Dictionary of Opera. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2013.
IRANIAN NATIONAL BALLET
See image in photospread.
A short-lived experiment in global culture, Ballet Melli Iran or the Iranian National
Ballet (INB) scheduled classic and neoclassic works for performance in Tehran’s four-
level Roudaki Hall Opera House. Dance training got its start under Armenian teacher
Sarkis Djanbazian, the father of Iranian ballet, who studied the Vaganova method in St.
Petersburg. He danced with the Kirov Ballet until his emigration from Russia to Iran,
where he taught classes to minority children.
The émigré opened his academy in 1938 with rooftop classes at the Armenian church in
Qazvin. In 1942, he held classes for one hundred fifty students in Tehran in an Armenian
high school. His elevation of dance from entertainment or ritual to a profession
encouraged students to concentrate on precision and artistry. In 1958, by organizing the
National Folkloric Music, Song, and Dance, he revived Qajar or Turkic tradition from the
last Persianized dynasty, which ended in 1925 with the death of Shah Ahmad Qajar.
Over twenty-seven years, Djanbazian’s INB produced one hundred programs, including
Fountain of Bakhchisarai, Dreams of Hafez, Chinese Flower Girl, Jealousy, Persian
Miniature, The Woodchopper, Sailors, Life and Death, Prayers in the Mountains, and
Rostam and Tahmina, an episode from the classic Persian father-son story of Sohrab and
Rostam. At Djanbazian’s death in 1963, his daughter, Anna Djanbazian, continued
teaching his style and methods at the Djanbazian Dance Company in La Crescenta,
California.
A National Company
In 1958, Iran’s Ministry of Culture invited Ninette de Valois, founder of the Royal Ballet,
to form a classical ballet ensemble. Uruguayan instructor Robert de Warren took over the
post of artistic director in 1966 and scheduled visiting companies to dance in Tehran.
Established in 1967 and managed by Armenian prima ballerina Haideh and Nejad
Ahmadzadeh, the fifty-member Iranian National Ballet followed the classical canon by
mastering Swan Lake, Scheherazade, Paul Dukas’s ballet La Péri (The Flower of
Immortality, 1912), and Love & the Clown, a comic ballet set to Giuseppe Verdi’s Alzira
(1845). Performed at the new opera house for the coronation of Shah Reza Pahlavi and
Queen Farah, the premiere of Cinderella and Giselle starred Haideh Ahmadzadeh and de
Warren. In gratitude, the shah presented de Warren the Order of Homayoun.
The INB toured Canada, Turkey, Egypt, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan performing
classical and folk dances, including Bijan and Manijeh, a portion of Hakim Ferdowsi’s
tenth-century epic Shahnameh (Book of Kings), featuring Aideh Changizian and Jamshid
Saghabashi as mismatched lovers from warring states. The staging displayed the corps de
ballet in lightly veiled dresses as they executed classical steps to Turkish and Egyptian
arm and head postures. Across social levels, dance became popular, involved more
Iranians, and inspired composers to write ballets.
As the INB gained a reputation for serious art, ballet superstars Rudolf Nureyev and
Margot Fonteyn visited Tehran in 1969 and mounted a production of Le Corsaire (The
Pirate). Swiss-French dancer Maurice Béjart choreographed Asian motifs and themes into
Bhakti (1968) and Golestan (Rose Garden, 1973), which the company performed to
traditional music at a Persepolis arts festival. Béjart also designed Farah and Heliogabalus
(1976) to debut in Brussels.
From 1976 to 1979, IMB dancers thrived under the direction of Ali Pourfarrokh, who
trained at the Tehran Dance Academy and in the United States. The repertoire included
Coppélia, Miss Julie, La Bayadère (The Temple Dancer), and choreographer David
Lichine’s Graduation Ball (1940), a series of teen divertissements and dance floor
flirtations. Soloist Gavin Dorrian joined the corps de ballet in Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s
Serenade and four pieces adapted by Lithuanian dance designer Nicholas Beriosoff—Carl
Orff’s medieval suite Carmina Burana, The Nutcracker, Romeo and Juliet, and The
Sleeping Beauty. For the fight scene in Romeo and Juliet, the Iranian National Fencing
Team staged combat with epees.
Outlawed Dance
After the Islamic Revolution of 1979 destroyed the Pahlavi dynasty, during its thirty-fifth
season, the Iranian ensemble dispersed. Under the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the
dismantling of Western cultural influences included the stifling of the national ballet as
well as movies, taped music, and all dance—classical and folk—between men and
women. Anna Djanbazian had to teach behind obscured windows to conceal pas de deux
training from Islamic enforcers of the moral code.
When dance sank from art to taboo, the Iranian diaspora relocated ballet dancers,
teachers, librettists, and composers to a variety of safe sites. Haideh and Nejad
Ahmadzadeh fled Iran and settled in Stratford, England. Teacher Azita Sahebjam
emigrated to Vancouver, British Columbia. Pourfarrokh found work in Essen, Germany,
and the Dance Theatre of Long Island. Robert de Warren settled in Sarasota, Florida, as
impresario and ballet coach.
 In 1999, dance master Nima Kiann formed the Iranian ballet anew under the title Les
Ballets Persans. Renamed the New Iranian National Ballet, the company debuted in
Stockholm in October 2002. In August 2014, thirty-five years after the ensemble
disbanded, a reunion at the Hyatt Regency in Washington, D.C., drew former members
from distant places.
In 2011, dance designer Newsha Tavakolian ventured through a snarl of Islamic
prohibitions to stage minimal poses or “harmonized movement.” Her pantomimes allowed
no graceful limb extensions or other postures that could be labeled sexually enticing. For
ballet attire, she veiled her head and obscured breasts and hips. While choreographing
limited productions, she supervised strict separation of male and female dancers in
accordance with fundamentalist Islamic values. To avoid censors declaring the work
haraam (forbidden), Newsha designed adagio dance for males alone.
Source: Davis, Matthew. “Portraits of Iranian Ballet Pair.” Manchester Evening News
(17 January 2013).
IVANOV, LEV (1834–1901)
Russian dancer and dance master of twenty presentations for tsarist Russian audiences,
Lev Ivanovich Ivanov made his way up the ballet hierarchy into his last month. The
Muscovite son of single mother Tia Adamova, he was born on February 18, 1834, and
entered an orphanage before he could walk. While growing up in the home of a merchant,
he displayed the ability to play piano by ear.
Before his connection to the arts, Ivanov’s life was haphazard and unpromising. His
father, merchant Tio Adamov, introduced him to ballet at a performance of Don Juan. A
student at the Moscow School of Dance until age ten, he began training under Jean-
Antoine Petipa in 1844 at the imperial academy in St. Petersburg and adopted a life-long
dedication to modesty.
At his debut in 1850, Ivanov danced with the Imperial Ballet in Jean-Baptiste Blache’s
pantomime Les Meuniers (The Millers, 1787). Subsequent parts placed him on stage with
star Fanny Elssler in La Esmeralda (1844), Catarina, ou La Fille du Bandit (Catarina, or
The Bandit’s Daughter, 1846), and La Filleule des Fées (The Fairy Goddaughter, 1849).
For his virtuoso performance in an 1855 adaptation of La Fille Mal Gardée (The Poorly
Guarded Daughter), Ivanov advanced to company soloist.
In 1858, Ivanov married his partner, Vera Lyadova, with whom he had danced a bolero
in La Muette de Portici (The Mute of Portici, 1857). In addition to serving as chief mime,
in 1858, he taught lower-level classes. After his wife’s death, he wed Varvara Mulchugina
in 1875. In hyper-masculine costume, he starred as Solor opposite Ekaterina Vazem in La
Bayadère (The Temple Dancer, 1877), a ghost tale set in India.
By 1882, Ivanov worked as régisseur (stage manager) before his promotion to assistant
artistic director to Marius Petipa. He topped his desk with paper figures and put them
through balletic combinations. Upon presenting his work at rehearsals, he asked dancers
for their input. At a height of creativity, he choreographed La Forêt Enchantée (The
Enchanted Forest, 1887); La Tulipe de Haarlem (The Harlem Tulip, 1887), danced by
Enrico Cecchetti and Carlotta Brianza; and, in 1889, revised La Flûte Magique (The
Magic Flute), a vehicle for diva Anna Pavlova. For the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre, he
also completed two one-act divertissements, La Beauté de Séville (The Seville Beauty,
1889), and La Fête des Bateliers (The Soldiers’ Celebration, 1890).

Russian dancer and dance master of twenty presentations for tsarist Russian audiences, Lev
Ivanovich Ivanov made his way up the ballet hierarchy into his last month. Four Centuries of
Ballet, p. 178.

In 1892, Petipa’s bout with pemphigus, a blistering autoimmune disorder, left to Ivanov
the choreographing of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, a classic Christmas
ballet and of the second act of Cinderella (1893). In 1895, Ivanov collaborated with Petipa
on a new design for Swan Lake. Dance historians laud Ivanov for reworking the second
and fourth acts and the Hungarian and Venetian dances.
Ivanov’s later works and collaborations with Cecchetti covered a variety of subject
matter, including a version of Cinderella in 1893, La Fille du Mikado (The Mikado’s
Daughter, 1897), and Nuits Égyptiennes (Egyptian Nights, unproduced). After a half
century of teaching for the tsar, Ivanov died poor on December 24, 1901, three weeks after
the debut of his adaptation of Sylvia.
See also Sergeyev, Nicholai; Swan Lake.
Source: Fisher, Jennifer. “Nutcracker” Nation: How an Old World Ballet Became a
Christmas Tradition in the New World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.
 • J
JAMISON, JUDITH (1943–)
A charismatic American soloist-choreographer in the tradition of Alvin Ailey, Judith Ann
Jamison contributed grandeur and idiosyncrasy to dance by defying the stereotype of the
petite Caucasian ballerina. A Philadelphian born in Germantown on May 10, 1943, to
teacher Tessie Belle Brown and sheet metal worker John Henry Jamison, she heard opera
in infancy. She learned piano and violin in childhood in a household permeated with
rhythm and melody.
At age six, Jamison enrolled with Marion Cuyjet, John Jones, and Delores Brown at the
Judimar academy to study classical ballet, acrobatics, eurythmics, and modern and tap
dance. By age fifteen, she starred in Giselle. Antony Tudor introduced her to the Cecchetti
technique. As a psychology major at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, and dance
student at the Philadelphia Dance Academy, Jamison added to her skills kinesiology, the
Horton whole-body technique, dance history, and ballet notation.
American Ballet Theatre choreographer Agnes de Mille discovered Jamison at an
audition in 1964 and invited her to train for the role of Mary Seaton for The Four Marys
(1965), featuring Carmen De Lavallade as Mary Hamilton. Because Jamison echoed
Ailey’s commitment of shared cultural expression, he invited her to dance with the Alvin
Ailey American Dance Theater. She debuted in a suicide ballet, choreographer Talley
Beatty’s Congo Tango Palace (1965), which toured in Africa, Cuba, India, Japan, France,
and Sweden.
A Dance Superstar
Diverted for a year to the Harkness Ballet as deputy artistic director, Jamison returned to
the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre as a principal and mastered seventy ballets, beginning with
Riedaiglia (1967) set to avant-garde jazz. Ailey featured the statuesque dancer as the West
African voodoo goddess Erzulie opposite Avind Harum as Xango in The Prodigal Prince
(1967), the mother in Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (1968), the sun in the Greek myth Icarus
(1968), and a saloon performer in Masekela Language (1969), a survey of the causes of
black violence. In 1972, Jamison wed Puerto Rican dancer Miguel Godreau, nicknamed
the “black Nureyev,” and accepted presidential appointment to the National Endowment
for the Arts.
At a career acme for Ailey and Jamison, on May 4, 1972, he featured her in a solo, Cry,
a fifteen-minute paean to womanhood, which she performed to gospel hymns and jazz by
Alice Coltrane. Barefoot in white leotard and lacy skirt, Jamison dramatized mother, lover,
sister, goddess, supplicant, confessor, and dancer, the seven stages of a female life. Ailey
presented the ballet as a birthday tribute to his mother, Lula Elizabeth Cliff Cooper. In a
duet with Russian defector Mikhail Baryshnikov, Jamison performed the sassy Pas de
Duke (1976), a suite of ragtime turns, glissades, and low battements, which the pair
performed to Duke Ellington tunes in Austria. Ailey rewarded Jamison’s virtuosity with
Passage (1978) and Cello Suite (1978), solos exhibiting her feline grace.
 Demand for Jamison’s concert solos brought invitations to the Washington Ballet,
President Jimmy Carter’s inauguration, Ballet of the 20th Century, the San Francisco
Ballet, Munich State Opera, Vienna State Ballet, Swedish Royal Ballet, Studio 54, and
Cullberg Ballet. For the Vienna Opera, in 1977, she dramatized the attempted seduction of
Joseph by Potiphar’s wife in Josephslegende, a classical ballet by John Neumeier. Also in
classical form, in 1978, she danced in Maurice Béjart’s resetting of Le Spectre de la Rose
(The Spirit of the Rose).
At age thirty-seven, Jamison ventured onto the Broadway stage. She joined Gregory
Hines for Sophisticated Ladies (1981), an art deco revue of Cotton Club glamour danced
and sung to Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo,” “Don’t Get Around Much Any More,” and
“I Love You Madly.” In the same period, she instructed master classes at Jacob’s Pillow at
Becket in western Massachusetts and earned from Harvard University an “Outstanding
Performer of the Year” citation. In 1986, the Washington Ballet premiered her Time Out.
Teaching and Designing
A mark of Jamison’s arts vision, the Jamison Project organized twelve pupils for
individual mentoring. Debuting in New York at the Joyce Theater in 1988, the troupe
presented Divining (1984), a Jamison recital piece regulated by conga drum taps. In the
last year of Ailey’s life, Jamison again assisted him in administration and assumed troupe
management after his death on December 1, 1989. The post elevated her to a feminist
pioneer, the first African-American female director of a modern dance company.
Jamison managed a fifty-city global tour, presented the ensemble in South Africa, and
established AileyCamp for urban youth. In addition to her own works, she staged dances
by Kris World and Talley Beatty and revived Pearl Primus’s The Wedding (1961), an
African ritual set to chant and drumming. A majestic performer and commanding
choreographer, Jamison devised Just Call Me a Dancer (1984), Into the Life (1987), and
Forgotten Time (1989), a portrayal of ancient rites of passage to the choral works of Voix
Bulgares.
In the 1990s, Jamison introduced Rift (1991) and Hymn (1993), an Emmy-winning
salute to Ailey with libretto by Anna Deavere Smith. After taking a break to write a
memoir, Dancing Spirit (1993), and dance for President Bill Clinton’s inaugural, the
choreographer coordinated Ailey in the Park for an audience of thirty thousand in New
York’s Central Park. Jamison designed Sweet Release (1996) and, in 1997, celebrated the
passage of apartheid with a South African residency of the Ailey company. She became
the youngest recipient of the Dance USA Award, conferred in 1998. Additional honoraria
include a Candace Award, the 1998 New York State Governor’s Arts Award, and Kennedy
Centers Honors and an Emmy in 1999.
Still actively planning dance in the twenty-first century, Jamison completed Double
Exposure (2000) and HERE … NOW (2002), and collaborated with Robert Battle and hip-
hop specialist Rennie Harris on tableaus for Love Stories (2004), set to Stevie Wonder “If
It’s Magic.” Of her personal romance with ballet, Jamison considered dance the closest
earthly union with God. She collected vignettes for Among Us (2009), a perusal of
ordinary people to the jarring jazz of Eric Lewis. Jamison’s receipt of the National Medal
of the Arts in 2001 preceded a theatrical award from Ghana. She applauded the opening of
the Joan Weill Center for Dance in 2005, when additional space and advanced equipment
and decor enabled the Ailey company to thrive.
More acknowledgments informed the public of Jamison’s benefaction to the arts,
particularly the 2007 Bessie Award, a U.S. Congressional Cultural Ambassador to the
World designation in 2008, and a Black Entertainment Television accolade and a Time
Most Influential People designation in 2009. In retirement in 2011, she passed over Ailey
dancer Ronald K. Brown and chose as her successor Robert Battle, a graduate of Juilliard.
At age seventy, she received an award of merit from the Association of Performing Arts
Presenters.
See also Ailey, Alvin.
Source: Anstead, Alicia. “In Flight.” Inside Arts (Conference 2013): 42–44.
JAZZ BALLET
A mongrel genre, the first jazz ballets allied structured classical postures with the relaxed,
self-directed gestures and rhythmic steps patterned to music indigenous to West African
slaves in the Western Hemisphere. Unlike strict turnout, jazz stance placed the feet
parallel, a posture that Roland Petit encouraged during rehearsals of Le Jeune Homme et la
Mort (The Young Man and Death, 1946) to jazz. A broad spectrum of combinations
incorporated multidirectional kicks and spins less elegant and more vernacular, more
spontaneous than ballet. Costuming embraced a wider variety of exercise wear and street
shoes and garments to enhance the impression of both adagio and allegro rhythms from
everyday life.
Anticipated by French composer Darius Milhaud’s bluesy Le Création du Monde (The
Creation of the World, 1923), the first Negro ballet, French hybrid jazz began with the
Ballets Russes staging of Apollon Musagète (Apollo and the Muses, 1928) to the
choreography of Russo-American designer George Balanchine. American jazz ballet
debuted on Broadway at the Imperial Theatre on April 11, 1936. The emerging genre took
the form of a raucous narrative musical, On Your Toes, set to the score of Richard Rogers
and lyrics of Lorenz Hart. Lead hoofer Ray Bolger claimed the role intended for Fred
Astaire and performed opposite Swedish-Tartar concert ballerina Tamara Geva.
By involving professional dancers with gangsters, lowlife hustlers, and vaudeville
performers, the libretto of the Great Depression era ballet On Your Toes parodied the
pomposity of a highbrow Russian ballet-within-a-ballet called La Princesse Zenobia. At
the height of a comic discussion of art, fictional benefactor Peggy Porterfield claims that
the public has wearied of “Russian turkeys” such as Scheherazade and La Spectre de la
Rose. Her denigration of Ballets Russes repertoire placed jazz ballet in the chronology of
early twentieth-century dance movements and elevated Americanized dance above
European standard works.
The production of On Your Toes, starring English tap dancer Jack Whiting and German-
Norwegian diva Vera Zorina, progressed to London in 1937 and returned to Broadway in
1954, featuring Zorina with Bobby Van and Elaine Stritch. Central to critical acclaim, the
production number “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” became a classic American ballet,
performed in 1968 by Arthur Mitchell and Suzanne Farrell and added to the New York
City Ballet repertoire. A 1983 revival won twelve award recognitions, including a best
actor Drama Desk Award, Tony, and Theatre World Award for Natalia Makarova and Tony
and Drama Desk nominations for best choreography.
After England’s Kenneth MacMillan set Somnambulism (1953) to the music of Stan
Kenton, audiences welcomed the shift from orchestral suites. For Italy’s Spoleto Festival,
choreographer Jerome Robbins premiered N.Y. Export: Op. Jazz (1958). A Danish
televised documentary, Jazz-Ballet ABC (1962), legitimized jazz hybrids worldwide as
fusion art. In its third year of performance, the Australian Ballet of Melbourne mounted
Betty Pounder’s Jazz Spectrum (1964), an amalgam of exuberant athleticism and pointe
work. At London’s Covent Garden, English choreographer Frederick Ashton mounted
Jazz Calendar (1968), a jazz-blues showpiece that filled the stage with the varied
performances of stars Anthony Dowell, Rudolf Nureyev, Antoinette Sibley, and Keith
Martin decked in trendy costumes by Derek Jarman.
In New York, dance maker Twyla Tharp adapted Jelly Roll Morton’s New Orleans jazz
for Eight Jelly Rolls (1971) and Bix Beiderbecke’s works for The Bix Pieces (1971). After
the defection of Latvian dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov to Toronto in June 1974, Tharp
collaborated with him to expand his classical style. By allying pure balletic technique with
jazz, she taught him nuanced elements, the unremitting introspection that he later applied
to choreography for his troupe, the White Oak Dance Project.
In 2011, for choreographer Christopher Bruce’s Hush, a fun reprise of circus clowning,
the Houston Ballet pounded bare feet to riffs of a jazz sax. The saucy relocation of Jane
Austen’s domestic novel Pride and Prejudice from England to a 1920s Montmartre
cabaret updated the social satire for a 2014 performance by Ballet Fantastique of Eugene,
Oregon. Amid pirouettes and attitudes, the choreography featured mock can-can, chorus
lines, soft shoe, and the Charleston.
Source: Block, Geoffrey. Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from “Show
Boat” to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
JOBURG BALLET
See image in photospread.
A rising presence in world dance, the Joburg Ballet (JB) merged the talents of the South
African Ballet Theatre, State Theatre Ballet, and South African Mzansi Ballet. Formed at
the Joburg Theatre in July 2012, the ensemble featured an ethnic mix of part-time and
permanent dancers trained at a development school, teen academy, and graduate program.
Trustees envisaged educating pupils on health and performance and readying artists for
stage and costume design and publicity as a means of boosting tourism and the
appreciation of world arts. One strategy involved giving children glimpses of ballerinas in
Soweto and Sedibeng schools, Durban and Cape Town airports, Pretoria Zoo, Hyde Park,
and passenger trains in November 2013 as advertisement for the Christmas performance
of The Nutcracker.
 At the Joburg Theatre in 2013, the resident ensemble staged a two-act Cinderella
showcasing Havana native Claudia Monja as the agreeable fairy godmother and comic
dancers Luis de Castro of Havana and Carlos Santos of Sao Paulo, Brazil, as ugly
stepsisters. Played by prima ballerina Burnise Silvius opposite Jonathan Rodrigues as the
prince, the title figure reached her acme in the royal nuptial, the finale of the narrative
ballet set to music by Johann Strauss. Director Iain MacDonald spiced humorous scenes
with a masked rodent quartet, danced by Jin Ho Won, Shannon Glover, Jessica Overton,
and Lindé Wessels.
The South African company collaborated with El Colegio del Cuerpo of Cartagena,
Colombia, to mount choreographer Alvaro Restrepo’s God-by-the-Sea (2000). Presented
to thirteenth-century Galician and Romanian melodies, the shore dance evolved into
primal combat. The program balanced the tribal scenario with works by female
choreographers: Belinda Nusser’s The Deep and Lovely Quiet (2013), Kitty Phetla’s I Am
(2013), and Shannon Glover’s Use Somebody (2013).
Color and daring marked the JB repertoire, with a grinning mask on an armed soldier in
2012 and a maidenly party dress on Clara, danced by Kozue Mikami. For Don Quixote,
Spanish costumes created a community fervor, as did folk dress for Giselle and Coppélia.
Wardrobe registered more majesty and imagination in the 2013 showing of Danish dance
maker August Bournonville’s Flower Festival at Genzano and Le Corsaire (The Pirate),
which highlighted male brigands with orange sashes and daggers and female dancers in
orange harem costumes opposite Medora in gold and white tutu.
Trustees initiated training in the Cuban and Cecchetti systems as a means of funneling
into the professional troupe apprentices aged thirteen to sixteen. Based on the techniques
of the National Ballet School of Cuba, directed by Ramona de Saá, the effort required the
coaching of Cuban ballet masters NorMaria Olaechea, Ana Julia Bermudez de Castro, and
Elena Cangas Martinez and mentoring by dancers Claudia Monja and Luis Bermudez de
Castro.
Source: Mkele, Yolisa. “All the Train’s a Stage.” (Joburg) Times (14 November 2013):
3.
JOFFREY BALLET
A crossover dance troupe formed during the post–World War II years, the Joffrey Ballet
(JB) expressed an American ebullience that credited the younger generation with
imagination and verve. From the enthusiasm of Italian-American choreographer Gerald
Arpino and Afghan-Italian teacher-administrator Robert Joffrey, the company pioneered
an eclectic ballet model in 1956 in New York City, including in the original troupe
choreographer Glen Tetley. The debut performance featured the music of Francis Poulenc
for Pierre Gardel’s Le Bal Masqué (The Masked Ball, 1799), followed by Tetley’s Pierrot
Lunaire (Pierrot by Moonlight, 1955), an expressionist melodrama to the atonal score of
Arnold Schoenberg.
With backing from philanthropist Rebekah Harkness, JB’s six dancers toured eleven
states with their fervid celebration of pop culture. In 1960, the annual Jacob’s Pillow
workshop featured Joffrey’s company, stars Nels Jorgensen and Lisa Bradley, and guests
Michael Maule and Maria Tallchief in Joffrey’s Pas des Déesses (Dance of the Goddesses,
1954), a sardonic reprise of the competition among nineteenth-century ballerinas Lucile
Grahn, Fanny Cerrito, and Marie Taglioni. Alvin Ailey made dance history by accepting a
JB commission for the tragic elopement story Feast of Ashes (1962), a first for a
modernist choreographer with music by Carlos Surinach.
A Second Beginning
In 1963, Arpino presented his dance repertoire in the Soviet Union and continued seeking
new venues at the Kennedy White House and on film and television. Fearing Harkness’s
legal rights to alter the ensemble’s repertoire, the partners acquired a 1964 Ford
Foundation grant to bankroll a separate company. The dancers reprised early twentieth-
century classics, commissioned works from emerging talent, and mounted political
statements celebrating hippies and protests of the Vietnam War, the focus of Kurt Jooss’s
1932 Nazi-era classic The Green Table.
For the JB’s brash, energetic approach to ballet, it became an American arts
phenomenon and the resident company at City Center. Into the 1970s, the company
redefined ballet vocabulary with the rock suite Trinity (1970), Twyla Tharp’s hip Deuce
Coupe (1973), Arpino’s meteoric Suite Saint-Saens (1978), and Rudolf Nureyev’s
Homage to Diaghilev (1979). At the JB revival of Pablo Picasso’s costumes for Parade
(1917), designer Willa Kim painted spirals on white body suits.
In 1982, Arpino and Joffrey extended their East Coast concept to a studio in Los
Angeles, where the company functioned without star billing or internal hierarchy. JB
introduced Americans to Czech choreographer Jir˘í Kylián’s Forgotten Land, a 1981 elegy
depicting refugees gazing out to sea toward their homeland. The 1987 restaging of Vaslav
Nijinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring, 1913) involved research with
Russo-Polish dance facilitator Marie Rambert into archival Ballets Russes costumes,
makeup, and choreography.
Dance without Joffrey
After Joffrey’s death from AIDS on March 25, 1988, Arpino took over the company and
began winning awards for his experimentation with homoerotic works and high-powered
production numbers. A masterwork, Billboards (1993), incorporated “Thunder” and
“Purple Rain” by Prince. To stave off bankruptcy, Arpino moved the ensemble to Chicago
in 1995. A decade later, JB dancers celebrated their bicentennial with a performance of
Frederick Ashton’s The Dream (1964), a compression of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer
Night’s Dream that honored the English playwright’s quadricentennial. The classic ballet
headed performances in twenty-six countries and four hundred U.S. cities.
Scheduling in 2007 included a JB collaboration with the University of Iowa for a
“River to River” tour, a heartland effort intended to instill appreciation for the arts in the
Midwest. In September 2008, the ensemble opened Joffrey Tower, a Chicago high-rise
containing seven studios and a theater. At Arpino’s death on October 29, 2008, he left
control to Ashley Wheater, who maintained the JB commitment to public education and
international tours.
The Joffrey Ballet returned to Jacob’s Pillow on August 24, 2012, to debut Son of
Chamber Symphony to the music of John Adams. Three premieres in February 2014
introduced works by Brock Clawson, Christopher Wheeldon, and Alexander Ekman. More
headline presentations packed auditoriums, notably, in April 2014 for Czech
choreographer Krzysztof Pastor’s Romeo & Juliet, featuring Rory Hohenstein and
Christina Rocas in the title roles.
See also Arpino, Gerald; The Rite of Spring.
Source: Siegel, Marcia B. Mirrors and Scrims: The Life and Afterlife of Ballet.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010.
JOHANSSON, CHRISTIAN (1817–1903)
A noble, versatile Swedish instructor and choreographer for the Russian Imperial Ballet
School, Pehr Christian Johansson contributed the Franco-Danish romantic vision to the
golden era of Russian classical ballet. A native of Stockholm’s slums, he was born on May
20, 1817, to Margareta Johansson, a twenty-four-year-old unmarried woman, and gained
admittance to the opera school on July 1, 1829. The only clues to his paternity are his
Russian patronymic, Petrovich (son of Peter) and an identification of his father as a sea
captain.
In preparatory classes under Sophie Daguin and Per Wallquist, Johansson studied as a
paid pupil. He gained an artistic heritage passed from Jean-George Noverre and Auguste
Vestris to Antoine Bournonville and his son, Gallo-Danish mentor August Bournonville,
choreographer for the Royal Danish Ballet. Swedish Crown Prince Oscar paid for
Johansson’s training in Copenhagen for two years under Bournonville, who stressed
articulation of steps.
Johansson mastered the lithe Parisian style marked by flowing port de bras and the
gallant footwork of the danseur noble. Opposite Daguin, he debuted at the Royal Swedish
Opera in 1835 in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s revolutionary opera The Marriage of
Figaro. With instruction from mentor Anders Selinder, from 1836 to 1839, Johansson
acquired precision, agility, and polish, which he exhibited in theatrical divertissements and
in December 1837 at a performance of Oedipus.
A Career in Dance
Although Johansson sparred with Selinder over technique and repertoire, the dancer led
the Stockholm company from 1837 to 1840. In 1838, he debuted his ballet, Soldier and
Peasant, performed in Selinder’s idyll The Homecoming (1838), and danced before the
family of Tsar Nicholas I in Bournonville’s Valdemar (1835), a historical pantomime.
From Christmas 1839 into January 1840, the dancer attended sixteen hours of class per
week and performed every other day a four-part program of Salvatore Viganò’s La Vestale
(The Vestal Virgin, 1818) and Ferdinand Hérold’s pirate comedy Zampa, ou La Fiancée de
Marbre (Zampa, or The Marble Bride, 1831), concluding with Zampa’s condemnation to
hell. On February 1, 1840, Johansson performed his own version of the bridegroom’s
polonaise in Pierre Gardel’s comic pantomime La Dansomanie (Dance Craze, 1800).
For La Sylphide in August and September 1841, Johansson teamed with partner Marie
Taglioni at the Royal Swedish Theater, where he received the services of a dresser and
valet. Following her to the St. Petersburg Imperial Theatre in winter 1841, he earned
respect from instructor Antoine Titus, who extended a temporary residence to full-time
employment. On June 24, 1841, Johansson debuted at the imperial theater in a pas de deux
with Elena Andreyanova from La Gitana (The Gypsy), choreographed by Filippo
Taglioni.
For twenty years, Johansson collaborated with Jules Perrot and Marius Petipa in
shaping the uniqueness of Russian ballet and cultivating enchaînements (combinations)
for the male soloist. Johansson partnered the prima ballerinas of his time—Carlotta Grisi,
Tatyana Smirnova, Lucile Grahn, and Fanny Cerrito. On March 3, 1846, he starred with
Fanny Elssler in Catarina, ou La Fille du Bandit (Catarina, or The Bandit’s Daughter,
1846), directed by Perrot, who danced the part of Diavolino.
The Swede made St. Petersburg his home and attended evangelical Lutheran services at
the St. Catherine II Swedish Church. He attended classes in the Russian language and read
articles on dance in Revue des Deux Mondes (Review of Two Worlds). On October 14,
1853, he married a Swede, Emma Löf (or Loef), mother of dancer-teacher Anna
Christianovna Johansson and five other children—Emma, Fanny, Alexandra, and sons
Oscar and Alfred Theodor, both of whom died in infancy.
The Revered Teacher
After performing in Daniel Auber’s La Muette de Portici (The Mute of Portici, 1857), in
1860, Johansson retired from the stage to teach by a graded system. A forerunner of the
Cecchetti method, Johansson’s classes varied from a daily repetition of the same exercises.
Among his contributions to technique and terminology, he fostered a spontaneous bravura
and renamed changement de pieds to flic-flac, an onomatopoetic description of the sharp
front-back foot beats at the ankle. Johansson contributed combinations to La Fille du
Pharaon (The Daughter of the Pharaoh, 1862) and partnered with Marie Petipa as Conrad
and Medora, the lead roles of Le Corsaire (The Pirate).
Johansson took Petipa’s place as theater director in 1863 and advanced to the imperial
faculty in 1869. Playing a miniature violin, he groomed Agrippina Vaganova, brothers
Nikolai and Sergei Legat, Pavel Gerdt, Olga Preobrajenska, Nikolai Sergeyev, Marie
Petipa, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Anna Pavlova along with his daughter Anna. Arts historians
claimed that the pedagogue never repeated an enchaînement (combination) in three
decades of classes.
Johansson’s dedication to the Franco-Danish mode and his challenging footwork
attracted Marius Petipa as a spectator. At age fifty-four, Johansson danced Giacomo
Meyerbeer’s Gothic favorite Robert le Diable (Robert the Devil, 1871). Over time,
Johansson regretted losing his female dancers to wedlock and domesticity. For his loyalty
to students, he received summer vacations for his family on an estate outside Moscow.
 In the 1870s, Johansson collaborated with Petipa on romantic scenarios featuring the
female en pointe supported by the handsome cavalier. In 1874, he reported staging The
Little Humpbacked Horse (1864), the first ballet featuring a Russian story. After a family
vacation to Finland in August, the Swede invited his boyhood teacher, Bournonville, to
visit Russia the following year to debate with Petipa Swedish and Russian theories of
ballet discipline and structure. Johansson revived Petipa’s Camargo (1872) and danced the
part of the Rajah of Gulconda in Petipa’s La Bayadère (The Temple Dancer, 1877).
Johansson’s variations for male dancers inspired Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty (1890) and,
in 1893, empowered the performance of Varvara Nikitina in Les Caprices du Papillon
(The Whims of a Butterfly).
For Johansson’s classe de perfectionnement, which he began teaching in 1895, he
watered the floor with a watering can. When the dust settled, he coached pupils through a
regimen intended to correct their breathing and build stamina. As exhibited by his pupils
Yekaterina Geltzer, Tamara Karsavina, and Mathilde Kschessinska, the sincerity and
elegance of Russian ballet promoted Russian artistry, which had entered a decline in
Western Europe.
In retirement in 1902, Johansson chose Nikolai Legat to take charge of his master class.
He lost Emma to pneumonia in June 1903. At his death from stroke at age eighty-six, six
months later, on December 12, 1903, two granddaughters, many students, and his
colleague Petipa mourned his passing.
See also Taglioni, Marie; technique.
Source: Hall, Coryne. Imperial Dancer. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 2005.
JONES, INIGO (1573–1652)
In the late English Renaissance, the premier draftsman of physical theater, Inigo Jones,
promoted Italian stagecraft through the design of moveable shutter sets, historical
costume, and the picture-frame proscenium arch. His conventions linked dance and
spectacle with painting. A self-educated Anglo-Welsh painter born on July 15, 1573, he
and seven siblings came of age in the Smithfield section of northwest London. By 1585,
he resided in a Welsh community and apprenticed under a carpenter-joiner while teaching
himself landscape painting.
Serendipitously, Jones reached maturity at a time when ballet troupes developed
professionalism. In 1603, Lord Arundel became his patron and underwrote tours in
Florence of Medici court intermezzi produced by scenographer Bernardo Buontalenti, such
as La Pellegrina (The Pilgrim, 1589), and Giulio Parigi, builder of pageant floats for
ballets in the palace Salone della Commedia. At age thirty-two, Jones designed costumes
and, for a Twelfth Night (January 5) celebration, built demountable scenery in the
Renaissance Italian mode for The Masque of Blackness (1604), the first of five hundred
Jacobean theatricals. To understand the rudiments of proportional architecture, he
translated the Roman designer Vitruvius’s De Architectura Libri Decem (Ten Books on
Architecture, ca. 30 BCE) and Andrea Palladio’s classic four-volume I Quattro Libri
dell’Architettura (Four Books of Architecture, 1570).
 For Queen Anne of Denmark, consort of James I, in 1605, Jones initiated a thirty-five-
year career in staging masques and ballets. He began with a collaboration with dramatist
Ben Jonson in producing Hymenaei (Marriage, 1606) and The Masque of Beauty (1608),
extravaganzas tailored to the limits of the Banqueting House at Whitehall. For Hymenaei,
the dancers progressed from disarray in the prologue to balance and regularity in the
falling action, a gesture of support for marriage as a harmonizer of erratic human
behaviors. The dance theme stated a prevailing satisfaction with the monarchs who
replaced Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen.
Jones and Jonson separated in anger over Jones’s £3,000 budget for satyr and fairy
costumes and rock masonry set for The Masque of Oberon, the Faery Prince (1611), for
which Jonson received only £40 for the text. In the employ of James I and Queen Anne of
Denmark, in 1613, Jones toured Italy’s six most Romanized cities and learned Italian well
enough to analyze the principles of staging dance spectacle. With massive expenditures,
he provided the Stuart courts of James I and Charles I with primarily decorative ballets
featuring processionals, divertissements (entertainments), and ballets. At the same time
that Jones cultivated royal preferment, he wrote and produced performances for public
playhouses.
For 470 scenographies extolling the Jacobean monarchy, Jones engineered special
effects, specifically, machinery maneuvered by counterweights and ropes and pulleys for
flying flats and props. He exalted ballets with divine chariots and clouds on which air-
borne dancers performed. The application of perspective to dance in Pleasure Reconciled
to Virtue (1618) reinforced the contrast between fashionable dress and graceful behavior
and the leaden, folk-centered gyrations of Welsh dancers, symbols of medieval European
peasantry.
Jones’s visionary contrivances resulted in harmonious musical performances that
startled and delighted aristocrats. By carving grooves on the stage floor, he anchored
framed sets to slide in and out of audience view. Using colored glass, he intensified the
effects of chandeliers by tinting the reflected light, a shift from auditory to visible
pageantry that tinged Queen Henrietta Maria’s untitled masque in 1627.
Surviving diagrams of Jones’s ingenuity indicate his holistic approach to dance. For The
Temple of Love (1635), he sketched dancers in motion performing vigorous steps and
gesturing with vivid mime the part of a monstrous fish. For Britannia Triumphans
(Victorious Britain, 1638), his physical arrangements contrasted lithe dancers with
plebeian, earthbound rustics, gothic dwarves, and stock characters from the commedia
dell’arte. His fantasy performances came to an end in 1642 with the outbreak of the
English Civil War and conservative Puritanism thwarting court entertainment.
See also intermedio.
Source: Worsley, Giles. Inigo Jones and the European Classicist Tradition. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
JUVENILE COMPANIES
Historically, since the Renaissance, ballet companies have introduced young apprentices
to the stage by incorporating them in character roles and production numbers. Large
ensembles maintained dance academies that started children in ballet as early as age three,
a common feature of Australian ballet in the 1920s. The concept maintained momentum
with crowd scenes in Jerome Robbins’s The Pied Piper (1951), the ritual ring dance in
Matthew Bourne’s The Lord of the Flies (2010), child performance in Twyla Tharp’s
moral story The Princess and the Goblin (2012), and in 2014, the gathering of New York
City Ballet fairies in George Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
In the mid-sixteenth century at the French court of Henry II, Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx,
an Italian dance designer, established his expertise at training French children. The first
ballet school, the Académie Royale de Danse, opened in Paris in 1661 at the command of
Louis XIV, who promoted juvenile performers as a diversion during adult court
entertainment. Kirov ballroom dance tutor Jean Baptiste Landé furthered child troupes in
St. Petersburg in 1738 by educating six sons and six daughters of the palace staff of
Empress Anna of Russia.
Child Dancers
Throughout Europe, the training of juvenile companies bolstered staging with a variety of
ages and sizes, notably, Italian ballet master Filippo Beccari’s coaching of fifty-four
orphans in 1773 as the beginning of Moscow’s Bolshoi ensemble. In Bordeaux, French
dance master Jean Dauberval’s premiere of La Fille Mal Gardée (The Poorly Guarded
Girl, 1786) garnered critical acclaim for its use of a child troupe. German dance master
Friedrich Horschelt’s Viennese Kinderballett (Children’s Ballet) began enrolling homeless
six-year-olds in 1815. The group featured nine girls, which promoters pictured in La
Terpsicore Milanese (Milanese Dance, 1822), an almanac of school-age performers.
Because of Horschelt’s inability to control behavior, the empress Carolina Augusta
disbanded the ensemble in its seventh year.
In its brief history at the Theatre an der Wien, Horschelt’s juvenile company performed
fairy tale dances, beginning with an all-child adaptation of Louis-Antoine Duport’s
Aschenbrödel (Cinderella, 1813). Professional training produced ten-year-old character
dancer-choreographer Johann Raab and divas Fanny and Theresa Elssler, ages ten and
twelve. Another child trainee, Thérèse Heberle, debuted in the 1820s, starred in Milan at
La Scala in La Statua di Venere (The Statue of Venus, 1825), and paired often with Jean
Rozier, a German ballet star.
Vienna reinstituted its youth academy in 1841 under the direction of Josefine Maudry
Weiss, who scheduled ballet tours of her all-girl Danseuses Viennoises throughout Europe,
Great Britain, and North America. For The Harvest Dance (1846), a corps de ballet of
eight children aided by six smaller dancers depicted Viennese field workers in traditional
costume. A similar casting of a youthful corps de ballet in London’s Drury Lane in an
1860 remounting of Catarina, ou La Fille du Bandit (Catarina, or The Bandit’s Daughter)
introduced fifty Spanish dancers. One critic dismissed their presentation as an
experimental novelty.
Russian Companies
In the early 1900s, Russo-Armenian dance designer Agrippina Vaganova contributed to a
court dance for Tsar Nicholas II by choreographing roles in Fairy Doll (1903) for imperial
ballet pupils. The rise of Alexander Gorsky in Moscow to choreographer for the Bolshoi
increased the demand for child dancers, notably eleven-year-old Léonide Massine, who, in
1907, played a dwarf in composer Mikhail Glinda’s Russlan and Lyudmila. For La Fille
du Pharaon (The Pharaoh’s Daughter), in 1909, a Bolshoi children’s company executed
the “Pas des Caryatids” opposite diva Sofia Fedorova, who danced the part of the slave
Hita. Another staging of the ballet in 1915 at St. Petersburg featured Vera Karalli and
Platon Karsavin as Aspicia and Father Nile in “The Kingdom of the Rivers,” performed by
a company of seven children in Egyptian costumes.
The assassination of Nicholas II, the last Romanov emperor, and his family in 1917
preceded the closing of Russia’s Imperial dance academy, the feeder school for neophyte
performers. At the Mariinsky Theatre in 1922, seventeen-year-old George Balanchine
revived post-Revolution juvenile interests by forming the Young Ballet. For the ensemble,
he initiated the experimental presentations and techniques that marked his sixty-year
career.
Balanchine organized a youth processional to his version of the Coq d’Or (The Golden
Cockerel) and designed child roles for Oriental Dance (1922), Hungarian Gypsy Dance
(1922), Spanish Dance (1923), and Invitation to the Dance (1924). For presentations, the
children sewed calico into tunics accessorized with gray caps, tights, and slippers. Two
controversial ballets—The Twelve (1923) and Funeral March (1923)—aroused Duma
censorship and threats to pupils Vera Kostrovitskaya and Nina Stukolkina for
characterizing hunger, prostitution, looting, and violence during the revolt.
Staging Child Dancers
In 1947, Serge Lifar, director of the Paris Opera Ballet, ennobled the presentation of ballet
pupils with the grand défilé, a gracious procession of students by accomplishment. In
groups, the ensemble advanced by rank from the back of the stage toward the audience to
the “March of the Trojans,” composed by Hector Berlioz. A vivid spectacle, the assembly
of trainees, dressed in white and black, concluded in a group révérence (bow) to
acknowledge the long course of learning steps and developing into premiers danseurs.
Young companies began to emerge in more locales. In Warsaw in 1950, Polish dance
coach Leon Wojcikowski modeled a training program on Russia’s imperial academies. At
the New York City Ballet, Balanchine initiated a parallel dependence on young dance
pupils. Beginning in 1954, he cast thirty-nine apprentices from the School of American
Ballet as mice and snowflakes in The Nutcracker. In 1959, Cuban liberator Fidel Castro
bankrolled a youth dance corps in Havana under dancer-educator Alicia Alonso, who
made ballet training available to gifted children from all socioeconomic levels.
In North Africa, the juvenile company of the Cairo Opera Ballet began staging original
works in the mid-1970s. At a competition in Yugoslavia, the ensemble won a gold medal
for Oriental Fair (1976), to a score by Magda Izz. A decade later, Peter Martins directed
the New York City Ballet and ten children in Songs of the Auvergne (1986). The music of
Joseph Marie Canteloube included “Bailèro” and “Pour l’Enfant.”
 The Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv established a youth corps, Batsheva
Ensemble, in 1990 under the sponsorship of Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin. He
mounted ballets for the troupe, beginning with Deca Dance, a visceral concert also known
as Echad Mi Yodea (Who Knows One, 1990), a Passover hymn. The focus of the dance
begins with the freeing of formally dressed dancers of confining emotions and ends with
the removal of their suits and shirts.
Source: Craine, Debra, and Judith Mackrell. The Oxford Dictionary of Dance. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
 • K •
KIEV BALLET
Historically, the Kiev Ballet (KB) has preserved and promoted the grassroots tradition of
Ukrainian dance. From prehistory, dance in the Ukraine influenced improvisational arts in
Central Asia and shared narratives with Buddhist ritual. An outgrowth of drama and opera,
the National Ballet of Ukraine formed on October 27, 1867, as the result of petitions from
art lovers to the government for a residential repository of folklore and anti-noble peasant
dance. The repertoire promoted the traditional sword dances, the nuptial hutsulka, and the
hopak, a circle dance marked by claps and stomps and punctuated by the split leaps of
male dancers.
A mark of prestige, a KB performance before composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky of
The Oprichnik (The Guardsman, 1874) at the Russian Opera House raised national
perception of Ukrainian artistry. At the rise in Kiev’s reputation for the arts in 1887, Polish
actor-ballet master Stanislav Lenchevsky designed indigenous dances. As the company
increased in size and precision, in 1893, it added narrative ballet to its repertoire and
performed in traditional costumes, boots, and box headdress.
Professional Instruction
A fire on February 4, 1896, destroyed KB scores, tutus, slippers, and sets. Recovered by
1910, the ensemble expanded study and performance of classical and contemporary
works. Soloist Mikhail Mordkin, a thirty-year-old graduate of the Bolshoi Ballet School,
left Moscow during the 1917 Revolution and taught Ukrainians the flamboyant
combinations of the Ballets Russes. At the Young Theatre in 1919, he premiered
ethnomusicologist Igor Hiutel’s Azaide, Alexander Ilyinsky’s Nur and Anitra (1906),
playwright Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna (1919), and Mykola Lysenko’s Utoplena (The
Drowned Maiden, 1919) and Taras Bulba (1924), a poetized opera replete with
nonnarrative Tartar dance and Cossack marches.
In the struggle for independence, Kiev’s few trained residential performers stressed
Ukrainian music and arts, but lacked the numbers to mount narrative ballet. A self-exile
since 1916, dancer-dance coach Bronislava Nijinska initiated avant-garde rhythms and
gestures in January 1919 at Kiev’s l’École de Mouvement, a training ground for soloist-
choreographer Serge Lifar. In 1923, Nijinska fused folk values with classical style for a
stylized variation of Les Noces (The Wedding), a balletic study of village promotion of the
nuclear family.
Throughout the late 1920s, ballet and opera tours familiarized the working class with
Ukrainian talent and folk background. On October 18, 1931, KB premiered Pan
Kanyovsky (Mr. Kanyovsky), the first nationalistic symphonic ballet, composed by
Mikhailo Verikivsky. Critics recognized the value of local themes to patriotism.
Choreographer Igor Moiseyev, a Gallo-Romanian-Russian trained at the Bolshoi,
reshaped the local troupe into a theatrical folkloric ballet. He introduced participants to
authentic barre discipline, the introit to earthy character dance. Male dancers learned the
nanayo (boy fight), a choreographed hand-to-hand combat without rules. The ensemble
presented Moiseyev’s thirty-eight-minute Night on Bald Mountain (1935), a nightmarish
dance reprising a story by Nikolai Gogol to the music of Modest Mussorgsky. After
earning a gold medal at the 1935 London International Folklore Dance Festival, the KB
broadened its program to compete on a global level. In 1935 and 1937, public momentum
inspired Kiev’s dancers to form the Shevchenko Opera and Ballet Theater and the
Ukrainian Soviet State Folk Dance Ensemble.
Post-War Directions
Following World War II, KB acquired energy from new performers and staged Konstantin
Dankevich’s popular Lileya (Lily, 1939) and Aram Khachaturian’s Spartacus (1956), a
showpiece for male dancers. In the late 1950s, the company, sparked by the solos of
Galina Samsova, toured Bulgaria, Hungary, and Yugoslavia and ventured beyond the Iron
Curtain to France, England, and Canada. The Kiev dancers’ expertise earned them the
étoile d’or (gold star) at the 1964 International Classical Dance Festival in Paris and prizes
for Iraida Lukashova and Valery Parsegov, soloists in Swan Lake.
Under dance master Anatoly Shekera after 1966, KB danced his nine operas and
seventeen ballets, including a new staging of Aref Melikov’s The Legend of Love (1961), a
complex study of passion. The company ventured into symphonic ballet in 1971 when
Shekera’s wife, Eleonora Stebliak, starred in Romeo and Juliet, which earned a UNESCO
medal for its use of the score by Sergei Prokofiev. Composer Aram Khachaturian came to
Kiev to view Shekera’s 1977 staging of Spartacus. At a peak of excellence, the company
toured Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Italy, France, Great
Britain, and North America.
In 1981, soloist and artistic director Viktor Yaremenko transferred from the Bolshoi to
lead the Ukrainian dancers in revivals of Raymonda, Scheherazade, and Petrouchka. Tour
schedules became global in 1990, when Ukraine broke free of the Soviet Union. KB
competed in Paris in 1991, Strasbourg in 1993, Madrid in 1995, Avignon in 2000, and
Budapest in 2001. Under choreographer Yaremenko, the repertoire grew to thirty-two full-
length ballets, including updates by choreographer Valery Kovtun and appearances by
Romanian soloist Alina Cojocaru, who trained in Kiev.
In 2006, choreographer Radu Poklitaru followed the strategy of the Bolshoi and Kirov
by preparing a new generation of performers for eventual inclusion in KB. He arranged
patronage for the Kiev Modern Ballet, an ensemble of twenty-two young dancers learning
staging and presentation of such works as Carmen, Bolero, The Nutcracker, and the
organic drama The Myth of Verona: Shakespeariments (2008). The troupe toured the
Ukraine as well as Moldova, Romania, France, Spain, and Portugal.
In the 2014–2015 season, the ensemble, consisting of one hundred fifty members,
scheduled a program of sixteen performances per month from romantic works—La
Sylphide, Giselle, Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, Don Quixote, The Firebird, Romeo and
Juliet, and French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj’s Blanche Neige (Snow White, 2008).
Presently, the Kiev corps de ballet dances Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s magical fairy story
The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1900), Mikis Theodorakis’s Zorba the Greek (1968), Mikhailo
Skorulsky’s The Forest Song (1987), and the two-act phantasmagoric satire Master and
Margarita (2003) to the music of Dmitri Shostakovich and Hector Berlioz. Local stars
find opportunities worldwide, as with KB principal dancer Denis Matvienko, who
maintains guest status with the Tokyo Theatre Ballet.
Source: Nahachewsky, Andriy. Ukrainian Dance: A Cross-Cultural Approach.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012.
KIROV BALLET
See image in photospread.
A long-lived training ground for Russian dancers, the Kirov Ballet (KB)—also known
as the Soviet Ballet or Mariinsky Ballet—has survived nearly three hundred years of
competition and change. The nation’s first dance school opened on May 4, 1738, in St.
Petersburg under the direction of Jean Baptiste Landé, a French performer who had taught
regimented exercises in Poland, Sweden, and Denmark and to poor Russian children and
soldiers in training. Promoted by Empress Anna Romanovna and the Greek Orthodox
Church, Landé set up the Imperial Theatre School for twenty-four staff members in the
Winter Palace, home of the royal family. In 1744, the ballet master added Catherine the
Great to his pupils.
Because of the high salaries and renown of performers, the imperial school enrolled a
steady flow of outsiders from Scandinavia, Germany, France, and Italy. Rinaldo Fusano, a
Neapolitan dancer, arrived in Russia in 1742 and codirected the school with Landé.
Fusano introduced Italian style and fine-tuned character dance and mime with
Mediterranean elegance and masking. In 1758, Austrian choreographer Franz Hilverding
presented for Tsarina Elisabeth II a unique Viennese combination of leap and pirouette.
After 1759, Hilverding led the imperial school in three heroic ballets—Britannicus (1740),
Idomenée (1742), and Alzire, ou Les Americains (Alzira, or The Americans, 1761), a
survey of vicious clashes between South American Indians and conquistadors. He
controlled curriculum until his replacement in the 1760s by Gasparo Angiolini, a Viennese
dance master and proponent of ballet d’action.
Despite the supervision of outsiders, the imperial school, much like the tsarist military,
maintained a tyrannical hierarchy based on skill and absolute obedience. Angiolini set the
tone of motivation and consequences for actions with Le Festin de Pierre, ou Don Juan
(The Feast of the Stone, or Don Juan, 1761), a Gothic ballet to the music of Christoph
Gluck. Debuted in Vienna, the production concluded with the tragic hero relegated to hell
for his lust. A mythic dance, Médée et Jason, performed in 1763, posed more ghastly sins
of parricide.
After 1783, the imperial ensemble shared performance space with opera at the
Kamenny (Stone) Theatre, which Fusano had designed to hold two thousand viewers.
Imperial protocol ushered hirelings into the galleries, refined families to the loges, and
tsarist bureaucrats and the military to prime seats in the orchestra. In 1787, Charles Le
Picq, a pupil of Jean-Georges Noverre, brought to Russia experienced dancers from stages
in Spain, Austria, and France. Invited to direct the Imperial Ballet, Le Picq arrived with
his wife, Guertroude Rossi. He followed Noverre’s Lettres sur la Dance, et sur les Ballets
(Letters on Dance and Ballet, 1756), a groundbreaking reform of mime with the acting
strategies of English tragedian David Garrick. The text invested classes with precise
direction for acting.
Le Picq chose as a company dancer and codirector Swedish dancer Charles Didelot, the
inventor of flying performances by dancers on wires. Didelot, a French-educated dancer
under Jean Dauberval and Noverre, directed the Kirov in 1801 toward a classic curriculum
stripped of faddish social dance from Paris. A redesign of the Stone Theatre in 1802
headquartered the company in comfort for nine years, when the building burned. After a
hiatus in France during the War of 1812, Didelot returned to the school in 1816 to
permeate ballet with indigenous Russian dance. At the new theater after 1818, his forty
ballets, enhanced by the stage machinery of Alberto Cavos, brought worldwide
appreciation of the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre and of Russia’s arts program.
The Kirov’s Golden Age
Simultaneous with the arrival of Swedish soloist Christian Johansson, Marius Petipa, the
imperial ballet master after 1847, enhanced Mediterranean style by hiring divas trained by
Carlo Blasis. In winter 1848, dancer Jules Joseph Perrot, one of the most talented dancers
in Kirov history, took control of ballet instruction, bringing with him ballerinas Carlotta
Grisi and Fanny Cerrito. Teamed with composer Cesare Pugni and Petipa, Perrot staged
Catarina, ou La Fille du Bandit (Catarina, or The Bandit’s Daughter, 1846), starred Fanny
Elssler and Johansson in Le Rêve du Peintre (The Painter’s Dream, 1848), and mounted an
original version of La Femme Capricieuse (The Unpredictable Woman, 1850), starring
Pavel Gerdt and Eugeniya Sokolova.
As director, Petipa favored his wife, actor-dancer Mariia Surovshchikova, for parts in
L’étoile de Grenade (The Star of Granada, 1855), Un Mariage sous la Régence (A
Marriage under the Regency, 1858), and Le Marché de Paris (The Parisian Market, 1859),
a comic street scene. In competition with Arthur Saint-Léon, the French choreographer of
Moscow’s Bolshoi company, Petipa staged La Fille du Pharaon (The Pharaoh’s Daughter,
1862), a Gothic desert tale starring Carolina Rosati. Petipa celebrated the opening of a
new stone Mariinsky Theatre on October 2, 1862, with a revival of A Life for the Tsar, a
patriotic tragedy.
Petipa increased public taste for exotic spectacle with Le Roi Candaule (King
Candaules, 1868), the Greek historian Herodotus’s account of wifely trickery and the
overthrow of a Lydian king in the eighth century BCE. For the director’s enthusiasm and
appealing programs, in 1869, arts authorities advanced him to first place in the Imperial
Theatre. That same year, the Kirov danced Don Quixote and celebrated its centenary with
a revival of Perrot’s Faust.
The exciting ballet d’action during Petipa’s reign featured fairy tales, fantasy, and myth.
From the success of Le Dahlia Bleu (The Blue Dahlia, 1875) and La Bayadère (The
Temple Dancer, 1877), starring Ekaterina Vazem, Anna Johansson, and Lev Ivanov, ticket
prices rose so high that only aristocrats could afford them. Petipa bolstered his reputation
across Europe with a nationalistic allegory, La Nuit et le Jour (Night and Day, 1883),
celebrating the crowning of Alexander III. Under the direction of Ivan Vsevolozhsky, the
Kirov edged away from Gallic styles to Russian aesthetics, particularly scenarios set to the
music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Alexander Glazunov.
During a massive restoration of the city’s fire-damaged facades, the new Mariinsky
Theatre debuted a pair of ballets—L’Offrandes à l’Amour (Offerings to Cupid, 1886), a
tribute to the Tsaritsa Maria Federovna, and La Tulipe de Haarlem (The Harlem Tulip,
1887), featuring character dancer Enrico Cecchetti, the first male dancer to rival the appeal
of ballerinas en pointe. Under Petipa and colleague Johansson, the Imperial Ballet reached
a peak of lasting fame with two landmarks in dance history, The Sleeping Beauty (1890),
starring Carlotta Brianza and Enrico Cecchetti, and The Nutcracker (1892), a sumptuous
ballet-féerie highlighted by elegant sets and the rhapsodic scores of Tchaikovsky. For the
former storybook dance, Vsevolozhsky earmarked 25 percent of the theater budget for fur,
feathers, velvet, and embroidered silk costumes. For Nutcracker, the company expanded
to two hundred dancers led by Antonietta dell’Era as the Sugar Plum Fairy.
To preserve Petipa’s ingenuity, dancer Vladimir Stepanov devised a coding system for
dance, which he published in L’Alphabet des Mouvements du Corps Humain (The
Alphabet of Movements of the Human Body, 1892). Nowhere in Europe did
choreographers rival the Kirov’s expertise or the star power of Petipa’s protégé, prima
ballerina assoluta Pierina Legnani. With story ballets—the 1890 version of La Fille Mal
Gardée (The Poorly Guarded Girl), starring court favorite Mathilde Kschessinska; an 1893
adaptation of the French Cendrillon (Cinderella); an 1894 revival of Coppélia; and an
1895 resetting of Swan Lake, featuring Legnani—the Kirov ensemble defined the
creativity and imperial elegance of Russian ballet.
Performances of The Tsar Maiden (1895), La Perle (The Pearl, 1896), Barbe Bleue
(Bluebeard, 1896), Raymonda (1898), and an 1899 production of La Esmeralda brought
Petipa’s direction of the Imperial Ballet to a glorious conclusion. His energy waned from
the failure of Le Miroir Magique (The Magic Mirror, 1903), but the Imperial Ballet’s style
continued transforming the arts on the Continent and in the British Isles and North
America for the next century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Petipa yielded his
place to director Serge Wolkonsky and reformer Alexander Gorsky, yet carried into
retirement the title of “father of Russian ballet.”
The Fall of Imperial Ballet
Alterations at the Kirov began in earnest on October 15, 1905, after stage artists Felia
Doubrovska, Michel Fokine, Vaslav Nijinsky, Sergei Legat, Tamara Karsavina, Anna
Pavlova, Olga Preobrajenska, and Petipa’s daughters, Marie, Nadia, and Vera, plotted a
strike and demanded better work conditions, higher pay, and more control of their roles.
Urged by Tsar Nicholas II to stifle the revolt, the dancers agreed. They regretted that
pressure on Legat drove him to suicide. By 1911, the ballet powerbrokers had abandoned
the Mariinsky and moved west to Paris. The breach rechanneled the careers of Léon
Bakst, Doubrovska, Pavlova, Karsavina, Fokine, and Nijinsky to the Ballets Russes.
 Renovators of the Mariinsky ballet theater installed its famed black-and-gold stage
curtain in 1914. At the fall of the Romanov dynasty during the Russian Revolution on
March 8, 1917, the Bolsheviks closed the Imperial Ballet School and discontinued the
troupe. St. Petersburg itself disappeared under “Leningrad,” a de-Christianized name
reflecting political overconfidence. As Russia bled its talent into the West in the 1920s,
Russo-French studios in Paris spread Kirov poise and technique to a new generation.
In 1922, the Soviet Ministry of Culture rid dance of the savor of imperialism by
renaming the complex the Leningrad State Choreographic School, home of the Soviet
Ballet. Reformer Fyodor Lopukhov enriched the Mariinsky repertory with classless
contemporary and story ballet featuring Marina Semenova, Alexei Yermolayev, and
Galina Ulánova, but he banned from the repertory the radical works of Fokine. As party
dogma tightened its tentacles on the ensemble, in 1924, George Balanchine defected to
Paris, where Diaghilev hired artists and performers from the Mariinsky school to recapture
the golden age of Marius Petipa.
The impresario restaged the choreographer’s The Sleeping Beauty as The Sleeping
Princess (1921), starring Olga Spessivtseva as Aurora. In Leningrad, proletkult, a socialist
cultural redirection under Vsevolod Meyerhold, forced the Mariinsky company to train as
though for the army and to emulate the lock-step routines of factory workers and soldiers
for Dance Symphony: The Magnificence of the Universe (1923). In 1928, an authoritarian
fiat set the parameters of a dance competition featuring everyday settings and themes.
After the staging of The Flames of Paris (1932), in which diva Natalia Dudinskaya
dramatized the spirit of the French Revolution, soloist Vakhtang Chabukiani steered the
Kirov from its French foundations to the earthy Georgian style of his youth, which he
presented during tours of Estonia and Latvia.
To honor a Bolshevik martyr, Leningrad mayor Sergei Kirov, during the Great Terror of
1934, the historic company took the name Kirov Ballet, from which the Bolshoi attracted
performers and model choreography. To spread the Marxist ideology to laborers, the
Central Committee demanded that the arts limit topics to socialist scenarios. Petipa’s
methods remained the standard under Russo-Armenian instructor Agrippina Vaganova,
creator of Fundamentals of the Classical Dance (1934), the first Kirov syllabus.
Leningrad’s ballet troupe dominated Russian choreography with a production of The
Fountain of Bakhchisarai (1934), which set a standard of realism for dram-balet
(propaganda ballet), a dance form mimicking contemporary drama. Designed by Rostislav
Zakharov, the tragic Tartar tale depicts conquest and jealousy that victimizes Maria, a
Polish naif. Ensemble members exhibited pride in the characterizations of dram-balet,
which talent scouts spread across the Soviet Union. Vaganova’s 1936 choreography of
Swan Lake highlighted an unvoiced faith in the symbolic triumph of good over evil,
evidence that the Kirov refused to yield to totalitarianism. Similarly bold, Chabukiani’s
Heart of the Mountains (1938) and Laurencia (1939) extolled the Georgian spirit for its
passionate folk expression and unity that defied socialist coercion.
Political pressures unsettled the company, forcing Armenian dancer Sarkis Djanbazian,
the father of Iranian ballet, to emigrate from Russia to Tehran. During the evacuation of
the Kirov to a cramped facility in Perm in 1939, the Kirov ensemble performed Aram
Khachaturian’s bucolic Gayane (1942), set among Kurds on a collective farm. On return
to Leningrad, the KB danced The Bronze Horseman (1949), a balletic interpretation of
Alexander Pushkin’s epic verse about the mounted statue of Peter the Great with allusions
to Josef Stalin. With the failure of scenes of Soviet village life in Native Fields (1951),
popular rejection of danced dogma unleashed an anti-propaganda backlash.
Critics favored a verbal libretto set to prosaic dance. Open attack on dram-balet
followed the death of Stalin on March 5, 1953, beginning with a 1954 presentation of
Leonid Iakobson’s Tartar storybook dance Shurale, which concludes with a magical fire
that cleanses a forest of a demonic monster. The militance of diva Natalia Dudinskaya and
her husband, choreographer Konstantin Sergeev, stultified creativity, thus pleasing the
Soviet committees setting socialist standards for the Kirov.
Increasingly marooned by Moscow’s hard liners, KB lost ties with Western European
and North American ballet. In the late 1950s and 1960s, the company resurrected Russian
enthusiasm for symphonic dance with stagings of story ballet—Prokofiev’s The Stone
Flower (1953), Spartacus (1956), The Path of Thunder (1958), The Legend of Love
(1961), and The Coast of Hope, a 1959 performance extolling the steadfast strength of the
Soviet. A new generation of principals—Natalia Makarova, Rudolf Nureyev, Mikhail
Baryshnikov, Valery Panov—impressed global arts critics with the nation’s rededication to
artistic purity.
With the defection of Rudolf Nureyev on June 16, 1961, the aging artistic commune
withered while young dancers lost perspective on classical artistic foundations and the
esthetic uprooting caused by revolution and authoritarianism. Ironically, during this
period, ballet master Peter Gusev introduced Russian dance technique to new territory in
Ghangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing, China. The defection of Makarova in London in 1970
reminded the ensemble of the Kirov’s loss of international clout. Four years later, the
growing oversight of the arts by the Ministry of Culture pushed Baryshnikov to defect to
Canada.
The Birth of the Mariinsky Ballet
At the nadir of Communism, KB spurned regimentation by retaining autonomy over
themes and technique. A retro period in the late 1970s revived nineteenth-century
choreography by Arthur Saint-Léon, Perrot, and Danish dance maker August
Bournonville. Under director Oleg Vinogradov, the Kirov interlaced its classical repertory
with the revisionist coups de theatre of Michel Fokine and George Balanchine.
Demoralized by suicides and defections of star dancers and the mounting reputation of the
Bolshoi, Kirov ensemble members retreated into the soothing classicism of Noverre and
Vaganova.
Under glasnost, a liberalization of Communism under Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989, KB
reclaimed defectors Makarova and Nureyev and reinstated Balanchine’s works. The
ensemble acquired its first foreign soloist, Lisa Macuja-Elizalde, the world’s first Filipina
prima ballerina. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 created the need for more
renaming, by which the Mariinsky Theatre and Mariinsky Ballet replaced “Soviet” and
“Kirov” in institutional titles. From the 1990s into the twenty-first century, programs
showcased modernism in Kenneth MacMillan’s revision of Manon and John Neumeier’s
Now and Then (1992), the solo Spring and Fall (1996), and Sounds of Empty Pages
(2001). Works by Petipa, Bronislava Nijinska, Vaslav Nijinsky, and William Forsythe
extended the breadth of program innovations.
Into the twenty-first century, the Mariinsky embraced its whole history. Under director
Yuri Fateyev, the ballet company of two hundred performers retained classic dances
—Paquita, Giselle, La Sylphide—along with classics introduced by the Ballets Russes
—The Firebird, Scheherazade, and The Prodigal Son. In the 2014–2015 season, the
company toured with Sylvia, Spartacus, The Little Humpbacked Horse, Carmen, and Anna
Karenina.
See also en pointe; Guangzhou Ballet; Petipa, Marius; Sergeyev, Nicholai; Vaganova,
Agrippina.
Source: Homans, Jennifer. Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet. New York: Random
House, 2010.
KOREA NATIONAL BALLET
An artistic outlet for South Koreans, the Korea National Ballet sets lofty goals for the
future of artistic dance. An element of the National Theater of Korea, the company began
in Seoul in 1962 under management by Lim Sung-nam. His talents included mentoring
and choreographing seven works of Korean literature, particularly The Dream of Jigwi
(1974), the Yi dynasty seduction scenario Baebijang (1984), the country’s first comic
ballet, and the surreal Love of Chunhyang (2007).
Lim directed dance artistry for three decades before surrendering his post to ballerina
Kim Hae-sik, an appointee of the Korean Ministry of Culture. She raised the number of
state dance pupils to fifty and encouraged members to design stage works. During the
1980s, the troupe performed Scheherazade, featuring Japanese ballerina Tae-ji Choi, who
also starred in The Nutcracker. In the 1990s, the company added to its repertoire La
Bayadere (The Temple Dancer), Cinderella, Carmen, Paquita, Raymonda, La Fille Mal
Gardée (The Poorly Guarded Girl), and The Sleeping Beauty and performed Spartacus in
Russia at the Novosibirsk State Ballet Theatre. In 1995, the dancers joined national
celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of liberation from Japan’s occupation troops.
A Professional Company
Korea’s ballet freed itself of dependence on national theater and in 1999 hired its first
choreographer, Byung-nam Moon. The company mounted full-length works in the Seoul
Arts Center at the 2,340-seat Opera Theater. In addition, the ensemble toured Egypt,
Israel, China, Japan, and Russia. For a fortieth anniversary special, in 2002, the troupe
performed the Jean-Christophe Maillot 1996 version of Romeo et Juliette.
In 2006, after success in lyric roles in Giselle, Swan Lake, Le Corsaire (The Pirate), and
Romeo and Juliet, ballerina Joo-won Kim earned the Benois de la Danse award. The
following year, the company directors docked her salary for one month for appearing
topless in a Vogue fashion spread. Libertarians demanded complete artistic freedom for
Kim.
Grown to eighty members, in 2008, the Korea National Ballet passed the direction to
Tae-ji Choi, holder of awards for performance and coaching. She lobbied the Ministry of
Culture for a government dance academy and boarding school to foster ballet for children
and teens and to exempt male dancers from military service. The dance ensemble
strengthened its case for a greater subsidy in 2010 by collaborating with the Bolshoi
Ballet.
The Dance Fad
Into the decade, dance appealed to the Global public, who bought ballet flats and skirts as
a fashion statement. The Korea National Ballet starred Lee Won Guk in Spartacus, his
plum role since 2001, which increased the membership of his fan base. The company
packed the house for Giselle, Don Quixote, and Hispanic innovations in 2011 and, in
October, performed Moon’s original narrative ballet Prince Hodong in Naples and Rome
to sell-out crowds. The following year, members taped advertising pas de deux for Levi’s
Stretch Jeans featuring Kim Li Hoe and Lee Dong Hoon.
In 2013, the ensemble made headlines with the debut of fourteen-year-old Yun Seo-hoo
opposite Lee Won Guk in The Nutcracker, with a popular presentation of Tchaikovsky’s
Mystery of Life and Death, and with Joo-won Kim’s staging of an original version of
Marguerite and Armand. In 2014, Kim performed Chohyeon (Two in Two), a double duet
with Kim Ji-young partnered by ballerinos Kim Bo-ram and Jang Kyung-min. The
multifaceted choreography contrasted classical steps to flamenco and tango. Dance
management promoted to artistic director award-winning dancer Kang Sue-jin, the first
Asian to win the Prix de Lausanne competition.
Source: Do Je-hae. “Kang Sue-jin to Lead Korea National Ballet.” Korea Times (3
December 2013).
 • L •
THE LADY OF THE CAMELLIAS
An autobiographical novel by Alexandre Dumas, La Dame aux Camélias (The Lady of the
Camelias, 1848) inspired stage, ballet, opera, and film versions by a variety of names.
Giuseppe Verdi chose Camille (1852), the theater play of mismatched lovers, as a basis for
an opera, La Traviata (The Fallen Woman, 1853). For the Royal Ballet in 1962, Frederick
Ashton choreographed Marguerite and Armand, a compressed version of the love story
influenced by Greta Garbo’s film version, Camille (1936). After he saw a stage adaptation
the previous year starring Vivien Leigh and John Merivale, Ashton scored Franz Liszt’s
“B Minor Piano Sonata” for oddly mismatched dancers—forty-three-year-old Margot
Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, then age twenty-four.
At Covent Garden, a covey of fifty photographers crowded the dress rehearsal, which
opened on a chandeliered setting that designer Cecil Beaton swathed in gauzy drapes. In
the style of Garbo’s costumes, Beaton dressed Margot in a bare-shouldered red dress with
bodice centered by a white camellia, a duality picturing the woman of pleasure sporting a
symbol of innocence. Nureyev danced an appropriate role—the youth bored with the life
of the roué. Clad in high evening style, he grew so displeased with his swallowtail coat
that he yanked off the collar and trimmed the back extensions with scissors.
Two viewers, Queen Mother Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, added a touch of
command performance to opening night. When the partners executed the dance on March
12, 1963, they and Ashton took twenty-one curtain calls. The audience acknowledged the
dramatic convention of the social neophyte inveigled by a demimondaine. A huge success
and source of rumors about an off-stage Nureyev-Fonteyn affair, the ballet set the tone for
romantic partnering into the twenty-first century. Critics curbed public enthusiasm for the
partners, by remarking that, without the star dancers, the libretto offered nothing special.
Thwarted Love
Mirroring the scenarios of Eugene Onegin, the ballet contrasts the virulence of urban life
with the repose of the country, a rustic ideal rid of the mannered courtesies of the
bourgeois ballroom. The prologue reveals a frivolous party in Paris at which men and
glamorous courtesans flirt playfully. Ashton featured the language of flowers in “The
Meeting,” where Marguerite first gestures interest in Armand in the white camellia she
tosses to the floor.
As the relationship progresses to intimacy, the lovers dance “In the Countryside,” where
flashbacks reveal the progress of his infatuation with Marguerite. At the ballet’s climax,
“The Insult,” a tangle of emotions separates Marguerite from Armand. He fails to realize
that his father, played by Michael Somes, has engineered the breakup and sent Marguerite
away from a country respite. Medically and symbolically, while the city accelerates the
lung infection that kills her, the insincerity of urban life wrings her heart.
 For the finale, “The Death of La Dame aux Camélias,” the dance abandons the sexual
badinage of temporary liaisons to enact real and lasting passion. In Marguerite’s last
moments before dying of tuberculosis, Armand learns that his father’s meddling has
intruded on true love. In an apartment shortly before Marguerite’s death, the lovers
reignite their sexual lyricism in a poignant pas de deux.
A Resilient Dance
The partners performed Marguerite and Armand some fifty times. As the bereaved
Armand, Nureyev won the favor of arts patron Jackie Kennedy. After forty presentations
in London, Nureyev and Fonteyn carried their electric pairing to La Scala in Milan, the
1966 centenary of the Paris Opera, the Metropolitan Opera House in 1968, and, in 1975,
across Canada, the United States, and South America. In 1973, Louis Jourdan directed a
film version, A Dancer Named Nureyev, which contained the entire ballet. In 1977,
Fonteyn and Nureyev danced the tragic twosome one last time.
For the Stuttgart Ballet in 1978, John Neumeier, director of the Hamburg Ballet and the
Royal Winnipeg Ballet, reset The Lady of the Camellias to Frédéric Chopin’s Second
Piano Concerto and Romanze as a vehicle for prima ballerina Marcia Haydée and Ivan
Liska. Nureyev hoped to perform Marguerite and Armand in Leningrad, but never worked
out the details. A decade after his death, a revival of the showpiece for the Sadler’s Wells
Theatre on January 20, 2003, featured Sylvie Guillem and Nicolas Le Riche as principals.
Source: Kavanagh, Julie. Nureyev: The Life. New York: Pantheon, 2007.
LA SCALA THEATRE BALLET
An eminent company derived from Renaissance court dance performed for the Sforza
family, the La Scala Theatre Ballet (SCTB) attracted talent from its scuola di ballo (ballet
school) and international choreography from the best of European innovators. Following
the fire that burned the Teatro Regio Ducale on February 25, 1776, the new structure,
patronized by Hapsburg empress Maria Theresa, took the name of a fourteenth-century
church, Santa Maria alla Scala (St. Mary of the Stairs). Lighted by oil lamps and a massive
chandelier and painted blue and gold, the structure seated three thousand patrons in pit
stalls and six semicircular loggias surrounding one of Italy’s largest stages. Dancers
performed before grand drapes, which Domenico Riccardi painted with the mythical
Greek Mount Parnassus, a symbol of excellence.
SCTB regularly embellished opera performances. On August 3, 1778, the new theater
opened under the patronage of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria and ninety wealthy
Milanese. The inaugural ballet, Apollo Placato (Apollo Appeased, 1778), presented the
choreography of Giuseppe Canzani, the inventor of ballo tragico (dance tragedy). The
ensemble also danced in Antonio Salieri’s opera Europa Riconosciuta (Europe Revealed,
1778), dedicated to Beatrice d’Este of Modena.
An eminent Milanese company derived from Renaissance court dance in Italy, the La Scala Theatre Ballet
attracted talent from its scuola di ballo (ballet school) and international choreography from the best of
European innovators. Heirloom postcard purchased over eBay from St. Petersburg, Russia.

From 1779 to 1789, a period when the Paris Opera squelched creativity, SCTB ballet
master Gasparo Angiolini of Lucca spearheaded the promotion of Italian arts among
peripatetic dancers. For the Milanese company of fifty members, he introduced ballet
d’action, an early form of narrative dance that replaced medleys. Angiolini followed the
theories of Viennese theorist Franz Hilverding that ballet should banish grotteschi (Gothic
excess) by integrating steps and postures with mime and characterization that made the
figures come alive.
Nineteenth-Century Developments
In 1804, pre-romantic composer-choreographer Salvatore Viganò, a Neapolitan disciple of
Jean Dauberval, superintended SCTB and directed programming toward historical
recreations. Viganò initiated coreodramma (dance drama), a synthesis of lyricism and
vivid pantomime that he applied to the heroic ballet Coriolano (1804). He orchestrated the
magical atmosphere of Il Noce di Benevento (The Walnut Tree of Benevento, 1812), for
which designer Alessandro Sanquirico painted accurate topography. During Viganò’s
tenure, in 1813, impresario Benedetto Ricci opened the theater’s dance academy, teaching
ballet foundations and specialization in variation and partnering. Among the first pupils,
Amalia Brugnoli perfected the technique of toe dancing, a skill that attracted the curious.
 Backed by an energetic stage crew, SCTB performed Viganò’s allegorical Prometeo
(Prometheus, 1813), Psammi, King of Egypt (1817), set in Memphis, La Vendetta di
Venere (The Revenge of Venus, 1817), and La Vestale (The Vestal Virgin, 1818). Partners
Nicola Molinari and Antonia Pallerini performed credible impersonations for Otello
(1818) before a famous couple, authors Percy and Mary Shelley. I Titani (The Titans,
1819), a heroic work, featured the corps de ballet in a study of gold and human greed. The
La Scala company danced Salvatore Taglioni’s La Conquista di Malacca (The Conquest
of Malacca, 1820) before a spectacular scene of a shipwreck, another of Alessandro
Sanquirico’s painted marvels.
From 1835, instructor Carlo Blasis and his wife, Annunziata Ramaccini, an expert on
mime, extended Viganò’s vision of serious dance as they co-managed the La Scala
Imperial Academy of Dancing and Pantomime. Under their direction, for fifteen years, the
academy regained its reputation for excellence, especially for the character roles of
Marietta Baderna and thirteen-year-old Sofia Fuoco’s speed and intricate steps in the
tarantella, a southern Italian folk dance set to taps on the tambourine. A list of star pupils
—Augusta Dominichetti, Flora Fabbri, Carolina Granzini, and Giovanni Lepri—mastered
barre basics while increasing torso and limb stamina.
On advancement to solo work, La Scala students learned the enchaînements
(combinations) of adagio and allegro dancing as well as breath control and erect posture, a
regimen that influenced teacher Enrico Cecchetti, who had trained under Cesare Coppini
at Milan. The quality of technique elevated the performances of Antonio Cortesi, the
dancer-composer who had staged Marco Visconti (Viscount Mark, 1836), a tale from the
fourteen century featuring troubadour lays. Cortesi’s works incorporated the best of La
Scala talent—L’Ebrea di Toledo (The Jew of Toledo, 1841), a role for young Giovannina
King, an 1841 presentation of La Sylphide featuring Amalia Ferraris, and Giselle (1843),
starring Carlotta Grisi in the title role.
During Jules Joseph Perrot’s choreographer-in-residence appointment in Milan in 1848,
he directed Faust and paired with Fanny Elssler as Mephistopheles and Marguerite.
Nationalistic Italians hissed Elssler for her Austrian heritage, forcing Perrot to substitute
American dancer Augusta Maywood. Maywood’s performance in Giuseppe Rota’s opera
Bianchi e Neri (Whites and Blacks, 1848) pleased the Italian audience, elevating her to the
first ballerina from the United States at La Scala to compete with European divas.
In mid-century, French instructor Charles-Auguste Hus trained Caterina Beretta, Rita
Sangalli, and Giuseppe Bonfiglio, a stickler for classical technique and dance attire. Hus’s
star pupil, Claudina Cucchi, achieved the rank of allieva emerita (distinguished student)
and stardom in Giuseppe Rota’s Un Fallo (The Fault, 1853). As with other promising La
Scala alumni, Cucchi moved on to the Paris Opera, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Cairo, and
Rome. With Blasis’s mentoring, Pasquale Borri rose to the level of primo ballerina di
rango francese (first male dancer of French rank) and performed the romantic ballet La
Giocoliera (The Juggler, 1856) opposite teenaged star Carolina Pochini. Another La Scala
graduate, Marietta Bonfanti, made her career in Lyons, Paris, London, and Madrid, thus
propagating the Italian method throughout western Europe. In 1857, dancer-choreographer
Domenico Ronzani scheduled a tour to Philadelphia and other U.S. cities featuring mimes
Cesare Cecchetti and Serafina Casagli and their young son, Enrico Cecchetti, three more
ambassadors of Milan’s dance techniques.
Technical Wizardry
During the blossoming of narrative ballet apart from opera, dancer-choreographer Luigi
Manzotti replaced paltry divertissements with ballo grande, a dance spectacle devoid of
Gallo-Russian refinements. Manzotti created a hero tale, Pietro Micca (1876), featuring
soldiers and cannon, and a Nordic saga, Sieba, ou La Spada di Wodan (Sieba, or Wotan’s
Sword, 1879), which displayed precision dancers and the backstage machinery of La
Scala’s engineering department. Manzotti’s masterwork, the colossal Excelsior (1881), a
tribute to the Industrial Revolution, starred Carlotta Brianza and Maria Giuri dancing to
the score of Romualdo Marenco opposite five hundred dancers, twelve horses, two cows,
and an elephant. The stage manager cataloged three thousand one hundred costumes, eight
thousand props, and one hundred thirty painted flats. In the United States, South America,
Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Vienna, and St. Petersburg and again in Milan in 1883, Brianza and
Virginia Zucchi reprised the dance’s eleven tableaux, a celebration of the steam engine,
electricity, and the Suez Canal.
Manzotti and the romanticists dueled for the hearts of balletomanes. In March 1886,
Gaetano Saracco mounted La Bella Dormente (The Sleeping Beauty), starring Brianza as
Aurora. Pierina Legnani, a pupil at La Scala tutored by theater director Caterina Beretta,
achieved top billing in 1892 before transporting the grand Italian style to the Imperial
Ballet at St. Petersburg, where narrative ballet ruled. A La Scala staging of Sylvia in 1895
and La Bella (Beauty, 1896) returned Brianza to the Milan theater in the era’s endearing
female roles. The following year, Manzotti mounted Sport (1897), an enormous fantasy on
global athletic competitions through meticulous ballet mimicry.
Restoring Order
In 1898, La Scala welcomed the musical genius of conductor Arturo Toscanini, who
modernized lighting and suppressed Manzotti’s extravaganzas. Following a four-year
closure brought on by world war, in 1921, Toscanini raised funds to reopen La Scala’s
dance school under Olga Preobrajenska, who danced the lead in Il Convento Veneziano
(The Venetian Convent, 1922). Upon the retirement of Cecchetti in 1923, instructor
Nikolai Legat inherited the post of dance master at La Scala.
Lucia “Cia” Fornaroli directed the academy, applying the theories she learned while
studying at the La Scala Academy along with the modernism of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets
Russes. As prima ballerina, she performed Casanova a Venezia (Casanova in Venice,
1929) and a series of opera divertissements. Into the 1930s, she operated a private dance
academy and trained students in La Scala style.
From 1928 to 1938, mounting fascism and anti-Semitism under Italian dictator Benito
Mussolini crushed the spirit and artistry of La Scala’s dancers and musicians. The
forethought of collectors rescued archival photos, books, programs, recordings, and
scores, notably, Gaspero Angiolini’s libretto of the ballet Semiramis (1765). Direct hits
from British fire bombs on August 15–16, 1943, destroyed La Scala’s roof and gutted
seating and floors. The loss of venue forced performers to reschedule events at the Palazzo
dello Sport and dance for soldiers at Italian theaters unscathed by war. By May 11, 1946,
the theater had recovered its structure, chandelier, and operation, underwritten in part by
Toscanini’s check for $10,000.
Guest appearances revived audience fervor. Diva Carla Fracci brought fame to the La
Scala Ballet in the 1958–1959 season with performances of Romeo and Juliet and Don
Giovanni. The choreography of Finnish dancer Jorma Uotinen increased global
enthusiasm for the Milanese ballet. After the burning of the Royal Opera House in Cairo
in 1971, arts enthusiast Abdel Kamel studied at La Scala and married an Italian soloist,
Erminia Gambarelli, who influenced the future of dance in Egypt. Russian defector Rudolf
Nureyev mounted a version of Romeo and Juliet in 1981, featuring Margot Fonteyn as
Lady Capulet.
In 1992, prima ballerina Alessandra Ferri, a former pupil at La Scala, returned to her
roots as guest star in Le Baiser de la Fée (The Fairy’s Kiss), Armide, and La Chauve-
Souris (The Bat). In 2007, she starred in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which she
danced an ethereal pas de deux with Roberto Bolle. For fifteen years, she executed a series
of concert pieces designed for her by Roland Petit, Kenneth MacMillan, William Forsythe,
and Annamaria Steckelman.
In 2011, performer Mariafrancesca Garritano exposed a pervasive problem with eating
disorders among La Scala dancers. As a result of her charges, in January 2012, the
management fired her. In December 2013, the ensemble premiered Alexei Ratmansky’s
inventive Opera, a radical salute to La Scala featuring Roberto Bolle and the male corps
de ballet in Roman legionary attire and females in the long dance skirts of the 1700s. For
the 2014 troupe staging in the film Notre-Dame de Paris, principals Bolle and Natalia
Osipova wore costumes designed by Yves Saint Laurent and danced to the music of
Maurice Jarre.
Source: Veroli, Patrizia. “Walter Toscanini, Bibliophile and Collector, and the Cia
Fornaroli Collection of the New York Public Library.” Dance Chronicle 28, no. 3 (2005):
323–62.
LEGAT, NIKOLAI (1869–1937)
A dancer-instructor for the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg, Nikolai Gustavovich Legat
enlarged the reputation and following of dance master Marius Petipa. A third-generation
dancer born of German-Swedish heritage in Moscow on December 30, 1869, he was the
son of character specialist Maria Seminovna Granken and Gustav Legat, a ballet teacher in
Helsinki and at the Bolshoi. Other family troupe members included a younger brother,
dancer Sergei Legat, Uncle Ernest Legat, and Aunt Adelaide Legat.
Known as “Kolinka,” Nikolai studied with Sergei in St. Petersburg under Swedish
ballet master Christian Johansson and specialized in caricature, lyricism, athletic
technique, and the floor patterning of pas de deux. In a twenty-year career, Nikolai starred
as a principal in seventy productions. One of the instructors of nine-year-old Agrippina
Vaganova, in 1888, he taught her classic steps from the 1700s. He also developed leg
muscles in Anna Pavlova and clashed with student Michel Fokine over classical
discipline.
Nikolai starred as Prince Coqueluche opposite Olga Preobrajenskaya as the Sugar Plum
Fairy in the original production of The Nutcracker (1892). He danced as Zephyr in Le
Réveil de Flore (Flora’s Awakening) in 1894, as the clown Pierrot in Les Millions
d’Arlequin (Harlequinade, 1900), and as Aminta in Lev Ivanov’s 1901 adaptation of
Sylvia. At Johansson’s retirement in 1902, he chose Legat to take charge of his classe de
perfectionnement and to inherit the violin that Johansson had played at rehearsals. Nikolai
choreographed and performed with his brother in Fairy Doll (1903), an imperial court
performance featuring Mathilde Kschessinskaya, Pavel Gerdt, and Olga Chumakova.
Nikolai and Sergei published a lighthearted book of satiric cartoons, Russian Ballet in
Caricatures (1905), which included a self-parody of Nikolai’s balding head. Their career
took a grievous turn during the company strike on October 15, 1905, which involved
Sergei and Maria, daughter of choreographer Marius Petipa. In the aftermath of revolt
against tsarist authoritarianism, Sergei went into a drunken depression and slit his throat
with a razor.
A Dancer-Teacher
From 1906 to 1914, Nikolai Legat filled the vacuum left by the death of Johansson and the
retirement of Petipa. Legat danced in Raymonda in 1907 and, in 1906 and 1909, directed
Pavlova and Gerdt in the debut of The Blood-Red Flower (1907) and staged successful
productions of Don Juan and Paquita, featuring Vaslav Nijinsky and Elena Smirnova.
Legat’s coaching of mime and adagio dance influenced a generation of dancer-
choreographers of the Ballets Russes, notably, Finnish soloist George Gé, Tamara
Karsavina, George Balanchine, Adolph Bolm, and Léonide Massine.
Legat toured Warsaw, Prague, Vienna, Leipzig, and Berlin, where he exhibited his
remarkable enchaînements (combinations). In 1909, he partnered Mathilde Kschessinska
in a revival of Petipa’s Le Talisman (The Amulet) in honor of the thirteenth wedding
anniversary of Empress Alexandra and Tsar Nicholas II. In the role of Colas, he teamed
with Pavlova in La Fille Mal Gardée (The Poorly Guarded Girl). As a coach in private
practice, he trained prima ballerina–choreographer Nadine Nicolaeva, whom he wed in
Paris in 1910.
At the dance master’s retirement in February 1914, the tsar rewarded Legat with a
bonus and gold cigarette case. Legat continued to dance major roles, including the lead in
The White Lily (1915), which paired Pavlova and Nijinsky. In 1919, Legat completed
divorce proceedings against his common-law wife, Antonina Tchumakova, sister of his
first wife, Olga Tchumakova, and mother of Legat’s daughter Maria. During the Bolshevik
Revolution, Nikolai and Nadine staged performances at the Narodny Dom, a civilian
theater, and partnered in adagio dance to entertain the Russian army in open-air arenas.
The bureaucracy of the Bolshoi in Moscow dismayed the couple, who felt stymied by a
preferential political hierarchy that seized his residence.
Legat as Refugee
In 1922, Legat and his wife immigrated through Germany and France to London, where
the couple launched the Moscow Arts Ballet and academy, a gathering place for Russian
exiles. When Enrico Cecchetti retired as trainer of the Ballets Russes in 1923, Legat
replaced him, but suffered from persistent comparisons to his predecessor. Upon viewing
the troubled relationship between Nijinsky and impresario Sergei Diaghilev, Nikolai
criticized the coercive sexual relationship the older man forced on the young dancer.
Legat viewed Russian ballet as a study of French, Scandinavian, and Italian dance and
the application of their techniques to Russian aesthetics. After eight years of introducing
Russian carriage and precision to non-Russians, he opened the School of Classical Russian
Ballet at Colet Gardens in London and choreographed for the Camargo Society. He taught
progressive dance to Ludmila Lvova, Ninette de Valois, André Eglevsky, Alicia Markova,
Frederick Ashton, Alexandra Danilova, Serge Lifar, Anton Dolin, Margot Fonteyn,
Michael Somes, and Moira Shearer.
At Legat’s death on January 24, 1937, the arts world revered him as the great-
grandfather of British ballet. Nadine Legat continued operating the Legat ballet school and
issued her husband’s journal, Ballet Russe: Memoirs of Nicolas Legat (1939). Dancer John
Gregory preserved the dance master’s legacy by founding England’s Legat Foundation.
Source: Frame, Murray. The St. Petersburg Imperial Theaters: Stage and State in
Revolutionary Russia, 1900-1920. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000.
LIFAR, SERGE (1905–1986)
A theorist and principal dancer of the Ballets Russes and Paris Opera throughout the mid-
1900s, Ukrainian choreographer Serge Mikhailovich Lifar empowered male performance
while reclaiming the French dance heritage from neglect. A native of Kiev, he was born on
April 2, 1905, the third of the four children of Sophie and Michael Lifar, a civil servant.
Serge dreamed of wearing a cavalry uniform, like his twelve uncles, until he witnessed the
savagery of the October Revolution of 1917.
After service in the White and Red armies, at age fifteen, Lifar abandoned the military.
He discovered dance in the Ukraine at the Kiev Opera Ballet and studied under Bronislava
Nijinska. At age sixteen, he fled to Warsaw and escaped a prison term for illegal
emigration from Russia. He migrated to Paris via freight train.
Lifar educated himself in European arts and eurythmics, a cultic movement training that
harmonized body and soul. Serge Diaghilev, manager of the Ballets Russes, advanced cash
for his hotel and meals before the ensemble’s tour to Barcelona and Amsterdam. Diaghilev
dispatched Lifar to Turin, where he studied pure classical postures and progressive dance
under ballet masters Enrico Cecchetti, Pierre Vladimirov, and Nikolai Legat.
In Self-Exile
On January 13, 1923, Lifar joined Diaghilev’s company and, as a replacement for Vaslav
Nijinsky, advanced to the glamorous level of principal dancer at age twenty. In the
impressionist mode, Lifar appeared in beach attire by Coco Chanel for Le Train Bleu (The
Blue Train, 1924) and as a police sergeant in the comic ballet Barabau (1925), costumed
by Maurice Utrillo. He partnered Tamara Karsavina in Roméo et Juliette, in which he wore
a Renaissance bodice and vizard mask designed by Max Ernst and Joan Miró. In metal
headgear and one-shoulder tunic, Lifar teamed with Alicia Nikitina in George
Balanchine’s avant-garde La Chatte (The Cat, 1927). Opposite Alexandra Danilova in
Apollon Musagète (Apollo and the Muses, 1928), he performed in pleated Greek tunic and
calf-high sandals.
Because of Lifar’s flamboyance and physical beauty, Diaghilev quickly ousted Anton
Dolin as favorite and promoted Lifar to artistic consultant. On August 19, 1929, Lifar
exhibited his knack for collaboration. He adorned the Ballets Russes spring production of
Le Fils Prodigue (The Prodigal Son) with his own mime, scenes painted by Georges
Rouault, libretto by Boris Kochno, the choreography of George Balanchine, and Sergei
Prokofiev’s score.
At the death of Diaghilev, Lifar accepted Jacques Rouché’s invitation to revive and
redirect the Paris Opera Ballet. During Balanchine’s recovery from tuberculosis, Lifar
undertook the choreography for Les Créatures de Prométhée (Prometheus’s Creatures,
1929), a version of the Greek creation myth for which he teamed with French ballerina
Susanne Lorcia to the music of Ludwig van Beethoven. As visionary for the Paris Opera
Ballet, he deconstructed the classical canon to rid ballet of superfluous gesture and
overlaid staging of the Cecchetti style with elements of the Vaganova school.
As Lifar perfected steps and mime, he developed a flair for perfectionism. Minute
details of serious ballet demanded the extinguishing of house chandeliers during
performances, the closing of the backstage to roués seeking dates with dancers, and the
removal of personal jewelry and mustaches from the ensemble. He expounded his views
on dance history in Twenty-Five Years of Russian Ballet (1930).
Lifar’s influence on the next generation of soloists included the coaching of George
Skibine, Roland Petit, and Marjorie Tallchief, whom the director hired for the Paris Opera
in 1930. Lifar stirred controversy by dancing the role of abductor and rapist in Bacchus et
Ariadne (Bacchus and Ariadne, 1931) and triumphed in Giselle, in which he glorified the
part of Albrecht. To introduce modernism, Lifar restaged Le Spectre de la Rose (The Spirit
of the Rose) and, in 1935, L’Après-Midi d’un Faune (Afternoon of a Faun).
Lifar’s mythic dances included Icare (Icarus, 1935), a balletic drama based on the
human urge to fly and requiring the rebalancing of the body to waft a pair of floor-length
wings. His Manifesto of Choreography (1935) insisted that ballet should set its own
parameters free from music and other arts. In 1938, he partnered Alicia Markova during a
North American tour and compiled Ballet, Traditional to Modern (1938). His skill at
strengthening the ensemble resulted in the addition of French dancer Petit in 1940 and, the
following year, company étoile Yvette Chauviré, the lead dancer in Istar (1941),
highlighted by Persian costumes by Léon Bakst.
World War II and Aftermath
World War II challenged Lifar to shield the arts and protect his artist friend Pablo Picasso
from German imprisonment. Lifar spent part of 1939 in Bali and Indonesia viewing
Apsara dance, the sacred Khmer court dance of Cambodia, which inspired Asian touches
in his choreography. On his return to Europe, the anti-Semitic Vichy government
appointed him dance director once more, a post that placed him in the Nazi social circle.
In 1940, Lifar struggled to keep the Paris venue open to the public and to raise the
standard of excellence. To succeed, he compromised with the German High Command
and, on August 28, filled one-third of seats with German voyeurs and balletomanes. He
compiled a biography, Serge Diaghilev, His Life, His Work, His Legend (1940), which
defended the extravagance and athleticism of the art deco era. Lifar’s genius marked the
Kiev folk dance of Igor Moiseyev and advanced technique for a symbolist ballet, Suite en
Blanc (Suite in White, 1943), staged in Zurich, Switzerland.
Lifar combed scripture and legends for narratives suited to neoclassic ballet and for
choreographers the caliber of Léonide Massine and Frederick Ashton. Lifar began reaping
rewards in 1944 with the Chausson d’Or and a gold medal from the city of Paris. At the
liberation of Paris, he found himself on the French Resistance blacklist for hosting Adolf
Hitler on a tour of the Paris Opera. The director hid in the wardrobe of his friend, designer
Coco Chanel, who had outfitted him for the starring role in Bal du Tricentenaire de Racine
(Ball of Racine’s Tricentenary, 1939).
Although charged with collaboration with the enemy in 1945, Lifar directed refugees of
the Paris Opera in the Nouveau Ballet de Monte Carlo. By 1947, he cleared himself of
complicity with Hitler’s regime, but could no longer dance sur la scène (on stage). In
addition to staging Phèdre (1950) and a classic ballet cantata, Les Noces Fantastiques
(The Fantastic Wedding, 1955), he taught dance at the Sorbonne and at l’École Normale
de Musique and compiled Lifar on Classical Ballet (1951) and Treatise on Academic
Dance (1953).
Forced out of his job in December 1958 because of anti-Russian bias, Lifar left the
Paris Opera Ballet to George Balanchine and returned to the Ukraine for a visit. After
publishing an autobiography, Ma Vie (My Life, 1970), and an overview of sets and
costume designs, in 1970, he trained members of the Cairo Opera Ballet in neoclassic
roles for Daphnis and Chloe. The dancer joined his love, Lillan Ahlefeldt-Laurvig, at
Glion in 1981 and received a Legion of Honor award in 1983. He retired to Lausanne,
Switzerland, where he donated an archive on dance to the city. When he died of cancer on
December 15, 1986, Lillan honored him by organizing the Lifar Foundation. The Kiev
Ballet retains his dances in its repertoire.
See also eurythmics; juvenile companies; neoclassical ballet; pas de deux.
Source: Garafola, Lynn. Legacies of Twentieth-Century Dance. Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 2005.
LOUIS XIV (1638–1715)
A dance fan from boyhood, Louis XIV buttressed the absolute Bourbon rule of France
with magnificent divertissements (entertainments), favorites of his father, Louis XIII.
Because the dauphin came to power at age four, his adviser, Cardinal Jules Mazarin, set
the boy king on a schedule of gymnastics, fencing, and string and keyboard lessons and
two to three hours of dance instruction per day, a regimen he followed from morning to
midnight for a quarter century. As first minister, Mazarin meant to display royal splendor
and glory on the proscenium stage to accentuate the divine right of kings and to distract
audiences from international intrigue.
Each year for carnival season preceding Mardi Gras, Louis came to expect a new ballet
enriched with role reversals and facilitated by masking and disguise, including the king’s
travesty roles as women. From daily training in the 1640s by dancer-choreographer Pierre
Beauchamp and the encouragement of the Queen Mother, Anne of Austria, Louis
advanced to stage participation and adaptations of stage classics. His roles varied from
Ceres, Greek goddess of grain, and Aeolus, Greek god of the winds, to a gentleman,
peasant girl, shepherd, demon, sprite, and spring.
Most of the works, underwritten by middle-class taxation, took place in temporary
indoor theaters molded from papier-mâché or amid fountains and reflecting pools in his
palace gardens with the aid of demountable stairs, balconies, loges, and engineer Antonio
Vigarini’s stage machinery. To enhance a utopian aura, painters created the illusion of
marble and gilt. In the fulfillment of eighty parts in forty masquerades, interludes, and
ballets, the king performed in cumbrous wigs and heeled pumps and introduced a royal
step, the Basque entrechat-deux (two interweavings), a leap and change of foot positions
in the air. The corps de ballet never turned its back on the king, who dominated behaviors.
Out of courtesy to royalty, dancers introduced the convention of walking backwards from
his presence.
Riding in a stage chariot in February 1651, at age thirteen, Louis dominated the
presentation of the comic Ballet de Cassandre (Cassandra’s Dance). In the allegorical Les
Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus (Celebrations of Love and Bacchus) the same year, he
played a diviner, Titan, drunk pickpocket, muse, and icicle. Two years later in carnival
season, he took the role of Apollo, Greek divinity of art and light, in a twelve-hour
coming-of-age spectacle, Le Ballet Royale de la Nuit (The Royal Ballet of the Night,
1653), featuring dialogue by the playwright Molière and stage dancing by Beauchamp.
From a gilt-rayed costume representing the allegorical figure of the sun, Louis acquired
the title of “le Roi-Soleil” (the Sun King), a metaphor acknowledging the dominance and
authority that followed him throughout history. Two months later, he reprised the role of
Apollo in the Italian comedy Les Noces de Pélée et Thétis (The Wedding of Peleus and
Thetis, 1654), in which his character slays a python. In 1655, he soloed in the part of
Europe.
At Louis’s seizure of absolute power in 1661, ballet became an independent theatrical
art. To institutionalize dance, in Paris, the king sponsored the Académie Royale de Danse,
headed by Beauchamp. The following year, the king appointed Jean Baptiste Lully
director of court performances, which featured virtuoso soloist François Honorat de
Beauvilliers. For self-aggrandizement, Louis took character parts—an Egyptian in Le
Mariage Forcé (The Forced Marriage 1664), a Moor in Molière’s Le Sicilien (The
Sicilian, 1667), and Apollo and Neptune in Les Amants Magnifiques (The Magnificent
Lovers, 1670). In 1672, a second school, the Académie Royale de Musique, forerunner of
the Paris Opera Ballet, scheduled instruction by Lully.
The king contributed to the advance of comédie-ballet by dancing in works cowritten
by Molière. The court obsession with dance influenced the aristocracy to emulate royalty
by studying steps, dancing at court, and attending elegantly staged and costumed
presentations. Contributing to fan appeal, the tension between royal affectations and the
rush of the middle class to embrace the arts as evidence of taste heightened satire on the
nation’s class envy.
After achieving a stage presence equivalent to that of a career dancer, as Louis’s health
declined from obesity and gout at age thirty-two, he retired from ballet following his
appearance in Ballet de Flore (Flora’s Dance, 1669). His departure left the stage open for
less noble dancers to develop expertise. To maintain standards, he authorized dance cadres
and set behaviors for court performance and social dance that included heeled boots and
plumed helmets.
In 1676, Louis applauded Atys (Attis), a five-act mythic opera set to Lully’s music and
libretto by Philippe Quinault. Louis requested repeat performances in 1678 and 1682.
Stimulated by stage musicals, in 1681, he built the first Salle de la Comédie (playhouse) in
Versailles, his country palace.
See also Beauchamp, Pierre; classical dance; divertissement; Lully, Jean Baptiste; Paris
Opera Ballet; shoes, ballet.
Source: Cowart, Georgia. The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of
Spectacle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
LULLY, JEAN BAPTISTE (1632–1687)
A Florentine composer and performer at the French ballets de cour of Louis XIV, Jean
Baptiste Lully initiated the heavily ornamented French baroque style of dance. At age
twenty, he gained the attention of fourteen-year-old Louis XIV. In February 1653, Lully
first danced with the young king in Le Ballet Royale de la Nuit (The Royal Ballet of the
Night), in which Louis took the role of the sun. In March, the king appointed Lully as sole
composer of instrumental music for court intermedii (filler between acts) and
divertissements (entertainments).
For propaganda, Lully worked with librettist Philippe Quinault on scenarios that
extolled the king as supreme monarch of a European superpower. Lully enlivened stately
court processions with spirited gavottes, minuets, and bourrées, all derived from peasant
dance. After his first complete score for Ballet de la Galanterie du Temps (Ballet of
Contemporary Gallantry, 1656), performed at the Louvre, he set standards for string
ensembles and orchestration that rarefied and purified French and English music into the
nineteenth century.
By elevating the spoken roles with the dialogues of playwright Molière, Lully and
choreographer Pierre Beauchamp invented the comédie-ballet mode. The first model Les
Facheux (The Bores, 1661), encapsulated French baroque style at a performance in the
royal palace in Paris. A classic five-act burlesque featuring Lully’s music and
Beauchamp’s choreography, Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (The Middle-Class
Aristocrat, 1670) remained a favorite of Louis XIV for its humorous portraits of courtiers.
As music master to the royal family with absolute power over lyric performances, by
1671, Lully had written thirty ballets, some in collaboration with poet Isaac de Benserade.
With the founding of the Académie Royale de Musique in 1672, Lully directed the world’s
oldest continuous dance academy, forerunner of the Paris Opera Ballet. He dominated
French opera, which took its stylistic cues from ballet.
Lully composed grand arias, marches, rounds, processions, and minuets for Alceste, ou
Le Triomphe d’Alcide (Alcestis, or The Triumph of Alcides), a five-act musical tragedy
that premiered in January 1674 featuring the choreography of Pierre Beauchamp. The
most significant of Lully’s thirteen operas, Le Triomphe de l’Amour (The Triumph of
Love, 1681), added ballerinas to all-male casts with the debut of sixteen-year-old
Mademoiselle de Lafontaine. Lully died of blood poisoning from a work injury—a foot
ulcer inflicted by his baton while he conducted an original Te Deum (1687).
See also Beauchamp, Pierre; intermedio; Louis XIV; Paris Opera Ballet.
Source: Prest, Julia. Theatre under Louis XIV: Cross-Casting and the Performance of
Gender in Drama, Ballet, and Opera. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Attire. Rebecca McLane of The School of Dance in Ottawa, Ontario, freely dances barefoot in the lightweight
and stretchy fabrics developed in the mid-1900s. Photo by D. Brian Campbell, www.theschoolofdance.ca.

Ballet Afsaneh. An ensemble promoting Persian afsaneh (folklore) in San Francisco, Ballet Afsaneh
coordinates a global effort featuring transnational dance and costume, as displayed by lead dancer Leila
Sadeghi in the classical Persian work Roya (The Dream, 2010). Photo by Raymond Van Tassel, Sharlyn
Sawyer, director, www.dancesilkroad.org.
Ballet d’action. The introduction of ballet d’action retrieved dance from banal amusement to a form of
narrative included among the imitative arts, as exemplified by character involvement in Romeo and Juliet as
performed by Ballet Jörgen. Photo by Charlene McIntosh, Ballet Jörgen, www.balletjorgencanada.ca.

Ballet music. Ballet music advanced slowly from the background into distinction as a motivator of
atmosphere and mood, as with the traditional World War II Jewish ghetto strains provided by KlezRoym for
Chinese choreographer Ma Cong’s Ershter Vals (2010). Photo by Sarah Ferguson, dancer Maggie Small,
Richmond Ballet, www.richmond ballet.com.
Barre warm-up. Tendus (stretches) and elevés (rises) at the barre flex, tighten, and lift the body in readiness
for combinations, as demonstrated by dancers of the Alberta Ballet in Calgary, Canada. Alberta Ballet,
Calgary, www.albertaballet.com.

Blasis, Carlo. At the Paris Opera in the 1820s, director Carlo Blasis guided technique toward lighter
garments to facilitate higher lifts and specified that men dominate majestic, vigorous steps and women create
voluptuous, lissome poses, such as that exhibited by Clare Bassett, who partnered with Jedidiah Duifhuis for
Ballet Kelowna’s performance of Double Variations (2012). Photo by Glenna Turnbull, Ballet Kelowna,
Kelowna, B.C., www.glennaturn bull.com.
Bournonville, August. Gallo-Danish dancer-choreographer August Bournonville choreographed La Sylphide
(1836) as the epitome of the romantic quest to possess the ideal, a concept depicted by Allynne Noelle and
Ulrik Birkkjaer for the Los Angeles Ballet. Photo by Reed Hutchinson, Catherine Kanner, Los Angeles Ballet,
www.losangelesballet.org.

Cinderella. One of the enduring persecution and rescue motifs, Cinderella’s story has been adapted
worldwide to some fifteen hundred historic and ethnic pantomimes, plays, and dances, such as the Colorado
Ballet presentation led by Sharon Wehner in the title role. Photo by Allen Birnbach, Sanya Andersenvie,
Colorado Ballet, www.coloradoballet.org.

Contemporary ballet. Contemporary ballet grounds choreography in classical ballet and incorporates the
movements, style, attire, and music of modern dance, as with Christina Beskou’s merger of ballet with
Argentine tango for the Seresta Dance Company in Athens, Greece. Christina Beskou, Seresta Dance
Company, Athens, Greece.
Coppélia. A classic comic ballet about a wooden-headed dancing doll, Coppélia has anchored the repertoire
of dance companies worldwide, including that of the Singapore Ballet, featuring Australian Timothy Coleman
with Korean dancer Rosa Park. Photo by Nicole Then, Melissa Tan, www.singaporedancetheatre.com.

Don Quixote. For an international coup and model of ballet d’action, in 1869, Russian dance master Marius
Petipa excerpted from Miguel de Cervantes’s satiric 1615 novel the pictorial ballet Don Quixote. Photo by
Serdica Music, Maximiliano Naselli, Sofia Ballet, Bulgaria, www.sofiaballet.com.

Duato, Nacho. A Spanish modernist choreographer of the Compañía Nacional de Danza in Madrid, Nacho
Duato experiments with ethnic Iberian, contemporary, and fusion ballet, as demonstrated by Luisa María
Arias and Isaac Montllor performing Arenal. Photo by Fernando Marcos, Maite Villanueva, director, Compañia
Nacional de Danza, Madrid, cndanza.mcu.es.
En pointe. An adjunct to grace, dancing en pointe (on the toes) distinguished the agility and elevation that set
romantic dance apart from classicism, as demonstrated by Anne Sidney Hetherington in the Richmond Ballet
presentation of Carmina Burana. Photo by Richmond Ballet, dancer Anne Sidney Hetherington,
www.richmondballet.com.

Erté. Couturier Erté set standards of Oriental spectacle that remain in use by stage wardrobe designers, as
displayed by Mariam Gaibova’s peacock costume for Roya (The Dream, 2010), danced by Ballet Afsaneh.
Photo by Shalom Ormsby, Sharlyn Sawyer, director, www.dancesilkroad.org.
Eugene Onegin. Based on Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin advanced narrative ballet to a modern
social analysis of idealism from contrasting perspectives, as displayed by dancers Fiona Evans and Matthew
Lehmann of the West Australian Ballet. Photo by Sergey Pevnev, West Australian Ballet, Maylands, WA,
waballet.com.au.
The Firebird. Revivals of The Firebird have stripped the Russian setting from their productions and placed
the fairy tale as far away as the Caribbean, Venezuela, and fantasy locales, which the Birmingham Royal
Ballet depicted with the skeleton suit of the sorcerer Kashchei, danced by Valentin Olovyannikov. Photo by
Bill Cooper, Clair Lishman, media officer, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Birmingham, UK, www.brb.org.uk.

Fokine, Michel. For Anna Pavlova, Russo-German expressionist Michel Fokine composed the showpiece
The Dying Swan (1905), an interpretation of the music of Camille Saint-Saens danced by Kitty Phetla for the
Joburg Ballet. Photo by Susanne Holbaek, Lindsay McDonald, Joburg Ballet, www.joburgballet.com.

Folkloric ballet. A hybrid art, folkloric dance applies traditional gestures, facial expressions, and steps to the
costuming and choreography of indigenous troupes, such as Natassia Parson’s performance in Saraka for
Ballet Creole in Toronto. Photo by David Hou, choreographer Patrick Parson, www.balletcreole.org.
Houston Ballet. A Southern anchor of American dance, the Houston Ballet is a company that graces
audiences with a lengthy annual program, including star Christopher Gray as the genie in a vivid 2014
production of David Bintley’s Aladdin. Photo by Amitava Sarkar, Kalyn Oden, public relations, Houston Ballet,
www.houstonballet.org.

Hybrid ballet. Hybrid ballet blends elements of folkloric dance and experimental contemporary movements
with classical steps, as demonstrated by the Swedish Ballet in Stockholm. Photo by Mats Lindgren, Jens
Rosen, http://www.stockholm59north.com.
Iranian ballet. In Stockholm, Sweden, in 1999, dance master Nima Kiann formed the Iranian ballet anew
under the title Les Ballets Persans and presented the ballet Femme. Taban Teyhoo, coordinator; Rahim
Karimi, photographer; Les Ballets Persans; www .balletspersans.org.

Joburg Ballet. A rising presence in world dance, the Joburg Ballet features an ethnic mix of part-time and
permanent dancers, the performers of Le Corsaire, starring Andile Ndlovu. Photo by Susanne Holbaek,
Lindsay McDonald, www.JoburgBallet.com.
Juvenile companies. Ballet companies introduce young members to performance demands by incorporating
them in character roles and production numbers, exemplified by these members of Dancecyprus in Dancing
with the Orchestra. Photo by Alison Sale, choreography by Davide Bombana, Dancecyprus, Limsassol,
Cyprus, [email protected].

Kirov Ballet. A long-lived training ground for Russian dancers, the Kirov Ballet in St. Petersburg premiered
classic story ballets, including Coppélia (1870), performed here by Jacob Mosehla and Burnise Silvius of the
Joburg Ballet. Photo by Bill Zurich, Lindsay McDonald, www.JoburgBallet.com.
Mime. The coordination of mute actions and rhythms, mime exaggerates the human feelings of suspicion,
terror, pity, grief, and love, the expressions of Ballet Jörgen’s Hiroto Saito and Saniya Abilmajineva, starring in
Romeo and Juliet. Photo by Charlene McIntosh, Ballet Jörgen, www .balletjorgencanada.ca.

The Nutcracker. The acme of story ballet, The Nutcracker (1892) marks the Christmas-Hanukkah season
with a fantasy that entrances children and adults, as demonstrated by Claudia Monja of the Joburg Ballet.
Photo by Bill Zurich, Lindsay McDonald, Joburg Ballet, www.joburgballet.com.
Partnering. The seamless pairing of dancers for shared combinations builds drama while harmonizing the
strengths and balance of participants. Photo by Carl Thorborg, Jens Rosen,
http://www.stockholm59north.com.

Pas de deux. Twenty-first century duets revealed the strength of the pas de deux in contemporary dance,
particularly the classic grace and strengths of male and female, as expressed in the Paul Simon Suite by
Kathleen Piper and Delton Frank of Ballet Creole. Photo by David Hou, choreographer Gabby Kamino,
www.balletcreole.org.
Petipa, Marius. The rejuvenator of Russian ballet, Marius Petipa enlivened Don Quixote (1869) with Spanish
peasant dances, as performed by Claudia Monja of the Joburg Ballet. Photo by Susanne Holbaek, Lindsay
McDonald, www.JoburgBallet.com.

Photography. Capturing the grace and dynamics of dance on film requires an appreciation of complex
elements, a quality of Erik Berg’s photos of Melissa Hough and Camilla Spidsøe of the Norwegian National
Ballet in Alexander Ekman’s Swan Lake. Photo by Erik Berg, Norwegian National Ballet, Oslo, Norway,
operaen.no/en.
Polonaise. A traditional three-step peasant promenade, from the late 1500s, the polonaise has added nobility
and flair to court processionals, as demonstrated by a 2011 production of Paquita by the Alexandra Ballet in
Chesterfield, Missouri. Photo by Tynetta Chastain, CiCi Houston, Alexandra Ballet, alexandraballet.com.

Romantic dance. Romantic dance prioritizes feeling over reason and creates atmosphere by contrasting
opposing spheres, the source of conflict in Eugene Onegin as danced by Jayne Smeulders and Jirˇí Jelínek
for the West Australian Ballet. Photo by Sergey Pevnev, West Australian Ballet, Maylands, WA,
waballet.com.au.

Royal Winnipeg Ballet. The oldest ballet company in Canada, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet progressed from
humble Manitoba beginnings to world renown for grace, elegance, and precision, as displayed by this scene
from a production of Swan Lake. Courtesy of Canada’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Jane Puchniak, public
relations, Winnipeg, MB.

Scenic design. Scenic design depends on the use of furnishings, props, sets, and lighting to create an
illusion, illustrated by the elements of a Russian ballroom in Eugene Onegin performed by the resident
company at the Hungarian State Opera in Budapest. Photo by Attila Nagy, archivist Ivanyi Jozefa, Hungarian
State Opera, www.opera.hu.
Scheherazade. Imported from Baghdad and Istanbul to the West during the Crusades, the story of
Scheherazade, excerpted from the prologue of The Arabian Nights, evokes an interracial vengeance motif, as
demonstrated by Corey Scott-Gilbert of Alonzo King LINES Ballet. Photo by R.J. Muna, Annette Muller,
marketing specialist, www.linesballet.org.
Shoes, ballet. In the 1820s, Italo-Swedish-Polish ballerina Marie Taglioni replaced standard wood and
leather ballet shoes with a square-throated kidskin and satin upper and linen toes layered over a cardboard or
fiberboard arch, an accommodation to flexion demonstrated by Sarah Felschow of Motus O. Photo by James
Croker; dancer Sarah Felschow of Motus O, Stouffville, Ontario, www.motuso.com.

The Sleeping Beauty. A Gallic ballet-féerie (fantasy ballet), The Sleeping Beauty (1890) contributed to dance
history a stylized tale of love triumphing over evil and an allegory of sexual awakening as revealed by
Yolanda Correa and Yoel Carreño of the Norwegian National Ballet. Photo by Erik Berg, Norwegian National
Ballet, Oslo, Norway, operaen.no/en.

Swan Lake. A classic tale of good, evil, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice, Swan Lake evolved into a cultural
stereotype of the gliding, ethereal prima ballerina courted by a prince, as danced for the Norwegian National
Ballet by principals Maiko Nishino and Philip Currell. Photo by Erik Berg, Norwegian National Ballet, Oslo,
Norway, operaen.no/en.

Terminology. In the early 1800s, Italian theorist Carlo Blasis introduced attitude, a pose with back leg bent
upward at ninety degrees, as demonstrated by the figure of Death in the Motus O production of A Christmas
Carol. Photo by Tom Vogel; James Croker, www.motuso.com, Stouffville, Ontario.

Variation. A bravura moment in ballet staging, the appearance of a soloist introduces a classical variation, a
departure from the group dance of the corps de ballet, as demonstrated by Jonathan Rodriguez in the Joburg
Ballet production of Coppélia. Photo by Bill Zurich, Lindsay McDonald, www.JoburgBallet.com.
 • M •
MACMILLAN, KENNETH (1929–1992)
Scots dance maker Kenneth MacMillan dedicated his art to theatrical full-evening ballets
relevant to British audiences. A native of Dunfermline, he was born on a farm on
December 11, 1929, the youngest of the five children of Edith May Shreeve, a kitchen
maid and fortune teller, and William MacMillan, a coal miner and veteran of World War I
disabled by mustard gas. During Kenneth’s coming of age at a Norfolk boarding school,
he studied the films of Fred Astaire, an escape from the Luftwaffe’s bombings of Great
Yarmouth and from his mother’s death from epilepsy in 1942.
Evacuated to Nottinghamshire, MacMillan mastered tap dancing before trying ballet.
He attended Sadler’s Wells Ballet School on scholarship before joining the company in
1946. Mentored by Ninette de Valois, he debuted in The Sleeping Beauty during a 1949
New York tour. De Valois designed The Great Detective (1953) for MacMillan, who
danced both the parts of Sherlock Holmes and the villain, Moriarty.
World War II impacted MacMillan’s memories with chaos and survivalism. Through
tense footwork and constricted body language, his tracts explored a generation haunted by
the war years, notably The Burrow (1958), a glimpse of twenty-one refugees furtively
jostling in an attic. Within claustrophobic space, the ballet gloried in budding love
between naifs, danced by Lynn Seymour and Donald MacLeary.
Wearied of Russian fairy tale dance, MacMillan developed an urgent presence in
choreography—three jazzy variations in Somnambulism (1953), the isolation of the
outsider danced by Maryon Lane in Laiderette (The Ugly Girl, 1954), a witty
carnivalesque suite for Danses Concertantes (1955), and Noctambules (Night Walks,
1956), starring Leslie Edwards as a sideshow hypnotist. In 1962, the Royal Ballet added to
its repertoire his Rite of Spring, a ritualized circle dance enacted by forty menacing tribe
members. His symbolic Song of the Earth (1965) provided the Stuttgart Ballet with a
somber dance ode to death and reunion.
At the debut of MacMillan’s 1965 masterwork, Romeo and Juliet, at the Royal Opera
House, the Shakespearean tragedy starred Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn, who
performed the film version in 1966. The adaptation stressed the theme of Veronese
patriarchy dominating youth and generating an unresolveable double suicide. The success
resulted in MacMillan’s appointment to director of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, for which he
designed a scriptural fratricide in Cain and Abel (1967) and a mythic riddle in The Sphinx
(1968).
As resident choreographer for the Royal Ballet after 1970, MacMillan promoted
narrative works—Anastasia (1967), starring Lynn Seymour; a 1974 adaptation of Manon,
featuring Antoinette Sibley and Monica Mason; the film The Turning Point (1977); and
the melodramatic ballet Mayerling (1978), based on the 1889 suicide of Crown Prince
Rudolf of Austria-Hungary. MacMillan’s provocative ballets toured North America in
alternate seasons and earned him a knighthood in 1983. That same year, the ensemble first
visited China and premiered Valley of Shadows, a portrayal of fascism that earned
ballerina Alessandra Ferri an Olivier Award.
Late in his career, MacMillan mounted The Prince of the Pagodas (1989), danced by
Darcey Bussell and Jonathan Cope, and The Judas Tree (1992), a controversial psycho
drama of the betrayal of Jesus that teamed Viviana Durante with Tartar dancer Irek
Mukhamedov. While overseeing a staging of Mayerling at Covent Garden, MacMillan
died of cardiac arrest on October 29, 1992. The Judas Tree won him posthumous honors—
an Olivier citation and a Society of London Theatre Special Award. Another recognition, a
Tony, acknowledged his choreography for a 1994 revival of Carousel.
Source: Parry, Jann. Different Drummer: The Life of Kenneth MacMillan. London:
Faber and Faber, 2009.
MARTINS, PETER (1946–)
Danish dancer-choreographer Peter Martins maintains one of the longest and most prolific
careers in U.S. arts direction. A Copenhagen native, he was born on October 27, 1946, to
engineer Børge Martins and pianist Tove Christa Ornberg, who reared him and his two
sisters following a divorce. Peter began learning ballroom combinations at age five from
his maternal uncle and aunt, Leif and Elna Ornberg, members of the Royal Danish Ballet.
Because Leif and Elna Ornberg were Nazi sympathizers who fled Scandinavia and
rebuilt their careers in Madrid, Spain, Martins incurred discrimination when he applied to
ballet school. His sisters faced rejection from classes. Because the school needed male
pupils, the staff decided to accept Martins.
By studying the style of Erik Bruhn and Rudolf Nureyev, Martins internalized staunch
stage tradition. However, by his mid-teens, the music of George Gershwin and a viewing
of West Side Story (1957) endeared the United States to him. He graduated from the Royal
Danish Ballet academy before joining the ensemble, for which he became its youngest
principal. He danced the lyric repertoire of August Bournonville until age twenty-three,
including Napoli, or The Fisherman and His Bride (1842), Le Conservatoire, or A
Marriage by Advertisement (1849), and The Kermesse in Bruges, or The Three Gifts (The
Festival in Bruges, 1851).
A Balanchine Protégé
Martins married Lise la Cour and sired Nilas Martins. The son, who was born in 1965
while Peter starred in The Moon Reindeer, received the hero’s name and followed his
father’s career. Among Martins’s roles was a last-minute fill-in for Jacques d’Amboise at
the 1967 Edinburgh Festival, where Martins met George Balanchine, cofounder of the
New York City Ballet and the most prized dance master of the twentieth century.
Balanchine cast Martins in as many as eight roles in one year.
Martins adapted to the fast, aggressive Balanchine style and took the title role in Apollo
in 1967 and the part of Diamonds in Jewels (1967). In 1968, he abandoned his Danish
family and progressed to a principal of the company, for which he danced the lead in
Liebeslieder Walzer (Love Song Waltzes) and the part of Oberon, king of the fairies, in a
version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. At the height of stage virtuosity Martins
developed the leads in Goldberg Variations (1971), Violin Concerto (1972), and Duo
Concertant (1972).
For more than a decade, Martins teamed with Suzanne Farrell and choreographed some
fifty works. Among his breakthrough creations, in 1975, he flourished as the gypsy in
Tzigane and set the abstract combinations in Calcium Light Night (1977) to the music of
Charles Ives. For his artistic innovation, Martins earned a 1977 Dance Magazine citation,
Cue’s 1977 Golden Apple, and the title 1980 Man of the Year from the Danish American
Society.
Balanchine’s Successor
In 1981, Martins replaced Balanchine as the New York City Ballet dance master and
mused on his New York residency in a memoir, Far from Denmark (1982). He partnered
dancer Darci Kistler until his retirement from dance in 1983. That September, Queen
Margrethe II declared Martins a knight of the Order of Dannebrog.
Martins maintained the New York ensemble’s repertory of works by Balanchine and
Jerome Robbins, but imposed his own style with the premiere of L’Histoire du Soldat (A
Soldier’s Story, 1981). A variety of contemporary interests led Martins to choreograph
Piano Rag Music (1982), a 1982 version of The Magic Flute, Tango (1983), and the 1985
Broadway performance of Song & Dance, featuring Tony Award nominee Christopher
d’Amboise and Gregg Burge. Martins created Les Gentilhommes (The Gentlemen, 1987),
tinkered with modernism for Barber Violin Concerto (1988), and, in 1990, mounted the
original Ecstatic Orange to the music of Michael Torke.
Martins moved on to administration in 1990 with the resignation of Robbins. Martins
married Kistler in late December 1991 and fathered Talicia Tove Martins. As ballet
master, he demanded energy and commitment from his pupils. His stage novelties required
both immediacy and timelessness. In a break with Balanchine’s vision, in 1993, Martins
fired ballet master Suzanne Farrell, an iconic performer of the mid-twentieth century.
With nonstop combinations, Martins began streamlining The Sleeping Beauty for
presentation in 1993. He collaborated with Wynton Marsalis in 1995 for the
improvisational Accent on the Offbeat. His River of Light (1998) met with critical acclaim,
yet lovers of Balanchine’s art felt a chilly perfection and forced humor in the stage works
of his successor. The complaints generated an identity crisis both personal and
professional.
In the twenty-first century, Martins maintained a rigorous schedule, notably, the debut
of the duo piano masterwork Hallelujah Junction (2001) at the Royal Danish Theatre,
starring ballerina Janie Taylor. In 2000, he formed the New York Choreographic Institute,
a source of new ballets by innovators Christopher Wheeldon and Alexei Ratmansky.
Martins designed combinations for his wife and for the animated films Barbie in the
Nutcracker (2001), Barbie of Swan Lake (2003), and Barbie in the 12 Dancing Princesses
(2006) and set the neoclassical Octet (2003) to a score by Felix Mendelssohn. In 2004, he
ventured into neoromanticism by designing Distant Light for the Boston Ballet.
Harmonized to the violin concerto of Latvian musician Peteris Vasks, the dance extended
the classical traditions of Cuban ballerina Lorna Feijóo.
To promote classical technique in new ballets, Martins joined benefactor Irene Diamond
in empowering the Diamond Project. By 2006, their effort had recognized fifty-five works
by thirty-one choreographers. In 2012, Martins debuted three of Justin Peck’s ballets—In
Creases, Year of the Rabbit, and Paz de la Jolla, set to music by Czech composer
Bohuslav Martinu. To a score by John Adams, a Martins favorite, the ballet master
choreographed Fearful Symmetry (2013), a high-energy suite of pas de deux requiring
strength and stamina.
Source: Siegel, Marcia B. Mirrors and Scrims: The Life and Afterlife of Ballet.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010.
MÉNESTRIER, CLAUDE FRANÇOIS (1631–1705)
French cultural scholar, critic, and dance theorist Claude François Ménestrier archived
libretti and performance notes and compiled principles of spectacle and ballet. A native of
Lyons, he was born on March 9, 1631, to an apothecary. He learned to evaluate antique
knowledge from his great uncle, Claude Ménestrier, the former Vatican librarian of Pope
Urban VIII.
Trained by Jesuits at the College of the Trinity in Lyons and Chambéry, Ménestrier
joined the brotherhood, studied ancient and modern languages, and preached at Grenoble,
Annecy, and Chambéry. A savant from boyhood, at age fifteen, he taught speech,
humanities, poetry, and Greek and directed pupils in end-of-the-year festivities. On return
to Lyons, he devoted himself to scriptural analysis, Hebrew, and theology.
For a state visit by Louis XIV to Lyons in 1658, Ménestrier directed divertissements
(entertainments) suited to royal interests. In preparation, for a year, he studied symbology,
painting, and public decorations on churches and city halls. He composed the ballets
Destinées de Lyon (Lyons Fates, 1658) and L’Autel de Lyon (The Lyons Altar, 1658). The
second work epitomized his notion of unity of performance for a particular occasion.
Additional responsibilities included divertissements for the wedding fêtes for the union of
Françoise d’Orléans and Charles Emmanuel, Duke of Savoy and the canonization of
Francis de Sales.
In maturity, in 1669, Ménestrier spent a year touring Germany and Italy. Settled in
Paris, he compiled works on Latin inscriptions, medals, playing cards, pyrotechnics,
mummification, town history, armor, and heraldry. The height of his assessment of ballet
appeared in 1682 as Des Ballets Ancien et Modernes selon les Règles du Théâtre (Ancient
and Modern Ballets According to Rules of Theater), which chronicles the history of dance.
At his death on January 21, 1705, he left a canon emblematic of the Renaissance
intelligence.
Ménestrier understood the fluctuations in social and professional attitudes toward the
body as revealed in the plastic and kinetic arts. Among his scrutinies of the era’s
transformations, he viewed theatrical ballet as a profession to be studied and learned in the
studio like fencing or weaponry. He legitimated respect for the dance teacher who
itemized skills for classroom imitation and mastery and for choreographers who expressed
cohesive plot lines through intuitive motion.
Des Ballets Ancien et Modernes acknowledges the varied sources of dance, both from
nature and abstraction. He credited surreal imagery as a form of illusion, a magic that
transports viewers across multiple milieus without promising a recognizable resolution of
conflicts. He described the role of the audience in interpreting figures and their symbolic
import. Essential to communication, between dancer and viewer lay a harmonious subject
presented logically, sequentially, in identifiable steps and movements.
Source: Spicer, Andrew, and Sarah Hamilton, eds. Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in
Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006.
MIME
See image in photospread.
A hybrid form of stagecraft presented through stylized facial expression and body
postures, mime imitates real bestial and human actions, such as sailors cavorting on leave
in Jerome Robbins’s Fancy Free (1944), meadow rabbits in Frederick Ashton’s The Tales
of Beatrix Potter (1971), and patrons of a brothel in Paul Taylor’s House of Joy (2012).
Originated in 467 BCE in Greece by actor-dancer Telestes, mime adapted altar rituals to
the plays of Aeschylus. The coordination of mute group actions and rhythms exaggerated
the human feelings of suspicion, terror, pity, grief, and love, the same emotions depicted
on representational masks. The Greek chorus danced responses to dramatic scenes,
typifying public or group reaction to war, homecoming, or the sensational crimes of
murder, treason, or incest.
From the plays at the court of Louis XIV in the mid-1600s, mime invested song and
dance. In the early eighteenth century, the suppression of song in opéra-ballet placed a
burden on the dancer to supplant vocalization with some other method of communicating
action, the invention of dance theorist John Weaver for The Loves of Mars and Venus
(1717). In the 1740s, arts theorist Jean-Georges Noverre abandoned artificial singing and
dance and promoted ballet d’action, a realistic presentation of narrative through steps,
rhythm, and gesture.
Realistic Dance
Choreographers turned to literal gestures for hunger, sleep, fear, and joy. For a 1770
performance of Medée et Jason, Gaëtano Vestris, a principal dancer for the Paris Opera,
abandoned masking and used facial expression to enhance the mimicry of character roles.
His agile, athletic son and partner, Auguste Vestris, breached the boundaries between court
dance and mime, thus merging gesture and facial expression with technical innovation for
the demi-caractère (melodrama), an amalgam of classical technique and theatrical dance.
The Bolshoi Ballet premiered on December 30, 1780, in a pantomime, The Magic School.
After the French Revolution of 1789, character dancing supplanted noble court ballet with
participation by shepherds and rustics in Anacreontic ballet.
 In the monograph The Code of Terpsichore (1828), the foundations of ballet training,
pedagogue Carlo Blasis devoted a chapter to comic dance and pantomime. He considered
silent acting the primeval communication that predated speech. As such, it combined
natural gestures as a means of one-to-one expression.
Blasis characterized gesture as a dynamic intended to stimulate emotion and dance as a
natural adjunct to motions of head and hand. For models of skilled mimes, he
recommended the provincial companies in Lyons, Bordeaux, and Marseilles rather than
Paris. The Paris Opera reclaimed its reputation for story ballet with Giselle (1841), a
romantic classic requiring extensive miming of a tale of redemptive love from beyond the
grave.
Melodrama and Improvisation
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky dramatized conflict in The Sleeping Beauty (1890) via the
melodrama performed by Carabosse, the evil fairy who curses Princess Aurora. Through
improvisation in Marius Petipa’s version of the dance, Carabosse, played by Italian mime
Enrico Cecchetti, acted out the pricking of the girl’s finger on a spindle that would end her
life. Cecchetti’s imitative fluttering for the Bluebird set a standard of mime for the part, as
did his menacing presence as the wizard in The Firebird (1910).
As an element of storytelling or character dance, such as playwright Anton Chekhov’s
The Cherry Orchard Dream (1904), whole-body mime extended the mimicry of dance
from the feet to the hands to convey plot through sorrow, anger, pleading, pledging,
insanity, connivance, contemplation, and eavesdropping. Like recitative in opera, mime
built momentum in story-dance through conventional gestures without mouth movements,
a narrative code similar in style and purpose to hula. A pointed finger in Swan Lake
represented accusation; a swirl of fingers before the face in Giselle indicated beauty. With
parallel intensity, the priest in Romeo and Juliet explained how the elixir suppressed the
appearance of life.
Modern ballet edged toward humanism and away from the arbitrary, overdramatized
hand signals manifesting intense emotion, as with the hand over the heart and fingers
wiping away tears. Each dancer shouldered the task of individualizing displays of
affection or disbelief, a challenge that distinguished the National Ballet of Canada and the
Kurt Jooss troupe from Essen, Germany. Translating a written text, the performer aligned
a series of less stereotypical gesticulations and changes in facial expression
chronologically to narrate a past event or predict the future, for example, the love letter
that Tatyana writes in Eugene Onegin (1879), clowning in George Balanchine’s Jack in
the Box (1926), a village uprising against a castle in Latvian-Georgian choreographer
Bakhtang Chabukiana’s Laurencia (1939), or the coming of a hero-rescuer in Russian
composer Aram Khachaturian’s androcentric ballet Spartacus (1956).
In the mid-1900s, English choreographer Frederick Ashton urged the Royal Ballet to
express the internal form of music as emotion, a concept expressed in Glen Tetley’s
Pierrot Lunaire (Pierrot by Moonlight, 1962). French choreographer Maurice Béjart
advanced dance toward a unified concept of dance theater anchored more fully in mime
than previous efforts. For the Czech National Ballet, performance of absurdist mime
focused on black humor and choreographed stage fights, such as Hara-kiri (1968), which
dancers performed without masks or white-face makeup.
In defiance of Soviet control of stage performances, into the 1980s, Eastern Bloc
dancers embraced mime as a means of satirizing and denouncing people and topics that
officials shielded. Czech choreographer Jir˘í Kylián heightened the poignancy of A Way
Alone (1998), which arranged individuals apart to gesture and sign meaningfully to each
other. For Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato of Madrid, the humor of Multiplicidad:
Formas de Silencio y Vacío (Multiplicity: Forms of Silence and Emptiness, 1999) derived
from a male string player using his bow to wring a performance from a ballerina posing as
his instrument. In 2014, gestures dominated Ballet Flamenco’s La Lluvia (The Rain).

Modern dance rejected strict ballet movements and combinations and introduced natural body rhythms and
fluid gestures, such as those expressed by the Seresta Dance Company of Athens, Greece. Seresta Beskou,
Athens, Greece, www.seresta-dance.gr/English/Main/company.html.

See also Nagy, Zoltán, Jr.; National Ballet of Canada.

Source: Nye, Edward. Mime, Music and Drama on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: The
Ballet d’Action. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
MODERNISM
Modern dance rejected balletic verticality and turnout and introduced natural body
rhythms and fluid gestures energized by horizontal glissades (gliding) and torso bends,
sometimes performed outdoors. Through studies of ideokinesis, or individualized body
awareness, dancers revisited their classical training to deepen their perceptions of weight
distribution, balance, and personal involvement in steps, transitions, and joint articulation.
From acquaintance with everyday walking, dancers developed vernacular moves, gestures,
and emotional reactions to stimuli, especially lighting and music, a concept of multiple
stimulus and response explored by Isadora Duncan, José Limón, Martha Graham, Merce
Cunningham, and Ruth St. Denis.
A twentieth-century concept, Russo-German expressionist Michel Fokine’s ballet
contemporain warred against relegation of the body to exact reproduction of classic
French poses and exhibitionist solos in such sentimental fairy tale dances as Swan Lake
and Giselle. In 1905, his theories influenced Russo-Polish prodigy Vaslav Nijinsky, a
fifteen-year-old innovator who favored the exoticism of Scheherazade (1910), The
Firebird (1910), Le Spectre de la Rose (The Spirit of the Rose, 1911), L’Après-Midi d’un
Faune (Afternoon of a Faun, 1912), and Petrouchka (1911), which mimicked the
directionless antics of a puppet. On May 29, 1913, Nijinsky breached the strictures of
formal ballet to create Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring, 1913), an asymmetric
bohemian solo featuring primitive gestures set to dissonant music. Less robotic and more
natural, Nijinsky’s release of dancers to replicate atavistic responses stirred the audience,
creating disgust and shock in viewers who expected ballet to be prim and predictable.
Nijinsky pursued modernism in Jeux (Games, 1913), a mimed tennis match.
Fokine and modern dance found a home amid democratized U.S. companies, which
began incorporating into productions the West African–inspired blues, ritualistic
Caribbean rhythms, and black dancers Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, and Alvin Ailey.
Fokine’s successor, Russian-American choreographer George Balanchine, introduced a
version of crossover modernism with Apollon Musagète (Apollo and the Muses, 1928),
the original jazz ballet. Another innovator, Agnes de Mille, inserted Americana into stage
performances, replacing European princes with cowboys in Rodeo (1942).
Intrigued by the impressionistic compositions of Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy
and the possibilities of stretchy dance attire, Balanchine continued pushing the outer limits
of form with The Four Temperaments (1946), an austere psychological abstraction without
scenery. Executed by the New York City Ballet in warmup clothes, the ballet featured
Tanaquil LeClercq demonstrating precise classical pointe work and unexpected knee
action, a movement imported from popular swing and jitterbug. Creole dance hybridizer
Carmen De Lavallade performed on Broadway with Ailey and Geoffrey Holder in Truman
Capote’s House of Flowers (1954), a throbbing Haitian musical set to the steel pans of
Tobago and Trinidad.
In the 1960s, modernism took a decided turn toward atonal music by Arnold
Schoenberg and pop and folk/rock of radio’s top forty, the energizers of works by Paul
Taylor’s company. For the Dutch National Ballet, both Glen Tetley and Rudolf Nureyev
reduced aristocratic leaps and lifts by replacing them with idiomatic floor work and
everyday scenarios. In 1973, Twyla Tharp designed a dance theater to the Beach Boys’ hit
song “Little Deuce Coupe,” a reflection of the teen world and its unique partnering. The
advancement of Mikhail Baryshnikov to head of the American Ballet Theatre in
September 1980 generated two esthetic streams—a return to Russian classics—Cinderella,
Swan Lake, Don Quixote—and revivals of Balanchine’s modern works as well as Roland
Petit’s masterwork, Le Jeune Homme et la Mort (The Young Man and Death, 1946), a
dramatization of a suicide. A twenty-first-century icon of modernism, Sergei Polunin
merged ballet with gymnastics in “Take Me to Church” (2015). For An American in Paris
(2015), Wheeldon revived street clothes and comfortable walking shoes.
See also Ailey, Alvin; contemporary ballet; eurythmics; Graham, Martha; Petit, Roland;
Taylor, Paul; Tetley, Glen; Tharp, Twyla; von Laban, Rudolf.
Source: Paskevska, Anna. Ballet beyond Tradition. New York: Routledge, 2005.
MOULIN ROUGE
A notorious pleasure palace in Paris during the decline of romantic ballet, the Moulin
Rouge (literally, red mill) merged artistic dance with the spectacle and vaudeville of the
late nineteenth century. Opened in Pigalle on October 6, 1889, by Catalonian investor
Joseph Oller and showman Charles Zidler, the cabaret thrived on sex tourism. Its
purveyors dismantled the efforts of artistic dancers to separate classical ballet and
intermedio from music hall degeneracy. The owners welcomed riffraff, who mingled with
the dancers, and vaunted a selection of prostitutes, who arranged trysts with the dissolute
male patrons of the Elysée-Montmartre district.
Among the revues, pantomime, strip tease, apache dance, and chorus lines, the program
introduced classical ballet, including the ingenuous 1908 version of Cendrillon
(Cinderella). After a fire on February 27, 1915, the owners remodeled the stage in 1921 to
accommodate more ballet troupes. Nightclub choreography drew unavoidable
comparisons to serious dance and influenced choreographer Léonide Massine’s Boutique
Fantasque (The Magic Toyshop, 1919) and Gaîté parisienne (Parisian Gaiety, 1932), a
vehicle for ballerinas Nina Tarakanova, Frederic Franklin, and Eugenia Delarova.
Dramatist Jean Cocteau and composer Erik Satie mocked the louche world of the Moulin
Rouge with Massine’s Parade (1917), an avant-garde satire that the Ballets Russes
performed before sets by Pablo Picasso. French ballerina Colette Marchand starred in a
more realistic British film, Moulin Rouge (1952), which won her an Oscar nomination.
In 2009, Canada’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet debuted Moulin Rouge: The Ballet, a
nostalgic romance set in fin-de-siècle Paris by choreographer Jorden Morris. The director
teamed Harrison James as artist Matthew with Jo-Ann Sundermeier as cabaret star
Nathalie and Yosuke Mino in the part of poster artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The
production coordinated sixty dancers in classical choreography, tango, and cancan, the
reckless leg show of the 1890s introduced by the Hungarian Rom.
Source: Carter, Alexandra. Dance and Dancers in the Victorian and Edwardian Music
Hall Ballet. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004.
 • N •
NAGY, ZOLTÁN JR. (1966–2008)
Hungarian dance visionary Zoltán “Zolli” Nagy Jr. aspired to a long association with his
nation’s arts program. Born in Budapest on February 18, 1966, he was the only child of
dancers Katalin and Zoltán Nagy Sr., both trained by Ferenc Nádasi, a master dancer
educated in the Cecchetti method. The younger Zoltán learned stage presence from his
mother and character mime from his father, who danced the part of King Herod in 1973 in
Japanese composer Akira Ifukube’s Salomé (1948).
At age twenty, Nagy completed a nine-year course at the Hungarian Academy of Dance
and entered the 100-member Hungarian National Ballet, which the state had founded in
1884. Within months, he won a first place in the 1985 International Dance Competition in
Lima, Peru. He progressed to soloist and principal, performing protagonist roles in
Giselle, Spartacus, Swan Lake, Coppélia, The Sleeping Beauty, and Les Sylphides.
Gifted in mime, humor, and passionate combinations, Nagy introduced the Hungarian
folk legacy to La Fille Mal Gardée (The Poorly Guarded Girl) and Mayerling. For Don
Quixote, he partnered Belorussian ballerina Alesia Popova. He performed Shakespearean
roles—Romeo in Leonid Lavrovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, the villain Iago in Othello, and
the wily suitor Petruchio in Shakespeare’s domestic comedy The Taming of the Shrew.
When Olympic skater Christopher Dean sought advice on ice ballet, Nagy demonstrated
how to look masculine while partnering.
For virtuosity, in 1990, Nagy won the Ferenc Liszt Prize, followed in 1993 by the Philip
Morris Hungarian Ballet Award. He collected archival footage of Bonchida (Romanian)
dancing as a teaching tool at music camps to educate Transylvanian villagers in folkloric
dance. In April 1996, he danced a duet with Katalin Khagai in a benefit performance to
raise pensions for underpaid Russian dancers.
Under the direction of Gyula Harangozó, Nagy executed stage works created by
Hungarians. Princely poses came easily to Nagy, as with his royal and aristocratic parts in
The Nutcracker, The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, The Miraculous Mandarin, and Eugene
Onegin, a title role he danced opposite Katalin Volf. He played comedy in Lászlo Seregi’s
Sylvia and drama in Lilla Pártay’s Anna Karenina before venturing into more
contemporary ballets with Uncertain Harmony (2004), an edgy work for three couples
choreographed by Italian musician Andrea Merlo to buzzing violin strings.
For Nagy’s excellence as an actor and danseur noble, he won the Gusztáv Oláh Medal
and the Outstanding Artist’s Award in 1996, the EuroPas Hungarian Dance Award in
1998, and the 2000 Kossuth Prize, a state honorarium conferred by the Hungarian
National Assembly. His tours introduced him to audiences in North America, Mexico,
Cuba, England, Cologne, Turin, Graz, St. Petersburg, Moscow, South Korea, and Taiwan.
For the European traveling Project 1999–2001, he collaborated with Swiss dancer Bettina
Holzhausen, Fiona Millward (United Kingdom), Olga Zithluhina (Latvia), and Rossen
Mihailov (Bulgaria).
 With the uncanny ability to become the character he danced, Nagy premiered Tifton 328
(2003), an organic quintet permeated with immature relationships. In 2006, he accepted
appointment as rector of the Hungarian Academy of Dance and, opposite Krisztina
Kevehazi, danced a plum role of Rhett Butler in Lilla Pártay’s version of Gone with the
Wind (2007). While supporting Dance Council Malta and planning visits from foreign
dance masters to view his classes, he battled cancer.
At age forty-two, Nagy died in Budapest on March 23, 2008, leaving a wife, son, and
daughter. The following May, the Hungarian Dance Academy commemorated Nagy’s role
as dancer, choreographer, and ballet coach. The Zoltán Nagy Jr. Foundation, a memorial
dance prize, and the Zoltán Nagy Jr. Theatre Hall honor his versatility and dedication to
ballet.
Source: Nadasi, Mia. “Zoltan Nagy: Leading Figure in Hungarian Dance.” Independent
(16 April 2008).
NAHARIN, OHAD (1952–)
A wildly popular Middle Eastern dancer-choreographer, Ohad Naharin rid ballet of
structured, uniform steps by introducing Gaga, a form of improvisational dance. Born in
1952 at Mizra in northern Israel to a dance instructor, Tzofia Naharin, and actor-
psychologist Liav Naharin, he grew up at a kibbutz, where he painted, composed music,
wrote fiction, told stories, and joined folk dance. After a required hitch in the Israeli
military, in 1974, he danced the part of Esau in Jacob’s Dream with the Batsheva Dance
Company in Tel Aviv, a Martha Graham studio established in 1964.
Graham invited Naharin to New York, where he refined his talents on scholarship at
Juilliard and the School of American Ballet. Naharin played the lead in English
choreographer Antony Tudor’s Adam and Eve (1932) with Bat-Dor Dance Company in
Tel Aviv and performed in Maurice Béjart’s Ballet of the 20th Century in Brussels. In
1978, Naharin wed Mari Kajiwara, a Japanese-American modernist dancer and assistant to
Alvin Ailey.
In a burst of creativity, Naharin premiered his first choreography in 1980 at the Kazuko
Hirabayashi dance studio and designed works for the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance
Company. He collaborated with Mari in concerts, including Haru No Umi (The Sea in
Spring, 1982). In 1984, he joined his wife in forming the Ohad Naharin Dance Company,
a traveling troupe based in New York, and created Sixty a Minute (1984), Chameleon
Dances (1987), and Tabula Rasa (1988), an Aristotelian reference to the pure state of an
infant’s mind and heart.
A Jewish Innovator
At age thirty-eight, Naharin decided to return to Israel to tap Jewish passions. He directed
the Batsheva Dance Company, a vital, revolutionary ensemble fusing the experiences of
dancers from the United States, Israel, Spain, Japan, and Russia. For the troupe, he
designed such ballets as Axioma (What Is Self-Evident, 1991) and Kyr (One Thousand
Years, 1990), a muscular suite that reflected Israeli unity and purpose.
 As rehabilitation for a spinal injury, Naharin explored liberating body movement. The
merger of traditional glissades, arabesques, plies, and tendus with contemporary gestures
introduced new stimuli to dance creation. His focus ventured from ballroom patterns in
Anaphasa (1993) to atavistic gesticulation in Opening Ceremony (1993), Perpetuum
(Forever, 1994), and Z/Na (1995), a contrast between everyday violence and peaceful
coitus.
For his theory of Gaga, an uninhibited flow of energy involving anatomic senses,
Naharin progressed outward from the body’s core to the sensitivity of genitals, heart,
palms, and bare insteps. Training in multidimensional movement personalized reparative,
restorative, and inspiriting postures. The increase in self-awareness promoted agility,
flexibility, and stamina in such professional dancers as Natalie Portman and Kirven James
Boyd, instructor Danielle Agami, and members of Mikhail Baryshnikov’s Cedar Lake
Contemporary Ballet.
Global Recognition
Applying universal physicality, Naharin choreographed Mabul (1992) for his wife and
complete works commissioned by ensembles in Paris, Lyons, Marseilles, Geneva,
Frankfurt, Stockholm, Madrid, Holland, Leipzig, Bavaria, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Montreal,
Sydney, and São Paulo. His creations, allied with atmospheric music and whimsical props,
stripped story ballet of chronology. The excerpts contrasted the body at rest with layers of
motion that allied space, light, and continuity, elements of the witty Sabotage Baby (1997)
and Zachacha (1998), which invited audience members to join the troupe on stage.
In 1998, Naharin received the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from France.
To honor his wife after her death from cancer, he staged Minus 16 (2001), a celebration of
the joy of dancing, and reintroduced Black Milk (1985) for the Alvin Ailey troupe. His
rejection of performance conventions marked the autobiographical Virus (2001), audience
involvement in Mamootot (Mammoth, 2003), a self-performance in Playback (2004), and
Three (2005), a paean to passion. Along with multiple honorary doctorates, his honoraria
include the 2005 Israel Prize, the 2009 lifetime achievement award from the Samuel H.
Scripps American Dance Festival, a 2009 Dance Magazine citation, and a 2009 EMET
Prize for advancing the arts and sciences in Israel.
In addition to remixes of earlier works, Naharin’s earthy novelties continued with Seder
(Order, 2007), Max (2009), and Sadeh21 (2011), a psycho-dance analyzing the
motivations for human responses. In 2014, he introduced Secus (Contrary) with the
Atlanta Ballet. His liberation of body and spirit with intuitive, asymmetric postures and
nudity set to varied musical genres from hard rock to a Passover hymn aroused
controversy. Protesters charged Naharin with blasphemy and contested the funding of the
Batsheva ensemble with state money. In 2015 he taught Gaga in Barcelona.
See also juvenile companies.
Source: Bales, Melanie, and Karen Eliot, eds. Dance on Its Own Terms: Histories and
Methodologies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
NATIONAL BALLET OF CANADA
A well-schooled arts treasure for more than sixty-five years, the National Ballet of Canada
(NBC) enabled North American performers to achieve global recognition without leaving
the country. Founders sought a bias-free selection of dancers to join a company emulating
England’s Royal Ballet. To ensure objectivity, in 1951, the board of directors chose
London-born dramatic ballerina Celia Franca to lead the troupe.
While working at Eaton’s department store in Toronto, Franca began recruiting dancers
in August 1951 and readying them for an NBC debut on November 12 at St. Lawrence
Hall, where they performed Les Sylphides and Polovtsian Dances. For staff, she relied on
Russian choreographer Boris Volkoff to create ballets and Kay Ambrose to design sets and
costumes for favorite story ballets The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, and Coppélia. Among the
thirty charter members, David Adams emulated classical heroes opposite ballerina Lois
Smith, Canada’s first dance diva. Adams also choreographed Dark of the Moon, the
preface to Barbara Allen (1960), starring Franca in the title role. Another founder, Grant
Strate, the resident choreographer, applied Canadian heritage to classical works.
Building the Ensemble
The experiment with national artistry brought more dancers to world attention, including
Earl Kraul, NBC lead dancer in his original The Fisherman and His Soul (1956), based on
an Oscar Wilde story. Kraul designed Antic Spring (1960) and the starkly vengeful The
House of Atreus (1964). Danseur noble Erik Bruhn staged La Sylphide, starring Kraul as
James, and developed the part of Jean in Miss Julie. Avant-garde composer George Crumb
orchestrated scores for Giselle and the Antony Tudor ballet Offenbach in the Underworld
(1954), a parody of exhibitionism among French cafe society.
To raise the standards of technical precision to that of Sadler’s Wells Ballet, in 1959,
Franca joined dance mistress Betty Oliphant in opening the National Ballet School of
Canada. The academy for one hundred fifty dancers grades six through twelve adhered to
Cecchetti classicism, an influence on the grace and precision of Vanessa Harwood’s role in
Don Juan. Staff trained dancer–ballet coach Veronica Tennant and partners Frank
Augustyn and Karen Kain, dramatic and comic successes who starred in The Sleeping
Beauty and La Fille Mal Gardée (The Poorly Guarded Girl).
Franca led the NBC on tours of Europe and Asia. Under artistic director Glen Tetley, in
1979, the Toronto ensemble became the first Canadian troupe to dance in London’s
Covent Garden. Choreographer James Kudelka debuted A Party (1976) and Washington
Square (1979), a resetting of Henry James’s coming-of-age novel. During his employment
at NBC, resident Greek dance maker Constantin Patsalas won the 1979 Boston Ballet’s
Choreographic Competition for Piano Concerto, set to Alberto Ginastera’s score.
A Global Presence
By the 1980s, the Toronto ensemble grew to seventy members and hired Mavis Staines as
successor to Oliphant. The ranks included John Alleyne, a Barbadian soloist, and Rex
Harrington, the lead dancer in The Merry Widow and Eugene Onegin. Choreographer
Bengt Jörgen of Stockholm introduced his original works, Shelter (1984) and Circle
(1985), to the corps de ballet and Tuwat (1986) to the company’s concert troupe. Another
graduate, Robert Desrosiers designed the eccentric Blue Snake (1985), a bluesy ballet that
featured a mechanized reptile and fantasy bodysuits, headdress, and capes. The hiring of
dainty Chinese danseuse Chan Hon Goh of Beijing diversified roles for the prima
ballerina from narrative to abstract. Director Bryce Anderson supported the company
during economic shortfalls and continued to showcase Canadian choreography and
artistry.
In the 1990s, NBC added to its repertory the award-winning Frames of Mind (1993), a
deconstruction of classicism created by French-Canadian Jean Bernard Grand-Maître and
repeated on a European tour. The board of directors ventured into the international
community to hire Kudelka as artistic director. The company and prima ballerina Karen
Kain filmed the rehearsals and performance of Kudelka’s The Actress for a film, Making
Ballet (1995). Grand-Maître revitalized The Firebird in 2000 and rebuilt the ensemble’s
repertoire.
Under Kain, Grand-Maître’s successor, in 2006, NBC opened the new stage of the Four
Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts by presenting The Sleeping Beauty. The company
continued supporting Canadian artistry by headlining Guillaume Côté in Le Corsaire (The
Pirate) and presenting Marie Chouinard’s 24 Preludes by Chopin (1999) and Crystal Pite’s
award-winning Emergence (2009), a rigorous classical ballet replicating primitive ritual.
See also Baryshnikov, Mikhail; Mime.
Source: Neufeld, James. Passion to Dance: The National Ballet of Canada. Toronto:
Dundurn, 2011.
NEDERLANDS DANS THEATER
A contemporary troupe based at The Hague, the Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT) earns
respect for communal ballet juxtaposing old with new. The concept of planners Carel
Birnie, Benjamin Harkarvy, and Aart Verstegen, the company formed in 1959 with
eighteen soloists from Sonia Gaskell’s Dutch National Ballet, the largest ballet ensemble
in the Netherlands. The group shaped a repertoire around the choreographies of Édouard
Lock, Toer van Schayk, Maguy Marin, and Rudi van Dantzig, a rebel against the strictures
of narrative dance.
Harkarvy, a New Yorker educated at the Juilliard School of Music, joined
choreographer Hans van Manen in hybridizing ballet with provocative modern dance.
Professional dancers—notably, Jaap Flier, Han Ebbelaar, and Alexandra Radius—
liberated stale repertory with a range of classical and late twentieth-century choreography
by Anna Sokolov, Glen Tetley, John Butler, Lynn Taylor-Corbett, Rodney Griffin, Charles
Czarny, Margo Sappington, Ohad Naharin, and Choo San Goh. Subsidized by the
government since 1961, the NDT survived clashes of philosophy regarding impressionistic
music by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, diverse works by Russian composer Igor
Stravinsky, the Slavic mass of Leos Janácek, and the twelve-tone scale of Austrian
composer Arnold Schoenberg.
The Human Response
Headquartered at the Lucent Danstheater, the thirty-two members of NDT gained global
attention for progressive abstraction tempered with humanism. Glen Tetley began
directing the ensemble in 1969. In 1978, a subset, NDT II, grouped fourteen young
dancer-choreographers into an ensemble to execute fluid, singular programs. Ballerino
Alexander Ekman, a dancer groomed by the Royal Swedish Ballet, enriched presentations
with virtuosity.
Jir˘í Kylián, a prolific Czech choreographer from Prague, achieved a riotous
breakthrough with the masterwork, Sinfonietta, at the 1978 Charleston Festival. Set to
Janácek’s lyrical score, the scenes mused on the nature and motivation of neolithic dance.
NBC blended eroticism with spirituality in Symphony of Psalms (1978), a neoclassic
choral motet by Igor Stravinsky based on the octatonic scale. Inclusion of less familiar
modes and themes broadened interpretive range through contrasting physiological states
and spoof, the genre of Kylián’s Symphony in D (1981), a parody of over-serious classical
dance featuring a line of males partnering a single female.
In August 1981, NDT produced Kylián’s Forgotten Land, a series of duets examining
the function of memory as revealed in a sea painting by Norwegian expressionist Edvard
Munch. Concerts emphasized organic ballet, a coordination of steps and movements with
breathing. On tour at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, the troupe presented
Kylián’s disturbing war commentary, Soldiers’ Mass (1981), a liturgical dance to music by
Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu. By sacrificing the individual to the company, the
ballet universalized the sufferings of combat victims. Less defined, Overgrown Path
(1981), a tribute to ballet master Antony Tudor, expressed free-floating sorrow to
Janácek’s poignant piano cycle.
Under Kylián’s artistic direction, the NDT polished as many as four new works per
year, including the pensive Songs of a Wayfarer (1982), Maurice Bejárt’s neo-romantic
salute to leave-taking. The style featured soloists peeling off from a central wedge of
dancers, a concept repeated in Svadebka (Village Wedding, 1982), a resetting of Igor
Stravinsky’s Russian peasant nuptial from Les Noces (The Wedding). In another rural
setting, a temptation tale set to Stravinsky’s composition L’Histoire du Soldat (The
Soldier’s Tale, 1981) depicted an infantryman on leave and his encounter with Satan.
In 1989, a corps de ballet of eight female NDT members in black leotards performed
Falling Angels, a survey of womanhood set to tense, urgent Ghanian drumming. To two
Mozart concerti, Kylián aligned dancers armed with epées for Petite Mort (1991), one of
his many existential perusals of subconscious fears of imminent doom. In 1992,
collaboration with the Czech National Ballet brought to Prague Martinu’s Soldiers’ Mass
as well as works by van Manen and Kylián’s Return to a Strange Land (1975).
Kylián challenged NDT with varied ethnic source material. In 1995, he staged the
polonaise for Arcimboldo, a production vignette from the time of seventeenth-century
Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. The presentation aligned the entire ensemble with the
Juilliard School student body. For Kaguyahime (The Moon Princess, 1995), Kylián
designed a Japanese legend to modern limb and torso postures set to a flute solo. His One
of a Kind (1998), a paean to freedom under the Dutch Constitution, incorporated the
abstract set of Japanese architect Atsushi Kitagawara. A second offshoot of NDT, NDT III,
collected five senior dancers over forty years of age to execute a separate program,
including A Way Alone (1998), a vignette by Kylián depicting individuals gesturing and
signing to express thought and need.
A Distinctive Repertoire
Kylián’s intense attention to evocative movement earned him two Prix Benois de la Danse
honoraria and a Laurence Olivier Award. Into the twenty-first century, he tagged his
humanistic choreography with introspective titles: Far Too Close (2003), Last Touch
(2003), and Sleepless (2004). Following the kinetic musings of Gods and Dogs (2008),
Queen Beatrix presented Kylián a medal of honor. At the company’s bicentenary in 2009,
NDT I joined NDT II in reflecting the vigor, cohesion, and variety of Dutch ballet.
In 2011, NDT committed to six new ballets per season plus standard works by Nacho
Duato, Mats Ek, and William Forsythe. The ensemble took an earthy, urban direction from
Spanish choreographer Sol León and English dancer Paul Lightfoot and from Johan
Inger’s Falter (2010) and Ekman’s original works Flockwork (2011), Left Right Left Right
(2012), and Maybe Two (2013), lighted with strobe effects. In 2014 travels to Carré,
Maastricht, Rotterdam, and Eindhoven, the corps de ballet poured energies into pulsing,
pumping combinations by Hofesh Shechter. In addition to stage presentations, NDT added
live, big-screen broadcasts to six hundred theaters worldwide.
See also Duato, Nacho.
Source: Bremser, Martha, and Lorna Sanders, eds. Fifty Contemporary
Choreographers. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2010.
NEOCLASSICAL BALLET
A retreat from Romantic or narrative ballet toward structural complexity, neoclassical
ballet placed choreography at the center of productions, a feature of the San Francisco
Ballet’s 2014 presentation of Serge Lifar’s Suite en Blanc. Following the gauzy fairy tale
works scored by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky in the 1880s and 1890s and the colorful art deco
spectacles of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes after 1909, twentieth-century neoclassic
performances abandoned extensive mime and used less spectacular costumes and sets. In
the most startling avoidance of story ballet, Diaghilev mounted to music by Claude
Debussy a dance poem, Jeux (Games, 1913), a forerunner of neoclassicism featuring
dancer Vaslav Nijinsky in the role of a tennis player involved with two female opponents.
During the decline of romanticism in the late 1920s, George Balanchine elevated
precision as the focal point of dance by his company, the New York City Ballet.
Influenced by the modernism of Martha Graham, his paring down of lighting and props
reduced the budgets and paraphernalia of concert ballet to bare stages and practice tights
and leotards in place of costumes. In lieu of ornate staging, he set his sights on the needs
of dancers and musicians and opened spaces for disarming physical improvisation.
Moving steadily away from nineteenth-century fussiness, Balanchine trained dancers at
the School of American Ballet to reduce their efforts to an essential, pure stage presence.
He augmented the standard five positions with barefoot dance en pointe and in two release
positions, which turned the feet inward. For the 1951 revivals of Concerto Barocco and
The Four Temperaments, he stripped the stage of scenery and reduced the dancers to
practice clothes. His anti-romanticism freed hands to contract, elbows to bend, and the
corps de ballet to synchronize contrasting movements, often to atonal music and rapid
shifts of tempo.
Balanchine’s troupe progressed from the narrative Apollon Musagète (Apollo and the
Muses, 1928) to Jewels (1967), an abstract performance free of plot. Sleekly costumed by
Barbara Karinska, three styles of minimalist tutus resembled gemstones. To the music of
Gabriel Fauré, Igor Stravinsky, and Tchaikovsky, partners Violette Verdy and Conrad
Ludlow paired as emeralds, Patricia McBride and Edward Villella sparkled as rubies, and
Suzanne Farrell and Jacques d’Amboise rounded out the motif as diamonds.
Contemporaneous with Balanchine’s restoration of classicism, Ukrainian choreographer
Serge Lifar began directing the Paris Opera Ballet in 1929 toward deconstructionism. Far
from the Roméo et Juliette (1926) of his early years, Lifar’s whimsical Suite en Blanc
(1943) began experimenting with technical mastery for a presentation in Zurich,
Switzerland. Independent of control by set designers and composers, he mimicked
Egyptian art with flattened profiles derived from art deco and dressed in white.
Another period dance master, English choreographer Frederick Ashton set a group of
witty divertissements to music for Façade (1931), which debuted at London’s Cambridge
Theatre. Droll in the ridicule of contemporary dance, the avant-garde survey began with
Scots folk rhythms and progressed through yodeling, polka, waltz, tango, and paso doble
to the Spanish tarantella. Ashton, a gifted mime, reserved for himself the part of gigolo.
Globally, neoclassic ballet won new audiences, especially devotees of Marie Tallchief
in Bronislava Nijinska’s Chopin Concerto (1942) and Etude (1943) and fans of the San
Francisco Ballet and of Lew Christensen’s rambunctious Con Amore (1953). In the fourth
year of the Cairo Opera Ballet, Lifar accepted an invitation to instruct dancers in classic
style. A 1970 performance of Daphnis and Chloe introduced the Egyptian dancers to
individual study with a master teacher. In the United States, Gerald Arpino, resident
choreographer of the Joffrey Ballet, created the lyric Italian Suite (1983), a ballerina solo
and pas de deux performed in dappled light.
See also Balanchine, George; Technique.
Source: Siegel, Marcia B. Mirrors and Scrims: The Life and Afterlife of Ballet.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010.
NEW YORK CITY BALLET
A work always in progress, the New York City Ballet (NYCB) emerged from urban arts
efforts dating to the early 1930s to maintain the largest repertoire in North America. The
company formed in 1948 from the collaboration of Belgian conductor Léon Eugene
Barzin with impresario Lincoln Kirstein and Russian dancer-choreographer George
Balanchine. Immediate press accolades followed the premiere of Orpheus on April 28.
 The partnering of Melissa Hayden with Jacques d’Amboise and diva Maria Tallchief’s
mime and artistry in the 1949 presentation of The Firebird increased NYCB’s influence
through the Americas and Europe. Balanchine requested a new work, Illuminations
(1950), from English dance maker Frederick Ashton. After a tour of England, the New
York company reprised Prodigal Son and The Fairy’s Kiss, featuring Tallchief with
Nicholas Magallanes, and debuted Antony Tudor’s The Lady of the Camellias (1951) and
the German satire Tyl Ulenspiegel (1951).
Contemporary Themes
In the 1950s, NYCB incorporated passion and eroticism from the dances of Swedish
designer Birgit Cullberg, who featured French ballerina Violette Verdy in Medea. The
company toured Barcelona, Berlin, Paris, Florence, Edinburgh, Lausanne, Zurich, London,
and the Hague, followed in 1952 by visits to Genoa, Trieste, Rome, Venice, Como,
Naples, Brussels, and Stuttgart. The tragic paralysis of Tanaquil Le Clercq in Copenhagen
in 1956 ended her performance of roles commissioned from Merce Cunningham and
Jerome Robbins and in Balanchine’s La Valse (1951) and The Four Temperaments.
Management fought racism in 1955 with the presentation of black dancer Arthur
Mitchell in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Nutcracker. Mitchell partnered Allegra
Kent in Agon (Contest, 1957), which emulated performances of the Scots branle, West
European galliarde, and Spanish sarabande and two intermedii at the court of Louis XIV.
In 1958, Kent mastered female roles in Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins (1933) and the
Japanese wedding ballet Bugaku (1962).
A Global Presence
In 1960, diva Patricia McBride displayed kinetic pairing with Edward Villella in
Symphony in C (1947), a part originated by Le Clercq. For the 1962 Russian tour, the
NYCB danced Balanchine’s Western Symphony (1946), featuring partnering between
cowboys and saloon girls. As the ensemble increased to sixty-four members, the hiring of
teen prodigy Suzanne Farrell preceded critically respected presentations into the 1980s of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Agon, Liebeslieder Walzer (Love Song Waltzes), Orpheus,
Mozartiana, and Davidsbündlertänze (Dances of David’s League). Farrell’s duet with
Arthur Mitchell in the 1968 presentation of “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” turned the
number into a repertory classic. A single staging of Requiem Canticles (1968) honored the
passing of freedom fighter Martin Luther King Jr.
To acknowledge a lengthy synergy with musician Igor Stravinsky, in 1972, Balanchine
launched a Stravinsky festival featuring the debuts of Violin Concerto, Duo Concertant,
and Symphony in Three Movements and a televised presentation of Noah and the Flood. A
high point in company achievement, the 1974 performance of McBride as Coppélia
boosted the North American acclaim of Arthur Saint-Léon’s dance design. Danish danseur
noble–choreographer Peter Martins dominated starring roles into the 1970s with the leads
in Tzigane (1975) and Calcium Light Night (1977). In Balanchine’s last years, he boosted
principal Darci Kistler to leads in Jewels and Prodigal Son.
 After Martins and Jerome Robbins replaced Balanchine in 1981, the public and critics
dickered over the new directors’ departures from established style and technique and, in
1993, the firing of ballet coach Suzanne Farrell. While increasing the repertoire to
seventy-three works, Martins focused on reclaiming neoclassicism in revivals of Serenade,
Bourrée Fantasque (Fantasy Peasant Dance), and Harlequinade.
In the twenty-first century, the New York City Ballet continued to promote neoclassical
works by showcasing Jenifer Ringer in the bubbly Donizetti Variations and dancer
Christopher Wheeldon’s Mercurial Manoeuvres (2000), Carnival of the Animals (2003),
Shambards (2004), and Klavier (2006). For a 2008 tribute to Robbins, the company
revived Afternoon of a Faun, West Side Story Suite, Four Bagatelles, and Les Noces (The
Wedding). A 2008 benefit featured Dances at a Gathering and Union Jack, a patriotic
ballet created for the nation’s bicentennial.
Youth and energy enlivened the company in the 2010s. Chase Finlay performed Apollo
and Asian-American soloist Amar Ramasar starred in Fancy Free. The ensemble debuted
The Lady with the Little Dog, choreographed by Alexey Miroschnichenko. The company
extended its season at Lincoln Center, Saratoga Springs, and Jackson Hole. The 2014
remounting of A Midsummer Night’s Dream featured new costumes for lead dancers
Megan Fairchild, Jared Angle, and Daniel Ulbricht.
See also Balanchine, George; Baryshnikov, Mikhail; Farrell, Suzanne; Martins, Peter;
shoes, ballet.
Source: Froman, Kyle. In the Wings: Behind the Scenes at the New York City Ballet.
New York: Wiley, 2007.
NIJINSKY, VASLAV (1889–1950)
The Polish-Ukrainian pacesetter for twentieth-century male dancers, Vaslav Nijinsky
celebrated character roles with avant-garde flair. Born Waclaw Noizynski on March 12,
1889, in Kiev to Polish corps de ballet members Eleanora Bereda and Tomasz Nizynski,
he grew up introverted and shy in Russia, where he admired the peripatetic lives of
gypsies. As a small boy studying dance with his father, Nijinsky teased his sister
Bronislava and brother Stassik by balancing on door knobs and swaying back and forth.
A folk dancer at age five, Nijinsky appeared in Hopak (1894), a Ukrainian showpiece
produced in Odessa. Two years later, he performed as a heroic chimney sweep at a circus
in Vilno. During his parents’ itinerant career, Nijinsky’s father abandoned his wife and
children and took a mistress. Nijinsky lived with his mother in St. Petersburg, where, in
1900, she received support from Italian dance teacher Enrico Cecchetti to enroll the boy in
the Imperial Ballet School. Nijinsky received instruction by Christian Johansson, an expert
in male solo work.
 Rowdy and willful, Nijinsky rejected all academics except geometry. He failed to make
friends and ducked bullying by Ukrainian classmates ridiculing his Polish heritage. He
excelled at flute, balalaika, piano, and accordion and won the title of “eighth wonder of
the world” for his dancing, which included performing on point. His admiration for his
teachers, Nikolai and Sergei Legat, resulted in deep grief for Sergei, who killed himself in
1905. From small roles in Faust, The Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty, Don Juan, and Swan
Lake, Nijinsky progressed to productions for Tsar Nicholas II at the Winter Palace and the
Chinese Theatre that paired him with his younger sister, soloist Bronislava Nijinska.

The Polish-Ukrainian pacesetter for twentieth-century male dancers, Vaslav Nijinsky celebrated character
roles with the avant-garde flair displayed in this 1911 production of Le Spectre de la Rose. Photo from
National Library of Australia.

Becoming a Star
The siblings left the class of dance master Nikolai Legat in 1909 to join Sergei Diaghilev’s
Ballets Russes, an experimental collaboration of dancers with composers, costume and set
designers, and choreographer Michel Fokine. Debuting in Paris at the Théâtre de Châtelet
on May 19, 1909, Nijinsky partnered with prima ballerina Tamara Karsavina in “The
Bluebird,” a role in The Sleeping Beauty invented by his instructor, Enrico Cecchetti. For
Nijinsky’s emotive performances, the French gave him the title of le dieu de la danse (god
of the dance).
In a milieu that extolled ballerinas, the prominence of the male dancer derived from
Nijinsky’s daring, skimpily costumed fantasy roles reflecting salacious poses stylized from
classical Greece and Persia. Character parts ranged from an androgynous slave in brown
body paint in Scheherazade (1910) and the wind god Vayou in a 1910 presentation of Le
Talisman (The Amulet). As the patrician Albrecht in Giselle in 1910, he refused to wear
pants over the tights that outlined his genitals. Maria Feodorovna, mother of Emperor
Nicholas II, declared the costume obscene.
Flouting conventions marked Nijinsky’s mounting reputation for inappropriate
choreography. Despite royal approbation, he gained notoriety for Petrouchka (1911), a
stirring character transformation from straw puppet to athletic, effeminate boy victimized
by a Moorish killer. Because of stark lip and eye makeup for Le Spectre de la Rose (The
Spirit of the Rose, 1911), the miming of masturbation in the moody, mythic L’Après-Midi
d’un Faune (Afternoon of a Faun, 1912), and the emergence of a homosexual self in Jeux
(Games, 1913), the world’s first modern ballet, the dancer’s scrutiny of boundaries
between the genders aroused outrage in conservative viewers. He followed with a
groundbreaking modern ballet, Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring, 1913), a
jarringly bohemian dance set to dissonance, asymmetry, and pagan rhythms. The ugliness
of the production launched an uproar in the audience, marking May 29, 1913, as one of the
most notorious revolts against modernity.
Nijinsky’s firing from the Ballets Russes resulted from his marriage in Buenos Aires,
Argentina, on September 20, 1913, to Hungarian heiress Romola de Pulszky. The
defection from a long affair with Diaghilev cost Nijinsky his stardom and, in spring 1914,
his employment. At Diaghilev’s command, Léonide Massine replaced the boy star in the
Ballets Russes. Deprived of Nijinsky’s ebullient elevation and power, admirers began
building his cachet with opinions and half-truths.
Decline and Madness
Lacking administrative skills, Nijinsky began forming and directing his own company, but
lapsed into a nervous breakdown in March 1914, forcing a cancellation. The onset of
World War I forestalled negotiations for stage roles and material. Because of Romola’s
nationality, Nijinsky spent eighteen months under civilian house arrest in Poland. He used
the time to invent a system of choreography notation. Upon his release, he rejoined the
Ballets Russes as director of a North American tour, but began to display a persecution
complex that he rationalized as a reaction by envious competitors.
Although thwarted by a sprained ankle and labor issues, Nijinsky’s 1916–1917 tour
pleased audiences with his startlingly original choreography of the German satire Tyl
Eulenspiegel and L’Après-Midi d’un Faune. Studio outbursts and a bizarre retreat from
rehearsals in Montevideo, Uruguay, revealed the severity of his manic states. Under a
diagnosis of schizophrenia, he entered a mental hospital in December 1917 in St. Moritz,
Switzerland.
In 1918, Nijinsky and his wife and daughter Kyra settled in Budapest, where Romola
penned a biography, Life of Nijinsky (1933). Their second daughter, Tamara, developed a
love of puppetry. After his brother Stassik’s death in a madhouse around Christmas 1918,
Nijinsky withdrew into drawing masks for soldiers, butterflies, and spiders. A week later,
he committed himself to an asylum in Zurich.
The famed prodigy faded from public view. In 1944, Nijinsky’s expression of
nationalism resurged during an impromptu dance for Russian soldiers near Vienna. He
died on April 8, 1950, in a London asylum, leaving a journal stating his disdain for logic
and his reliance on feelings.
See also Ballets Russes; eurythmics; Scheherazade.
Source: Buckle, Richard. Nijinsky: A Life of Genius and Madness. New York: Open
Road, 2012.
NOVERRE, JEAN-GEORGES (1727–1810)
An arts theorist and reformer of stage performance, Jean-Georges Noverre redirected
choreography away from stagnant court productions and opera-ballet toward the flawless
technique and passionate realism of ballet d’action. A Parisian born on April 27, 1727, to
Marie Anne de la Grange of Picardy and Swiss infantryman Jean Louys Noverre, he
rejected an army career in favor of studying dance. Trained by Louis Dupré in the royal
academy company of fourteen, Noverre debuted at age sixteen at the Opéra-Comique in
the one-act vaudeville Le Coq du Village (The Village Rooster, 1743), a satire of a bucolic
playboy.
In Paris, Noverre resented the stifling symmetry forced on opera-ballet, a hybrid art
involving singing and dance. A tour that took him to Dresden and Strasbourg, to
aristocratic productions at Fontainebleau, and before Frederick II and Henry of Prussia in
Berlin buoyed his career. While supervising dance in Strasbourg, he presented an Asian
fantasy, Les Fêtes Chinoises (The Chinese Fair, 1747), a montage of travel scenes
accompanied by the percussive effects of cymbals and triangle.
Experimental Ballet
Travel released the choreographer from stilted controllers of the arts at the Paris Opera
Ballet. Newly wed to actor Marie-Louise Sauveur, Noverre moved on to Lyons, a more
progressive milieu than Paris. He partnered with Hispano-Belgian ballerina Marie
Camargo and directed the first ballet pantomime, Le Jugement de Paris (The Judgment of
Paris, 1750), a grand representation of a beauty contest of goddesses that caused the
Trojan War. He reprised the successful work in 1751 at Marseilles.
To introduce acting techniques to his company, in 1755 at London’s Drury Lane,
Noverre apprenticed at the Theatre Royal under David Garrick, a Shakespearean actor
noted for expressive eyes and hands. Because of animosities between the French and
English aroused by the Seven Years War, Noverre produced ballet extravaganzas, but took
no public credit lest haters of the French attack him and his family. Despite his caution, a
staging of Les Fêtes Chinoises at Drury Lane on November 8, 1755, resulted in rioting and
destruction of expensive silk costumes and sets.
Forced out of London, Noverre returned to the Lyons Opera. The monograph Lettres
sur la Dance, et sur les Ballets (Letters on Dance and Ballet, 1756) presented Noverre’s
research into classical mime and the results of his collaboration with Garrick. Setting the
parameters of ballet d’action, Noverre stripped stage productions of the mannered
costuming and fragmented choreography that linked dance with sixteenth-century courtly
behaviors. Instead, he favored Anacreontic ballet, based on the pastoral odes of the Greek
poet Anacreon.
Inspired by composer Jean-Philippe Rameau’s individualistic orchestrations and dancer
Marie Sallé’s naturalistic gowns and hairstyles, Noverre rejected heavy wigs and
constricting corsets, masks, jewelry, and shoes. His instruction encouraged the corps de
ballet to favor their anatomical strengths rather than strict synchrony of dance mechanics.
His writings on artistic dance received the approval of Voltaire and flourished in
translation across Europe.
Ballet d’Action
Searching for realism in ballet, Noverre declared that dance could emulate any situation
from daily life. For Queen Marie Leczinska at Brunoy, he presented a pastoral pantomime,
Les Caprices de Galathée (Galathea’s Fantasies, 1757), featuring tiger pelt costumes and
tree bark shoes appropriate to rustic herders. Under the patronage of the Duke of
Württemberg, he taught ballet at the Royal Academy and introduced progressive theories
to a pupil, Gaëtano Vestris, an emerging talent, who left Paris to join Noverre’s company
in Stuttgart.
With a new emphasis on varied steps and on the turnout of the legs from the hips,
Noverre conceptualized realistic movement with melody, lighting, and makeup to suit a
cohesive theme. In agreement with dancer Charles Le Picq, Noverre reduced the bulk of
costumes to allow virtuoso aerial maneuvers and agile steps, essentials of La Mort d’Ajax
(The Death of Ajax, 1758) and La Mort d’Hercule (The Death of Hercules, 1762). At the
Stuttgart Grand Ducal Theater on February 11, 1763, Noverre’s company excelled from
the combined talents of fifteen soloists and forty-four company dancers in Medée et Jason
(Medea and Jason), one of his most celebrated tragic ballets. The audience flinched at the
verisimilitude of jealousy, spontaneous combustion, child murder, and the vengeance of
Furies.
Noverre mined mythology for its most emotive hero stories—Hypermnestre, ou Les
Danaïdes (Hypermnestra, or the Danaids, 1764), Orphée et Euridice (Orpheus and
Eurydice, 1766), and Atalante et Hippomène (1769). Accompanied by a company of
French dancers, he taught his precepts at the Vienna Opera with great success. On return
to Stuttgart, he received a 20 percent raise to six thousand florins.
In 1769, Noverre instructed nine-year-old prodigy Antoine Bournonville in ballet and
fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette in ballroom dance and performed a Scottish reel for
her amusement. By 1776, Noverre directed a grueling four ballets per week at Stuttgart
encompassing sixty dancers and the German opera, but lacked the support of Joseph II for
hiring a French ballet master. Upon the breakup of the Stuttgart troupe, thirty dancers
departed to Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, and England to teach the Noverre method.
To the dismay of rival Jean Dauberval, in 1776, Noverre returned to France to assume
the teaching post of Vestris, who had taught ballet at the Paris Opera for six years. In May
1778, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart began writing twelve pieces anonymously for Noverre’s
opera interlude Les Petits Riens (The Little Nothings), consisting of three tableaus for four
couples on the themes of playboys, wooing, and jealousy. In flight for his life after the
1789 French Revolution, Noverre built a company at the King’s Theatre in London and
encouraged emotive, pictorial mimodrama in dance, a quality mastered by romantic lead
dancer Giovanna Baccelli.
Noverre’s career encompassed one hundred fifty productions. Although he never visited
Russia, his progressive philosophy of storytelling coordinated with Slavonic traditions
dating to the Middle Ages and influenced the Imperial Ballet School at St. Petersburg. At
his death at Saint-Germain-en-Laye on October 19, 1810, Noverre bore the titles of “the
Shakespeare of ballet” and “the Prometheus of the dance.”
See also ballet d’action; intermedio.
Source: Lee, Carol. Ballet in Western Culture: A History of Its Origins and Evolution.
New York: Routledge, 2002.
NUREYEV, RUDOLF (1938-1993)
One of the most impressive stars of twentieth-century ballet, Rudolf Khametovich
Nureyev reshaped dance drama with grace and psychological impact. The son of Farida
Idrisova and Red Army Major Hamit Nureyev, he was born of Islamic Tartar heritage on
March 17, 1938, on a train at Irkutsk, Siberia. While growing up in Moscow before
wartime evacuation to Ufa, he and his three older sisters—Rosa, Lilla, and Razida—
studied the Turkish dances of the Bashkir, a native people who settled the Ural Mountains
dividing Europe and Asia.
 By age fifteen, Nureyev defied his father’s orders to study medicine or engineering and
found part-time work with the Ufa opera as an extra. After joining the Bolshoi Ballet, he
decided he preferred the Kirov in Leningrad, where he attended choreographic school in
1955. Boarding with the family of ballet coach Alexander Pushkin, Nureyev partnered
Natalia Dudinskaya and Alla Sizova.
While learning fifteen dances, Nureyev achieved the rank of soloist and earned critical
comparison to Vaslav Nijinsky. In private, Nureyev rejected Communist youth
organizations and taught himself English. In his early twenties, he performed in a 1958
film of Le Corsaire (The Pirate) and, in 1959, partnered Vaganova-trained soubrette-
ballerina Ninel Kurgapkina in a dazzling staging of the choreodrama Laurencia, based on
revolt of Spanish peasants.
In April 1961, Nureyev again paired with Kurgapkina for his first performance of Swan
Lake. He joined Kirov principals Natalia Makarova, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Valery
Panov in reviving Russian artistry, especially the elegance and precision of piqué
arabesque and renversés en arrière (back reversal) for male dancers. For women, he
accentuated staggered pirouettes en pointe. His performance of Kingdom of the Shades in
Paris established his virtuosity and popular appeal.
Leaving Home
Because Nureyev alarmed Soviet political agents by talking to foreigners during a tour of
Paris, he sought assistance of French gendarmes because he anticipated arrest on his return
to Soviet Russia. At Le Bourget Airport on June 16, 1961, he chose self-exile rather than a
return to the U.S.S.R. Contracted within the week to the Grand Ballet du Marquis de
Cuevas, he executed a duet with Nina Vyroubova in The Sleeping Beauty, a ballet he
disliked.
Busy with his new notoriety, Nureyev joined Ruth Page’s Chicago Opera Ballet, teamed
with Rosella Hightower in a pas de deux from The Nutcracker, and authored a memoir,
Nureyev: An Autobiography (1962). For director Ninette de Valois of the Royal Ballet in
1962, he starred with Margot Fonteyn in Frederick Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand, a
stage tragedy they performed in London, Milan, Paris, Canada, the United States, and
South America. Introduced to Erik Bruhn through friend Maria Tallchief, Nureyev formed
a lasting romance with the Danish dancer, who shared his belief that men deserved
opportunities to perform lyric solos.
Nureyev sampled a range of styles and techniques, including an appearance with prima
ballerina Yvette Chauviré in the 1962 Royal Ballet movie version of Les Sylphides. The
following November 1963, he appeared in The Kingdom of the Shades in Covent Garden
and, on American television, performed an Armenian folk variation in the Armenian ballet
Gayane and a solo from The Sleeping Beauty. Both presentations featured the quick turns
and triple cabrioles that he popularized for male leads.
Eager to experience a range of staging, Nureyev aided the Australian Ballet financially
by joining Fonteyn to perform Giselle and ventured into choreography in 1964 with an
adaptation of Raymonda for the Spoleto Festival in Italy. With French star Zizi Jeanmaire,
he filmed for a 1966 television program Roland Petit’s masterwork Le Jeune Homme et la
Mort (The Young Man and Death). The following year, Nureyev danced Adam opposite
Fonteyn as Eve in ballet héroïque—Petit’s Paradise Lost (1967), based on John Milton’s
literary epic. Nureyev’s inspired role as the Greek god in Apollon in 1967 recurred
frequently in programs.
In 1968 as codirector of the Dutch National Ballet, Nureyev experimented with
modernism, partnering with Lynn Seymour in Glen Tetley’s Laborintus (1972), a fierce
view of people damned to the inferno. At age thirty-two, Nureyev joined the Paris Opera
Ballet and instituted an eclectic repertoire based on standard and new works. In 1972, he
toured Australia with Don Quixote and performed Raymonda in Zurich. For the 1973
filming of Don Quixote, he staged a duet with New Zealand ballerina Lucette Aldous.
Dance Magazine awarded Nureyev its 1973 citation simultaneous with the Prix Marius
Petipa, two acknowledgments of his dash and zest for innovation. He partnered Chauviré
and ballerina assoluta Eva Evdokimova, lead dancers in a 1975 London Festival Ballet
production of The Sleeping Beauty. Out of admiration for the exuberant Tartar, Martha
Graham designed for Nureyev and his partner Fonteyn the showpiece Lucifer (1975).
Before sets painted by Joan Miró, the performance extolled the fallen angel, who mocked
himself for challenging God.
Varied Talents
After performing ballroom dance in Catalonia opposite Leslie Caron in the film Valentino
(1977), Nureyev exhibited his versatility by dancing in white face Glen Tetley’s Pierrot
Lunaire (Pierrot by Moonlight) and adapting Romeo and Juliet for the London Festival
Ballet. After rejecting the directorship of the Royal Ballet, Nureyev premiered two roles,
the solo Vivace and Canarsie Venus. The latter, a Jamaica Bay beach comedy, proposes the
appearance in Brooklyn of the Greek goddess of passion. Designed for the Murray Louis
Dance Company to Cole Porter tunes, the dance starred Anne McLeod opposite Nureyev
as a bumbling mortal seduced by a divinity. He received the 1978 Medaille de Vermeil de
la Ville de Paris, where he made his home.
Opposite Patricia McBride and Jean Pierre Bonnefous, Nureyev performed in a 1979
production of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (The Middle-Class Gentleman). In a burst of
creativity, he designed neoclassical heroic works—a contrast of pure and wicked women,
Erminia and Clorinda, in Tancredi (1979) for the Vienna Opera Ballet and Lord Byron’s
Faustian Manfred (1979), a tortured solo for the Paris Opera. He rushed on to stage The
Nutcracker in 1980 in Berlin before the presentation of Giselle at the Opera of Roma. At
the time of his naturalization as an Austrian citizen in 1981, he mounted Romeo and Juliet
at Milan’s La Scala and furthered the stardom of prima ballerina Élisabeth Platel and
Manuel Legris by featuring them in Georgian folk combinations for Raymonda.
As director of the Paris Opera Ballet after 1983, Nureyev scouted such promising talent
as soloist Sylvie Guillem, French étoile Laurent Hilaire, and Vietnamese dancer-teacher
Charles Jude, star of the film Ivan the Terrible (1977). After receiving the 1984
Coronation Award from the Royal Academy of Dancing in London, Nureyev
choreographed The Tempest (1984) and Washington Square (1985) and modernized
Cinderella the next year as a vehicle for Isabelle Guérin. Within months of the death of
Erik Bruhn from AIDS, Nureyev feared that acknowledging his own infection with HIV
might limit visas for guest appearances in foreign countries. The thawing of Soviet-U.S.
relations in 1987 restored Nureyev to fame in his homeland and allowed reunions at the
Kirov and a visit to his dying mother. He returned to dance Martha Graham’s Appalachian
Spring with Mikhail Baryshnikov and performed George Balanchine’s Orpheus with the
New York City Ballet.
Returning to mixed media, Nureyev highlighted the artistry of diva Élisabeth Maurin as
a snowflake in The Nutcracker, filmed in 1988 for French television, and, a year later,
collaborated with the Kirov in a staging of La Sylphide. On a U.S. tour, he joined a revival
of The King and I in 1989, singing the part of Mongkut, King of Siam. In Paris in 1990, he
performed to the lieder of Gustav Mahler Songs of a Wayfarer, a title suggestive of his
existence as a vagabond dancer-choreographer.
In his last years in Paris, while struggling with AIDS and the toxic drug AZT, Nureyev
groomed Platel to star in La Bayadère (The Temple Dancer) and returned to southern
Russia for a visit. Declining health in April 1992 required surgery for pericarditis and
recuperation at his Caribbean home in St. Bart’s. He directed Romeo and Juliet the
following May in New York and choreographed a starring role for Hilaire as Solor in La
Bayadère for an October presentation in Paris. Meanwhile, Nureyev planned a restaging of
John Cranko’s The Prince of the Pagodas.
After six and a half weeks of hospitalization, Nureyev died on January 6, 1993, at age
fifty-four. Lying in state in the lobby of the Paris Opera, he was eulogized alongside two
honors—a sash of the Commander of Arts and Letters and the cross of the Legion of
Honor. The ballet world honored his exhilaration and the creation of mimetic male stage
roles.
See also The Lady of the Camellias.
Source: Kavanagh, Julie. Nureyev: The Life. New York: Pantheon, 2007.
THE NUTCRACKER
See image in photospread.
The acme of story ballet, The Nutcracker (1892) marks the Christmas-Hanukkah season
with a fantasy that entrances children and adults. The result of collaboration between
composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky and choreographer Marius Petipa, the ballet took
shape in the shadow of The Sleeping Beauty (1890), which netted a lukewarm critical
reception. The libretto for The Nutcracker reprised Prussian writer Ernst Theodor
Amadeus Hoffmann’s folk tale “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” (1816). Because of
Petipa’s illness with an auto-immune condition of the skin, Muscovite stage manager Lev
Ivanov completed the choreography.
The original plot dramatized the joy of seven-year-old Marie Stahlbaum in the
Christmas nutcracker, which springs to life and transports her to a magic realm of dolls.
Because of the story’s flashbacks and Gothic grotesquerie, the adapter kept the framework
and rephrased it with a charming war between toy soldiers and mice and an elegant
coronation. To ensure a childlike innocence, Petipa wrote parts for his conservatory class
of juveniles, whom the critics belabored for their lack of technical skill and musicality.
The two-act ballet debuted before Tsar Alexander III at the Mariinsky Theatre in St.
Petersburg on December 18, 1892, to a sold-out house. The premiere lacked the details
and electronic machinery of twentieth-century versions, but claimed one of most
rhapsodic scores in ballet history. The program featured twelve-year-old Stanislava
Belinskaya as Clara, Pavel Gerdt as Prince Coqueluche, and Sergei Legat as the
Nutcracker/Prince, all dancing to ethnic Russian, Georgian, Slavic, and Ukrainian
melodies. Antonietta Dell’Era, who introduced the part of the Sugar Plum Fairy,
pirouetted to the tinkle of the celesta, triangle, and glockenspiel.
Although the audience demanded encores of the “Tea Dance” and gave Dell’Era five
curtain calls, the production closed on its fourteenth performance. Arts maven Alexander
Benois called the ballet “amateurish.” Other critics demanded fewer child performers,
more artistry, and a logical connection between acts one and two.
The Original
Against the dominance of the Enlightenment, The Nutcracker extolled imagination and a
retreat from the dullness and pain of real life, as represented by the smashed jaw and
silenced voice of a wooden homunculus. Opening to a sprightly full orchestra overture on
Christmas Eve at the Stahlbaum residence, the ballet spotlights an imagination at liberty to
display the dash and abandon of youth. The action converges on a German parlor
gathering of friends and family admiring a candle-lit Christmas tree. The setting captured
the universal focus of Christendom on good will and generosity, signified by a mélange of
hospitality, color, light, and music.
In a gift exchange, presents delight Fritz and Clara, the daughter named from the Latin
for “bright” and “clear.” Contemporary presentations sometimes cast Fritz as a breeches
role, thus pairing two ballerinas as brother and sister. At the stroke of 8 PM, the horologist
and magician Drosselmeyer, Clara’s godfather, sets in motion four automata that he has
engineered for the occasion. The next gift, a wooden nutcracker, appeals to Clara. Because
Fritz breaks the toy’s jaw mechanism, he destroys Clara’s holiday mood. The cliché of the
bratty brother sets up a foil for Clara’s handsome prince.
In a demonstration of female gentleness and compassion, after bedtime, Clara creeps
into the parlor to tend the Nutcracker’s wounded jaw. To the chiming of midnight, the
story shifts to ballet-féerie (fantasy ballet). Drosselmeyer appears on the Nutcracker’s
sickbed and surveys the scurry of mice, a standard invader of domesticity in folklore such
as Aesop’s fable “The Lion and the Mouse” and the Grimm brothers’ “The Pied Piper of
Hamelin.” The Christmas tree stretches taller to loom over a comic battle between rodents
and gingerbread soldiers, which the mice nibble. To allegro vivo strains, the Nutcracker
commands a squadron of tin soldiers. The Mouse King falls victim to Clara’s well-aimed
bedroom slipper and lies supine in the arms of mice rescuers, who carry him off the
battlefield.
 Scene two moves outdoors to a stand of pines, an isolated setting swathed in moonlight
for Clara’s coming of age. The scene carries transformation to greater extremes by
replacing the parlor and its indoor Christmas tree with pines in a real forest graced by the
Dove of Peace. At the periphery, Ded Moroz (Father Christmas) and Snegurochka (Snow
Maiden) emphasize the holiday atmosphere. As the mice dash into the shadows, the
Nutcracker shapeshifts into the Prince. He and Clara stroll through twirling snowflakes, a
beneficence reminiscent of fairy dust and the idealization of beauty promoted by German
romanticism.
The second act begins with a voyage by nutshell toward the Land of Sweets, far from
the control of the Stahlbaum household. Navigated by dolphins, the boat echoes similar
transport in The Sleeping Beauty. Clara enters the Prince’s magic castle in a merry land of
chocolate, candy canes, marzipan, Arabian tea, Chinese coffee, and the family of Mother
Ginger, who dances with bonbons. To the Sugar Plum Fairy, the Prince recounts the tin
soldiers’ victory over the mouse army.
A global array of candies cavorts to pizzicato strings and flute trills. Russian dancers
whirl to taps on the tambourine, Spanish castanets set the syncopation of the chocolate
dance, and flowers waltz to harp arpeggios. To the dance of the Cavalier and Sugar Plum
Fairy, the sweets add divertissements, a finale, and the crowning of Clara and the Prince,
who assume the role of fairyland’s royalty. Art history noted the death of Tchaikovsky’s
sister Sasha, whom he honored with a woodsy wooing, coronation, and orchestral
melodies that defied death.
A Ballet Platform
Twentieth-century stagings have employed insightful costumers along with special effects
and the cream of dance adapters to generate versions both affectionate and eerie. In 1911,
for a tour of Europe and the United States, Anna Pavlova excerpted the snowflake waltz as
a showpiece. For the Bolshoi at Moscow in 1919, stage manager Alexander Gorsky
melded parts, turning the innocent dance of the Cavalier with the Sugar Plum Fairy into an
adult grand pas de deux featuring Clara/Masha and the Nutcracker/Prince. The changes
influenced subsequent productions directed by émigrés Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail
Baryshnikov.
In 1940, choreographer Alexandra Fedorova and the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo
brought an abbreviated Nutcracker to the United States for presentation in New York. In
the same year, Walt Disney presented segments of the ballet in his animated feature
Fantasia. Near the end of World War II, Alexandra Danilova and George Balanchine
helped choreographer William Christensen and the San Francisco Ballet introduce the
opus on Christmas Eve, 1944. The troupe made the program an annual holiday treat.
Balanchine’s live television broadcast in 1954 featured June Lockhart as Frau
Stahlbaum and Balanchine as Drosselmeyer. Perversions of the style and spirit of the
ballet yielded cartoons, the satiric “Notcracker” and “Slutcracker,” choreographer Mark
Morris’s The Hard Nut (1991), and 3-D cinema as well as puppetry, ice ballet, gay
pastiche, children’s books and paper dolls, and video games. Hong Kong choreographer
Yuri Ng and Japanese dancer Yuh Egami’s touching Firecracker (1997) reset the ballet in
China among homesick Jewish immigrants. A realistic take in the Canadian film The
Secret of the Nutcracker (2007) depicted Clara’s father as a Nazi prisoner during World
War II. For a performance at the Bristol Hippodrome on November 1, 2013, the Russian
State Ballet of Siberia sparked wintry costuming by attaching snowflakes to the wrists of
the corps de ballet. In February 2015, the National Ballet of China celebrated Chinese
New Year in Beijing with The Nutcracker.
See also divertissement; Ivanov, Lev; Pacific Northwest Ballet; San Francisco Ballet.
Source: Fisher, Jennifer. “Nutcracker” Nation: How an Old World Ballet Became a
Christmas Tradition in the New World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.
 • O •
OPERA-BALLET
An adjunct to baroque opera, European opera-ballet evolved from classic musical
performances into a loose collection of dance skits presented to royalty as an entertaining
spectacle. A theatrical prologue set the tone and themes of stand-alone acts, which
featured mythology, the supernatural, and exotic places and events, as with the 2013
productions of Tosca and Tannhäuser by the Estonian National Ballet and the August 2014
presentation at Lincoln Center of Acis and Galatea by the Mark Morris Dance Company.
Because eclectic segments yielded a whole entertainment, the opera-ballet could serve a
repertoire as a self-contained performance.
French composer André Campra initiated opera-ballet at the Paris Opera on October 24,
1697, with L’Europe Galante (Europe in Love), a four-part presentation that opened with
a prologue sung by Venus, the goddess of passion. The production incorporated a libretto
by Antoine Houdar de la Motte that contrasted styles of romance in France, Spain, Italy,
and Turkey. Baroque costumes consisted of weighty masks, headdresses, and heeled
pumps. Female dancers wore panniered skirts over hoops. Men dressed in the tonnelet,
blousy hooped shorts covering the thighs.
Ornamental and fastidious of steps and mannerisms, the opera-ballet modeled the
refinements of baroque art. At the Tuileries in Paris, musician André Destouches’s
allegorical Les Éléments (The Elements, 1721), incorporated Louis XV in the corps de
ballet. A creation myth, the plot opened with Destiny and Venus describing Chaos, a
common anthropomorphic goddess in classical ballet. A mix of deities and peasants
performed opposite Love in the four-part division of skits into Air, Water, Fire, and Earth.
In 1723, French composer François Colin de Blamont created a subset of opera-ballet
called ballet héroïque (heroic ballet). Based on exotic models of classical events, the
subgenre got its start with Les Festes Grecques et Romaines (Greek and Roman
Celebrations). Staging consisted of a prologue and acts outlining the Greek Olympic
games and Bacchanales honoring Dionysus, god of Wine, and Roman Saturnalias during
the reign of Augustus, Rome’s first emperor.
A major proponent of the musical genre, composer Jean-Philippe Rameau described
opera-ballet in a handbook, Le Maître à Danser (The Ballet Master, 1725). He completed
Les Indes Galantes (The Chivalric Indies, 1735), staged by dance master Louis Dupré
with elements of three continents. Based on a state visit of six Illini chiefs from North
America to Louis XV, the ballet went through frequent variations. The disparate acts
began with “The Gracious Turk,” which preceded a skit on the Emperor Huascar leading
Peruvian Inca, a Persian love tale, and a concluding scenario on European adventurers
wooing Zima, daughter of an Illini chief. Rameau added to his canon Les Fêtes d’Hébé
(Celebrations of Hebe, 1739), a return to Anacreontic settings with characters representing
Mercury, a river, a naiad, Sappho, a shepherdess, Love, and Hebe, cupbearer of the Greek
gods.
 In 1742, Frederick the Great of Prussia established Berlin’s Royal Opera House, a court
venue that featured a resident ballet troupe. The director hired professional Parisian
dancers, then saved on salaries by opening a ballet academy to train Prussian girls. The
dancers filled in gaps in the opera with intermedi until 1794, when the company operated
independently.
In the 1740s in Italy, arts theorist Jean-Georges Noverre directed ballet away from
artificial court dance and semi-serious musical theater toward ballet d’action, a realistic
presentation of narrative. Devoid of singing and aristocratic posturing, Noverre’s stage
productions expressed true human emotion through technically advanced dance and mime.
Instead of separate skits grouped around a unifying theme, each ballet enacted one plot
from beginning through the middle and conclusion. The separation of dance from opera
enabled aria, chorus, and recitative to develop greater heights of musicality.
The fusion of singing and dancing continued to delight audiences, as with the debut of
fifteen-year-old ballerina Caterina Beretta at Milan’s La Scala in Giuseppe Verdi’s opera I
Vespri Siciliani (Sicilian Vespers, 1855). While grand opera attracted its fans, ballet
evolved spectacle and narrative that appealed to balletomanes. Additional demands on
ensembles required the huge corps de ballet of Luigi Manzotti’s Excelsior (1881), a
defense of the Industrial Revolution performed with a massive cast of actors, dancers, and
animals.
Because Creole ballerina Janet Collins destroyed obstacles to black dancers in 1951,
twentieth-century performers found opportunities to join opera companies and contribute
to choreography. As dance maker of the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, Zachary Solov
directed black ballerino Alvin Ailey and Creole dancer Carmen De Lavallade for
demanding stage roles in Samson and Delilah (1956), Aida, and Faust. Collins also
performed in John Butler’s 1959 Carmina Burana with the New York City Center Opera.
Peripheral study of singing improved her balletic presentations by deepening her breathing
from upper chest to diaphragm.
Worldwide, opera continued to foster ballet. In 1975, Robert Helpmann, director of the
Australian Ballet in Melbourne, adapted the Franz Lehar operetta The Merry Widow to
lavish ballroom sets and elaborate costume dance featuring guest performer Margot
Fonteyn in the lead role. In 1986, Gerald Arpino, resident choreographer of the Joffrey
Ballet, set a six-solo pièce d’occasion, Birthday Variations, to the opera-ballet music of
Giuseppe Verdi. In July 2015, the Paris Opera Ballet celebrated the fortieth anniversary of
Manon.
See also ballet d’action; Beauchamp, Pierre; Le Corsaire; Mime; Noverre, Jean-
Georges.
Source: Balthazar, Scott L. Historical Dictionary of Opera. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2013.
 P
• •

PACIFIC NORTHWEST BALLET

A popular, technically advanced Seattle ensemble, the Pacific Northwest Ballet (PNB)
satisfies popular demand while achieving critical acclaim for Washington State arts.
Balanchine-trained dancers Francia Russell and Kent Stowell formed the company in 1972
as an adjunct of the Seattle Opera. As proof of long-range planning, in 1975, an archivist
began collecting dancer photos and arts memorabilia dating to the 1930s.
The eighteen-member PNB stood on its own in 1977 at its headquarters in the Marion
Oliver McCaw Hall. Housing progressed steadily, notably, the 1980 acquisition of a scene
warehouse that has stored sets for such spectacular story ballets as Carmen, Cinderella,
Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, and Carmina Burana. Within a year, the company premiered
George Balanchine’s Square Dance and La Valse.
In 1983, PNB filmed a performance of illustrator Maurice Sendak’s The Nutcracker,
featuring soloists Patricia Barker and Wade Walthall and narration by Tony Randall. A
production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream starred Barker as Titania, Mongolian dancer
noble Batkhurel Bold as Theseus, Jeffrey Stanton as Demetrius, and Ariana Lallone as
Hippolyta. In 1989, the company costume shop outfitted the troupe with its first major
wardrobe for The Firebird.
Maintaining a repertoire of six ballets, PNB flourished from the efforts of its teachers
and multiethnic performers, notably, soloist Chalnessa Eames, dancer-model Maria
Chapman, choreographers Andrew Bartee and Kiyon Gaines, and Hawaiian principal
Noelani Pantastico, whose picture on the cover of Dance Spirit Magazine attested to her
virtuosity. Tours have taken the company to Australia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Europe, and
throughout North America, notably, to perform La Valse and Agon at New York’s City
Center in 1996. In 2005, the ensemble hired Brazilian principal Carla Körbes, a
showstopper in a production of George Balanchine’s Jewels and in Elégie at the 2012 Vail
International Dance Festival. By 2009, company membership reached forty-eight.
In 2012, PNB contracted choreographer Twyla Tharp for a year’s residency and the
mounting of Air Twyla. The following year, the forty-four dancers wowed a New York
City audience and critics with Roméo et Juliette, presented at the Guggenheim Museum to
the score of Sergei Prokofiev. Featured choreography included the world premier of
Alejandro Cerrado’s Memory Glow, Susan Marshall’s Kiss, and Jir˘í Kylián’s Petite mort
and Forgotten Land.
In the tradition of children’s specials—Hansel & Gretel, Snow White—the 2013–2014
program offered Pinocchio, a family work presented the same season by the Atlanta
Ballet, Arkansas Festival Ballet, and the New Jersey Ballet Company. Director Peter Boal
also scheduled Leta Biasucci in George Balanchine’s Diamonds and opposite Jonathan
Porretta in Giselle. The June 2014 performance marked two retirements, those of
executive director David Brown and Japanese principal Kaori Nakamura, the partner of
Jerome Tisserand in Swan Lake, Coppélia, and Giselle.
 Source: Tobias, Tobi. “Life after Mr. B.” New York Magazine (11 November 1996): 90,
99.
PARIS OPERA BALLET
The Paris Opera Ballet, the world’s oldest continuous dance academy, became an arts
magnet for performers across Europe and Russia. To place France in the lead of cultural
arts, Louis XIV professionalized the study of ballet in 1661 by founding the Académie
Royale de Danse. The thirteen dancers, directed by Pierre Beauchamp, extended the
outreach of baroque entertainment from the royal court to general audiences. As an
adjunct to the Académie d’Opéra, established in 1669, three years later, the king opened a
school, Académie Royale de Musique, the ancestor of the Paris Opera, which offered a
tuition-free education.

The Paris Opera Ballet, the world’s oldest continuous dance academy, became an arts magnet for performers
across Western Europe and Russia, notably, Marie Taglioni, star of this production of Robert le Diable in
1831. Great Ballet Prints #7.

For the court’s dance conglomerate, Jean Baptiste Lully taught classes and directed
professional ballets, beginning in 1672 with Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus
(Celebrations of Love and Bacchus), choreographed for the king by Beauchamp. Philippe
Quinault wrote a tragic libretto for Cadmus et Hermione (1673), interspersed with
intermedi (dance interludes). In 1681, the first ballerina, Mademoiselle de la Fontaine,
integrated the all-male royal troupe and danced opposite Jean Ballon and Michel Blondi.
French composer André Campra devised the first baroque opera-ballet on October 24,
1697, with L’Europe Galante (Europe in Love). By 1713, a royal decree named twenty
dancers—ten men and ten women—as the permanent resident troupe, led by Nicolas de
Francine and Hyancinthe de Gauréault Dumont in twelve state theaters.
After Belgian-French principal dancer Marie Camargo wowed audiences in Brussels
and Rouen in 1720, balletomanes called for her hiring at the Paris Opera. She energized
solo footwork in Les Caractères de la Danse (1727) with the divertissements of instructor-
dance maker Françoise Prévost. Because Camargo designed the first ballet slippers,
female dance introduced a new era in the 1730s. By stripping heels from her shoes, she
created a flat surface oversewn at the instep for support and rid ballet of courtly pomp.
Ballet Reform
In the mid-1700s, dance master Jean-Georges Noverre, creator of ballet d’action,
criticized the Paris Opera Ballet for its soulless display of technique. Florentine performer
Gaëtano Vestris injected realism into stage works by ridding the performers of masks and
miming characters with enhanced mouth and eye expressions. Simultaneously, composer
Christoph Gluck introduced the comic opera with Don Juan (1761) and Orfeo ed Euridice
(Orpheus and Eurydice, 1762), with dances designed by Florentine Gasparo Angiolini.
After the building burned in 1763, the Paris Opera moved to the Palais des Tuileries.
Teaming with choreographer Jean Dauberval, Vestris staged serious dance narratives,
including Dardanus (1767), which allied a march with a tambourin, menuet, rigaudon, and
closing chaconne. The company occupied the new Theatre de Palais Royal in time for a
staging of Medée et Jason (Medea and Jason, 1763).
Noverre, who replaced Vestris as company instructor in 1776, raised the standard for
the opera-ballet Les Petits Riens (The Little Nothings, 1778) by setting enchaïnements to
the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Noverre’s reforms anticipated the great age of
romantic ballet and the idealization of beauty. Late in the 1770s, French arts directors
maintained traditional ballet productions while troupes in Great Britain, Germany,
Scandinavia, and Russia ventured into story dance. The suppression of youthful
innovation drove some Paris dancers to the rigorous dance academy at Milan’s La Scala.
Jean Dauberval, the company’s director, rescued the Paris Opera dancers from fire in
1781, when the building burned. German choreographer Maximilien Gardel replaced
Noverre in 1783 and, to advance the career of diva Madeleine Guimard, mounted light-
hearted performances of Les Sauvages (The Savages, 1786) and Le Coq du Village (The
Village Rooster), a satire of the rural ladies’ man. The next year, Louis XVI extended the
scope of the royal ballet school by training children and grading them by jury.
Vestris’s management of the Paris Opera Ballet School ended with the French
Revolution of 1789, when Pierre Gardel, Maximilien’s brother, began staging post-revolt
performances, a position he held for thirty-five years. Instructor Auguste Vestris,
Gaëtano’s son, contributed hand and face gestures to ballet technique as introits to
dramatic ballet, the focus of classical performances for the next three decades. For the
debut of Fernand Cortés, ou La Conquête du Mexique (Hernan Cortéz, or The Conquest
of Mexico, 1817), Geneviève Gosselin attracted the curious to a primitive form of toe
dancing.
A move in 1821 to the five-story Salle le Peletier accommodated fresh new dances,
beginning with Pierre Gardel’s Le Retour de Zéphire (Return of the Spring Wind).
Choreographers specialized in folkloric drama and Gothic elements, such as the magic
created by the fairy godmother in Cendrillon (Cinderella, 1823), featuring Gallo-Italian
ballerina Émilie Bigottini in the title role. The introduction of gas lighting gave greater
emphasis to footwork and partnering. In 1824, Gallo-Danish dancer August Bournonville
relocated to the Paris Opera to perfect balance, pirouettes, and port de bras. For
unhindered footwork, he introduced shortened pants and silk hose to the male costume.
The Taglionis
Instructor Filippo Taglioni generated new life in the Paris Opera at the debut of his
daughter, Italo-Swedish-Polish prima ballerina Marie Taglioni. At her debut on July 23,
1827, in a revival of Le Sicilien (The Sicilian), she introduced balancing sur la pointe, a
style that elevated female dance. Under contract in Paris, she performed atmospheric roles
in Le Dieu et la Bayadère (The God and the Temple Dancer, 1831), Robert le Diable
(Robert the Devil, 1831), and La Sylphide (1832), the first romantic ballet. Opposite
Taglioni, Jules Perrot revealed masculine legs in the lederhosen he wore for Nathalie, ou
La Laitière Suisse (Natalie, or The Swiss Milkmaid, 1832). More opportunities followed
with La Gitana (The Gypsy, 1838) and L’Ombre (The Shadow, 1839). Marie imposed
refinements on the revered opera house by surrounding the stage with seating for ladies
rather than for voyeuristic skirt chasers.
The revival of story ballet began in 1841 with Giselle, starring Carlotta Grisi, and
included resettings of Marie Taglioni’s La Sylphide. From the 1840s to the 1860s, Italian
composer Cesare Pugni accepted contracts at the Paris Opera to inject exotic settings,
including Gypsy camps, Turkish pirate caves, Spanish markets, and an Egyptian tomb in
works directed by Taglioni and Joseph Mazilier. Le Corsaire (The Pirate, 1856) pleased
Napoleon III and his wife Eugénie, who requested a performance for the French Army of
the East.
During the Third Republic, the Paris Opera company underwent restructuring in 1860,
when Marie Taglioni aided directors in a talent search for dancers to perform such works
as Le Papillon (The Butterfly, 1860), Pasquale Borri’s L’Étoile de Messine (The Star of
Messina, 1861), and La Source (The Spring, 1866), a tragic fable of a nymph who dies of
unrequited love. To maintain romantic dance, Taglioni managed an advanced class and
superintended rankings of pupils. In May 1870, Milanese teenager Giuseppina Bozzacchi
performed the role of Swanhilde in Coppélia before the Emperor Napoleon III and
Empress Eugénie.
With the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War on July 19, 1870, and the collapse of the
French empire, the theater closed until 1871. During the rise of Russian ballet under
choreographer Marius Petipa, the latter end of the 1800s saw a decline in excellence at the
Paris Opera Ballet. The dearth of French dancers gave more opportunities to Italian divas
Virginia Zucchi, Julia Subra, and Rita Sangalli.
 In 1873, the Grande Salle le Peletier burned, giving place to the Palais Garnier,
completed in 1875. Dance master Louis Mérante christened the new venue with Sylvia
(1876), featuring music by Léo Delibes. He directed the one-act mime-ballet Le Fandango
(1877), starring Léontine Beaugrand, with Spanish gestures and dancing lessons. The
building housed varied stage works, notably, Les Deux Pigeons (The Two Pigeons, 1886),
from a fable by Jean de La Fontaine featuring a breeches part for Marie Sanlaville.
Twentieth-century ventures on the Paris Opera stage presented the best of innovation,
featuring Carlotta Zambelli in L’Étoile (The Star, 1897) and Javotte (1909), depicting a
village festival and a queen of the ball. Director André Messager and dance master Léo
Staats graced the stage in 1910 with impresario Sergei Diaghilev’s The Firebird and
Scheherazade, avant-garde vehicles for Vaslav Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina. Russian
choreographer Ivan Clustine revived flagging audiences with Suite de Danses (1913), a
selection of melodic variations. Director Jacques Rouché raised public enthusiasm by
showcasing La Légende de Joseph (1914), the last of the Ballets Russes performances
until the end of World War I.
The postwar years intensified efforts to support French dance. Appealing programs
introduced Igor Stravinsky’s music in Scherzo Fantastique (1917) and Enrico Cecchetti’s
character dance in La Boutique Fantasque (The Magic Toyshop, 1919). Rouché scheduled
Michel Fokine, Anna Pavlova, and Bronislava Nijinska in standard works of the Russian
canon in 1924.
Under troupe director Serge Lifar, in 1930, the company acquired stars George Skibine
and Marjorie Tallchief, followed in 1941 by Yvette Chauviré, the company principal. Lifar
introduced Suite en Blanc (Suite in White, 1943) and scheduled Igor Moiseyev’s folkloric
ballet of Kiev. In mid-century, ballerina Claude Bessy gained fame in South African
choreographer John Cranko’s La Belle Hêlène (Beautiful Helen, 1955), which raised
Cranko’s global presence by satirizing Napoleon III and the Second Empire. The
following year, Skibine became the first American principal of the Paris Opera Ballet,
which he directed in 1958 while performing as étoile (star). The troupe became the first
outsiders after World War II to stage ballets at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre.
From 1972 to 2004, Bessy directed the dance school, bringing new challenges and
higher standards to performances. While serving as ballet master-in-residence for the Paris
Opera company, in 1974, George Balanchine mounted the avant-garde ballet Agon
(Competition) to music by Igor Stravinsky, and Walpurgisnacht (Witches’ Night, 1975) to
Charles Gounod’s compositions. Russian defector Rudolf Nureyev restaged Cendrillon
(Cinderella) in 1986. Choreographer William Forsythe introduced In the Middle,
Somewhat Elevated (1987). The late 1990s saw the advance of principals José Martinez,
Aurélie Dupont, Ghislaine Fallou, and Agnès Letestu.
Later experiments introduced by director Brigitte Lefevre presented balletomanes
complicated plot turns in Giselle in 2006 and, in 2009, Blanche Neige (Snow White),
directed to Gustav Mahler’s music by Albanian choreographer Angelin Preljocaj. For the
2013–2014 calendar, the 186-member company danced Rudolf Nureyev’s The Sleeping
Beauty and former director Roland Petit’s Notre-Dame de Paris.
 See also Beauchamps, Pierre; Louis XIV; Lully, Jean Baptiste; Petit, Roland.
Source: Guest, Ivor Forbes. The Paris Opéra Ballet. Alton, UK: Dance Books, 2006.
PARTNERING
See image in photospread.
From serious classical dance to Matthew Bourne’s all-male parody Spitfire (1988), the
seamless pairing of dancers for shared combinations builds drama while harmonizing the
strengths and balance of participants. In the early Renaissance, the close work of men and
women raised issues of propriety. In defense of double work, in 1460 in Milan, Antonio
Cornazzano, dance teacher for the Sforza family, declared ballet an artistic endeavor
devoid of sexual allure or indecency. In his description, the partners synchronized their
interpretation of each figure and followed the music to join the two halves. The harmony
of duets produced some of the great partnerships on stage, as with the minuets of Louis
XIV and his queen in the 1660s, Jean Georges Noverre and his wife/partner actor Marie-
Louise Sauveur, in the 1750s, and the noted Viennese waltzers of 1780, who changed
partners in each set as evidence of good manners.
In nineteenth-century romantic ballet, where most partnering involved each male with
only one female, the finished set gave the effect of a balanced sculpture epitomizing the
myth of weightlessness. The danseur served as a support and point of reference for the
danseuse, almost as though the male were a barre and the female a dainty fascination that
he held at arm’s length. During pointe work in an adagio dance or arabesque en tournant
(turning on one leg while extending the other leg), the female usually performed in front
of or beside the male and leaned on his arms and shoulders for balance. After Marie
Taglioni introduced toe dancing in 1832, supportive pointe shoes eased the work of her
partner, Jules Perrot. To spread the burden evenly, he maintained a vertical alignment of
head, shoulders/torso, hips, and feet and anticipated shifts in Taglioni’s center of gravity,
for example, in finger turns and fish dives.
Gendered Purpose
In the early 1800s, the best performances strove to boost the momentum of women’s turns
and to make men’s lifts and women’s dives look coordinated and effortless, a strength of
Philadelphian George Washington Smith, who partnered Mary Ann Lee and Viennese diva
Fanny Elssler. For bulk, males sometimes coordinated barre classes with training in
gymnastics and weightlifting that built core muscles and upper-body mass. Well paired
couples who thought of the partner as one half of a unified body shared timing, glances,
and a kinetic feel for the figure as a whole. A physical and emotional connection enhanced
the subtlety of the libretto, an illusion of romance essential to the waltz of the prince with
the title figure in an 1823 mounting of Cendrillon (Cinderella).
In the 1830s and 1840s, dance master August Bournonville taught his pupils at the
Royal Danish Ballet in Copenhagen to balance the contributions of male and female
partners. The shared role presented vitality and strength in both dancers rather than in the
female alone. In a demonstration of stage equality at London’s Queen’s Theatre, Jules
Perrot performed beside Carlotta Grisi in La Polka (1844), a mimicry of folk dance that
gained synchrony from matching bodices, sashes, and red boots. For Catarina, ou La Fille
du Bandit (Catarina, or The Bandit’s Daughter, 1846), coordinated costumes—pointed
hats, waist ties, and slippers laced with ribbons up the calf—gave a visual unity to partners
Jules Perrot and Lucile Grahn. The duets of Carolina Rosati and Domineco Segarelli for
Le Corsaire (The Pirate, 1856) offset Rosati’s footwork with the expressionism of
Segarelli’s mime.
Postromantic variations destabilized the male-female ideals of ballet. At the debut of
Coppélia at the Paris Opera on May 25, 1870, Milanese ballerina Giuseppina Bozzacchi
starred as Swanhilde opposite danseuse Eugénie Fiocre in the breeches role of Franz. A
titillating shift in gender, the supported promenades of Swanhilde in doll dress by a female
Franz in male dress communicated to the public the aptitudes of women on stage and in
sociopolitical roles. The sophisticated partnering reflected a postromantic ideal of the
woman as powerful and assertive in choosing her life path.
Classical vs. Radical
In the 1870s, the Gallo-Russian ballet master Marius Petipa, the era’s chief exponent of
classical dance, rejected breeches parts and retained stylized male/female courtesies. To
display ballerinas on toe and males as romantic cavaliers, he partnered as porteur with
Fanny Elssler, a strong-willed dancer who disdained the delicacy of her stage rival, Marie
Taglioni. With inspiration from colleague Christian Johansson, Petipa created additional
stage fantasies out of the romanticism of the male cavalier supporting the female en
pointe. To suit the assets of each, he invented variations that built on shared talents, age,
and experience, training males to lift and shift their partners’ poses several times en l’air
(in the air).
The formation of the Ballets Russes’s ballet contemporain (contemporary ballet) in
1909, encouraged choreographer Michel Fokine to reclaim Bournonville’s notion of
equality between the genders. In the duets of diva Anna Pavlova and Michael Mordkin at
the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, the beauty of both bodies generated applause.
The two dancers created a reciprocity of purpose because Mordkin contrasted the bravura
of Pavlova with a physicality of his own.
For Le Spectre de la Rose (The Spirit of the Rose, 1911), a forerunner of expressionism,
Fokine tipped the balance from the fragile female to an equally delicate male characterized
by hard adult musculature and sinuous vivacity. Danced to the music of Hector Berlioz by
Tamara Karsavina and Vaslav Nijinsky, the pairing blurred gendered gestures by picturing
Nijinsky’s rose as an androgyne with firm legs and lithe, feminine arm movements.
Photographers and sketch artists captured the unsettling duality of Nijinsky, the
ambiguous male as a pretty, smiling danseur.
Just as acrobatic pairing boosted the circus, kinetic partnering marked the best of early
twentieth-century choreography, especially the smooth figures sketched by Ruth St. Denis
and Ted Shawn, Alexandra Danilova in duets with Frederic Franklin, Edward Villella with
Patricia McBride in Symphony in C for the New York City Ballet, and the liberation of the
black female in Alvin Ailey’s Revelations (1960). Of particular note, Margot Fonteyn
gained stage presence from pairings with Michael Somes, who diminished his role to add
stature to their adagio duets. Another male concession, Orlando Salado protected visually
impaired partner Alicia Alonso from falls and missteps during the duet from Carmen,
performed in Puerto Rico in 1979, and the elegant Viennese waltz in a 1987 version of The
Merry Widow.
In 1965, British choreographer Frederick Ashton modeled the freedom of posture and
limb position in Monotones II, starring Zenaida Yanowsky. The neoclassical piece, set to
Erik Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies, pictured two males turning, testing, and examining the
female body of their partner as though discovering its plasticity and uniqueness. Reduction
of costumes to one-piece body suits further focused the dance on body alignment and
execution of steps.
Mikhail Baryshnikov, a Russian defector to the United States, paired with tall African
American soloist Judith Jamison in the jazzy Pas de Duke (1976), evidence of his
adaptation to American-style tempos and relaxed teamwork. In 1980, he set a standard for
the male partner in his pas de deux with Lesley Collier for Rhapsody, a rapturous figure
set to two-against-three tempo. Designed by Frederick Ashton with classical grace, the
pairing opened with close partnering with mirror-image moves synchronized to the music
of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme from Paganini. Baryshnikov enhanced
the duet with arm extensions that paralleled Collier’s exacting port de bras. By controlling
the flow of combinations, the two modeled the purpose of partnering.
In 2001, Cuban diva Alicia Alonso stated the visual satisfaction of partnering. She
explained that her Havana-based school expected a sharper vigor in the male. By elevating
masculinity, bravura, and muscle, the man projected his protection of the delicate,
feminine ballerina. Through gendered training, the pair exhibited a male-female contrast
essential to romantic and contemporary dance. In contrast to her gendered expectations,
Nguyen Tan Loc, director of Arabesque Vietnam, choreographed To (Two, 2013) to
emphasize balance in steps and lifts as a model of male-female harmony.
See also Alonso, Alicia; pas de deux.
Source: Lee, Carol. Ballet in Western Culture: A History of Its Origins and Evolution.
New York: Routledge, 2002.
PAS DE DEUX
See image in photospread.
In the romantic ballet of the early 1800s, a male-female pair shared equal parts of the
climactic duet. Late in the nineteenth century, the ballerina en pointe commanded audience
attention, reducing the male to a supportive role for such female-dominant duets as the
finales of Swan Lake (1876) and The Sleeping Beauty (1889). Serge Lifar, director of the
Paris Opera Ballet after 1929, redirected staging to heighten male activity during
partnering. To equalize the importance of Albrecht in Giselle, in 1931, he added gestures,
including kissing the hem of the tutu on his partner, Olga Spessivtzeva. With Susanne
Lorcia in Les Sylphides in 1938, he fluffed her skirt as a gesture of admiration and
accentuated his role as partner with fervid leaps and entrechats quatres (crossing feet in
the air).
 The ballet duet dissected male and female methods of seduction. In 1950, Swedish
choreographers focused on erotic attraction in the pas de deux from Miss Julie, a
misalliance of an aristocrat with her butler on the kitchen table. As a break from political
wrangling and slave rebellion in Spartacus (1956), composer Aram Khachaturian ended
act two with a loving adagio duet for the hero and his wife Phrygia set to achingly
romantic oboe music. In 1963, a melodramatic ballet version of Alexandre Dumas’s novel
The Lady of the Camellias featured Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev in the
compelling death scene in Marguerite and Armand, choreographed with buoyant lifts
defined by Frederick Ashton.
South African choreographer John Cranko specialized in the romantic duet. His original
pairings for Romeo and Juliet in 1962 and Eugene Onegin in 1965 introduced entrancing
pas de deux to the Stuttgart Ballet and world repertoires. In 1975, one of his protégés, Jir˘í
Kylián, a prolific Czech dance master for the Nederlands Dans Theater, examined male
partners for impressionistic music of Claude Debussy for La Cathédrale Engloutie (The
Sunken Cathedral), a resetting of a Breton legend that applauded less judgmental attitudes
toward homosexual pairing.
Twenty-first century duets revealed the strength of the pas de deux in contemporary
dance, particularly the classic grace and strength of partners trained by Sergei Bobrov,
artistic director of the Russian State Ballet of Siberia. In 2009, the Royal Winnipeg
Ballet’s Moulin Rouge: The Ballet paired Harrison James as artist Matthew with Jo-Ann
Sundermeier as cabaret star Nathalie in a duet to Claude Debussy’s Clair de Lune. A clash
of personalities intensified the duet of Hungarian principals Zoltán Nagy and Krisztina
Kevehazi as Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara in Lilla Pártay’s version of Gone with the
Wind (2007).
See also partnering.
Source: Greskovic, Robert. Ballet 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving the
Ballet. Pompton Plains, NJ: Limelight Editions, 2005.
PAVLOVA, ANNA (1881–1931)
A lithe, engaging superstar of twentieth-century Russian dance, Anna Pavlovna Pavlova
mesmerized audiences around the world, introducing many to their first glimpse of ballet.
Born in the south of St. Petersburg, Russia, on February 12, 1881, she arrived two months
premature. After the separation of her parents, laundress Lyubov Feodor-ovna and Lazar
Polyakov, a Jewish financier, she claimed the surname of her stepfather, Matvey Pavlov, a
retired soldier, who died in 1883.
A lithe, engaging superstar of twentieth-century Russian dance, Anna Pavlova mesmerized audiences
around the world, introducing many to their first glimpse of ballet, such as this pose for a Syrian Dance in
1918. Photo from National Library of Australia.

While living with her grandmother in Ligovo, Pavlova fantasized stage roles for herself.
At age eight, she fell in love with dance from seeing the premiere of The Sleeping Beauty
at the Mariinsky Theatre in January 1890, but appeared too frail for selection as a state
dancer. To tone her body, she followed a diet of fish and vegetables and disciplined herself
to eight hours of practice per day.
Training for the Stage
As a boarder at the Imperial Ballet School, Pavlova joined a juvenile company for a role in
Un Conte de Fées (A Fairy Tale, 1891), designed by Marius Petipa. After-class lessons
under dancer-instructors Nikolai Legat, Pavel Gerdt, and Christian Johansson strengthened
her spindly ankles and high insteps. From Enrico Cecchetti’s coaching, she gained muscle
memory. By 1898, she came under the mentorship of prima ballerina Ekaterina Vazem.
Lyric and emotionally involved with characters, Pavlova starred in a variety of roles in
La Flûte Magique (The Magic Flute), Bacchanale, and Le Corsaire. In 1898, she teamed
with Michel Fokine in Paquita, followed in 1899 by their partnering in Les Millions
d’Arlequin (Harlequinade, 1900), a love story performed before the Romanov court of
Nicholas II and Alexandra. For the Imperial Ballet of Moscow, staged by dance master
Alexander Gorsky, she shared the lead in Don Quixote (1900) with Tamara Karsavina and
Olga Preobrajenska and danced under Petipa’s direction in a 1901 revival of La Bayadère
(The Temple Dancer). Under Petipa in St. Petersburg, in 1903, she enacted the title part in
Giselle. Michel Fokine staged an excerpt, The Dying Swan (1905), for which Pavlova
interpreted the score of Camille Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals.
After training under Petipa, in 1905, Pavlova became the sole pupil at ballet master
Enrico Cecchetti’s academy at St. Petersburg. Petipa revised combinations for her
performance of Giselle in 1906. She paired with Vaslav Nijinsky in Le Pavillon d’Armide
(1907) as mistress and slave. During a worker’s revolt against tsarist autocracy, she joined
Petipa’s daughters, Maria, Nadia, and Vera, and others in a strike for safer working
conditions, more choice of roles, and higher pay.
A Life of Touring
Pavlova teamed with Adolph Bolm in a tour of Prague, Berlin, Riga, Stockholm, Vienna,
and Copenhagen and, in 1908, joined Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes for a guest
appearance in Helsinki. In a radical resetting of Scheherazade (1910) at the Théâtre du
Châtelet in Paris, Pavlova danced parts with cinematic brio to the direction of Michel
Fokine. The season included Les Sylphides, in which she shared billing with Tamara
Karsavina, Alexandra Baldina, and soloist Vaslav Nijinsky. At the peak of fame, she posed
for a life-size white-on-blue portrait in a sylph costume, painted by Valentin Serov.
 Diaghilev’s preference for male dancers caused Pavlova to leave the Ballets Russes and
accept a generous contract from London’s Palace Theater. At the Metropolitan Opera
House in New York on February 28, 1910, she chose Mikhail Mordkin as her partner for a
North American debut, which launched serious interest in dance throughout the United
States. She played Aspicia in La Fille du Pharaon (The Pharaoh’s Daughter) and toured
England, where she paired with Laurent Novikov and Pierre Vladimirov.
While living in London in 1912, Pavlova and her manager-husband, Victor Dandré,
formed the Russian Ballet Company. The troupe grew from eight Russian dancers to sixty
members, most of them English. She gave members lessons in their home, Ivy House,
where she maintained a studio and rehearsal hall.
Pavlova rejected the lead in Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird in 1914 and chose the
mechanical Coppélia and the snowflake from The Nutcracker as her first roles for the
Boston Grand Opera Company. In Hollywood, her stage magic influenced young Agnes
de Mille. Pavlova became a customer of Manhattan cobbler Salvatore Capezio. For her
troupe, she bought his toe shoes with broadened box toe and soles lined with wood. Her
skills developed from exposure to folk dancers and modernist Isadora Duncan.
With the outbreak of war in 1914, Pavlova directed her troupe to Germany and to
dowdy vaudeville theaters in Peru, Argentina, and Brazil, where she served as arts
missionary. A mime character in La Muette de Portici (The Mute of Portici) introduced
Pavlova in silent film. On return to Paris after World War I, she performed for charity to
aid Russian orphans.
Pavlova’s acquaintance with classical and folk dance resulted in her creation of Autumn
Leaves, Mexican Dances, Hindu Wedding, Rose Mourante, Oriental Impressions, Ajanta
Frescoes, and Radha and Krishna, for which she paired with Indian artist Uday Shankar.
In the 1920s, Gallo-Russian fashion artist Erté depicted her in haute couture outfits
consisting of paisley shawls, transparent harem skirts, and towering feathered turbans. At
Covent Garden in 1924, choreographer Mathilde Kchessinska featured Pavlova in Kitri’s
solo finale, an excerpt from Marius Petipa’s Don Quixote.
On 300,000 miles of global tours, Pavlova “sowed” art by dancing showpieces, Polish
and Mexican solos, and divertissements in the Hippodrome in New York, the British Isles,
American Indian reservations, China, Egypt, Philippines, New Zealand, Puerto Rico,
Japan, India, Burma, South Africa, and Australia. Performing a total of four thousand
performances in seventeen years, she taxed her strength. On vacation at Christmas in
1930, she survived a train accident between Cannes and Paris that subjected her to severe
cold while awaiting rescue.
At the Hague, Pavlova refused surgery to drain fluid from her lungs, which would have
compromised her career. On January 23, 1931, she died of pneumonia. Statues of her in
London adorned the Victoria Palace Theatre and Ivy House. A generation inspired by the
Pavlova dance legend included Ruth Page, Margot Fonteyn, Maria Tallchief, Frederick
Ashton, Doris Humphrey, and Agnes de Mille.
 Source: Cheyney, Arnold. Legends of the Arts: 50 Inspiring Stories of Creative People.
Culver, CA: Good Year Books, 2007.
PERROT, JULES JOSEPH (1810–1892)
At the acme of romantic ballet in Europe, mime and choreographer Jules Joseph Perrot
staged divertissements and fairy tale dances that prefigured story ballet. Born in Lyons on
August 18, 1810, to Laurence and Jean Perrot, a stage hand, the ballet master learned to
love theatrical machinery. At age nine, he began studying with dance master Auguste
Vestris, who taught him to compensate for a disproportionate physique. Within a year, the
boy worked in the circus as a mime and backstage in vaudeville as a messenger and prop
manager.
As a young danseur, Perrot parodied a stage comic before debuting in Paris at the Gaîté
Theatre. At age thirteen, he trained under Salvatore Viganó and premiered at age twenty at
the Paris Opera as a soloist in an 1830 performance of La Muette de Portici (The Mute of
Portici). After he partnered with diva Marie Taglioni in Flore et Zephyre (The Flower and
the Spring Wind, 1831), he began building a reputation for stunning entrechats
(crisscrossing of feet in the air) and jetés-battus (leaps with quick beats). For the lead in
Nathalie, ou La Laitière Suisse (Natalie, or The Swiss Milkmaid, 1832), he wore a folk
costume—lederhosen and suspenders. Making the most of his notoriety, he sought
contracts and higher pay in London and Naples.
From Dancer to Choreographer
To recover from a knee injury and prepare himself for choreography, Perrot observed
staged works in London, Milan, Naples, and Vienna. In 1836, he chose sprightly Italo-
Croatian ballerina Carlotta Grisi as his protégé, mistress, and mother of their love child,
Marie Julie. Perrot acquired prominence in the arts world with the teaming of Grisi with
Lucien Petipa for the two-act Romantic ballet Giselle (1841). Perrot co-staged the popular
work with Jean Coralli, a mentor blessed with broad experience and the guile to steal all
the credit. Disappointed in Coralli and saddened by Grisi’s affair with librettist Théophile
Gautier, Perrot left France.
By 1842, Perrot accepted a contract at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London, a city he
elevated in the arts realm. He continued combing the European stage for future divas,
including Fanny Cerrito, whom he showcased in Alma, ou La Fille du Feu (Alma, or The
Daughter of Fire, 1842). Perrot’s whirlwind of creativity in the early 1840s resulted in
twenty-three productions over a five-year span. His success preceded the critical acclaim
of Ondine, ou La Naïade (Ondine, or The Naiad, 1843), exhibiting the partnering of Perrot
and Cerrito, and, at the Bolshoi Theatre, La Esmeralda (1844), for which he starred with
Grisi as Gringoire and the title Gypsy.
For a short time, Perrot paired with prima ballerina Marie Taglioni in La Révolte au
Serail (The Revolt of the Harem, 1844), a forerunner of feminist ballet themes. At the
Queen’s Theatre in London, he performed a folk duet with Grisi in La Polka (1844),
creating a dance fad that swept Europe. For Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Perrot
showcased Taglioni’s precise moves en pointe in Pas de Quatre (Quartet, 1845), a
masterly divertissement featuring Cerrito, Lucile Grahn, and Grisi. The four divas
collaborated at the Queen’s Theatre in a variety of adagio and allegro combinations.
Taglioni’s jealousy of Perrot’s following ended their partnership.
The following season, Perrot and Lucile Grahn starred as principals in Catarina, ou la
Fille du Bandit (Catarina, or the Bandit’s Daughter, 1846), a tragedy that featured rural
robbers led by a woman. The choreographer spiced the performance with mumming and a
waltz and saltarelle, a traditional Italian skipping dance. For the 1846 revival of Le
Jugement de Paris (The Judgment of Paris), Perrot returned to the mythic plot of Homer.
Taglioni’s intrigues resulted in Perrot’s firing from the Paris Opera, a scandal reported in
the media. In the post of ballet master-in-residence at La Scala in Milan in 1848, he staged
Faust, a demonic ballet that matched Perrot as Mephistopheles with Fanny Elssler as
Marguerite.
From France to Russia
Demand for Perrot’s talents preceded his position in winter 1849 as dance master in St.
Petersburg for the Imperial Ballet, where he supplemented the efforts of dancer Marius
Petipa and Christian Johansson to elevate the stature of the male soloist. Grisi and Cerrito
joined Perrot to perform with the Bolshoi dancers. In collaboration with composer Cesare
Pugni and Petipa, Perrot designed Le Rêve du Peintre (The Painter’s Dream, 1848), La
Femme Capricieuse (The Unpredictable Woman, 1850), and L’Étoile de Grenade (The
Star of Granada, 1855) and revived past successes for the French. Imperial censorship of
La Guerre des Femmes, ou Les Amazones du IXe Siècle (The War of the Women, or,
Ninth-Century Amazons, 1852) as anti-tsarist and pro-revolution ruined the ballet master’s
reputation.
In 1857, Perrot composed a libretto for the dance fable La Rose, la Violette, et le
Papillon (The Rose, the Violet, and the Butterfly), a divertissement highlighting the
collaboration of three female soloists in brilliant costumes. In his last year in residence in
Russia, he joined the Bolshoi in an 1858 production of Le Corsaire (The Pirate), for which
he played the character role of Seid Pasha. Again forced out of his job, at age fifty-four, he
retired to a dreary life of poverty with his family, dancer Capitoline Samovskaya, their two
daughters, and Marie Julie. In 1869, the Imperial Ballet gave its 100th performance of
Perrot’s Faust. Edgar Degas pictured Perrot teaching young females in the animated
painting The Dance Class (1874). Perrot died while on vacation in Paramé, Brittany, on
August 24, 1892.
Source: Garafola, Lynn. Rethinking the Sylph. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press, 2011.
PETIPA, MARIUS (1818–1910)
See image in photospread.
The rejuvenator of Russian ballet, Victor Marius Alphonse Petipa staged fifty of the
most prominent works of the golden age of dance. A native of Marseille, he was born on
March 11, 1818, to tragedienne Victorine Grasseau and dance teacher Jean Antoine Petipa.
Well traveled during his parents’ residencies in European theaters, he learned ballet at
home and violin in Brussels at the Grand College and music conservatory.
The nine-year-old prodigy appeared in an 1827 production of La Dansomanie (Dance
Craze). During the Belgian Revolution of 1830, the family escaped unemployment by
moving to Nantes, where Marius studied with ballet coach Auguste Vestris. Upon
recuperating from a broken leg, he toured New York and appeared in Jean Coralli’s comic
La Tarentule (The Tarantula), the first ballet on Broadway in 1839. At the Comédie
Française, Petipa teamed with diva Carlotta Grisi and performed alongside his older
brother Lucien at the Paris Opera.
Dancer and Choreographer
Petipa partnered Elena Andreyanova in Giselle in 1842 in St. Petersburg and the next
season in Moscow. He staged original works in Bordeaux and soloed in La Fille Mal
Gardée (The Poorly Guarded Girl) and the 1843 debut of La Péri (The Good Fairy), in
which Grisi made dance history by diving from a platform into the arms of Lucien Petipa.
As male principal in Madrid at the King’s Theatre, Marius Petipa performed original
ballets until his romance with a married woman, the Marquise de Chateaubriand, forced
him to flee the city.
In St. Petersburg in 1847, Petipa injected Mediterranean style into the imperial
company by importing Fanny Cerrito, Carolina Rosati, Virginia Zucchi, Maria Giuri, and
Elena Andreyanova, ballerinas trained by Carlo Blasis. Directing in French, Petipa drove
dancers with an acid perfectionism. He choreographed thirty-five operas and performed
opposite Andreyanova in Paquita (1846), a Gypsy ballet set in the Napoleonic era, and an
1849 revival of Satanella, or Love and Hell (1840), an occult pantomime in which he
portrayed Count Fabio. The productions invigorated the popularity of social dance, as did
the hiring of dance master Jules Perrot and composer Cesare Pugni.
Petipa began an affair with Marie Thérèse Bourdin, mother of his son and namesake.
For his wife, actor-dancer Mariia Surovshchikova, mother of Marie and Jean Petipa, he
crafted stage roles, beginning with L’Étoile de Grenade (Star of Granada, 1855). She
danced in Un Mariage sous la Régence (A Marriage under the Regency, 1858), the first
work he directed, and in the comic suite Le Marché de Paris (The Parisian market, 1859),
in which he played Simon, the male lead. He renewed Le Corsaire (The Pirate) in 1858,
starring Ekaterina Friedbürg as Medora, himself as Captain Conrad, and Jules Perrot as
Seid Pasha.
After 1859, a collaboration with Arthur Saint-Léon, the French choreographer of
Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet, placed Petipa in a tenuous rivalry. For the farewell performance
of Carolina Rosati, he staged La Fille du Pharaon (The Pharaoh’s Daughter, 1862), a
virtuoso success for its Gothic opium dream, resurrected mummy, and encounter with a
cobra. In 1863, Petipa passed the directorship of theaters to Johansson.
Imaginative Canon
In competition with operetta, Petipa continued pleasing balletomanes with innovation and
spectacle, for which theater managers created the concept of season tickets. A Middle
Eastern triangle, Le Roi Candaule (King Candaules, 1868), based on Herodotus’s
Histories, attracted crowds to the theater. The productions resulted in Petipa’s promotion
in 1869 to premier ballet master of the Imperial Theatre. For Don Quixote (1869), he
collaborated with composer Ludwig Minkus on Spanish peasant dances.
In Camargo (1872), Petipa immortalized the abduction of ballerina Marie Camargo and
her sister Sophie. He divorced his wife in 1875, three years after the death of their son,
and staged Le Dahlia Bleu (The Blue Dahlia, 1875) for the debut of his daughter, Marie
Petipa. In 1876, he wed dancer Lyubov Savitskaya, who added three sons and three
daughters to their domestic contentment.
In addition to numerous interpolations for revived works, Petipa produced a series of
original ballets that contained myth, fantasy, banditry, and Russian fairy tale. The most
successful, La Bayadère (The Temple Dancer, 1877), set in India, featured intricate
combinations for the principals and a two hundred–member corps de ballet in “The
Kingdom of the Shades,” a Dantean hell foregrounding his emerging formalism. For the
coronation of Tsar Alexander III and Tsaritsa Maria Feodorovna on March 3, 1881, Petipa
created an allegorical fantasy, La Nuit et le Jour (Night and Day). He honored the tsaritsa
with L’Offrandes à l’Amour (Offerings to Cupid, 1886).
For The Sleeping Beauty (1890), Petipa spent lavishly on sets and machinery and hired
the genius musician of the era, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Petipa featured his daughters—
Vera as the White cat, Marie as the Lilac Fairy—and devised pas de caractère
(individualized combinations) for improvisation specialist Enrico Cecchetti to play two
roles, the villain Carabosse and the Bluebird. Unaware of the future greatness of Anna
Pavlova, Petipa directed the ten-year-old prodigy in Un Conte de Fées (A Fairy Tale,
1891).
In another historic moment of art history, Petipa initiated the staging of The Nutcracker
(1892) with a juvenile company, but had to withdraw because of the onset of pemphigus,
an autoimmune condition of the skin that causes blisters, hives, and sores. When the
ailment continued for a year, Italian instructor Enrico Cecchetti filled in for Petipa. To
archive Petipa’s choreography, performer Vladimir Stepanov invented dance notation,
which he compiled in L’Alphabet des Mouvements du Corps Humain (The Alphabet of
Movements of the Human Body, 1892).
The ballet master coined the term prima ballerina assoluta in 1894 to glorify his
protégé, Pierina Legnani, who starred in an 1893 revival of Cendrillon (Cinderella), Swan
Lake (1895), The Tsar Maiden (1895), La Perle (The Pearl, 1896), and Barbe Bleue
(Bluebeard, 1896). For Raymonda (1898), a chivalric rescue tale from Hungary, Legnani
partnered with Sergei Legat, Petipa’s future son-in-law. The emerging classic rounded out
Petipa’s soaring career.
Forced from Favor
Near century’s end, Vladimir Telyakovsky, now the ballet director, began conspiring to
remove Petipa from the position of ballet master. In response to the dictatorial newcomer,
Petipa dubbed him “colonel-of-the-arts.” The damning critical response to a glamorous
presentation of Le Miroir Magique (The Magic Mirror, 1903), starring diva Mathilde
Kchessinska as Snow White, included Serge Diaghilev’s pronouncement that the ballet
was a bore. Afterward, Alexander Gorsky replaced Petipa as company director.
Petipa supervised the dance training of his daughters Marie, Nadia, and Vera and, at a
revival of Giselle in 1903, directed Anna Pavlova in the title role. After Telyakovsky
abruptly canceled Petipa’s next ballet, The Rosebud and the Butterfly, the old man retired
within months. On a pension of 9,000 rubles, he relocated to Yalta to follow dispatches
from the Russo-Japanese War, dictate his memoirs to a French teacher, and gloat over his
daughters’ collusion in a ballet strike against Telyakovsky.
Afflicted with edema in his feet and ankles and depression, Petipa grieved for the death
of his daughter Eugénie, sister Victorine, son-in-law Sergei, and brother Lucien. Petipa
died on July 14, 1910, in Gurzuf, a Crimean resort on the Black Sea. Ironically, the French
ballet master earned the title of “father of Russian ballet.” Extending his fluid style in the
twentieth century were his pupils, Alexander Gorsky and Anna Pavlova, and archivist
Nicholai Sergeyev, who coded Petipa’s canon for future reference.
See also choreography; Le Corsaire; Don Quixote; Kirov Ballet; The Nutcracker;
Sergeyev, Nicholai; The Sleeping Beauty; Vaganova, Agrippina.
Source: Garafola, Lynn. Legacies of Twentieth-Century Dance. Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 2005.
PETIT, ROLAND (1924–2011)
Prolific French dance maker Roland Petit generated a post–Nazi era revival of his nation’s
theatrical ballet. Born on January 13, 1924, to Milanese costumer Rose Repetto and chef
Edmond Petit at Villemomble, northeast of Paris, he learned ballet under Serge Lifar at the
Paris Opera academy. At age sixteen, he apprenticed with the company.
Petit debuted in film in the dance tutorial Symphonie en Blanc (Symphony in White,
1942). After the city’s liberation on August 25, 1944, his eagerness to manage ballet
inspired the formation of the Ballets des Champs-Élysées, which he served as principal
dancer and promoter of French stage arts. He gained acclaim for Les Forains (The
Showmen, 1945), in which he and Solange Schwarz partnered as itinerant actors. His
ensemble mounted Guernica (1945), Le Rendezvous (1945), and Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe
(The Picnic, 1946), which debuted on a London tour.
A Man of Varied Talents
Petit’s naturalistic masterwork, Le Jeune Homme et la Mort (The Young Man and Death,
1946), won the hearts of Paris dance fans. It featured Petit’s gift for collaboration with
costumes by Yves Saint Laurent, score arranged by Ottorino Respighi, and libretto written
by playwright Jean Cocteau. The story of post–World War II despair enacted the suicide of
a spurned lover. Petit directed the realistic acting of Nathalie Philippart and Jean Babilée,
who smoked a cigarette onstage and kicked furniture before miming the painter’s hanging.
In Treize Danses (Thirteen Dances, 1947), Petit’s casting of Leslie Caron and Violette
Verdy heightened their popularity. At the Theatre Marigny in 1948, he reformed his
company as the Ballets de Paris to showcase ballerina Zizi Jeanmaire. For Les
Demoiselles de la Nuit (Ladies of the Night, 1948), he partnered Margot Fonteyn, who
mimed the part of Catwoman. He choreographed humans and puppets in the film Alice in
Wonderland (1948).
In 1949 at London’s Prince’s Theatre, Petit performed duets with Jeanmaire during a
lustful Carmen. The popular work preceded Le Loup (The Wolf, 1953) and Orson Welles’s
Gothic parable The Lady in the Ice (1953), featuring Colette Marchand as the ballerina
released from a frozen cube. After Petit wed Jeanmaire in 1954 and relocated to
Hollywood, she exploited their synergy in sixty productions.
From the Screen to the Stage
The choreographer created dances for Danny Kaye as a storyteller in Hans Christian
Andersen (1951), Leslie Caron as Cinderella in The Glass Slipper (1954), and Fred Astaire
and Caron as long-distance lovers in the jive classic Daddy Long Legs (1955). Petit
devoted more years to movie choreography, notably, a GI-in-Paris romp in Folies-Bergère
(1956) and Anything Goes (1956), a romantic comedy about jealousy in which Jeanmaire
partnered with Bing Crosby. For Black Tights (1961), Petit performed the roles of Don
José and Cyrano de Bergerac in costumes by Christian Dior.
After a decade of dance making for cinema, Petit contracted with the Paris Opera to
stage Notre-Dame de Paris (1965) and danced the role of Quasimodo to a score by
Maurice Jarre. Petit’s peripatetic career took him across Europe and the UK to Cuba and
Canada. He created controversy in Paris over the off-kilter rhythms in Turangalîla (Time
Play, 1968) and invited critiques of modernism for Kraanerg (Completed Job, 1969), to
the computer-generated music of Greek-French composer Iannis Xenakis. An inspired
casting of Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn in Paradise Lost (1967) featured the
popular duo as Adam and Eve.
In 1970, the Paris Opera Ballet appointed Petit to the directorship, but he chose to
remain independent. At his music hall, the Casino de Paris, he starred Jeanmaire in ballet
revues. He debuted a new troupe, the Ballet National de Marseille, with Pink Floyd Ballet
(1972), L’Arlesienne (The Girl from Arles, 1974), and a TV satire of Belle Epoque
snobbery, Proust (1974), the first dance reprising the novelist’s work, starring Maya
Plisetskaya.
Petit’s enthusiasm for a revitalized French dance won him a 1974 Legion of Honor and
subsequent French National Prize for Dance. His Nana (1976), The Phantom of the Opera
(1980), and Puss in Boots (1986) featured Patrick Dupond, a virtuoso heartthrob. Petit’s
success relied in part on sets and costumes by Max Ernst and Jean Carzou and on ballets
designed for guest divas Alessandra Ferri, Carla Fracci, and Natalia Makarova, star of The
Blue Angel (1985), the brooding tale of a schoolteacher with a nightclub singer.
In 1992, Petit opened a ballet academy in Marseilles. In J’Ai Dansé sur les Flots (I
Danced on the Waves, 1993), he issued his memoirs of his fifty contemporary, narrative,
and abstract dances and of his marriage and daughter Valentine. The following year, he
received the Prix Benois de la Danse. After a decade of creating stage works for London’s
Royal Ballet, National Ballet of Canada, Sadler’s Wells, Berlin Opera Ballet, Royal
Danish Ballet, and other companies, he died of leukemia in Geneva, Switzerland, on July
10, 2011. Within months, the Kirov revived his masterwork, Le Jeune Homme et la Mort.
Source: Caron, Leslie. Thank Heaven: A Memoir. New York: Viking, 2009.
PETROUCHKA
Premiered at the Théâtre du Chatelet on June 13, 1911, Petrouchka entranced audiences
with the harum-scarum rush of the Ballets Russes to Michel Fokine’s choreography and
Alexandre Benois’s libretto. At the heart of the drama lay the dynamism of Russian
composer Igor Stravinsky, a twenty-eight-year-old musical genius newly acclaimed in
1910 for his composition of The Firebird. Impresario Sergei Diaghilev initiated the second
project in June 1910 by suggesting that Stravinsky write a pagan spring ballet.
That winter, Stravinsky left St. Petersburg and settled in Lausanne, Switzerland, in his
attic to dramatize on a Russian icon, the manipulated peasant. To Diaghilev’s surprise,
Stravinsky ventured away from the original spring burlesque to an abstract Christian
fantasy for Shrovetide (Mardi Gras). Based on pure love and martyrdom, the ballet cast an
eerie foreshadowing of the massacre of unarmed peasants by Cossacks on Bloody Sunday
1905. Stravinsky’s dissonant instrumentation depicted a hapless straw-and-sawdust
puppet, the traditional Russian Carnival figure of Petrouchka (Little Peter), a red-robed
marionette from stock street fare demeaned by his neck ruff and wooden feet.
Depicting the medieval court jester and voiced with a whistle, Petrouchka paralleled the
rude English Punch, French Pierrot or Guignol, and Italian Pulchinello, the buffoon of
commedia dell’arte who contrasted the delicacy of Columbina. In his St. Petersburg
studio, Benois contributed his own memories of spontaneous peasant gaiety at the
entertainments held on Butter Week and injected into a Russian setting the realism of folk
dance. Meanwhile, Stravinsky became so rushed by deadlines that he mailed original
scores to Diaghilev, Fokine, and Benois. The finished work, rehearsed in Rome at the
Teatro Costanzi, epitomized theatrical unity with buoyant music, dance, mime, and
emotive makeup, costumes, and setting.
The Story
Set in St. Petersburg at Admiralty Square, the future location of the October Revolution of
1917, the one-act ballet opens during Butter Week Fair in winter 1830 to an orchestral
suite composed of harp, horns, and full percussion. Enacted before the Imperial Palace to
sprightly piccolo melodies, the scene depicts carnival rides and drunken roisterers. The
festival incorporates standard entertainments—barkers, organ-grinder, dancers, music box,
and flutist—to contrast the wooden quirks of puppets. In capturing true Russian
celebration, the corps de ballet had difficulty identifying the modernistic rhythms of
Stravinsky’s score.
Drumming and grumbling bassoons introduce a crotchety charlatan, played by character
dancer Enrico Cecchetti, whom Benois stereotyped in heavy cloak and blackface and
brandishing a wand. The impresario presents a black box containing three dolls suspended
from iron hooks—a coquettish ballerina en pointe, a menacingly virile Moor, and the
stuffed figure of Petrouchka in motley, a mute satire of old-school ballet. With a touch of
his flute, the puppet master animates the trio. Showcasing Vaslav Nijinsky, the role of
infuriated doll came to life using mime coached by Konstantin Stanislavsky, inventor of
method acting.
The lopsided puppet triad discloses the fascination of the dancer with the swaggering
Moor while Petrouchka makes a pathetic third. Alone in his room in scene two, the
grotesque ragbag doll is kicked onto the stage, the source of his despair and bitterness,
which links him to the suffering of Christ. Petrouchka languishes to a leitmotif of piano
arpeggios and, anticipating the mute tableaux of Marcel Marceau, scrabbles in vain at the
walls of his cell. With jerky ineptitude and an aura of self-hatred, he tries to express love
for the ballerina, a naif played by Tamara Karsavina.
On entry to Petrouchka’s room, the ballerina mimics the hyperfemininity of stage divas
from the previous century. She flees from his patchy appearance and inept wooing. His
mind at war with a disfigured body, Petrouchka collapses. Curled in a fetal position, he
mourns his defeat in wooing the dancer.
The third tableau reveals the Moor, danced by Alexandre Orlov, in a vibrant room
exoticized by painter Alexander Benois. The Moor lies on his sofa engrossed in a coconut,
a droll mockery of a human head that he fails to split with his scimitar, an emblem of
witless violence. After he turns his attention to the ballerina, they waltz to a disjointed
trumpet tune. The Moor is fondling her on his lap when Petrouchka interrupts them. The
Moor kicks the straw puppet from the room, causing the ballerina to swoon. The violator
returns to romancing her.
In scene four, Russian nannies, a cavorting bear, coachmen, Gypsies, and acrobatic
mummers caper about the square in the snowy evening light. With a cry, the Moor chases
Petrouchka out of the charlatan’s black box and dispatches him with a scimitar blow to the
head. Stravinsky marked the murder with spare violin lines. A police officer escorts the
charlatan into the square to examine the corpse, which has collapsed into a heap of rags
and sawdust. The charlatan drags the remains toward his booth through the snow, a
symbol of defiled purity.
The theme of resurrection controls an ambiguous resolution to jealousy and unrequited
love. The slaughter of the outcast retrieves the focus from pre-Lenten pleasures to the
Crucifixion. Petrouchka’s spirit hovers above the black box and gestures defiance while
directing tragic eyes toward his satanic tormentor. Nijinsky surpassed previous roles by
evolving the puppet’s humanity, a quality lacking in the ballerina and the smug Moor. The
terrified charlatan, recognizing a transformation from lifelessness to immortality, flees the
square.
A Historic Work
Lacking a primo or prima dancer, Petrouchka radicalized ballet by relying totally on
character parts, a reduction to an Everyman motif. On January 25, 1916, a revival of
Petrouchka at the Century Theatre in New York City debuted a new triad: Léonide
Massine in the title role opposite Lydia Lopokova as the ballerina and Adolph Bolm as the
Moor. After lengthy neglect of Petrouchka, the Polish Ballet returned it to prominence in
1935 at the London Coliseum. In 1942, additional performances reprised Petrouchka at
the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City and the Metropolitan Opera House in New
York.
In 1947, Stravinsky rescored the orchestration to feature fewer instruments and a
predominant beat of timpani and snare drums. In 1956 for a Sol Hurok television series,
the composer led a cartoon version, TV’s first animated special. Subsequent presentations
featured Petrouchka at the New York State Theatre in 1970.
At the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in 2005, a staging of Petrouchka cast
Frederic Franklin as the charlatan, once the premier mime-danseur of the Ballet Russe de
Monte Carlo. Multiple recordings of Stravinsky’s suite featured the conducting of Arturo
Toscanini, Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa, and Paavo Järvi. In 2013, Mal Murdmaa,
choreographer for the Estonian National Ballet, presented the tragic drama with pared-
down costumes. The title doll, played by Bruno Micchiardi in white shirt and pants, stood
out from the corps de ballet via exaggerated gesticulation and fearful pleas for rescue.
Source: Kappel, Caroline J. Labyrinthine Depictions and Tempting Colors: The
Synaesthetic Dances of Loie Fuller as Symbolist Choreography. Ann Arbor, MI:
ProQuest, 2007.
PHILIPPINE BALLET THEATRE
A prestigious Pacific company, the Philippine Ballet Theatre (PBT) cultivates an
appreciation for standard works and for Philippine heritage and tradition. The ensemble
started in 1987 and advanced to resident troupe at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in
Pasay City. Philanthropist Teresa Roxas and the founders intended concerts to generate a
love of art in native viewers. Headquartered at the Meralco Theatre, the company
rewarded supporters and school children with romantic partnering and spectacular sets,
lighting, and costumes.
In 1995, Madame Butterfly expanded on the theme of Eastern versus Western
philosophy. PBT ventured into narrative works—Giselle, Raymonda, Coppélia, and The
Hunchback of Notre Dame—and staged The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, and Alice in
Wonderland to please young audiences. The troupe progressed to Paquita, The Prodigal
Son, David Campos’s Carmina Burana, Jaynario’s Beatles Revisited, Gener Caringal’s
Ang Sultan (The Sultan), Edna Vida-Froilan’s Thatness, Thereness, and Jean Paul
Comelin’s Daughters of Mourning, based on Federico García Lorca’s saga The House of
Bernarda Alba.
Fans developed followings for character dancers Peter Lloyd San Juan and Jefferzon
Comeros, soloist Regina Magbitang, and choreographer Rolby Lacaba, creator of Cariõsa
(Decay), Kemenangan (Victory), and Bulag, Pipi at Bingi. In 1991, trustees offered day
camps, scholarships, and workshops for children as young as three. The ensemble thrived
under Bolshoi-trained ballet master Anatoly Panasyukov, who staged Esmeralda, Swan
Lake, La Bayadère (The Temple Dancer), Don Quixote, and The Nutcracker.
 Ronilo Jaynario began directing PBT and choreographing for the repertoire. At the
Filipino Heritage Festival, he mounted a dance drama, Darangen ni Bantugen (The Hero’s
Story, 2008), an ancient seventeen-part epic chant of the Maranao people featuring
Panasyukov as the Angel of Death. In addition to tours in North and Central America,
Spain, and Morocco, the group danced in Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and
China in 2008 and visited the Guangzhou Ballet. In 2011, the dancers celebrated a quarter
century of presentations. On tour with Romeo and Juliet in Mindanao in 2012, Lobreza
Pimental starred as Juliet opposite San Juan as Romeo.
In 2013, a historical spectacle, The King and I, choreographed by Filipino dancer Novy
Bereber, dramatized the Victorian-era clash between Siamese King Mongkut and Welsh
teacher Anna Leonowens, tutor to the royal children. The dancers retained strongly plotted
story ballet with Andrés KKK, a salute to freedom fighter Andrés Bonifacio that reclaims
the liberation of Filipinos in 1892. The April 2013 island debut of Le Corsaire (The
Pirate) starred as the protagonist Ali Filipino dancer Jared Tan, a guest from Atlanta
Ballet. Critics applauded Veronica Ylagan’s twenty-eight fouettés as Medora, Lemuel
Capa as Conrad, and Miguel Faustmann’s witty miming as Seid Pasha. Into 2014, the
twenty-two-member ensemble danced The Merry Widow, Carmen, and Sérye at Sayaw
(Dance Series), a fusion of soap opera with ballet.
Source: Villaruz, Basilio Esteban S. Treading Through: 45 Years of Philippine Dance.
Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2006.
PHOTOGRAPHY, BALLET IN
See image in photospread.
Capturing the grace and dynamics of dance on stills requires an appreciation of
complex elements. In one example, an intense study of the objectives of artistic director
Abdel Kamel and instructor Erminia Gambarelli provided Egyptian photographer Sherif
Sonbol with organic oneness with dancers of the Cairo Opera Ballet. According to Sonbol,
natural light and precise timing produced the most revealing images.
The evolution of photography as both art and teaching method found a proponent in
Alexander Gorsky, dance master at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre. From 1902 to 1924, he
made candid shots of students in class and on stage as models of their balletic faults and
dramatic strengths. Gorsky also pursued dance photography as an art, as displayed by the
pairing of Anna Pavlova with Mikhail Mordkin in La Fille du Pharaon (Daughter of the
Pharaoh) and a remounting of Cléopâtre.
Photography and Innovation
The erosion of symmetry and other restrictive art philosophies after 1909 by the Ballets
Russes inspired theatrical shots by French photographers Eugène Druet and Adolph de
Meyer of Vaslav Nijinsky, whose nine-year stardom left little visual evidence. A few
posed shots depicted him in costumes as the dusky slave in Scheherazade (1910), a
leaping Apsara dancer in Les Orientales (1910), the anguished straw puppet in Petrouchka
(1911), and a rapt sybarite in L’Après-Midi d’un Faune (Afternoon of a Faun, 1912). De
Meyer used his lens to disclose the complex personality guiding the footwork.
 A prominent London portraitist, Anglo-German photographer Emil Otto Hoppé devoted
his first portfolio, Studies from the Russian Ballet (1912), to Ballets Russes exoticism. He
directed attention to Tamara Karsavina, Adolf Bolm, and Sofia Fedorova in L’Oiseau de
Feu (The Firebird, 1910), Nijinsky in lissome relevé in Le Spectre de la Rose (The Spirit
of the Rose, 1911), Léonide Massine in Pulcinella (1920), Anna Pavlova in Hindoo Dance
(1923), and the sets and costumes of Léon Bakst. Critics for Photo-era Magazine noted
that Hoppé’s one-man show at London’s Goupil Gallery tended to stress head-and-
shoulder angles that diminished positions of dancers’ feet and hands.
The photos that preserved the works of Gallo-Danish choreographer August
Bournonville illuminated the subtlety of his mime. In 1911, Danish photographer Peter
Elfelt captured the theatricality of the Norwegian ballet in Bournonville’s The Wedding
Festival in Hardanger, which featured folk skirts and knee pants. Integral to Bournonville
style, the épaulement or carriage of the torso directed head and shoulder movements.
Rather than gesture toward viewers, the dancers expressed emotion within relationships to
accent naturalism.
During the Great Depression, modernist choreographer Martha Graham encouraged
ballet photography by Imogen Cunningham, who excelled at chiaroscuro. In the next
decades, Barbara Morgan shot some of the most reproduced stills of Graham and her
protégées, Erick Hawkins in El Penitente (1940) and Merce Cunningham in the
introspective Root of the Unfocused (1944). For the sake of modern dance history, Graham
engaged Latvian artist Philippe Halsman to document the droll comedy Every Soul Is a
Circus (1939), Letter to the World (1940), Dark Meadows (1946), Cave of the Heart
(1946), and Night Journey (1947), a substantial segment of the modern canon.
Evolving Technique
The February 19, 1940, issue of Life magazine examined the intricacies of the American
Ballet Theatre’s rehearsal of choreographer Michael Mordkin’s Voices of Spring.
Romanian photographer Gjon Mili applied high-speed motion stop, a technique developed
for athletics. For the warmth of footlights, he shot through orange filters to capture pointe
work by Nana Gollner, Nina Stroganova, and Andrée Howard, who partnered with Kari
Karnakoski in an intimate adagio. A one-page series featured dance maker Yurek
Shabelevski paired with Gollner in his original ballet Ode to Glory (1939), set to Frédéric
Chopin’s “Polonaise Militaire.”
In 1963, a herd of photographers descended on the dress rehearsal of Frederick
Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand, a condensed pas de deux from The Lady of the
Camellias. Among the media, Eve Arnold, Houston Rogers, Zoe Dominic, and Michael
Peto caught close-ups of the partners Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev. Designer Cecil
Beaton made snapshots of the progression of a doomed love, from initial attraction to
reconciliation before tuberculosis kills Marguerite.
Twenty-first-century ballet photography immortalized the repertoire of individual
companies. Photographers specialized in particulars of dance spectacle, particularly the
fluid motion of knit fabrics and streamers and stage lighting on the corps of the Royal
Ballet of Cambodia, a specialty of Anders Jiras. In 2003, art photographer Siu Wang-Ngai,
a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, compiled a photo album featuring the Hong
Kong Ballet. The collection highlighted the ensemble’s costuming and choreography in
Butterfly Lovers, Mulan, The Snow Queen, Anna Karenina, and The Last Emperor. A
Canadian specialist, Charlene McIntosh epitomized the energy, staging, and emotion of
Romeo and Juliet as performed in 2013 by Ballet Jörgen. Central to the elegance of her
dance portfolio, an understanding of the nature and purpose of ballet elevated the pictures
to art as well as visual elements of dance history.
Source: Hannavy, John. Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography. New York:
Routledge, 2013.
POLISH NATIONAL BALLET
A venue for national culture, the Polish National Ballet presents dance as the pinnacle of
European arts. During the Jagiellonian dynasty, the nation received its first glimpse of
Renaissance dance in mid-April 1518 after Queen Bona Sforza, Milanese wife of King
Sigismund I, imported Italian dance to Krakow as part of her wedding celebration. In the
1590s and early 1600s, Austro-Bavarian sisters Anna and Constance, the first and second
wives of Sigismund III Vasa, promoted court presentations at Krakow and Warsaw.
Directors of entertainments drew on the choreography of Ambrosio Bontempo and
Santi Ventura, the Italian ballet masters to the Vasa dynasty. French, Austrian, and Italian
dancers advanced the arts by importing the successful programs that debuted in Paris,
Venice, and Vienna. In 1628, Polish-Swedish prince Ladislaus IV Vasa, himself a dancer,
invited an Italian company to perform in Warsaw. By 1638, Poland had its own Royal
Theatre, where Ladislaus, now king, arranged ballets. At his death in 1648, the widowed
Maria Louisa Gonzaga took over staging arrangements.
Indigenous Dance
In the 1770s, Poland showcased its first native dancers, Maciej Prenczynski and Ignacy
Kurczynski. The rise of professional staging in 1785 inspired King Stanislaus Augustus to
support His Majesty’s National Dancers, a troupe of thirty local performers, who studied
in Lithuania. Management became the work of Parisian François Gabriel Le Doux, stager
of the tragic ballet Queen Wanda (1788), which extolled a widow who drowned herself in
the Vistula River in 750 BCE rather than marry a German conqueror, and, in 1789, of
Venetian Daniel Curz, choreographer of Cleopatra.
Under the supervision of Le Doux and Curz, the Polish company performed heroic
works that French dance master Charles Le Picq introduced with the imperial Russian
ballet. Le Doux encouraged local talent by opening Poland’s first private dance academy.
With the dissolution of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, dancers scattered to
safe havens for the next quarter century.
Despite treasury deficits, Polish dance survived during the Napoleonic wars under the
patronage of King Frederick Augustus I of Saxony. By 1820, the professional troupe
reconvened. In a period of intense patriotism, nineteenth-century Polish dance achieved
the first national ballet, Wesele w Ojcowie (Wedding in Ojcow, 1823). Romantic ballet
flourished under instructors Louis Thierry and Maurice Pion as well as guest dancer-
teacher Marie Taglioni. Guest choreographers Carlo Blasis and Filippo Taglioni performed
in Warsaw’s Teatr Wielki, built in 1833 on an Italian design. The architecture attested to a
lack of Polish self-confidence in the arts.
Developing an Image
In mid-century, the major contribution from Poland, Roman Turczynowicz, the first native
choreographer of the Polish ballet, boosted national pride. For his achievements from
1853 to 1866, Warsaw’s National Ballet School bore his name. Late in the century, the
Teatr Wielki welcomed local dancers, notably diva Helena Cholewicka, and guest divas
Virginia Zucchi, Mathilde Kschessinska, Pierina Legnani, Olga Preobrajenska, Tamara
Karsavina, Anna Pavlova, and Isadora Duncan.
The Polish ballet acquired more Italian style in 1902 from director Enrico Cecchetti,
newly retired from Russian ballet. Reformer Bronislava Nijinska began a rigorous
reorganization of PNB in 1937 to strengthen classical technique. She introduced five
original ballets at the 1937 Paris Exposition Internationale, where the Poles won a Grand
Prix.
A Nazi invasion of the Sudetenland in October 1939 and the bombing of the state
theater forced the PNB to migrate to other stages. Ballerina Sonja Woizikowska and
choreographer Yurek Shabelevsky fled to Australia and the New York World’s Fair while
less fortunate Poles lived in dread of Hitler’s final solution for Jews. Valery Shaevsky and
Edouard Sobishevsky took refuge in Sydney and formed the Polish Australian Ballet.
Dancer Tamara Tchinarova and her mother, Anna Rekemchouk, sought factory jobs in
Sydney.
As Europe recovered from war, Léon Wojcikowski, a former soloist with the Ballets
Russes, opened a ballet feeder school in Warsaw in 1950 and trained two hundred pupils
on the model of imperial Russian academies. An energized 1954 program featured Romeo
and Juliet and Boris Godunov, a biographical ballet based on an early seventeenth-century
tsar. Archivist Arnold Szyfman displayed dance memorabilia in the Theatre Museum in
1957, when he arranged collections of programs, posters, costumes, and props. The
national company made its first grand tour at Easter on March 29, 1959, with sixty-six
dancers and their technicians, who adapted to a small venue in Tokyo with a small corps
de ballet and strong character roles. In May 1959, the Warsaw theater attracted Michael
Somes and Margot Fonteyn, who presented Swan Lake.
In 1965, a rebuilt Teatr Wielki provided the company with modern lighting and
machinery for staging the classical canon in contemporary style. Polish choreographer
Krzysztof Pastor of Gdansk staged a symphonic ballet, Third Symphony (1994), to the
music of Polish composer Henryk Górecki. At the invitation of general manager
Waldemar Dabrowski, Pastor accepted artistic autonomy as director of the Polish National
Ballet and injected international elements to programs. For mounting Ashley Page’s
Century Rolls (2008) and Pastor’s Moving Rooms (2009) and the Celtic hero legend of
Tristan (2009), Pastor received the Terpsichore Award. For the first time in its history, the
ballet operated as a separate art from theater and opera.
 A second prize, the “Gloria Artis” Gold Medal, acknowledged the success of Pastor’s
And the Rain Will Pass (2011), starring soloist Bartosz Anczykowski. Pastor followed in
2014 with Emil Wesolowski’s Returning Waves and the debut of Adagio & Scherzo, set to
the music of Franz Schubert. PNB coordinated its 2014 season with the Royal Ballet of
Flanders, Baltic Dance Theatre, the Hong Kong Ballet, and companies in Barcelona and
Vilnius.
Source: Goldberg, Halina. Music in Chopin’s Warsaw. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2008.
POLONAISE
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A traditional three-step peasant promenade, from the late 1500s, the polonaise added
nobility and flair to court processionals. A stiffly rhythmic march, performed by rigidly
upright couples, advanced two steps slowly on demi-pointe. The third step involved a
fondu (dip) on the working leg and a forward thrust of the other leg. Variants took couples
backward and side to side, dancing in place, or bowing to each other.
Perhaps echoing the Polish chodozny (pedestrian dance) or the earthy Moorish
sarabande, the self-conscious promenade emulated the triumphant posture of mustachioed
Eastern European veterans on parade. Typical male costume involved wide ornamented
belts, knee-high boots, and overcoats lined at the cuffs and hems in fur. The French
introduced the polonaise on February 21, 1574, at the welcome of Henry III of Anjou to
the Polish Diet as king of Poland.
Composers popularized the stately rhythm into the 1600s. By 1645, women joined the
male ballet à entrée, contributing dainty foot and ankle movements under flounced skirts.
The genre dominated musician Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Les Indes Galantes (The Chivalric
Indies, 1735), which featured processions of Turks, Inca and other American tribes.
A European Original
By 1790, Poland claimed the polonaise as a national dance and promoted militaristic
instrumentation featuring trumpets, drums, and piccolos. At Buckingham Palace in 1791, a
suitably martial promenade introduced to the English court the newlywed Prince Frederic
and his bride, Frederica Charlotte of Prussia. The light-footed progression with a classical
ballon (bounce) gave men an opportunity to display striped pants and sabers and women a
reason to reveal scalloped underskirts and petticoats above a tight bodice, a dress style
known as a polonaise. The parade of dancers encircled the ballroom and led directly to
partnering for a polka or mazurka. A reverse polonaise concluded a dance with farewells
to each couple.
During Napoleon’s rule over Warsaw from 1811 to 1814, dancers filed ahead in cavalry
uniforms with plumed helmets and traditional women’s vests over full skirts and boots.
Musicians chose somber entrées by Frédéric Chopin for state occasions. In the 1820s,
English and Viennese courts opened balls and masquerades with a proper polonaise figure
dedicated to the honoree. Arm in arm, the premier partner saluted each couple and invited
them to join the entourage. Participants extended the line dance at garden parties, where
the leader, bearing a torch, wound the train around statues and fountains.
A Stage Legacy
Choreography welcomed self-important dance-pageantry for its contribution to mime and
character ballet. The genre foregrounded stately presentational scenes acknowledging the
majesty of society’s highest echelon, a trope illustrated in dance by Mikhail Glinka’s
panegyric in A Life for the Tsar (1836), honoring a Romanov victory in 1612–1613 during
a Polish clash with Russia. The reclamation of the royal cortege as an overture projected
an air of chivalry and dignity and enabled choreographers to incorporate older, less agile
dancers into the corps de ballet. For Gallo-Danish ballet master August Bournonville’s
Napoli, or The Fisherman and His Bride (1842), the promenade contrasted the
melancholy blue grotto scene and “O Sanctissima,” a pious hymn to the Virgin Mary.
Militarism and monarchy retained the polonaise in music of the 1800s. Joseph Mazilier
staged Paquita (1846) with a fervid processional characteristic of the overconfident
Napoleonic era. Composer Modest Mussorgsky captured the grandeur of sixteenth-century
Russia with the polonaise in act three of Boris Godunov (1868), during which the
pretender to the throne ducked in among aristocrats to hide from the Poles. As a trait of
Russian gentry, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky incorporated the processional in Swan Lake
(1876), Eugene Onegin (1879), and The Sleeping Beauty (1890), in which the prince’s
invitation to all enables a mix of social levels to join the promenade. Marius Petipa set the
Kirov corps de ballet into motion for “The Kingdom of the Shades,” an advance one by
one in La Bayadère (The Temple Dancer, 1877) that pictured hell as a dreary
regimentation of souls.
Romantic ballet reduced the stridency of folk ritual. Michel Fokine extended the revival
of the polonaise in the opening strains of composer Alexander Glazunov’s Les Sylphides
(1893). Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov dramatized the processional in act three of the opera-
ballet Christmas Eve (1895), a joyous fool’s tale incorporating a mazurka and czardas.
Marius Petipa’s Les Millions d’Arlequin (Harlequinade, 1900) paired Michel Fokine with
Anna Pavlova for a promenade and serenade.
The polonaise as overture remained prominent in Richard Strauss’s Pan im Busch (Pan
in the Rose Bush, 1900), for which the director equipped the corps de ballet with lanterns.
A year before the rise of Chancellor Adolf Hitler to power, German choreographer Kurt
Jooss overturned the aristocratic procession in The Green Table (1932), a march to hell
that equalizes the victims of a personified Death, the grand master. After 1954, Amalia
Hernández introduced the polonaise to Ballet Moderno de México, a coordination of
balletic technique with folk rhythms.
Jerome Robbins’s mid-century comic ballet The Concert, or The Perils of Everybody
(1958) reprised a Chopin polonaise as satiric comment on the pompous origins of ballet at
the seventeenth-century court of Louis XIV. Another revival of the classical cortege
marked George Balanchine’s Jewels (1967), which concluded with a diamond polonaise
featuring Jacques d’Amboise and Suzanne Farrell. In the twenty-first century, the Kiev
Ballet used costumes and noble steps to elevate the court polonaise as a royal component
of The Sleeping Beauty. In 2009, the Australian Ballet School observed its forty-fifth
anniversary by performing Jirí Kylián’s Polonaise.
See also Eugene Onegin; Nederlands Dans Theater; The Sleeping Beauty.
Source: Cowgill, Rachel, David Cooper, and Clive Brown, eds. Art and Ideology in
European Opera: Essays in Honor of Julian Rushton. Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2010.
 • R •
RENAISSANCE DANCE
The rise of ballet de cour (court choreography) in Italy, France, and Iberia derived from a
predetermined plan or story line, the spectacle of costume and pageantry, and the
mannerisms of the corps de ballet. To supply entertainments and fill in the gaps in courses
of a banquet, elite pupils trained from early childhood under the first professional dancers.
Additional occasions—weddings, funerals, saints’ days—invited slow, stately
performances at all social levels, from palaces to the Jewish, Moorish, and Spanish
peasant communities of western Europe.
At the stirring of the Italian Renaissance in the early 1400s, trainees deviated from
bassadanze (low or peasant dance) by following the written codes of choreographers who
declared ballet one of the sublime arts—the equivalent of painting, verse, and architecture.
Innovators excelled at haute dance (refined dance), which incorporated jetés (leaps) and
lifts along with complex step patterns and figures to display some aspect of human
behavior. The resulting intermezzi (short musical entertainments) preceded the prominence
of English court masque and French ballet.
From around 1425, theorist and composer Domenico da Piacenza, founder of the
Lombard school of dance, articulated the forerunners of geometric ballet steps in four
surviving balli (ballet plots)—Belfiore and Belriguardo, named for estates; Gelosia
(jealousy), a representation of realistic court intrigue; and Leoncello, a reference to the
lion symbol as an embodiment of courage and wisdom. While evolving theatrical
presentations, Domenico boarded as a salaried dancer-in-residence in illustrious
households, teaching members of the Sforzas, d’Estes, and Ferraras as young as age six
the graceful gestures of welcome and hospitality. In Milan, Naples, and Ferrara, he
demonstrated stage mime and directed and performed intricate motifs for saints’ days, the
pre-Lenten carnival, market day fetes, engagements, and weddings.
Influenced by the humanism of painting and mural and the erotic fad of moresca, an
acrobatic masked improvisation of bestiality, Domenico stripped dance of grotesque
mime. To distinguish ballet from vulgar exhibitionism, he classified the first ballet terms
and stage notation in De Arte Saltandi et Choreas Ducendi (On the Art of Dancing and
Directing Choruses, ca. 1425), a treatise published after 1455. The monograph fragmented
Lombardic ballet into individual elements represented by diagrams and diacritical slashes
and check marks.
Dancing to Music
In the same style as keyboarding manuals, Domenico’s reference work formalized five
techniques that mimicked human emotions and gestures:
aere: lithe, elevated movements
maniera: smooth, flowing movements from side to side
 misura: flexible rhythm coordinating adagio (slow) with allegro (quick)
misura di terreno: body postures accentuated by foot movements
memoria: recall of realistic and dramatic patterns of steps
Influenced the Aristotle’s Aesthetics (ca. 340 BCE), Domenico stressed plot
development by coordinating ballet kinetics with a musical meter. He insisted on a clean
order of steps, agility, control, and quick shifts from pause to movement, a parallel to the
silence and speech of drama.
By 1456, along with free board, Domenico earned a monthly wage of 20 lire, twice the
salary of the court accountant and scribe and half that of the physician. From the Holy
Roman Emperor Frederick III around 1463, Domenico received membership in the
chivalric Militia Aurata (Order of the Golden Spur) for idealizing secular and religious
scenarios. The knighthood rewarded his service to nobles and his mentorship of dance
instructors Giovanni Ambrosio and Antonio Cornazzano, who honored the dance master
as “king of the art.” After influencing ballet throughout Europe, Domenico died in Ferrara
around 1470, but his vision of elegant court dance found new disciples.
In 1460 in Milan, Antonio Cornazzano worked for Duke Francesco Sforza’s family as
court poet and tutor in the liberal arts. Replicating the theories of Domenico, his ballet
instructor, Cornazzano published Libro dell’Arte del Danzare (Book on the Art of Dance,
1455), which preserved eleven of Domenico’s balli. The text popularized storytelling
performances that mimicked human activities leading to some aim or goal, often the
pairing of man and woman in an amorous relationship.
Dance for the Elite
Cornazzano informed readers that patterned steps were the province of aristocratic
dancing schools and not intended for peasant presentation. He also stressed the gendered
notion that in the diversità di cose (variety of steps), only male dancers introduced
ornamentation to partnering. Against accusations that partnering and masking prefaced
seduction, Cornazzano declared ballet free of sexual enticement or vice. For teaching
diverse steps to Borso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, a social-climbing patron of the arts,
Cornazzano earned 60 ducats. The neophyte dance movement became the forerunner of
Milan’s La Scala Theatre Ballet.
Another Italian ballerino in Florence, Giovanni Ambrosio (previously called Guglielmo
Ebreo da Pesaro before his conversion from Judaism to Christianity), contributed to the
first manuscripts on Lombard ballet style with De Pratica seu Arte Tripudii (On the
Practice or Art of Dancing, 1463). He endorsed Domenico’s pronouncement that ballet
deserved a place among the fine arts. His text transcribed thirty-six court dances and
summarized the inborn talents of a master performer—posture, grace, lyricism, and
memory. For teaching the Duke of Urbino, the Duchess of Calabria, and six-year-old
Isabella d’Este and for nationalizing Lombard choreography in Ferrara, Milan, Ravenna,
Bologna, Mantua, Florence, and Naples, Ambrosio, too, received lucrative pay and a
knighthood.
 Italian arts permeated much of Europe. In 1518, Queen Bona Sforza, wife of Sigismund
of Poland, introduced Krakow to Italian dance as part of her nuptials. At the end of the
Italian Renaissance, Venetian ballet master Fabritio Caroso da Sermoneta summarized the
era’s advancements in classical dance from 1550 to 1600 as a contribution to an honorable
civil life. In 1581, he compiled Il Ballarino (The Dancer), followed in 1600 with Nobiltà
di Dame (Courtly Dance) with precise details of twenty-eight steps and combinations,
beginning with riverenza grave (deep bows). His handbooks archived in-depth musical
directions that accompanied forty-nine ballets along with descriptions of the female train,
the cloak-and-sword male costume, and accompanying postures and courtesies.
See also Le Ballet-Comique de la Reyne; Intermedio; La Scala Theatre Ballet.
Source: Hughes, Andrew, John Haines, and Randall Rosenfeld, eds. Music and
Medieval Manuscripts: Paleography and Performance. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004.
THE RITE OF SPRING
The most prominent concert ballet of the twentieth century, Vaslav Nijinsky’s episodic Le
Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring, 1913) set ballet on its arc away from politely
structured steps toward explosive, erratic movements of torso, head, and limbs. Composer
Igor Stravinsky based the suite on Lithuanian folk melodies and poet Sergey Gorodetsky’s
“Yarila” (Dionysus), a pagan deity who required annual life taking as proof of nature’s
power of resurrection. Anthropologist Nicholas Roerich universalized the libretto with
costumes, face painting, and sets drawn from a variety of world mythos.
Staged by Serge Grigoriev in Paris at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, the May 29
debut featured the Ballets Russes and ninety-nine musicians interpreting Stravinsky’s
score. With the assistance of Dalcroze trainee Marie Rambert and eurythmic ballet,
Nijinsky teamed with Maria Piltz, who played the doomed Chosen One. At the self-
sacrifice of the young girl in an atavistic ritual, the concert piece aroused laughter, hissing,
snickers, and virulent emotions in the audience and contrasting reactions from arts critics.
After ushers and gendarmes ousted forty rowdies, the performance continued to the finale.
A Primal Scene
Divided into an act of adoration and a rite of sacrifice, the thirty-five-minute ballet
constitutes a preface to modern dance. The work begins with the prognostications of a
crone, an archetype of augury represented by a querulous bassoon phrase and a squatting
posture that strip the wisewoman of femininity. Young females, with arms locked over
their breasts, anticipate abduction. They perform the khorovod (spring round), an influence
on admirer Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid. Adversaries leap and stamp their antipathies
toward the tribe.
 The most prominent concert ballet of the twentieth century, Vaslav Nijinsky’s episodic Le Sacre du
Printemps (1913) set ballet on its arc away from politely structured steps toward primitive
movements of torso, head, and limbs, as demonstrated by Lydia Boni in native costume. Great
Ballet Stars, p. 44, #95.

During liturgy affirming beauty and preordained brutality, the resident graybeard joins
the sacred processional and bends arthritic limbs downward for the consecration of the
earth. To expound on joy at the end of winter, the corps de ballet gravitates to center stage
in heavy smocks painted in geometric symbols and sandals laced to the calf. Members
perform “Danse de la Terre,” a jubilant sanctification of nature.
Part 2 introduces young maidens circling the stage in ominous rings. The chosen girl
cowers, trapped in the coil of gleeful peers, some in bear pelts. She observes the nuptial
celebration of a wedding she will never witness and bows during the invocation of
ancestors. The aged sage takes custody of the chosen one. Her hair streaming in time to
her quivers, she dances herself to death before a ring of passive male elders.
A Universal Ballet
After the production moved north to London in June, English critics charged Stravinsky
with barbarously syncopated percussion accompanying animalistic iconography. As World
War I consumed world attention, the revolutionary ballet sank into neglect. Léonide
Massine revamped the shockingly pagan original in 1920 into a more palatable form,
starring English ballerina Lydia Sokolova.
The American debut in 1930, featuring the Philadelphia Orchestra, the elemental moves
of Martha Graham, and Roy Halston’s aboriginal sarongs and loincloths, preceded Lester
Horton’s resetting of the spring ritual from Russia to the American frontier. The suite
gained acceptance in Berlin, Leningrad, and Milan and provided Moscow with a balletic
paean to Socialist atheism. In 1940, Walt Disney incorporated The Rite of Spring into
scenarios of the animated film Fantasia.
In Brussels, choreographer Maurice Béjart replaced the primal dance of death with a
coital ritual suggesting the plowing of earth and sowing of seeds. The Rite of Spring
entered repertoires of such disparate companies as the Czech National Ballet, Bolshoi,
Cairo Opera Ballet, Royal Ballet, Kirov, Australian Ballet, and Tokyo Ballet. In 1987,
Russo-Polish dance facilitator Marie Rambert contributed to the recreation of The Rite of
Spring by historian Kenneth Archer, dance archivist Millicent Hodson, and the Joffrey
Ballet. Arts historian Sharlyn Sawyer instituted Ballet Afsaneh, a reclamation of Central
Asian dance that once flourished along the Silk Road from China to the Mediterranean.
See also Ballets Russes; modernism; Nijinsky, Vaslav.
Source: Hill, Peter. Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2000.
ROBBINS, JEROME (1918–1998)
A storehouse of talent and energy, Jerome Robbins distinguished Broadway, cinema, and
dance theater with his theatrical ballet. A New Yorker born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz on
October 11, 1918, to deli operators Lena Rips and Harry Rabinowitz, he grew up in an
orthodox Jewish environment among Yiddish speakers. After relocating to Weehawken,
New Jersey, with older sister Sonia, where his Russian-Polish parents manufactured
corsets, Jerome attended a Hebrew school and studied piano and violin.
From boyhood, Robbins enjoyed musical theater, dime-a-dance halls, and friendships
with comics and vaudeville hoofers. Because of his father’s ridicule of male dancers,
Robbins left home to study chemistry at New York University. At the depth of the Great
Depression a year later, he left college to learn folk dancing and choreography and took
ballet lessons with Eugene Loring and Antony Tudor.

A storehouse of talent and energy, Jerome Robbins distinguished Broadway, cinema, and dance theater with
his 1944 ballet Fancy Free, in which he starred. Stars of the American Ballet Theatre, p. 28, #54.

While working in the Poconos in 1938, Robbins choreographed Our Town, a version of
Tom Sawyer called Lazy Days, and “Strange Fruit,” a Billie Holiday threnody to victims of
racist lynchings. For George Balanchine’s American Ballet Theatre, he soloed in restrings
of the narrative works Three Virgins and a Devil, The Prodigal Son, and Tyl Eulenspiegel
(1951) and designed and danced in Fancy Free (1944), a wartime military pantomime of
casual flirtation.
Commercial Success
Within months, Robbins moved up toward stardom. He collaborated with musician
Leonard Bernstein on urban comedy for the Broadway hit On the Town (1944) and with
Morton Gould for dream scenarios in Billion Dollar Baby (1945). With his fiancée, Nora
Kaye, Robbins danced the lead in Facsimile (1946), but he ended the relationship and
never married.
For a slapstick dance number, “Bathing Beauty Ballet,” and the solo “Papa, Won’t You
Dance with Me” for Nanette Fabray in High Button Shoes (1947), the choreographer won
a Tony. He satirized classical ballet with Look Ma–I’m Dancing (1948), starring Nancy
Walker and Harold Lang. At the height of entertainment stardom, Robbins’s testimony
before the House Un-American Activities Committee spared him from blackmail,
blacklisting, and outing as a bisexual and allowed him to tour Europe unhampered by
surveillance.
Ballet in the next decade featured Robbins’s “Shall We Dance?” in The King and I
(1951) and his stage advice on A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1951), Wonderful Town (1953),
The Pajama Game (1954), Tender Land (1954), and Peter Pan (1955), a classic vehicle
for Mary Martin. Codirection with Bob Fosse of Bells Are Ringing (1956) won Robbins a
Tony nomination. The street gang rumbles and biracial dancing by Natalie Wood and Rita
Moreno in West Side Story (1957) earned Robbins’s second Tony and an Oscar.
Back to the Classics
Robbins returned to classical ballet in 1958 with The Concert (or The Perils of
Everybody), a cavalcade of polonaise, waltz, ballade, and mazurka starring Tanaquil
LeClercq. At Spoleto, Italy, he debuted N.Y. Export: Op. Jazz (1958), showcasing Patricia
Dunn in his “ballet in sneakers.” His choreography elevated the career of Ethel Merman in
Gypsy (1959) and Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl (1964). Although severed from Judaism,
Robbins paid tribute to his Eastern European roots with the “Bottle Dance” in Fiddler on
the Roof (1964), a record-setting Broadway show that earned him another Tony for
choreography.
Traditional steps and the music of Chopin absorbed Robbins in his fifties. For the New
York City Ballet, he cast Allegra Kent, Patricia McBride, Violette Verdy, and Edward
Villella in peasant rituals for Dances at a Gathering (1969), Peter Martins in In the Night
(1970) and The Goldberg Variations (1971), and Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia
Makarova in the dramatic pas de deux and solos of Other Dances (1976). He formed the
Chamber Dance Company, danced the ringmaster’s part in Circus Polka (1972), and
promoted televised works for NBC and PBS. An omnibus show, Jerome Robbins’
Broadway (1989), reprised masterworks that won him another Tony.
Robbins lost strength and acuity in 1996 from Parkinson’s disease, cardiac surgery, and
repercussions of a bicycle smash-up. His career ended with a reprise of classic steps in
Brandenburg (1997) and a 1998 presentation of Les Noces (The Wedding), concluding a
lifetime creation of sixty-six classical and vernacular ballets and fifteen musicals. At his
death in a coma from a stroke on July 29, 1998, he left funds for the Jerome Robbins
Awards and donations to AIDS research. His achievements included a French Legion of
Honor, Kennedy Center citation, National Medal of Arts, five Donaldson Awards, and
three university doctorates.
See also: Apsara dance; jazz ballet; polonaise.
Source: Vaill, Amanda. Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins. New York: Broadway
Books, 2008.
ROMANTIC DANCE
See image in photospread.
After the French Revolution of 1789 and the first decade of the nineteenth century, a
romantic frenzy seized Europe and supplanted the rigorous classicism that stultified dance.
In the decades preceding the change, Italian dance master Vincenzo Galeotti’s Lagertha
(1801) prefigured the rise of local color and nationalism with the incorporation of
medieval Viking themes for the Royal Danish Ballet. Choreographer Salvatore Viganò
choreographed the premiere of Creatures of Prometheus (1801) in Vienna to the music of
Ludwig van Beethoven and filled the stage at Milan’s La Scala with heroic action, notably,
Coriolano (1804) and I Titani (The Titans, 1819).
Romanticism—the prioritizing of feeling over reason—created atmosphere by
contrasting opposing spheres—earth with luminous, otherworldly realms. The concept
impacted landscaping, decor, fashion, hairstyles, painting, music, drama, opera, and ballet
with lighter, less dogmatic subjects than previous styles. To flesh out crowd scenes in
marketplaces and castles, ballet masters trained the corps de ballet in makeup and acting,
both elements of mime.
Theorist Carlo Blasis’s Traité Élémentaire, Théorique, et Pratique de l’Art de la Danse
(Elementary, Theoretical, and Practical Treatise on the History and Art of Dance, 1820),
legitimized the hyperextensions of romantic ballet, an essential to stage illusion. Viewers
approved the grotesquerie of corpses and wraiths blanched white with makeup and stark
with false nails and otherworldly mascara. Similar exaggeration marked the corps de
ballet for Domenico Ronzani’s L’Orfana di Ginevra (The Orphan Girl of Geneva), which
opened at Milan’s La Scala in 1830.
The debut of Italo-Swedish-Polish ballerina Marie Taglioni in 1827 introduced Parisian
audiences to a lighter, more feminine story ballet set to evocative music. As Abbess
Hélène at the St. Rosalie cloister in Robert le Diable (Robert the Devil, 1831), Taglioni
coordinated ballet blanc (dance in white) with the Gothic graveyard scene to create a
ghostly aura of restrained eroticism. She revolutionized the role of the danseuse with steps
sur la pointe (on toe) in soft satin and kidskin shoes, which infused the ballet with an
ethereal femininity, the focus of her role as a chaste villager opposite dancer Jules Joseph
Perrot in Nathalie, ou La Laitière Suisse (Natalie, or The Swiss Milkmaid, 1832).
 Into mid-century, romantic ballet buoyed the female role above the muscularity and
athleticism of male dancers. For Gustave III, ou Le Bal Masqué (Gustav III, or The
Masked Ball, 1833), Lisa Noblet danced the part of court jester and brandished the clown
wand, a standard prop of the medieval entertainer. For La Chatte Métamorphosée en
Femme (The Cat Changed into a Woman, 1837), Fanny Elssler mimicked a transformation
of species in a furry gown and eared headdress.
Romantic Details
Romantic elements—folklore, idealized mates, exotic Gypsies and temple dancers,
demonic crime, transformations, supernatural elves and witches—replaced the eighteenth-
century emphasis on mythic and allegorical dance themes. Choreography attracted more
viewers to productions with folk dance, as with composer Gioachino Antonio Rossini’s
Swiss dances in the opera Guillaume Tell (William Tell, 1829) and Elssler’s titillating
cachucha in Le Diable Boiteaux (The Lame Devil, 1836). As stated in Aristotle’s Poetics
(ca. 335 BCE), the dramatization of emotional extremes creates a catharsis; thus romantic
ballet, infused with dances such as the mad gyrations of the title figure in Jules Perrot’s
Giselle (1841) purged the middle class of pent-up feelings that perplexed and frustrated
them.
Illusion dominated the romantic production, notably, the pure ideal of farm life
presented in Daldansen (1843), a Nordic revival that Anders Selinder choreographed for
the Royal Swedish Opera Ballet. Sets reflected the impenetrable sources of dreams and
visions. Spooky gas lighting shadowed the net and tulle dance dress and shawl and
reflected chiaroscuro consistent with such moonlit scenarios as La Sylphide (1832) and
L’Ombre (The Shadow, 1839) and the reverie in choreographer Jean Coralli’s La Péri (The
Good Fairy, 1843). Melodrama heightened public appeal with stories of unrequited love,
arranged marriages, vengeance in the afterlife, and sexual bondage, the focus of La
Révolte au Serail (The Revolt of the Harem, 1844), the forerunner of Scheherazade (1888)
and feminist ballet. A parallel strand drew balletomanes to parodies of romantic dance,
including satires of Viennese soloist Fanny Elssler’s cachucha noted above.
Ballet Music
The early ballet composers left fewer stand-alone scores than their successors. Italian
musician Cesare Pugni provided lyric sequences for Ondine, ou La Naïade (Ondine, or
The Naiad, 1843), La Esmeralda (1844), the gypsy seductress from the novel The
Hunchback of Notre Dame, and La Fille du Pharaon (The Pharaoh’s Daughter, 1862),
which highlighted diva Carolina Rosati as a mummified princess stretched on a bier in a
pyramid. Departing from the parameters of social dance and court divertissements
(amusements), producers hired composers to write strictly for the ballet, as with Cesare
Pugni’s creation of sets for the original La Corsaire (The Pirate, 1856), which featured
Perrot in a character role as Seid Pasha, a Turkish sybarite.
Commissioned work emphasized character roles with a leitmotif—a melody or
instrumentation that replicated some identifying quality. Familiar examples include
bassoon for villains and oafs, oboe solos for wizards, tympani for storms, strings for
courtship, and piccolo riffs for fairies and birds. Jacques Offenbach energized the waltz of
the fairy Hamza in Le Papillon (The Butterfly, 1860). Ludwig Minkus orchestrated the
poignancy of martyrdom for La Source (The Spring, 1866).
The last decades of the 1800s introduced audiences to the most memorable of romantic
ballets. Léo Delibes accommodated feminine roles—lyric peasant dances and wedding
music for Coppélia (1870) and French horn phrases for a chase scene and pizzicato
passages suited to the fluidity of Sylvia. Late in the century, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky fit
exquisite orchestrations to the flock movements of female swans in Swan Lake (1876), the
swoon of Princess Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty (1890), and a dazzling fight between
mice and tin soldiers in The Nutcracker (1892), a fantasy ballet featuring the rudiments of
surrealism.
Neoromanticism produced new works to engage audiences intent on story ballet. Agnes
de Mille idealized the American Western with the cowboy romance in Rodeo (1942) and
Midwestern wooing in the smash hit Oklahoma! (1943). Frederick Ashton, newly
mustered out of the Royal Air Force in 1948, designed a feminist version of Cinderella.
Mexican arts scholar Amalia Hernández, founder of the Mexican Folkloric Ballet,
generated nationalism by choreographing such regional Mesoamerican works as the
frontiersman’s heritage of Danza de la Reata (Lasso Dance, 1954). Gerald Arpino, an
innovator for the Joffrey Ballet, restaged the allure of Ondine, the illusory sea siren, for
Sea Shadow (1962), which he set to the impressionistic music of Maurice Ravel.
In 1967, the National Ballet of Canada premiered La Prima Ballerina, a retelling of
diva Marie Taglioni’s life choreographed by Heino Heiden. Performed by Lois Smith, the
story-within-a-story places her in the hands of bandits, who release her to dance on stage
to music by Godfrey Ridout. Public and critical approval of traditional storytelling dance
supported Ballet British Columbia’s literary tale The Faerie Queen (2000), designed by
Barbadian John Alleyne.
In Maoist China, the Guangzhou Ballet danced pro-Communist programs, notably
composer Ma Ke’s Maoist socio-drama The White-Haired Girl (1965). The story of
reunited lovers sets a menacing landlord over a peasant girl. By pretending to drown
herself, she escapes to a cave and survives to reunite with her lover and witness land
justice to poor farmers, who share the landlord’s fields. The tempering of propaganda with
a justice motif endeared romantic ballet to Asian audiences. In 2006, the Tokyo Ballet
retrieved from loss Filippo Taglioni’s La Fille du Danube (The Girl of the Danube, 1836),
a nineteenth-century favorite.
See also Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo; character role; story ballet; Taglioni,
Marie.
Source : Guest, Ivor Forbes. The Romantic Ballet in Paris. Alton, UK: Dance Books,
2008.
ROYAL BALLET OF LONDON
Passing through three incarnations, London’s Royal Ballet (RB) has presented classical
dance for more than eighty-five years. Formed as the Vic-Wells Ballet in 1931 by Irish
dance master Ninette de Valois, a veteran of the Ballets Russe, RB drew on talent coached
in the studio of the Sadler’s Wells dance academy. A proponent of eurythmics, a theory of
instinctive, whole-body coordination and relaxation, de Valois introduced national dances
from Great Britain and Western Europe, which a children’s company presented in Israel.
The original five dancers and their director joined guest performer Anton Dolin in a debut
presentation. De Valois debuted the first all-British work, Job: A Masque for Dancing
(1931), scored by Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Two years later, de Valois retired, leaving founding dancer Alicia Markova as star
ballerina and director of the classical Russian works of Marius Petipa, Enrico Cecchetti,
and Lev Ivanov. From original manuscripts smuggled out of Russia by Nikolai Sergeyev
and interpreted by Tamara Karsavina, on January 1, 1934, Markova and Dolin performed
Giselle. With the closure of the Old Vic Theatre in 1939, the ensemble took the name
Sadler’s Wells Ballet (SWB) from a late seventeenth-century healing spa and theater of
Richard Sadler.
To satisfy public demand for entertainment during World War II, the dancers performed
for civilians and khaki-clad soldiers and traveled to Brussels and Paris at war’s end to
hearten war-shattered Allied troops with a staging of the Hogarthian The Rake’s Progress.
In 1946, the company settled into the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, where senior
dance pupils specialized in ballet. Under the management of Scots impresario David
Webster of Dundee, the SWB premiered The Sleeping Beauty.
A crown charter in 1957 renamed the ensemble the Royal Ballet (RB). As arts
educators, the dancers toured England and presented matinees for students. A successful
production of Antony Tudor’s Shadowplay in 1967 starred Anthony Dowell and Keith
Martin dancing to the music of Charles Koechlin. The poignant character study of boy and
mentor earned Tudor the sobriquet “poet laureate of choreography.” For RB in 1970,
experimental dance maker Glen Tetley designed Field Figures, followed a decade later by
Dances of Albion—Dark Night: Glad Day (1980).
In the twenty-first century, the RB employed principals from Canada, Cuba, Argentina,
Brazil, the United States, Australia, Italy, Spain, and Russia, including Afro-Spanish-
Cuban lead dancer Carlos Acosta, who starred as the Messenger of Death in a reprise of
Kenneth MacMillan’s Song of the Earth and opposite Natalia Osipova in Romeo and
Juliet. Principal Ballerina Lauren Cuthbertson led the 2011 debut of Alice’s Adventure in
Wonderland and the 2014 premiere of The Winter’s Tale, which featured Australian
virtuoso Steven McRae.
See also Ashton, Frederick; Cranko, John; Fonteyn, Margot; MacMillan, Kenneth;
Nureyev, Rudolf.
Source: Anderson, Zoe. The Royal Ballet: 75 Years. London: Faber and Faber, 2006.
ROYAL NEW ZEALAND BALLET
The oldest dance company in Australasia, the Royal New Zealand Ballet (RNZB) tours
the islands and the globe with a varied blend of classical and contemporary ballet. Austro-
Danish dance master Poul Rudolph Gnatt developed the original foursome into the New
Zealand Ballet, a troupe he directed at Wellington from 1953 to 1962 and 1969 to 1971.
Among the initial stage works, codirected by Russell Kerr, Gnatt redrafted Le Spectre de
la Rose (The Spirit of the Rose), The Firebird, and Petrouchka from the Ballets Russes
repertoire.
RNZB benefitted from in-house talent, notably, Japanese comedian Kohei Iwamoto, a
character dancer in Carmen. In Gnatt’s last year, the company debuted the first foreign
presentation of Napoli, or The Fisherman and His Bride since August Bournonville wrote
it in Denmark in 1842. Performances benefitted from the expertise of technically precise
diva Rowena Jackson. Of particular note, actor-dancer Jon Charles Trimmer specialized in
such character parts as Captain Hook in Peter Pan opposite star Rory Fairweather-
Neyland as Peter, soloist Jacob Chown as John, Tonia Looker as Tinkerbell, and mime
Harry Skinner as Shadow.
The 1980s and 1990s saw a boost in RNZB creativity with the incorporation of Maori
elements into stage performances and the hiring of South Auckland-born choreographer
Douglas Wright. The ensemble presented three of his works: Sorry to Have Missed You
(1983); The Decay of Lying (1992), with text by Oscar Wilde; and Rose and Fell (1997),
to the music of Arvo Pärt and Modest Mussorgsky. In 1984, Queen Elizabeth II made the
New Zealand troupe the fourth company to be named “Royal.”
In 1998, the RNZB moved to the St. James Theatre and occupied a studio named in
honor of Gnatt. The twenty-first century featured technically skilled dancers for tours to
France and England. Reviewers noted Abigail Boyle, soloist in From Here to There (2010)
and partner opposite Trimmer in Don Quixote; Maree White, a standout in Saltarello
(2004), Christopher Hampson’s montage inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron
from early Renaissance Florence; and Clytie Campbell, lead dancer in La Sylphide.
Adriana Harper made her name for character parts in Dracula, Cinderella, Pinocchio, and
A Million Kisses to My Skin (2000) opposite lead dancer Paul Mathews. Bronte Kelly
performed supporting roles in Stravinsky Selection (2011) and The Snow Queen.
Directed from 2011 to 2014 by Pennsylvanian Ethan Stiefel, the RNZB premiered Greg
Horsman’s new staging of The Sleeping Beauty, featuring music directed by Nigel Gaynor.
Trainee Laura Jones toured in Johan Kobborg and Stiefel’s production of Giselle.
Apprentice William Fitzgerald flourished as soloist in Aria and for partnering in Solitaire.
In 2014, the RNZB scheduled a varied program of classical and narrative ballet,
including Allegro, A Christmas Carol, and Coppélia, choreographed by ballet master
Martin Vedel. The company toured the United States, performing in Los Angeles, Santa
Barbara, Minneapolis, and New York, debuting Gillian Murphy as Giselle. The program
bill showcased Benjamin Millepied’s 28 Variations on a Theme of Paganini, Javier de
Frutos’s bullfight ballet Banderillero (2006), and Stiefel’s Bier Halle (2013), a romantic
scenario with Bavarian roots.
Source: Shennan, Jennifer, and Anne Rowse. The Royal New Zealand Ballet at Sixty.
Wellington, NZ: Victoria University Press, 2013.
ROYAL SWEDISH OPERA BALLET
One of the oldest subsidized ensembles, the Royal Swedish Opera Ballet (RSOB)
illustrates nationalistic fervor for Scandinavian talent during the Age of Enlightenment. In
1771, King Gustav III rid Stockholm of most of its French and Italian entertainers.
Although he intended to set Swedish arts apart from Western European influence, he
retained ballet master Louis Gallodier and rewarded him with a country home at
Drottningholm west of Stockholm. French dancers Elisabeth Soligny, Marie-Jeanne
Frossard, Louis Frossard, and Ninon Dubois Le Clerc formed the nucleus of a new troupe,
a versatile group whose singing and acting tied them closely to opera and theater
programs.
At the debut of Thétis et Pelée (Thetis and Peleus) on January 18, 1773, the royal
family occupied the royal box in the first tier at Bollhuset (Ballhouse), the nation’s court
theater adjacent to Tre Kronor palace. In RSOB’s early years, Gallodier partnered with
Soligny in a 1778 presentation of the comic ballet Zémire and Azor and the opera ballets
Neptune and Amphitrite and Aeglé, featuring teen dancer Sophie Hagman. In 1783,
Gallodier hired principal dancer Giovanna Bassi and Julie Alix de la Fay, who served the
ensemble as soloists. A Swedish diva, Gustava Charlotta Slottsberg, who danced from
childhood, joined the children of the royal staff in studying at Bollhuset and shared duets
with Antoine Bournonville, a former pupil of dance innovator Jean-Georges Noverre.
Bournonville collaborated with Gallodier and instructor Jean Remi Marcadet for
incidental dances in the epic opera Armide (1787), which depicted the powers of a
sorceress.
An International Flavor
In 1792, twenty-year-old Louis Deland, a favorite of the king since an appearance in the
1782 staging of Orphée, took the male dance leads. In 1803, Deland received appointment
to ballet master and choreographer of mime and character parts. More native talent in the
company derived from the performances of Ulrika Åberg, Anna Maria Lind, and Hedda
Hjortsberg, a student of Gallodier who teamed with Italian soloist-choreographer Filippo
Taglioni in pas de deux.
In the early years of the nineteenth century, the royal ensemble abandoned its outdated
repertoire. In place of mythic court ballet, the artistic directors adopted new material,
beginning in 1812 with Jean Dauberval’s La Fille Mal Gardée (The Poorly Guarded Girl),
featuring French dancer André Isidore Carey, a trainee of Auguste Vestris. Dance and
acrobatics teacher Giovanni Ambrosiani partnered with Catherine Brulo in the
pantomime-ballet The Noble-Minded Sultan (1810) and, after 1823, composed incidental
scenes for the comic opera Il Turco in Italia (The Turk in Italy) and Fernand Cortez, a
racist epic of the Napoleonic Era depicting Spanish conquistadors as justified for
slaughtering Aztecs.
RSOB profited from input by Gallo-Danish theorist August Bournonville, teacher of
Swedish premier ballerina Maria Charlotta Norberg, the lead dancer in the French-style
ballet Max and Emma (1842). From 1839 to 1864, Bournonville strove to rid dancers of
affectation and indecipherable symbolic gestures. Swedish teachers Johanna Gustafva
Sundberg and Per Erik Wallqvist and Parisian instructor Sophie Marguérite Daguin, the
first female principal of the ballet school, extended Bournonville’s lessons in
interpretation to Norberg and other students of master classes.
In mid-century, during the rise of romantic ballet, dance master Anders Selinder turned
from classic choreography to folkloric dance, which he presented as pastoral scenarios.
King Karl Johan XIV applauded the use of indigenous steps and paid for Selinder’s
training in Paris. Selinder left his mark in 1843 with a Swedish divertissement, Daldansen,
a tribute to farm life. The dismissal of Selinder and Daguin in 1856 weakened the royal
ensemble, which had already lost soloist Christian Johansson to the Mariinsky Theatre in
St. Petersburg. Dancer-teacher Gunhild Rosén, a student of Selinder, restored pride in
RSOB with performances of original works I Ungern (In Hungary) and Brudköpet (Bride
Price).
An Independent Ensemble
In the twentieth century, RSOB distanced its function from that of the theater and opera
while developing more boy dancers in its school to even out the ensemble. Proof of citizen
enthusiasm emerged in regional ballets, such as the Skanes Dansteater in Malmö,
Norlandsoperan in Umea, Värmlandsoperan in Karlstad, and the Gothenburg Opera
Ballet, all of which complemented the aims of the Stockholm parent company. Guest
appearances by Anna Pavlova and Isadora Duncan directed public enthusiasm away from
static repertory toward modernism.
With a touch of genius, soloist Michel Fokine assisted the ensemble in 1914 by
partnering with his wife, Vera Fokina, in the staging of Cleopatra, which fed a European
mania for eastern Mediterranean exoticism. Fokine also presented Le Coq d’Or (The
Golden Cockerel, 1914) and took character roles—the sorcerer in The Firebird, a clown in
Carnaval, and the mythic rescuer Perseus in Medusa. From 1918 to 1920, he directed the
company and taught premier dancer Lisa Steier, who followed him to Denmark for more
instruction. A pivotal theorist after a stint in Paris, she served as ballet master in 1926 and
educator of the royal drama troupe.
After a decade of nonclassical revues, strong leadership buoyed RSOB in the 1940s,
particularly English choreographer Antony Tudor, who staged Lilac Garden (1949) and
Miss Julie (1950), based on a drama by August Strindberg. More innovation followed
from the exuberant British director Mary Skeaping, Montreal native Brian Macdonald, and
Danish star Erik Bruhn, who revived classical story ballet. In 1951, native ballerina Elsa-
Marianna von Rosen energized a performance of Medea and flourished under Skeaping’s
supervision in Cupid Out of His Humour (1956).
Swedish ballet master-historian Ivo Cramér revived the hope of Gustav III for national
authenticity by restaging The Prodigal Son with a folk emphasis in 1957 and by directing
the RSOB from 1971 to 1980. A state project begun in 1974 subsidized the marketing of
the royal company as arts tourism. Subsequent successes brought the heroic stature of
Romanian dancer Dragos Mihalcea to performances of Eugene Onegin and Manon and the
dramatic presence of American-Swedish dancer Nathalie Nordquist to La Bayadère (The
Temple Dancer). Impresario and archivist Bengt Häger expanded national outreach in
1963 by opening the Swedish State Dance School and by publicizing arts history in
Modern Swedish Ballet (1970) and Les Ballets Suédois (Swedish Ballets, 1989).
In 1997, Madeline Onne formed Stockholm/59° North, a small Swedish troupe
managed by Johannes Öhman featuring Anders Nordström, Anna Valev, and Jan-Erik
Wikström. Artistic director Jens Rosén led the ensemble in minimalist works, including
Mats Ek’s Pointless Pastures (1993) and Ulysses Dove’s commissioned piece Dancing on
the Front Porch of Heaven (1997) and at performances at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance
Festival in Becket, Massachusetts, where the company debuted.
Directed by Onne, the Swedish royal ensemble has toured Europe, North America,
China, and Japan with an inventive, at times farcical repertory. In 2000, the troupe merged
classical steps with modernism in Twyla Tharp’s Push Comes to Shove, a witty parody of
self-consciously prissy dancers. A presentation of Alexei Ratmansky’s The Firebird in
2002 reprised the eroticism and energy of the 1920s. Guest stints by Russian character
dancer Yuri Fateyev and a staging of Cristina Caprioli’s Cicada (2008) attracted audiences
with an international appeal.
See also Bournonville, August; Cullberg, Birgit.
Source: Grut, Marina. Royal Swedish Ballet: History from 1592 to 1962. New York:
George Olms, 2007.
ROYAL WINNIPEG BALLET
See image in photospread.
North America’s long-lived ensemble and the oldest ballet company in Canada, the
Royal Winnipeg Ballet progressed from humble Manitoba beginnings to world renown.
Established as a dance club by English culture maven Betty Hey Farrally and
choreographer Gweneth Lloyd in 1939, the company gave a royal command performance
of Lloyd’s Grain for George VI and Queen Elizabeth showcasing charter Royal Winnipeg
Ballet member Margaret Hample. The troupe expanded and, within two years, took the
name Winnipeg Ballet, featuring the solo work of dancer-teacher David Adams.
Margaret Hample danced lead roles in Lloyd’s original ballets Kilowatt Magic (1939),
The Wager (1940), Beauty and the Beast (1941), and Dionysos (1945), set by Canadian
designer Robert Bruce. After World War II, collaboration with the University of Manitoba
secured designers for scenery and costumes. The dancers toured Canada with Lloyd’s The
Pleasure Cruise (1946), Concerto (1947), Robert Fleming’s Chapter 13, and Lloyd
Kaufmann’s Visages (1948), all to music conducted by Eric Wild. In 1950, Wild
completed a frontier ballet, The Shooting of Dan McGrew, based on the popular recitation
poem by Robert Service.
A Star Company
Managed by stage director David Yeddeau, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet initiated the
Canadian Ballet Festival, a celebration of classical dance and Canadian ballet music. In
1951, Beverley Ivings performed choreographer Arnold Theodore Spohr’s Intermede for a
command performance for the future Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh.
Welsh choreographer Colin Russell-Jones presented popular mime in The Comedians
(1952). Lloyd continued designing programs for the company with the film Shadow on the
Prairie (1952), a stark scenario of pioneer life for an isolated Scots family.
International branding with a royal title in 1953 acknowledged the quality of execution,
which the Royal Winnipeg Ballet showcased during the 1954 U.S. tour starring guest diva
Alicia Markova. The first dancers worked around a disastrous fire in June 1954, which
seared scores, sets, and costumes and consumed the history of Gweneth Lloyd’s thirty
ballets staged for the company. During chaotic times worsened by debt and wavering
leadership, performances lauded versatile stars Aida Alberts in Lloyd’s Finishing School
(1942) and Les Sylphides; Margaret Grant in Parable (1955), a resetting of The Wise
Virgins; and Jill Alis, originator of the part of Jela in The Devil in the Village (1955), based
on a Croatian fool tale.
Under artistic director Spohr, uncertainty abated in 1958 with the incorporation of
varied choreography and themes, especially the work of Brian Macdonald, creator of The
Darkling (1958), set to Benjamin Britten’s music. Ballerina Beverley Barkley soloed in
two Macdonald works—Les Whoops-de-doo (1959) and opposite soloist Dick Foose in
Rose Latulippe (1966), a Gothic glimpse of satanic bewitching in colonial Canada. Michel
Conte staged his original Un et Un Font Deux (One and One Make Two, 1961).
Choreographer Jim Clouser premiered Recurrence (1961), Golden Phoenix (1962), Riel
(1966), and Out of Lesbos (1966), which preceded Paul Hoffert’s Ballet High (1970), Ann
Mortifee’s The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (1971), and Harry Freedman’s Five Over Thirteen
(1969) and Star Cross’d (1973). Dancer-teacher Richard Gibbs debuted in What to Do Till
the Messiah Comes (1973), a visionary rock ballet.
At the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School, ballet master David Moroni achieved an Order of
Canada award by educating performers such as actor-dancers Molly Parker and Mimi
Kuzyk. Moroni instituted the Vaganova method to fortify the ensemble with Russian-style
technique. The method doubly prepared André Lewis, a character figure in Romeo and
Juliet and company artistic director in 1996.
An Established Reputation
The 1980s increased opportunities for virtuoso performances, particularly soloist Evelyn
Hart’s gold medals from the 1980 World Ballet Concours in Japan and the 1980
International Ballet Competition in Varna, Bulgaria, the first win for a Western dancer. Her
partner, principal David Peregrine, achieved bronze medals at the same contests by
dancing Belong, an erotic pas de deux. Diane Buck starred in two original dances—The
Big Top (1986) and Anne of Green Gables (1989). Dance designer Michael Baker
premiered two futuristic ballets, Starwarriors (1989) and Technophrenia (1989).
In the 1990s, Jennifer Welsman made a name for herself with character parts in The Toy
Castle and Peter Pan. In the twenty-first century, the ensemble advanced to television film
with Dracula (2002) and a restaging of Cinderella, featuring comedic dancer Darren
Anderson. Subsequent successes included Moulin Rouge: The Ballet (2009) and The
Doorway: Scenes from Leonard Cohen (2012). During the 2013–2014 season, Moulin
Rouge highlighted cinema presentations paralleling live productions of Peter Quanz’s Q
Dance and Rodin/Claudel, Jorden Morris’s Défilé, and Lewis’s The Handmaid’s Tale,
Margaret Atwood’s dystopian tale of subjugated human breeders in the repressively
fundamentalist Republic of Gilead.
See also Baryshnikov, Mikhail; Moulin Rouge.
Source: Boyens, Ingeborg. The Encyclopedia of Manitoba. Winnipeg: Great Plains
Publications, 2007.
RUSSIAN STATE BALLET OF SIBERIA
A late twentieth-century development in national arts, the Russian State Ballet of Siberia
(RSBS), one of the nation’s youngest dance theaters, evidences the demand for new
companies that preserve Russia’s stage tradition. The group emerged from input by
professional dancers from Kiev, Yekaterinburg, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Novosibirsk.
Established by actor-danseur noble Vyacheslav Gordeyev in Krasnoyarsk, an industrial
city and stop on the Trans-Siberian Railway, on December 20, 1978, the company
presented its debut performance, Alexander Borodin’s Prince Igor (1890), a twelfth-
century hero tale.
A versatile assemblage, the dancers learned the classical canon, featuring The Sleeping
Beauty, Cinderella, Romeo and Juliet, La Bayadère (The Temple Dancer), Don Quixote,
Coppélia, La Fille Mal Gardée (The Poorly Guarded Girl), and Swan Lake. Within
twenty-seven years, the RSBS executed one hundred programs, going through eight
hundred pairs of ballet slippers annually. Over three decades, productions of the fifteen
ballets in the troupe’s repertoire earned applause for athletic bravura, humor, intricacy, and
costumes, masks, and painted curtains designed by Christina Fyodorova. For atmosphere
in The Nutcracker, technicians flashed snowy landscapes onto scrim, a compromise with
wood sets for convenience on tour.
RSBS has worked since 2002 under the direction of choreographer Sergei Bobrov, a
dancer trained in Moscow with the Bolshoi under Yuri Grigorovich. The Siberians
flourished with master dance coaching and the music of the twenty-eight musicians of the
Russian State Ballet Orchestra, conducted by Alexander Yudasin. Grown to forty-five
dancers and thirty musicians, the ensemble has toured Russia, Greece, Turkey, Italy,
Sicily, Spain, Brazil, China, Indonesia, Japan, Australia, Mexico, and the British Isles, a
favorite destination for entertaining hearty balletomanes.
On whistle stops from city to city, the performers adapt to the size and equipment of
each venue for staging complex works such as Elektra, Antigone, Stone Flower, Tzar-
Fish, Scheherazade, Carmen, and Sacred Spring. The troupe performed Giselle in 2006 in
Woking, England, featuring Anna Aulle and Alexander Butrimovich, an award-winning
dancer from Minsk. The presentation of Swan Lake at St. David’s Hall in Cardiff, Wales,
received critical acclaim for invention and beauty, a balance of sometimes opposing aims.
The Siberian dancers earned a best performance in 2007–2008 for their interpretation of
Romeo and Juliet. To accommodate the troupe, Bobrov collaborated with Juliana G.
Malkhasyants in choreographing a ballet-spectacle, Hussar Ballad (2012), a popular
musical featuring a woman serving in uniform during the Napoleonic wars. In Bristol,
England, in 2014, Natalia Bobrova’s depiction of Odette/Odile in Swan Lake captured the
Jekyll-and-Hyde duality of the heroine and villain, an acting feat demanding controlled
passion and vigor. For zealous direction, Sergei Bobrov won the Spirit of Dance Prize.
Source: Savage, Wayne. “Behind the Scenes of the Russian State Ballet of Siberia.”
Ipswich (UK) Star (14 February 2014).
 S
• •

SAN FRANCISCO BALLET

America’s oldest professional ballet troupe, the San Francisco Ballet (SFB) pioneered
West Coast classical dance and established U.S. style. The master stroke of Italian opera
conductor Gaetano Merola and Adolph Bolm, a Danish-Russian choreographer trained by
the Kirov in St. Petersburg, the ensemble debuted on June 2, 1933. Bolm managed
multiple duties as costumer and stager of a program of eleven dances, featuring fifty
performers at the Hollywood Bowl in Le Ballet Mécanique (1924), a blend of modernism
with the absurd.
The Danish-American Christensen brothers—Harold, Lew, and William—advanced the
SFB from a regional to a national company in 1938. William began a thirteen-year career
as ballet master, comic soloist, and founder of the dance academy. Headquartered at the
War Memorial Opera House, the sixty-member ensemble scheduled standard works,
beginning with Coppélia, starring Janet Reed.
SFB followed in 1940 with the first complete Swan Lake in the United States and with
American Interlude (1939), a Russianized version of Aristophanes’s sex-revolt-in-the-
time-of-war satire Lysistrata. For tours, dancers boarded buses headed up the Pacific coast
for Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. At Christmastime in 1944, the dancers earned
headlines for the first presentation of The Nutcracker in the Western Hemisphere.
Dancing around the Globe
Parallel to the growth of choreographer George Balanchine’s pared-down staging in New
York City, SFB began touring neoclassical works in the 1950s. In New York, the dancers
showcased Lew Christensen’s Con Amore (With Love, 1953), a three-part study of love,
beginning with “The Amazons and the Bandit,” featuring high-energy dancer Jacques
d’Amboise. In 1957, the ensemble introduced Asian venues to their tours. For their
leadership of Bay area arts, in 1963, they obtained a Ford Foundation grant.
Under director Michael Smuin, the SFB repertoire offered in-house choreography and
overextended the budget to costly stagings of Cinderella and Don Juan, a 1973
extravaganza starring Hungarian choreographer Attila Ficzere. To cover deficits, the
performers appeared in parks, stores, and streets in a concerted “Save Our Ballet”
campaign. New sources of revenue funded tours of Israel, Greece, Italy, Mexico, and
South America. The performance of Romeo and Juliet on PBS-TV in 1978, starring Sally
Streets and Jim Sohm, raised national awareness of the dancers’ precision and musicality.
Raising Standards
After 1985, Icelandic choreographer Helgi Tomasson directed the SFB in José Limón’s
Othello and Paul Taylor’s Sunset and broadened its identity with full-length works—Don
Quixote, Rodeo, Sylvia, Carousel, Agon, and Giselle, executed by Cuban star Lorena
Feijóo. For “Stars of the San Francisco Ballet” in 1997 in Bogotá, Colombia, Tomasson
cast Benjamin Pierce as soloist. Tomasson mounted a revised Nutcracker set in San
Francisco in 1915.
At a high point in the 2006–2007 schedule, Tomasson teamed principal Sarah Van
Patten with Pierre-Francois Vilanoba in the premiere of The Fifth Season (2006), a
showpiece demonstrating precision and virtuosity. During a tour of London, the SFB
received an Olivier Award for achievement and a “Company of the Year” designation
from Dance Europe. Tomasson’s energetic dance design challenged the ensemble with On
Common Ground (2007), On a Theme of Paganini (2008), RAKU (2010), and Trio (2011),
an elegant balance of pas seul, pas de deux, and corps de ballet ballroom dance.
The ensemble maintains an international presence with dancers from Cuba, Canada,
Brazil, China, Australia, Russia, Estonia, Armenia, France, and Spain. The 2008 PBS-TV
broadcast of The Nutcracker starred principals Vanessa Zahorian, Davit Karapetyan, and
Yuan Yuan Tan, an amazingly elastic dancer who enjoyed a large fan base in the Bay area
for performances of Russian Seasons and Tomasson’s Prism. For the spring 2014
program, the company executed precise footwork that gained media kudos for Myles
Thatcher’s Spectrum (2014) and Tomasson’s Bizet Pas de Deux (1987). In summer 2014,
the company appeared at the Spoleto Festival in Italy and danced Frederick Ashton’s
Voices of Spring (1940) and Tomasson’s 7 for Eight (1987).
Source: Ross, Janice. San Francisco Ballet at Seventy-Five. San Francisco, CA:
Chronicle, 2007.
SCENIC DESIGN
See image in photospread.
As ballet joined the arts, choreographers collaborated with set and costume designers to
project the maximum visual experience. The adaptation of ballet from Italian Renaissance
court entertainment to stage presentation of choreographer Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx’s Le
Ballet-Comique de la Reine (The Comic Ballet of the Queen, 1581) placed responsibility
on designers to inform audiences of physical location, time, and milieu through visual
cues, including props such as Chinese fans and Greek wigs. In the baroque era,
seventeenth-century Italian scenic design gained technological advances with Medici
engineer Bernardo Buontalenti’s stage machinery for Florentine spectacles and with Inigo
Jones’s demountable flats.
Sets for opera-ballet depended on the use of furnishings, greenery, drapes, and lighting
to create an illusion. In 1622, the dancers at the Hapsburg court in Vienna sharpened the
effect with patterned steps, mime, and facial expressions. Demands for entertaining
scenarios arose in France in the 1640s during the reign of Louis XIV, who varied staging
from Paris theater shows to court processionals and spectacles in the gardens of Versailles.
In 1661, the king gave his company a permanent home in Versailles at the first Salle de la
Comédie (playhouse) for presentation of the comédie-ballet Les Fâcheux (The Bores), a
forerunner of modern musical theater.
The Paris Opera intensified the effects of theatrical dance with extravagant court scenes
for L’Europe Galante (Europe in Love, 1697), which pictured aristocrats in flirtatious
mode. In Germany after 1742, Frederick the Great funded scene workshops for Berlin’s
Royal Opera House and its resident ballet troupe. In 1755, Jean-Georges Noverre’s
presentation of Les Fêtes Chinoises (The Chinese Fair, 1747), a montage of travel scenes
at London’s Drury Lane, lavished the production with silk costumes, masks, and flats.
Late in the 1700s, Anacreontic dance filled stages with painted scenes from Greek
mythology of meadows, streams, ferny bowers, fountains, and cave homes.
Staging with Light
Nineteenth-century technology furthered ballet’s visual impact. Alessandro Sanquirico’s
painted marvels for Psammi, King of Egypt (1817) and I Titani (The Titans, 1819) at La
Scala Theatre Ballet in Milan and stage machinery by Russian-Italian acoustical engineer
Alberto Cavos for the Mariinsky Theatre set high standards for European dance realism
into the mid-1800s. At Cavos’s Circus Theater, Drury Lane, and Covent Garden in 1822,
gas lighting augmented the perspective and shadows of gauze and tulle ballet skirts before
painted sets of storybook dance. The study of lighting as a separate element of design
focused on illusions of royalty, magic, and fantasy, the controlling atmosphere of
Fernando Sor’s Cinderella (1825) at the Petrovsky Theatre in Moscow. Artistry contrasted
a penurious fireplace scene in Act I with the grandeur of a presentation ball in Act II and
the transformation of Cinderella into a princess.
In Copenhagen in 1829, Danish dance maker August Bournonville shaped scenes in
shadow boxes built from three flats and a roof. To honor the Romanov dynasty, the
mounting of A Life for the Tsar (1836) revived dance pageantry with a royal cortege. For
Le Corsaire (The Pirate, 1856), Paris Opera engineer Victor Sacré and set designer
Édouard Despléchin engulfed the stage in a storm and shipwreck at sea heightened by gas
flares and shadows. Another intriguing use of machinery set a character dancer in conflict
with a huge windmill in Marius Petipa’s Don Quixote (1869). For the Emperor Napoleon
III and Empress Eugénie, the premiere of Coppélia at the Paris Opera on May 25, 1870,
enacted crowd scenes and folk dancing preceding the reception of a village bell, a
spectacle that dwarfed the choreography.
Staging with Modernism
In 1909, Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev piloted fairy tale ballet into the twentieth
century with kaleidoscopic color sets and costumes for ballet contemporain and the first
abstract ballet reverie, Les Sylphides. To introduce art deco, he hired Alexandre Benois to
build the sets for Petrouchka (1911), Pablo Picasso to paint scenes for Parade (1917), and
Spanish painter Juan Gris to sketch sets for La Fête Marveilleuse (The Marvelous Party,
1922) and Les Tentations de la Bergère (The Temptations of a Shepherdess, 1924), an
Anacreontic contrast between courtiers and peasants. Couturier Coco Chanel and painters
Maurice Utrillo and Georges Braque actualized the abstractions for which the Ballets
Russes became famous. For the immense production of Le Ballet Mécanique (The
Technological Ballet, 1924), set designers filled the stage with the history of technology,
reproduced in flats and props. The first Soviet ballet, The Red Poppy (1927), scenarist
Mikhail Kurilko’s melodrama about coolie enslavement, created the illusion of an Asian
port with swag drapes, paper lanterns, and a harbor painting. While World War II
shortages reduced scrim for curtains and silk for costumes, Agnes de Mille blended
wrangler garb, ropes, and fencing for her hybrid ballet Rodeo (1942).
At the same time that mid-twentieth century contemporary dance by Maurice Béjart,
Nacho Duato, and William Forsythe moved away from grand sets, George Balanchine’s
The Four Temperaments (1946) stripped dance to an abstraction without scenery.
Conversely, in Mexico City, arts scholar Amalia Hernández Navarro pioneered peasant
elements for Mesoamerican folkloric ballet. Alvin Ailey combined minimalism in scenery
with folk costumes for Revelations (1960), a ballet honoring black spirituals and blues.
For the Stuttgart Ballet in 1965, South African choreographer John Cranko’s adaptation of
Eugene Onegin featured columns and chandeliers as tokens of imperial grandeur. Twyla
Tharp experimented with battery-powered leotards in Re-Moves (1966), which turned
twinkly costumes into props.
Televised and cinema dance, particularly The Nutcracker (1977), revived the lavish
costuming and scenery introduced by Marius Petipa. A fledgling company, the Russian
State Ballet of Siberia maintained a repertoire of fifteen ballets by cutting corners—
flashing topologically accurate landscapes onto scrim, a lightweight curtain material that
replaced heavy wood flats for easier touring. The revival of Islamic fundamentalism in
2013 forced the Cairo Opera Ballet to reduce luxurious scenes of Republican Rome in a
revival of Spartacus. The multi-art Cirque du Soleil energized spectacle for Ka (2004), a
synchronized hybrid ballet featuring sound, music, electric stage, sets, and grotesque
costumes. For an August 2014 Lincoln Center production of the opera-ballet Acis and
Galatea, choreographer Mark Morris returned to the panache of the Ballets Russes and
created an illusion of forest abandon in dappled sets matched with leafy chitons.
See also Ballets Russes; The Firebird; Jones, Inigo; neoclassical ballet; Scheherazade.
Source: Brockett, Oscar G., Margaret Mitchell, and Linda Hardberger. Making the
Scene: A History of Stage Design and Technology in Europe and the United States. San
Antonio, TX: Tobin Theatre Arts Fund, 2010.
SCHEHERAZADE
See image in photospread.
An interracial vengeance motif excerpted from the prologue of The Arabian Nights, the
one-act Scheherazade became the first original dance of the Ballets Russes. Composed by
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in summer 1888, the symphonic mosaic evoked Ukrainian folk
culture and the strands of Middle Eastern storytelling that had filtered from Baghdad and
Istanbul to the West during the Crusades. By maintaining a vague place and time, the
composer allowed the European imagination to frame sensual rendezvous between Sultan
Shakhriar and his wife, Zobeida.
During the needle-and-thread stage of costuming and sewing backdrops in 1910, Léon
Bakst collaborated with artists Pierre Bonnard, Jacques Emile Blanche, Édouard Vuillard,
and Georges Seurat. The designers energized the dance with the color patterns, ethnic
aura, and erotic dance of oriental fantasies challenging European sexual and cultural
mores. The dress rehearsal ignited such enthusiasm that Diaghilev embraced Bakst. The
company exulted in anticipation of a sumptuous performance that whisked the audience
away from Europe into an antique Persian spectacle.
At a pivotal moment in dance history, Scheherazade injected European theater with a
heady blend of bare flesh and zesty dance. The ballet debuted in Paris at the Opéra Garnier
on June 4, 1910, to an electrified audience. In place of a demure corps de ballet in waltz-
length dresses simpering to please royalty, performers burst onstage in costumes flashing
metallic golds and reds. Reformer Michel Fokine, the choreographer of the Ballets Russes,
researched background material that defined characters with armlets and finger rings,
fringed wraps, Turkish slippers, and trimmed beards. Ballerinas set the mood with filmy
bras and harem pants barely concealing their breasts, thighs, and calves.
The Excerpt
The story of Shakhriar, the obdurate sultan of Persia, introduces him while he dallies with
his primary wife Zobeida, the role couturier Ida Rubinstein detailed with diaphanous
scarves and hip bands. Bakst positioned scenarios in a green tented pavilion lighted by
tasseled lamps. He overlaid emerald shades with a blue door and Asiatic motifs in black
and red-orange. Set against an African waitstaff clothed in sparkling gold and silver, the
bearded, bejeweled sultan prevailed in blue and violet on a diagonal set that created an
illusion of sumptuous space and limitless power.
The chief eunuch, played by character dancer Enrico Cecchetti, arranges a dance as
court entertainment. Fokine’s choreography banned symbolic hand mime and directed the
troupe to express intoxicating passions and guilt through movements of head, limbs, and
torso. Shah Zeman, Shakhriar’s brother, performed by Vasili Kissilev, cloaks his jealousy
of the primary wife in implications that she is sexually profligate. The sultan and Zeman
test Zobeida by making sham preparations for hunting.
In their absence, harem girls bribe the chief eunuch to liberate the male slaves from
captivity behind the bronze, silver, and gold doors. The meeting of gorgeous women with
muscular bondsmen releases male and female from the sultan’s control. Liberation
precedes opportunities for irresistible raptures. At the peak of carnality, Zobeida dances an
adagio duet with a pearl-wrapped slave, the part premiered by Vaslav Nijinsky, the most
celebrated dancer of his day. The uninhibited soloist shocked Edwardian sensibilities with
bronze body paint on arms, shoulders, chest, and midriff.
Undulating limbs and torsos against a jewel-toned setting detailed frenetic passion,
beguiling androgyny, and the downfall of an unfaithful wife. When Sultan Shakhriar
returns at the peak of the bacchanale, his narrowed eyes survey forbidden abandon. To an
aide topped by a colossal headdress, the sultan orders a mass execution by scimitar that
leaves only Zobeida alive. She grovels before him before seizing a dagger from a palace
guard and stabbing herself in despair. Too late, Shakhriar realizes that tyrannical anger has
lost him his enticing Zobeida.
Stage Orientalism
In radical mode, Diaghilev risked French urbanites’ anger for illegally appropriating
Rimsky-Korsakov’s music. To win conservatives who were loath to credit Russia with
artistic sophistication, the impresario hired Valentin Serov to paint a Persian hunting scene
and display it in Paris during a June 1911 performance of Scheherazade. To his relief,
Paris embraced Oriental modernism, a term sweeping all Asian culture into a fantasy
introduced in 1870 by painter Eugene Delacroix. Although Ballets Russes stereotyping
lacked authentic Asian dance, Fokine perpetuated the illusion that Russian dancers and
Russian orchestra members produced a spectacle based on ancient Persia.
Scheherazade reframed French notions of gender by empowering the desirous white
female to seduce the feminized black slave. For Arabian Nights soirees, dance mavens
flaunted Scheherazade outfits, featuring Hindu skirts and harem pants by couturier Paul
Poiret. Fashion designers reprised seraglio styles in salon pillows, draped ceilings, and
paisley wallpaper. The craze for Middle Eastern decor increased in 1917, when exiles fled
west from the Russian Revolution to invade the Folies Bergère and perform folk dances
barefoot at a night spot called “Scheherazade.” Bakst applied his Persian geometrics to the
production of Aladin, ou La Lampe Merveilleuse (Aladdin, or The Magic Lamp, 1919).
During the New York tour begun at the Century Theatre in 1916, Diaghilev featured an
oriental cycle including Scheherazade alongside Cleopatra and Thamar, a historical ballet
based on the life of a Georgian queen. Nijinsky’s delay by immigration inquiries forced
Léonide Massine to learn the favored slave’s role, a hurried substitution that raised his
admiration for the original soloist and his purely erogenous choreography. The death of
Bakst left Diaghilev with no designer in 1925, when he tried to hire artist Henri Matisse to
paint new sets. The artist’s refusal ended plans to reprise Scheherazade in London and
Paris.
Although stymied in ballet form, Scheherazade generated voluptuous, but inauthentic
Asian themes for vaudeville’s “Dance of the Seven Veils,” a tawdry striptease. Hollywood
ventured east for the stories and bold folk art in Kismet (1920), Rudolph Valentino’s rakish
makeup for The Sheik (1921), and flying carpets and crystal balls in The Thief of Baghdad
(1924), a vehicle for actor Douglas Fairbanks and Anna May Wong. The presentation of
art deco turbans, beaded tops, and billowy pants at the Exhibition of Decorative Arts in
Paris in 1925 proclaimed Scheherazade the fount of fashion. Producer Wassily de Basil
reprised the ballet in 1935 in Philadelphia starring Lubov Tchernicheva as Zobeida. After
Fokine resumed his role as artistic director of the Ballets Russes in 1937, Scheherazade
anchored the repertory with glittering costumes copied from Bakst originals.
Source: Mernissi, Fatema. Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different
Harems. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.
SCOTTISH BALLET
A contributor to international dance, the Scottish Ballet (SB) has more than a half century
of experience in diverse ballet repertoire, from pastoral dance to jazz, disco, and rock and
roll. Begun in 1957 in Bristol, England, by Irish-Italian choreographer Elizabeth West and
Peter Darrell, a student at Sadler’s Wells, the company profited from mid-twentieth-
century dance competitions, which singled out Darrell for his interpretations of
contemporary culture in the engaging Harlequinade (1900). Since its foundation, the
ensemble has gone under name changes and alternate venues as small as village halls and
school stages.
Intuiting the moods and interests of young Scots, Darrell set his course on introducing
the public to narrative and contemporary dance that incorporated comedy, satire, dramatic
realism, and vibrant rhythms. The SB debuted with The Prisoners (1957), a juxtaposition
of types of bondage with the music of Bela Bartok. Darrell built a repertory that included
the pantomime Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1957), A Wedding Present (1962), based
on a man-man-woman triangle, Jeux (Games) in 1963 to Claude Debussy’s score, and
Mods and Rockers (1963), the first ballet set to Beatles music.
A Dance Home
At the invitation of the Scottish Arts Council, in 1969, the Scottish Ballet headquartered at
the Theatre Royal in Glasgow, where master teacher Daniel Job coached new members.
Subsequent original programs ranged from The Trojans (1969) to music by Hector Berlioz
and Othello (1971) to Serge Prokofiev’s Four Portraits (1971), the nude revue Carte
Blanche (1976), and Gustav Mahler’s melodies in Five Rückert Songs (1978). Thea
Musgrave provided a commissioned score for Scorpius (1973), a duet danced by clashing
personalities. In 1975, guest ballerina Margot Fonteyn starred in The Scarlet Pastorale, a
study in psychological duality.
For travel to performances in Glasgow, Inverness, Aberdeen, Belfast, Newcastle,
Sterling, Hull, London, and Edinburgh, the Scottish Ballet overnighted at small bed and
breakfasts. Their programs reset familiar works—Cinderella, Swan Lake, Romeo and
Juliet, The Tales of Hoffmann, The Nutcracker, Coppélia, La Sylphide, and Giselle—and
added to narrative dance Mary, Queen of Scots (1976). For artistic excellence, in 1984,
Darrell received a Commander of the British Empire award. At his death in 1987, Russian
soloist Galina Samsova directed the dancers, who numbered around sixty. A high point of
her imaginative vision, a 1993 adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream brought crowds
to performances.
In 1994, establishment of the Peter Darrell Trust maintained the troupe’s creative
heritage and commitment to regional arts through a busy schedule of more than seventy
shows per year. The company continued to reach out to new challenges, including the
hiring of virtuoso performer Vladislav Bubrov to partner Czech prima ballerina Daria
Klimentová in A Fond Kiss (1995) and guest performances by Hans Nilsson of the Royal
Swedish Ballet and by Tamara Rojo, a future company director. A decade under Ashley
Page’s supervision brought a distinctive approach that focused on audience involvement,
especially in Jorma Elo’s Song of the Earth (1965) and for enchâinements to Carl Davis’s
score for Aladdin (2001) and 1930s pop tunes in Pennies from Heaven (2008).
Making Headlines
In spring 2009, Page moved the SB into the Tramway Arts Centre. Under the patronage of
the Prince of Wales, the staff offered a college course in modern dance and continued
developing the varied ballet styles of Frederick Ashton, George Balanchine, Kryzsztof
Pastor, Kenneth MacMillan, and Siobhan Davies, a disciple of Martha Graham. The Scots
troupe, under supervision of Christopher Hampson, branched out with Ian Spink’s
Petrouchka (2009), which won a Dancing Times award for principal Paul Liburd.
Innovation flourished in Richard Alston’s Carmen (2009) and Page’s imaginative Alice
(2011), which earned him the De Valois Award for Outstanding Achievement for its
merger of Lewis Carroll’s story with the author’s photos of Alice Liddell, the real Alice in
Wonderland. In 2011, a signal year, the Critics’ Circle National Dance Award for
outstanding female performance went to Sophie Martin of Cherbourg, France, for classical
ingenue roles.
The Scottish Ballet continued to challenge audiences with a tense New Orleans drama,
A Streetcar Named Desire (2012), which won the Critic’s Circle, South-Bank, National
Dance, and Olivier awards for choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, a Belgian-
Colombian dancer trained at the Royal Ballet Academy of Antwerp. The company added
Matthew Bourne’s raucous Highland Fling (2013) and a surreal Christmas special,
composer Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel & Gretel (2013), to its program and premiered
The Crucible (2014), based on the Salem witch trials. The Scottish Ballet carried its
dynamic artistry to North America, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Russia, China,
Malaysia, and Hong Kong. For UNICEF, in May 2014, an education team introduced
Scottish Ballet style in India.
Source: Brennan, Mary. Scottish Ballet: Forty Years. Glasgow, Scotland: Saraband,
2009.
SERGEYEV, NIKOLAI (1876–1951)
The régisseur-général (stage manager) of the Imperial Theatre in St. Petersburg, Nikolai
Grigorovich Sergeyev rescued an archive of Russian dance aesthetics. During his
employment from 1903 to 1917, he amassed sketches of sets and costumes, dance
programs, photos, master scores, and choreography documented by anatomist Vladimir
Stepanov. A trove of details on the mime and dance of ballet master Marius Petipa and his
aides, Christian Johansson and Lev Ivanov, the collection survived the October 1917
Bolshevik takeover of Imperial Russia.
Sergeyev’s preservation efforts completed a project that choreographist Stepanov had
begun in 1893 with the coding of two classic ballets—Ivanov’s La Flûte Magique (The
Magic Flute, 1791) and Jules Perrot’s Le Rêve du Peintre (The Painter’s Dream, 1848).
Upon approval by the ruling board of the Imperial Ballet, Stepanov continued coding 1894
performances, including a scene from Petipa’s Le Corsaire (The Pirate, 1856) and Le
Réveil de Flore (Flora’s Awakening, 1894), an Anacreontic dance still in rehearsal. At
Stepanov’s death at age thirty, the post of company recorder passed to Alexander Gorsky
in 1896 and to Sergeyev in 1903.
The Archive in Exile
When Sergeyev fled Russia during the cultural turmoil of 1917–1918, he smuggled
through Riga to Paris in crates and trunks a choreography archive encompassing twenty-
four ballets, twenty-four operas, tableaus, orchestral scores, and excerpts. For three years,
he tried to interest the Ballets Russes, Markova-Dolin Company, Ballet Russe de Monte
Carlo, and Metropolitan Opera Ballet in authoritative versions of the Petipa repertory. To
reduce humiliation to the Soviet for the loss of decades of dance history, the Ministry of
Culture discredited Sergeyev’s trove as the peddlings of an arts thief. Impresario Sergei
Diaghilev and ballet master Michel Fokine further disparaged the archive as an attempt to
chain ballet to formulas of Russia’s past.
Isolated and penniless, Sergeyev continued to offer Imperial Russian treasures to the
West. While cofounding the Latvian National Opera Ballet in Riga from 1921 to 1925, he
directed La Fille Mal Gardée (The Poorly Guarded Girl), Latvia’s first full-length dance
presentation, and assembled ballet music for piano and violin by composers Adolphe
Adam, Cesare Pugni, and Édouard Deldevez. Applying Sergeyev’s collection of original
combinations and directions as well as descriptions of sets and costumes, the Paris Opera
Ballet staged the Petipa version of Giselle in 1924 with Olga Spessivtseva and Albert
Aveline as principals.
Bankrolled in London by a stipend from the Camargo Society, Sergeyev taught classes
while monitoring his library of Russian ballet from damage or loss. From original
manuscripts, on January 1, 1934, he directed Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin in the Vic-
Wells Ballet presentation of Giselle. On a ten-year contract from Ninette de Valois, he
staged The Nutcracker for its first presentation outside Russia in 1934, a performance that
set a standard in the West.
Dance Scholarship
Sergeyev’s floor plan for Coppélia at London’s Drury Lane in 1938 occasioned critical
praise for the partnering and mime of Alexandra Danilova with Michel Panaiev. The
collection enabled Mona Inglesby, director of the International Ballet, to stage authentic
Petipa versions of The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, Cinderella, and Giselle. Upon
Sergeyev’s death in 1951, the archive changed hands twice before arriving at Harvard
University in 1969.
The Sergeyev archive, respected as the official repertory of classical ballet, aroused
controversy from French, Danish, American, and Russian scholars, who questioned the
curator’s musicality and exactitude. Nonetheless, in the late 1990s, the collection
energized Sergei Vikharev to restore Sleeping Beauty in 2000, followed by authentic
reconstructions of La Bayadère (The Temple Dancer), La Fille du Pharaon (Daughter of
the Pharaoh), Petrouchka, Carnaval, and Coppélia, starring Maria Alexandrova. In 2007,
the Bavarian State Ballet mounted a historic version of Le Corsaire (The Pirate) as a
tribute to a common heritage of the arts.
See also Royal Ballet of London.
Source: Scholl, Tim. Sleeping Beauty, a Legend in Progress. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2004.
SHANGHAI BALLET
The state dance ensemble of the coastal metropolis, the Shanghai Ballet (SB) merges
Western steps and gestures with traditional Chinese dance that encompasses realism and
fantasy in classic form. Established in 1966 two years after the creation of the Guangzhou
Ballet, the troupe, the Shanghai Baliewu Jutuan (Shanghai Ballet Institute), performed to
the music of resident orchestra director Chen Xieyang. The dancers mastered Vaganova
technique from the teachers who fled to China after the Russian Revolution.
The SB presented the standard European repertoire—Giselle, Romeo and Juliet,
Coppélia, La Sylphide, Don Quixote, The Sleeping Beauty—as well as Jiang Yun’s Hongse
Niangzijun (The Red Detachment of Women, 1964), Jeffrey Gantz’s The Ode to Joy
(1998), and French choreographer Bertrand d’At’s In the Mood for Love (2006). For
Jerome Robbins’s The Four Seasons (1979), the twenty-seven-member female corps de
ballet dressed in luminous calf-length costumes and danced in diamond formation to the
music of David Fong.
Red Ballet
The state-run SB specialized in presentations of composer Ma Ke’s Maoist propaganda
drama Baimaonü (The White-Haired Girl, 1965), the story of a girl who dresses in boy’s
clothing to attend a school that bars female pupils. A commentary tailored to conform to
the Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976, the choreography championed the downfall of a
plutocrat and the triumphal reunion of classmates Liang and Zhu. As a component of
cultural relations, the company toured global venues, covering North America, France,
Spain, Norway, and Finland as well as the Pacific Rim theaters of Australia, New Zealand,
Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia.
Politics and the arts blended during the convoluted redirection of the arts, during which
official fiats dampened creativity. The 1972 tour of Japan introduced a corps of two
hundred SB dancers as a cover for a spying mission. Propagandist Xi Qiming treaded
carefully around dogmatic supervisors in 1976 when he composed a pro-Maoist ballet,
Zhu Fu (The New Year Sacrifice, 1980), a grim survey of a widow’s losses.
A relaxation of pro-Communist cultural aims allowed the company to employ Strauss
waltzes in Cao Yu’s complex Leiyu (Thunderstorm, 1934), a study of wealth and corrupt
bureaucracies. Under the eyes of Chinese ambassadors accompanying SB in the United
States, in late June 1982, a dancer, Lin Jianwei, became China’s first defector while in
Jackson, Mississippi, after performing Deer with Its Head Back (1984), a glimpse of the
hunted eluding the pursuer. Another flight from China occurred in Ontario in September
1984 when Li Cunxin sought political asylum.
Company Achievements
In 1985, principal dancer and ballet coach Zhenrong Chen, an eighteen-year-old trained at
the Beijing Dance Academy, earned a bronze medal in China’s first ballet competition. Six
years later, he won a prize for dancing Encourage in Shanghai. In addition, he performed
Marius Petipa’s Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, Anton Dolin’s Variations for Four
(1957), and The Butterfly Lovers (1981), a third-century CE Chinese version of Romeo
and Juliet presented in sashed tunics with fans and traditional headdress amid artificial
smoke.
 In 2006, French dance coach Bertrand d’At joined the SB to combine more
contemporary combinations with classical music. A commission for the company, Graeme
Murphy’s Water (2009) introduced Australian style and technique. Directed by Ha Muti, at
the 1,800-seat Shanghai Grand Theater in People’s Square and on tour, the troupe featured
Ji Pingping and Wu Husheng as the protagonists in German-Nigerian choreographer
Patrick de Bana’s Gothic ballet Jane Eyre (2013). Based on the feminist novel by
Charlotte Brontë and costumed Victorian style, the staging turns the near bigamy of
Edward Rochester into a pas de trois picturing madwoman Bertha Mason as the wraith-
like obsessive wife.
The ballet troupe gained global attention for the candid memoir of Xing Jin, Shanghai
Tango (2007), which describes how a Korean colonel in the People’s Army sought China’s
first gender-change operation before she became a prima transsexual and director of her
own company, the Jin Xing Dance Theatre. In 2010, The Last Mission of Marco Polo
opened the Twelfth Shanghai International Arts Festival with a collaborative staging by
Chinese and Italian performers of the Venetian merchant’s journey from China to Persia.
For the Shanghai Ballet’s thirty-fifth anniversary in 2014, a company principal, Fan
Xiaofeng, starred in Dream Back to Shanghai (2014) portraying a young woman
reviewing five men in her life.
Source: Jin, Xing. Shanghai Tango: A Memoir. London: Atlantic, 2007.
SHOES, BALLET
See image in photospread.
For much of early ballet history, troupes performed with bare feet or in ordinary
slippers or heeled pumps. With the development of professional companies during the
Renaissance, female dancers chose lightweight 1.0- to 1.25-inch heels on slippers of
canvas, felt, velvet, silk, or satin. Italian composer Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx designed the
first professional slippers tied with ribbons to enhance the choreography of Le Ballet-
Comique de la Reyne (The Comic Ballet of the Queen, 1581), a five-and-a-half-hour
nuptial entertainment performed at the Louvre for guests of Henri III of France.
In the 1600s, Louis XIV of France, the founder of professional ballet, allowed a dress
sword and the fashionable buckles on his boots to set the length of his stride.
Unintentionally, he determined the original five ballet foot positions by his movements. To
display fur linings and hand embroidery on damask and silk insteps, he developed turnout,
which accommodated his vanity and rank. Simultaneously, dancers discovered that turnout
increased lift, flexibility, and the graceful line from thigh to toe.
Advancement in professional shoes accompanied improvements to technique and a shift
in gendered dancing. In the 1730s, for productions of the Paris Opera Ballet, Belgian-
French principal dancer Marie Camargo removed heels from her shoes, pleated the fabric
under her toes, and darned or over-sewed the metatarsal wings for support. The innovation
stripped the dance of aristocratic affectation and increased elegance and foot speed on the
Basque entrechat quatre (four-beat jump), her specialty.
 In flat tubular slippers as weightless as bare feet, Camargo dazzled viewers with
bravura leaps, slow rotations, and swift battus (beats) more commonly performed by men.
The slender foot coverings graced a svelte silhouette that complemented her figure. The
new fashion in soft ballet slippers revealed the talents of Neapolitan choreographer
Salvatore Viganò and his wife Marie in the 1790s and prompted women to choose
professional styles for street wear. According to Italian theorist Carlo Blasis’s Traité
Élémentaire, Théorique, et Pratique de l’Art de la Danse (Elementary, Theoretical, and
Practical Treatise on the Art of Dance, 1820), the professional slipper fostered advanced
techniques involving ankle, heel, toe, instep, and metatarsal.
In the 1820s, Gallo-Danish dancer August Bournonville designed a black slipper with
white V-shaped vamp to heighten men’s mobility and showcase their long pointed feet. In
the next decade, women polished execution of turns and glissades (gliding) by wearing
soft-soled kid slippers, which augmented the grip of feet on the floor. Stitchery stiffened
lightweight vamps, enabling dancers to rise briefly on point without bending the toes. The
popularity of ethereal dancing brought female performance to center stage and heightened
the prominence of romantic character parts. To display technical mastery, male dancers
with the Paris Opera shortened their trousers to the knee and added silk hose.
Pointe Shoes
Challenged by the toe-dancing stunts performed by vigorously athletic Grotteschi dancers
in Milan, Italo-Swedish-Polish ballerina Marie Taglioni introduced dancing en pointe in
Vienna in the 1820s. She gave the illusion of a celestial daintiness as her torso rose from
the pelvis, revealing a muscular back. She replaced standard wood and leather toe-dancing
shoes with square-throated kidskin and satin upper and linen toes layered over a cardboard
or fiberboard arch. To reveal intricate steps and beats performed on demi-pointe, a
transitional stage between court ballet and modern dance, she removed her sleeves and
shortened her skirts.
For her refinement and buoyancy, Taglioni’s 1827 debut at the Paris Opera occasioned
media outpourings. As the romantic lead opposite Joseph Mazilier in La Sylphide (1832),
she placed so much abrasion and stress on toe shoes that she required up to three pairs per
performance. Shoemakers replicated her footwear by handcrafting each via the turnshoe
method—layering each part inside out on a last, then turning the complete shoe to the
right side. Carlotta Grisi introduced the boxed toe slipper in 1840. The stiffening of toe
shoes made possible her small hops en pointe that marked the peasant fare in Giselle
(1841).
In the 1880s, Milanese diva Pierina Legnani reduced the points of toe shoes to
platforms to facilitate her famed thirty-two fouettés (whip turns). She designed a stiffer
shank (arch support), which she broke in by practicing until body heat melted the glue into
the shape of her foot. For a flat toe end, cobblers hammered tips of her slippers into a
flattened oval. A small circle at the toe box made contact with the floor through a padding
of glued canvas, hessian (burlap), or paper. The absence of nails reduced the clatter of
earlier blocked models.
 At Broadway and 39th Street in Manhattan in 1887, cobbler Salvatore Capezio, an
immigrant from Lucano, Italy, refurbished slippers and pointe shoes for the Metropolitan
Opera House, which opened in 1883. From his meticulous repairs evolved the Capezio
dance shoe, worn in 1910 by Russian salon-style dancer Anna Pavlova. For her London-
based company, Pavlova adapted pointe shoes with broader curved toes reinforced with
wood. Stronger arches supported her high insteps and protected her feet from injury. The
hard pointed toes contributed to her frail, wispy silhouette.
George Balanchine, subsequent director of the New York City Ballet, collaborated with
Capezio to streamline a pointe shoe that flattered the foot by reducing bulk. The design
lengthened the calf muscle and augmented the amount of time that the female corps de
ballet could remain en pointe. In stronger, harder pointe shoes in 1932, Irina Baronova and
Tamara Toumanova executed daring turns and lengthy balances that immortalized the
technical wizardry of the New Ballet Russe.
Technological Advances
In a flexible alteration of the one-piece kid sole, gymnasts relieved ballerinas of lost
sensitivity by replacing the hard pointe shoe with split leather-sole shoes, which mimicked
the shape of the foot in motion. Made by Jacob Bloch in Australia in 1931, the split sole
gained popularity for its fine, arch-hugging leather. Shaving and buffing smoothed the
surface to prevent undue friction with the floor. Before breaking in new shoes, dancers
darned the platform to add traction and halt the raveling of satin. Hammering the box
softened the toe, while shellacking the interior molded the shape to delay softening and
deterioration. In Havana in the 1930s, Cuban dancer Alicia Alonso broke in toe shoes
daily by wearing them around the house.
For practice, dancers tightened the throat of the shoe with a drawstring and warmed feet
and ankles with waist-high nylon tights, a post–World War II advance of the hosiery
industry. To secure the shoe at mid-point, women stitched elastic bands in an X over the
metatarsal arch, darned the tip to quiet steps, and lined toe boxes with lamb’s wool to pad
nail bed tissues and prevent hammer toe and ingrown toenails. In the 1960s, stage diva
Margot Fonteyn designed a thin leather insole and satin and silk vamp to meet her
specifications.
Late in the twentieth century, shoe customizer Nicolai Grishko of Kiev stiffened pointe
shoes for Russian performers. American dancers added gel pads and spacers to the toes to
enhance balance and prevent foot and nail malformation. Other innovations included
Bloch’s quieter paste, Capezio’s Supplex tights, Freed’s shankless trainers, Capulet’s
demi-pointe toe shoes, Fuzi’s seamless vamp, Merlet’s plastic resin shanks, Porselli’s
elastic insteps, and Schactner’s suede tips, manufactured in Vienna. In 1993, Gaynor
Minden patented shoes made with thermoplastic elastomer, a synthetic that that dancers
heated and cured to accommodate flexibility.
Even with improved materials, in 2013, the rapid deterioration of toe shoes forced the
Royal Opera House Ballet in London to buy 7,000 pairs per year at £39 a pair for an
expenditure of £273,000. In the same period, the New York City Ballet purchased 8,500
pairs at $76.47 per pair for a total footwear budget of $650,000. In contrast to structured
ballet, the Mark Morris Dance Company’s Lincoln Center production of Acis and Galatea
(2014) expressed the pastoral element of Anacreontic dance in chitons and bare feet.
See also en pointe.
Source: Fischer, Suzanne. “Ballet Shoes and Ballerinas as Technology: A History en
Pointe.” Atlantic (7 November 2011).
SKIBINE, GEORGE (1920–1981)
A magnetic Russian dancer, George Boris Skibine contributed elegance to corps de ballet,
partnering, coaching, and contemporary choreography. Born Yuril Borisovich Skibin on
January 30, 1920, he was a native of Yasnaya Poliana on the Baltic Sea. His father, Boris
Skibine, joined Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1923 and introduced George to dance.
In 1925, the younger Skibine, called “Yura,” appeared in the crowd scenes in Petrouchka.
In Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and Monte Carlo, George Skibine trained in classical
technique and mime under Julia Sedova, Serge Lifar, and Olga Preobrajenska. Paris Opera
Ballet director Lifar hired Skibine in 1930. At age seventeen, the year his father died, the
dancer performed in the chorus line at Bal Tabarin, a Paris nightclub. He moved on to the
Ballet de la Jeunesse (Youth Ballet) in 1938, when he fell in love with his sixteen-year-old
partner, Tatiana Leskova.
Skibine on Tour
A pioneer of North American ballet, Skibine fled war-torn Europe with the aid of Colonel
Wassily de Basil. The dancer signed on for the low pay, camaraderie, and peripatetic
travels of de Basil’s Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. During an Australian tour of ninety
towns in six months in 1939–1940, he partnered Alexandra Danilova and Tamara
Toumanova and debuted in Léonide Massine’s Seventh Symphony (1938) and Lifar’s
stately Pavane (1940).
Skibine gained critical attention for his natural poses. Massine’s coaching developed the
dancer’s bravura in character parts. The soloist starred with Nina Verchinina in Igor
Schwezoff’s modernist ballet Lutte Éternelle (Eternal Conflict, 1940). During a stint with
Sol Hurok’s American Ballet Theater under director Michel Fokine, Skibine performed as
the title Gypsy in the murderous ballet Aleko (1941), for which he teamed with Alicia
Markova and Irina Baronova, his girlfriend. For the premiere of Don Domingo de Don
Blas (1942) in Mexico City, Skibine played a Mayan warrior in a pas de deux with
Markova.
At age twenty-four, Skibine’s starring roles began with a fill-in solo as Albrecht in
Giselle and the lead in Bluebeard (1942), featuring the soloist in a duel. He served in army
counterintelligence and joined the amphibious landing at Normandy on D-Day, the preface
to American citizenship. Following the war, he danced with the original twelve members
of the Markova-Dolin company.
A Life Partner
During Skibine’s employment in Vichy, France, in July 1947, he wed Osage ballerina
Marjorie Louise Tallchief, mother of their twin sons, Alexander and George. Skibine
choreographed performances of the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas, for which he
featured Marjorie in Ballet in the U.S.A. (1947). In 1948, he showcased a revival of Les
Sylphides at the Theatre de l’Empire in Paris. Shrouded in a cape, he teamed with Marjorie
in Real Jewels (1949) and staged Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as Tragedy in Verona
(1950), a significant critical success. Skibine also had his wife in mind when he designed
Night Shadow (1950), a venture into “sleep-dancing.”
With folk strands from his homeland and the music of Aram Khachaturian, Skibine
condensed The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1951) into a one-act ballet, which he danced
with Tallchief, who also performed his Annabel Lee (1951), the subject of a melancholy
poem by Edgar Allan Poe. The following year, he and Rosella Hightower generated heat
in Ana Ricarda’s Doña Ines de Castro (1952), a biographical dance about a tragic
fourteenth-century Portuguese heroine. From 1954 to 1956, the ensemble headquartered in
Buenos Aires, where the choreographer debuted Idylle (1954), an equine love triangle
featuring Tallchief as the White Filly. By 1956, Skibine had helped boost Marjorie to
international fame.
During a five-month American tour for Ruth Page’s Chicago Opera Ballet in 1958,
Skibine nursed a torn Achilles tendon that precipitated his retirement from the stage.
Nonetheless, he distinguished himself as the first American member and director of the
Paris Opera Ballet. The company danced his creations—Concerto (1958), Atlantide
(1958), and Isoline (1958)—and became the first non-Russian troupe to perform at
Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre. In Frankfurt in 1959, to the music of Maurice Ravel against
settings by Marc Chagall, he unveiled Daphnis et Chloe featuring dancers Claude Bessy
and Erik Bruhn. The state visit of President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy to Versailles in
1961 included a command performance of Skibine’s Pastorale.
In 1964, Skibine returned to the U.S. to settle at Watch Hill, Rhode Island. At the Aix-
en-Provence festival in 1964, he choreographed a classic ballet cantata, Les Noces
Fantastiques (The Fantastic Wedding, 1955), to the music of Igor Stravinsky. In
November 1965, he became the first artistic director for the Harkness Ballet, which
debuted in Cannes, France. His final choreography for Tallchief, La Venta Quemada (The
Swindle, 1966), debuted in Barcelona with intricate flamenco footwork. For his
contributions to the arts, Skibine received a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres.
At age thirty-nine, Skibine settled in Texas, a state he loved for its ebullience and for
the long, lean bodies of its dancers. He and Tallchief trained professional dancers for the
Dallas Civic Ballet, including Cyndi Jones and Thom Clower. In 1969, Skibine partnered
with Tallchief in a revival of The Firebird and choreographed Romantic Encounters
(1978), which starred Clower. After a short illness, Skibine died in Texas on January 14,
1981.
Source: Sutton, Tina. The Making of Markova: Diaghilev’s Baby Ballerina to
Groundbreaking Icon. New York: Open Road Media, 2013.
THE SLEEPING BEAUTY
See image in photospread.
 A Gallic ballet-féerie (fantasy ballet), The Sleeping Beauty (1890) contributed to dance
history a stylized tale of love triumphing over evil and an allegory of sexual awakening. In
1890, Marius Petipa set to a four-hour score by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky the Grimms’
fairy tale “Dornröschen” (Briar Rose), a Gothic romance linked to multiple predecessors.
Using the trope of sleep to mimic death, the story pictures a lovely princess denied a
normal life, a plot outlined in French writer Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou Contes du
Temps Passé (Stories or Tales of Long Ago, 1697). Russian analysts read into the plot a
sociopolitical reference to an era of hard times relieved by a bold male from the tsarist
dynasty.
Tchaikovsky’s innovative ballets troubled purists, who suspected that French and Italian
dance novelties were weakening Russian standards of performance, rhythm, mature
themes, and musicality. Balletomanes feared that Western European innovations
foretokened a decline in artistry and ethnic authenticity. To improve attendance at imperial
ballets, Petipa spent 42,000 rubles—one quarter of the Mariinsky Theatre’s annual budget
—for machinery, sets, luxurious costumes, and props. The expenditure recalled the royal
outlay for the French court ballets of Louis XIV. At the dress rehearsal, Tsar Alexander III
congratulated Tchaikovsky.
For the premiere in St. Petersburg on January 15, 1890, splendor predominated as the
plot ranged over a century of fashion and decor. The symphonic score identified the evil
Carabosse and the Lilac Fairy with leitmotifs, melodies that typified their personalities and
powers. Character actor-dancer Enrico Cecchetti performed both the villain Carabosse and
the Bluebird, a classic avian mime defined by brisés and jetés. Cecchetti’s wife,
Giuseppina Cecchetti, played the queen; Marie Petipa, the director’s daughter, danced the
role of the Lilac Fairy, a flower sprite linked to girlish innocence. Petipa chose Pavel
Gerdt for Prince Florimund and, for Princess Aurora, diva Carlotta Brianza, who awed the
audience with her elasticity and double pirouettes.
A Two-Act Ballet
In a prologue commemorating baroque aesthetics, six fairies surround the French princess
Aurora at her christening, a ritual connecting her with privilege and beneficence. To six
gifts—charm, wit, beauty, courage, sweetness, and music—an intruder adds a curse. The
vengeful Carabosse, an androgynous fairy, outraged to be excluded from the gathering,
forces her way into the service and condemns Aurora to prick her finger and die. The Lilac
Fairy commutes the death sentence to a century-long sleep that a handsome prince will
end with a kiss. The gendered antidote to evil follows a standard trope of the empowered
male revitalizing the inert female through intimate contact.
Act one, laden with doom, begins auspiciously. In a futile attempt to outwit destiny,
Florestan XXIV, an autocratic French king lampooning Louis XIV, bans spindles and
knitting needles from his realm. As in Greek mythology, no human effort foils the curse.
On Aurora’s sixteenth birthday, she observes her well-wishers dancing a farandole and
partners four suitors in an adagio waltz, a balletic form of courtship.
Deception, a standard motif of Gothic folklore, sets the curse in motion. Aurora
receives a gift from Carabosse, disguised as a guest, and stabs her finger on a distaff
hidden in the wrappings. Too late, the royal parents witness the power of the malefactor
and arrange their daughter’s recumbent form on an elegant bed. The Lilac Fairy, a symbol
of hope, returns to wrap the dormant palace in vines, a symbol of safekeeping.
As the antidote to Aurora’s lengthy swoon, act two introduces Prince Florimund, who
performs the cavalier enchaînements of Swedish choreographer Christian Johansson.
While hunting, the prince learns the cruel fate of Aurora. Piloted in a boat by the Lilac
Fairy, he performs a phallic deflowering by slicing through undergrowth with his sword to
reach the enchanted castle. Upon finding the slumbering virgin, he kneels at her bier and
kisses her forehead. His love breaks the curse and frees Aurora of passivity. Aroused into
a potent future queen, she energizes the castle, awakens the royal family, and accepts her
rescuer’s offer of marriage, the standard emblem of unity that restores order.
The third act returns to tsarist spectacle, the setting for a fairy tale nuptial. Following
the amazing revival of an entire castle, the ballet spotlights the polonaise, a promenade of
soloists trained by Petipa for pas de caractères (character dance). After marching in the
“Cortège des Contes des Fées” (Procession of Storybook Characters)—the Bluebird, Little
Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Puss in Boots, Donkey
Skin, Goldilocks, Bluebeard and wife, White Cat—the corps de ballet watches Florimund
claim the first dance with his beloved. The full cast performs a mazurka and individual
divertissements. By slowing the action, the choreographer focuses on the mating of hero
and heroine. In an apotheosis derived from Greek drama, Apollo appears in golden rays to
bless the couple.
A Stage Tradition
More popular than Tchaikovsky’s first ballet, Swan Lake (1876), The Sleeping Beauty
dominated the 1890–1891 season with twenty-two performances. The ballet entranced a
sickly child, eight-year-old Anna Pavlova, who dedicated her life to dance. According to
an opposing view by Sergei Diaghilev, then seventeen years old, the performance lacked
coherence because of the disjointed work of a cadre of artists, including five set painters
working separately from the costumer. The production flourished for a decade in two
hundred performances, in part to aid the Mariinsky company break even on the
extravagant costs.
The fairy tale ballet passed to Milan’s La Scala troupe in 1896 as a vehicle for Brianza.
By 1899, Alexander Gorsky staged his own version of The Sleeping Beauty at the Moscow
Imperial Bolshoi Theatre. A subsequent revival in London at the Alhambra Theatre,
featuring scenery by Léon Bakst, enjoyed a record one hundred five performances. For a
London Christmas special, The Sleeping Princess (1921), Brianza came out of retirement
at age fifty-four to reprise Aurora for Diaghilev, then the impresario of the Ballets Russes.
In Philadelphia on February 11, 1937, Catherine Littlefield directed one hundred
dancers and eighty-five musicians at the debut of The Sleeping Beauty in the Western
Hemisphere. In 1939, six days after Hitler targeted the Royal Navy, Sadler’s Wells
performed the ballet in London starring Margot Fonteyn. The production entertained
Queen Mary and British troops and promoted the addition of the ballet to repertoires
worldwide.
 In 1946 at the end of World War II, director Ninette de Valois chose to produce The
Sleeping Beauty to note the world’s triumph over evil. For a 1949 presentation by the
International Ballet, choreographer Maurice Béjart danced the part of Bluebird. The
Pacific coast premiere in 1990 by the San Francisco Ballet celebrated a centenary of
stagings with Russian elements—a proscenium reminiscent of the Mariinsky Theatre, a
boyar dance, and tsarist settings.
Source: Siegel, Marcia B. Mirrors and Scrims: The Life and Afterlife of Ballet.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010.
SPARTACUS
A post–World War II tribute to self-determination, Spartacus (1956) attained immediate
status on global repertories. The historical Spartacus declined in rank from a mercenary in
the Roman legions in Macedonia to an outlaw and prisoner trained for gladiatorial combat
outside Capua at the school of Lentulus Batiatus. An uprising of seventy-eight slaves
exploded into the two-year Third Servile War (73–71 BCE), fought by consular appointees
on the Roman side and Spartacus, Crixus, and Oenomaus on the slave side. As the slave
army grew to seventy thousand on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, members equipped
themselves with kitchen knives and stolen weapons, with which they overran and
humiliated the three thousand recruits of Claudius Glaber.
In Calabria, Spartacus defeated two cohorts in spring 72 BCE. By fall, he had recruited
one hundred twenty thousand men. Consul Marcus Licinius Crassus led six legions and
ballista against the rebels and engaged in open combat at the Siler River. Spartacus
attempted a retreat to Sicily, but fell victim to the deceit of Cilician pirates. In the final
battle in 71 BCE, thirty-six thousand slaves, including Spartacus died. As a warning to
other slaves, at least eleven thousand slaves survived to face crucifixion along the Appian
Way.
Summarized by Plutarch, Appian of Alexandria, and Florus, the story of the slave revolt
featured a commoner who galvanized the masses. With music composed by the Russo-
Georgian Aram Khachaturian and a cast of two hundred, on December 27, 1956, the
ballet, called Spartak, summarized Roman history while reflecting the struggle of Russian
citizens against the Nazi invasion of June 22, 1941. The melodramatic music inspired the
choreography of Leonid Iakobson for the Kirov company in Leningrad. Female characters
—Phrygia and Aegina, danced by Maya Plisetskaya and Svetlana Adyrkhayeva—
interjected sexual tension as well as a one-on-one battle between good and evil. For the
production’s success, Khachaturian received the Lenin Prize.
Defiance of Rome
The story of Spartacus muses on the destiny of a lowly man caught up in the political
machinations of colonialism. In the last years of the Roman Republic, the consul Crassus
receives a triumph from the Senate as a reward for military valor. Costumed in armor,
greaves, lace-up boots, and laurel wreath, he enjoys combat spoils, which include the
chained slave Spartacus and his wife Phrygia, captives from Thrace on the northwestern
Black Sea. At the market in scene two, dealers separate males from females before the
sale. Phrygia departs from her love with lamentations of farewell.
In contrast to the tender parting, Khachaturian’s energetic suite arouses the audience
with vivid rhythms of seduction and armed conflict in urban Rome, mimed by a somber
corps de ballet. A power-mad sybarite, Crassus indulges his tastes by adding Phrygia to
his concubines and dancing with Aegina. To create spectacle, he condemns Spartacus to
fight gladiators in visored helmets. In the arena, Spartacus must kill a friend. Enraged at
coercive blood sport, on return to the barracks, the sinewy Thracian bounds over the stage
in successive jetés and raises a slave revolt among men who pledge allegiance to him.
Their loyalty attests to the magnetism of a selfless hero.
Act two begins on the Appian Way with the joy in liberty of runaway bondsmen, who
share their glee with shepherds. In a visual feast at Crassus’s Roman villa, aristocrats
cheer clashes between blindfolded gladiators. The courtesan Aegina proposes group
debauchery, by which she intends to beguile Crassus. Amid feasting and singing,
Spartacus bursts into the villa, humiliates Crassus in single combat, and retrieves Phrygia.
Aegina goads Crassus to apprehend the fugitive slaves. Spartacus joins his wife in an
amorous adagio pas de deux, a marital coupling that counterbalances Aegina’s perversion
of sex.
The final act parallels the paranoia of the Stalinist era. Narrative dance pictures Aegina
spying on the slave camp, where Spartacus and Phrygia share a tent. The siren lures men
of the slave army with seduction, dance, and wine, an allusion to the debauchery of the
Communist high command. Aegina summons Crassus’s soldiers, who spear Spartacus,
leaving a corpse reminiscent of Christ and St. Sebastian. The ballet concludes with the
widow’s sorrow and homage to the slave general’s remains.
A Long-Lived Ballet
Initially, Spartacus corroborated the Stalinist philosophy that personal suffering and death
enabled the Soviet Union to prosper. The concept of the nation’s welfare outweighing the
citizen’s worth derived from Russia’s link with Eastern philosophy. Composer Reinhold
Glière’s The Bronze Horseman, which the Kirov performed in November 1949, reaffirmed
the hypothesis that the Russian public thrived on individual martyrdom like that of
Spartacus and his gladiators. Revivals of the debut occurred under the Bolshoi director
Igor Moiseev in Moscow in 1958 and at the Kremlin under Iakobson in spring 1966.
At the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution in 1967, when the Ministry of
Culture commanded choreographer Yuri Grigorovich to reprise Spartacus, the production
proved that audience interpretation of the arts lay beyond the purview of the Soviet.
Grigorovich restaged the ballet not as a propaganda tool, but as a model of resistance
against Stalinist despotism, a subjugation as far-reaching as that of ancient Rome. The
Bolshoi’s performance championed the arts for their resilience against orthodox
Communism and supported ongoing efforts to communicate with dance companies
outside the Iron Curtain.
 Because of Khachaturian’s stirring marches and pas de deux, his Spartacus suite has
served cinema as background music for Caligula, Mayerling, The Hudsucker Proxy, and
Ice Age. At the 2009 World Figure Skating Championship in Los Angeles, Maxim
Shabalin and Oksana Domnina reenacted ardent husband-wife scenes from Spartacus. In
2014, the Bolshoi performed the ballet featuring Mikhail Lobukhin as Spartacus, Anna
Nikulina as Phrygia, Yuri Baronov as Crassus, and Ekaterina Shipulina in the part of the
traitorous Aegina.
Source: Ezrahi, Christina. Swans of the Kremlin: Ballet and Power in Soviet Russia.
Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012.
STORY BALLET
The evolution of artistic dance wed narrative romance to music composed especially for
stage presentation. The two—story and music—formed story ballet, an extravaganza of
visual and auditory stimuli that dates to the pharaonic narrative dance of ancient Egypt
and extends into the late 1900s with Roland Petit’s The Phantom of the Opera (1980), and
Puss in Boots (1986) and the Philippine Ballet Theatre’s production of Madame Butterfly
(1995). Fascination with narrative dance has continued into the twenty-first century with
the Royal Ballet’s Christmas 2014 production of The Wind in the Willows, a mounting of
Aladdin by the Houston Ballet, and the adaptation of Mary Poppins by English
choreographer Matthew Bourne.
The transformation of literature to dance supplanted the private contemplation of print
works to the public enjoyment of stage movement. At Drury Lane on March 2, 1717,
English dance theorist John Weaver experimented with nonverbal stage narrative by
producing The Loves of Mars and Venus. The mythic romance, danced in London by
Hester Santlow and Louis Dupre, emphasized the interplay of socially approved manners
with passion.
For plot development, the principals and corps de ballet relied on gesture and posturing
involving legs, torso, shoulders, and head. Physiognomy—short, tall, stooped, willowy,
stout—established character and gender stereotypes, usually majestic for royalty, roly-poly
for comic figures, bent for the aged, and hesitant, seductive, or fluttery steps for female
naifs. In 1750, Parisian choreographer Jean-Georges Noverre directed the first ballet
pantomime, Le Jugement de Paris (The Judgment of Paris), a resetting of Greek myth
introducing the Trojan War. From the epic Argonautica (ca. 350 BCE) by Apollonius of
Rhodes, Florentine dancer Gaëtano Vestris advanced the concept of mime with Médée et
Jason (Medea and Jason, 1763), the first unmasked character roles.
Dance as Story
The first narrative ballets abandoned the mythic allegories from ballet d’action, which
aggrandized royalty. In a shift toward democratization of stage works, designers favored
folkloric drama and Gothic episodes of human shape-shifting, disappearance, and
resurrection, a style danced at the Paris Opera in 1823 by Gallo-Italian ballerina Émilie
Bigottini in Cendrillon (Cinderella) and Italo-Swedish-Polish diva Marie Taglioni in
L’Ombre (The Shadow, 1839). Each narrative employed theatrical devices to enact
familiar scenes and supernatural outcomes from children’s storybooks, opera, and drama,
the focus of Danish choreographer August Bournonville’s La Sylphide (1836).
The success of female empowerment in Giselle (1841), La Esmeralda (1844), La Fille
du Pharaon (The Daughter of the Pharaoh, 1862), and Coppélia (1870) preceded the great
French-Russian collaboration on classic story ballets. In the next decade, the Czech
National Ballet targeted family audiences with A Christmas Eve Dream (1886) and A
Fairy Tale about Happiness Found (1889). The productions increased ticket sales as well
as the enrollment of children in beginning dance.
French dancer-choreographer Marius Petipa, the “father of modern ballet,” structured
story ballets from symphonic dance, athletic solos, varied combinations of steps and
rhythms, and spectacles with lasting appeal. In collaboration with Russian composer Peter
Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Petipa directed Swan Lake (1876), The Sleeping Beauty (1890), and
The Nutcracker (1892). To draw more people into the Mariinsky Theatre, Petipa willingly
spent large amounts for lavish costumes, stage machinery, and sets, such as the mouse
regiment and the magic Christmas tree in Nutcracker.
Lacking verbalization, Petipa’s story ballet existed in the harmonization of action with
music. Limited to mute gestures, the physical performance acquired nuance from
leitmotif, a melody or instrumentation illustrating character individuation, such as a
bassoon line for the villain Carabosse or flute for fairies in The Sleeping Beauty.
Tchaikovsky and subsequent composers strove for fluid transition of mood, an essential to
plot development.
Stage Traditions
Amid the rise of abstract dance in the 1900s, beginning with Vaslav Nijinsky’s Jeux
(Games, 1913), adolescent psychologists accounted for revivals of familiar fables and
historic scenarios of Don Quixote, The Nightingale, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Cleopatra,
Hansel and Gretel, and Beauty and the Beast as teen escapes from chaotic home life into
Old World certainties of beauty, order, and passion. In Scandinavia, the debut of Swan
Lake in Helsinki in 1921 won the first Finnish balletomanes to narrative dance.
The story ballet tradition impacted Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s jazz musical On
Your Toes (1936), Agnes de Mille’s smash hit Rodeo (1942), and Richard Rodgers and
Oscar Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (1943) and Carousel (1945). Devoid of the abstractions
and austerity of modern dance, narrative productions relied on orchestration, costuming,
makeup, props, lighting, and mime to express character relationships and actions, such as
the Spanish wedding in Georgian conductor Vakhtang Chabukiani’s Laurencia (1939) and
Finnish composer Ahti Sonninen’s Pessi ja Illusia (Pessi and Illusia, 1952), a forest
romance between a fairy and a troll.
In contrast to the American miniature ballet inserted in musicals, England’s full-length
narrative ballet perpetuated the French-Russian paradigm with Antony Tudor’s Pillar of
Fire (1942) and The Lady of the Camellias (1951), Frederick Ashton’s 1948 versions of
Cinderella and Ondine (1958), Ninette de Valois’s Sherlock Holmes suite for The Great
Detective (1953), John Cranko’s popular The Prince of the Pagodas (1957) for the Royal
Ballet, and Kenneth MacMillan’s House of Birds (1955), 1974 adaptation of Manon, and
Mayerling (1978), the story of the illicit romance of Austria’s Archduke Rudolf with
Marie Vetsera. In 1967, the National Ballet of Canada debuted Heino Heiden’s La Prima
Ballerina, a dance-within-a-dance featuring an incident in the life of diva Marie Taglioni.
Parallel to Eurocentric classics, strict interpretation of story ballet thrived in Japan,
Australia, and China in productions of Hongse Niangzijun (The Red Detachment of
Women, 1964), the account of a peasant’s advancement in the Chinese Communist
hierarchy, and Yugen (Beauty, 1965), an adaptation of a classic Japanese noh play about a
moon goddess. The Korea National Ballet made stage history by performing Prince
Hodong (1988), a traditional tale choreographed by Sung-nam Lim.
In the 2000s, a resurgence of story ballet revived the literalism of Dracula: Pages from
a Virgin’s Diary, performed in 2002 by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, and the heroic myth
Ulysses (2006), introduced by the Royal Ballet of Flanders to the music of Gustav Mahler;
Aladdin (2008), a National Ballet of Japan presentation; and Matthew Bourne’s Lord of
the Flies (2010). The Universal Ballet in Washington, D.C., toured a Korean peasant tale,
Shim Chung (The Blind Man’s Daughter) in a 2001 tour and followed in 2015 with The
Love of Chunhyang, a story of rescued virtue. The twenty-fifth anniversary of Motus O in
Stouffville, Ontario, featured children’s favorites—A Christmas Carol, The Little Prince,
and Little Match Girl. Perhaps as a countermeasure to 9/11 terrors and an unstable world
economy, audiences welcomed Marie (2011), the Houston Ballet’s bio-dance on the
doomed French queen Marie Antoinette; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (2011),
choreographed by Englishman Christopher Wheeldon; and the American Ballet Theatre’s
comic The Bright Stream (2011), a parody of courtship.
In 2012, American choreographer Twyla Tharp introduced Scots fabulist George
Macdonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, a Victorian Gothic tale extolling a child’s
courage, wit, and faith. Applying the glitz of Broadway to ballet, Tharp cast Alessa
Rogers as fourteen-year-old Irene. Tharp’s juvenile troupe dedicated their performance to
Czech writer and freedom fighter Vaclav Havel, who helped to destroy the Berlin Wall. In
2013, the Kansas City Ballet mounted Tom Sawyer. For the 2014–2015 season, the Joffrey
Ballet filled their program with story—a Japanese tale of passion and madness in Raku—
and a revival of Tudor’s Lilac Garden, which revisits the Edwardian arranged marriage, a
standard source of anguish to love-struck girls.
See also ballet d’action; Bourne, Matthew; Cinderella; The Lady of the Camellias;
mime.
Source: Lopukhov, Fedor V., and Stephanie Jordan. Writings on Ballet and Music.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.
SWAN LAKE
See image in photospread.
A classic tale of good, evil, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice, Swan Lake evolved into a
cultural stereotype of the gliding, ethereal prima ballerina courted by a prince. The
metaphor of the fragile bird overcome by a male predator dated to avian myths from
Siberia, Greece, Rome, Peru, and India. Outlined in 1871 and composed from mid-August
1875 to April 1876 by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the four-act presentation bore the original
title The Lake of the Swans. Opening in Moscow at the Bolshoi Theatre on March 4, 1877,
under the direction of a second-rate Czech dance master, Vaclav Reisinger, the ballet drew
on Hungarian ring dances, unpublished operatic waltzes, and a Russian fairy tale for the
transformation of Princess Odette into a swan.
Cast by Vladimir Begichev, director of the Imperial Theatres of Moscow, the ballet
featured Reisinger’s choreography. The primary performers, Pelageya Karpakova and
Victor Gillert, played the roles of Odette and Prince Siegfried. Tchaikovsky provided a set
of leitmotifs, or orchestral themes, identifying the perspective and social behaviors of each
character. The production disappointed the audience, but earned Tchaikovsky 800 rubles,
more than his yearly salary teaching music at the Moscow Conservatory.
A Tale of Deception
The ballet juxtaposes the lifestyles of men and women. In the first act, Prince Siegfried
invites his teacher Wolfgang and hunting buddy Benno to Siegfried’s coming-of-age party.
His mother, the princess, rebukes him for refusing to mature and marry, a duty implicit in
inherited monarchy. She plans a command gala the next night at which he must select a
fiancée. Downcast and stalking a flock of swans, he epitomized the leisure activities of
feckless royalty.
The second act, set at a moonlit lake, contrasts court machinations with the wilds of
nature. Siegfried meets Odette, a lovely swan queen dressed in feathered head circlet and a
tutu fringed in swan’s down. He learns that a sorcerer, Baron Von Rothbart (Redbeard), the
embodiment of ill fate, has transformed her and her twenty-four ladies-in-waiting into a
flock of swans. Ironically, the swans enjoy autonomy from the court by day. Only by night
do the birds return to their human state. To break the curse, Odette must win a beau who is
new to love, a stipulation that fits Siegfried.
Under threat, the vulnerable swan maidens teach four baby swans to dance in unison.
Siegfried attempts to execute Von Rothbart, but halts because the murder would rob
Odette of any future as a real girl. Benno and the hunters aim arrows at the swan maidens
until Siegfried intercedes and the swan queen shields her bird sisters from harm. Into the
night, the prince woos the swan queen in a pas de deux dramatizing the chivalric
idealization of womanhood, a concept found in Arthurian lore and the courtly love of
knights for their ladies. At daybreak, the maidens turn back into birds and withdraw into
the ruins of a chapel.
A subsequent scene parallels the sorcerer’s menace with the rigor of a royal dynasty. At
a costume ball the next evening, Siegfried’s mother organizes his introductions to six
potential brides. In one of stage ballet’s most demanding dual roles, Von Rothbart’s
daughter, the black swan Odile, appears disguised as Odette, whom Siegfried woos for a
bride with a chaste kiss on the hand. The choice of royal wife betrays his proposal to the
swan queen. Dancing to a chaotic orchestration, Siegfried regrets his proposal to Odile.
Too late, the prince realizes that the sorcerer’s trickery has cost him true love.
 The final act returns to the lake, where, amid melancholy strains, Odette grieves that
she has lost her lover to Odile. A romantic figure intent on uniting with his soul mate,
Siegfried hurries on stage to the roll of timpani and begs Odette’s pardon. With grace and
affection, she forgives him. Opposite the beneficent swan queen stands Von Rothbart,
bearer of doom. He demands that the prince wed Odile and that Odette remain a swan.
The ballet poses a third option based on sacrifice. To secure their romance in the
afterlife, the lovers drown themselves in the lake. As the swan maidens return to human
shape, they elude the sorcerer, who dies powerless. In the distance, the prince and Odette
rise into Heaven, united eternally in a triumph of celestial love over earthly evil.
The Variable Ballet
Set to music by the world’s greatest ballet composer, Swan Lake epitomizes the sublimity
and stateliness of nineteenth-century ballet. On stage and in film, novels, children’s
narratives, computer games, musicals, comic mime, television, cartoons and anime, and
the Chinese circus, the original story has a lengthy history of tinkerings and revivals. As
possible resolutions of the ballet d’action, variations end in the deaths of Von Rothbart,
Siegfried, Odette, and/or all three. Tchaikovsky perpetuated the theme of innocence beset
by fate with his creation of the fictional Tatyana in Eugene Onegin (1879) and the historic
Joan of Arc in The Maid of Orleans (1881).
At the Bolshoi Theatre in April 1877, Anna Sobeshanskaja danced the role of Odette
and starred in a duet that ballet master Marius Petipa inserted for her. Three years later,
Belgian choreographer Joseph Peter Hansen failed to popularize the complicated ballet.
Nonetheless, the Tchaikovsky-Reisinger original remained in performance for forty-one
evenings until 1883, when the costumes and sets lapsed into disrepair. The following year,
Hansen extracted act two as The Swans, performed in London at the Alhambra Theatre to
the music of Georges Jacobi. In 1888, a Hungarian extraction of the lake scene for a
concert in Prague honored Tchaikovsky.
With the aid of Tchaikovsky’s brother, librettist Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky, in 1895,
Petipa reprised Swan Lake at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. The salute to
Tchaikovsky, who had died in 1893, featured choreography of acts two and four by Lev
Ivanov, costumes by Yevgeni Ponomaryov, and sets by Ivan Andreyev, Mikhail Bocharov,
and Henrich Levogt. An all-star lineup cast Giuseppina Cecchetti as the princess mother,
Pavel Gerdt as Prince Siegfried, and Pierina Legnani in the part of Odette/Odile, for which
she performed an amazing thirty-two consecutive fouettés (whip turns). Audiences
approved interpolations in Tchaikovsky’s original music and the happy ending that spared
Odette and Siegfried.
For its emotional intensity, in 1911, Michel Fokine, choreographer for the Ballets
Russes, reprised the Petipa Swan Lake in London. He paired two featured dancers,
Mathilde Kschessinska as Odette/Odile and Vaslav Nijinsky as Prince Siegfried. In 1960,
George Balanchine choreographed a formerly lost addition to the 1877 score, the
Tchaikovsky pas de deux, discovered in 1953 in the archives of the Bolshoi Theatre. The
duet remained popular in productions, including the debut by the Australian Ballet in
Sydney in 1962, a 2009 tour of the Mariinsky Ballet in Japan, and, in 2014, world
premieres of Matthew Bourne’s all-male Swan Lake.
See also Bourne, Matthew; Ivanov, Lev.
Source: Brown, David. Tchaikovsky: The Man and His Music. New York: Pegasus
Books, 2007.
LES SYLPHIDES
In 1909 at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, impresario Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets
Russes coordinated a host of talents to present programs of innovative one-act abstracts.
On June 2, they debuted Les Sylphides, an atmospheric one-act reverie starring Tamara
Karsavina, Anna Pavlova, Alexandra Baldina, and danseur noble Vaslav Nijinsky as the
dreamer. Choreographer Michel Fokine and composer Igor Stravinsky collaborated with
set designer Alexander Benois and costumer Léon Bakst in cutting backdrops to a
minimum.
Les Sylphides, identified as a non-storytelling ballet blanc (white ballet), featured
ballerinas in long tulle tutus designed by Bakst. For presentation in St. Petersburg at a
charity benefit in the Mariinsky Theatre to the orchestration of Alexander Glazunov, the
four planners shaped the ballet from Chopiniana or Reverie Romantique: Ballet sur la
Musique de Chopin (1903), an antique character dance set to the polish composer’s piano
sketches.
The Abstract Ballet
The plotless action pictures a lead dancer darting about to charm and entice the poet, a
dreamer who encounters the fine-spun sylphides in a moonlit forest. Both principals solo
to a mazurka and waltz together in fluid unity. Mood music opens on the brief, but
haunting melody of Chopin’s “Prelude in A Major.” Rather than group the corps de ballet
in back, Fokine varied symmetrical lines and clusters in front, at center, and along the
sides as a framework for the principal dancers.
From its debut, Les Sylphides promoted beauty and an airy delicacy that equated with a
romantic experience. Essential to staging, the manipulation of lights depicted the spirits in
full brilliance and in chiaroscuro. The series of dances followed melancholic strains until
the energetic finale, the “Grande Valse Brillante” (Grand Sparkling Waltz). At a magic
moment, the spirits evaporate into the mist, an evanescence suggesting the fragility of
youth and an ephemeral first romance.
Innovative Versions
The performance underwent variations, from the renaming of programs in London and
New York in 1911 to Fokine’s 1916 version at the Metropolitan Opera set to Robert
Schumann’s Papillons (Butterflies). In 1941, Benjamin Britten re-orchestrated the music
for a fee of $300, yielding a light, lyric score that was both innocent and subtly erotic. To
honor Fokine, at his death on August 22, 1942, seventeen companies performed
simultaneous presentations of Les Sylphides.
 In the 1970s, as a focus on geometric dance, troupes featured the shifting, reforming
corps de ballet in Les Sylphides. In 2003, a DVD of Mikhail Baryshnikov’s pairing with
Marianna Tcherkassky broke the symmetry of female spirits with an even, mirrored waltz
punctuated with a series of allongés and low cabrioles. His secondary role amplified
Tcherkassky’s phrasing and the humility of lowered eyes and gentle gestures with hands
and feet. In May 2015, the Hong Kong Ballet chose Les Sylphides as a showpiece of the
speed and precision of Wu Feifei, Jin Yao, and Li Ming.
Source: Goldberg, Halina, ed. The Age of Chopin: Interdisciplinary Inquiries.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.
 • T •
TAGLIONI, MARIE (1804–1884)
Italo-Swedish-Polish star Marie Taglioni revitalized ballet for female performers by
dancing sur la pointe, a demanding style that gave an impression of ethereal lift and
angelic chastity. The daughter of Swedish prima ballerina and painter Hedvig Sophie
Karsten and Italian ballet master Filippo Taglioni, trainer of the Royal Swedish Ballet, she
was born in Stockholm on April 23, 1804. She and her younger brother, dancer Paolo
Nikola “Paul” Taglioni, shared an ample genealogy of ballet masters, musicians, actors,
artists, and stage performers.
The family lived in Vienna until the Napoleonic wars (1803–1815), when they settled in
Paris. Demand for her parents’ expertise as dancer and ballet coach kept them on the move
to Austria, Denmark, and Germany. Even as an itinerant, Marie maintained strong
matrilineal ties with her Swedish mother and maternal grandmother.
Rejected for her homeliness at age six, Marie studied under Jean-François Coulon in
Paris, then joined her father in Vienna. In spite of the fad for stage courtesans, pagans, and
crazed bacchantes, he insisted on decency, naiveté, and modesty of pose. He concealed a
curve in her spine by posing her slightly effacé (tilted forward) with elegant ports de bras
(arm positions) lifted to frame her face. To improve her technique, Filippo rehearsed his
young daughter six hours per day in pointe work and balloner (bouncing) until her debut
in Vienna in 1822. Upon viewing Amalia Brugnoli en pointe in Vienna in 1823 for Paolo
Samengo’s Die Fee und der Ritter (The Fairy and the Knight), Marie decided to learn the
technique.
Marie specialized in elements of story ballet, a passion she shared with partner
Christian Johansson. At the Paris Opera on July 23, 1827, she paired with Gallo-Danish
solo dancer August Bournonville in the debut of a light, airy style en pointe for Le Sicilien
(The Sicilian, 1667), Cendrillon (Cinderella, 1815), and Le Carnaval de Venise (The
Venetian Carnival, 1827), a box office success. To free herself from traditional dance
skirts and reveal exacting footwork, she introduced flesh-toned tights under a buoyant
bell-shaped waltz-length skirt, forerunner of the tutu. Her choice of a sleeveless bodice
and discreetly controlled center-parted hair and tight bun influenced stage styles for
women for over a century, earning them the name “bun heads.”
 Italo-Swedish-Polish star Marie Taglioni revitalized ballet for female performers by dancing sur la pointe, a
demanding style that gave an impression of ethereal lift and angelic chastity to this 1832 production of La
Sylphide. Great Ballet Prints #8.

After Marie’s sensational performance in London in 1829, she and her father secured
their careers with a six-year contract with the Paris Opera and toured England and
northwestern Europe. Taglioni’s stage presence in Le Dieu et la Bayadère (The God and
the Temple Dancer, 1831) and her role as Abbess Hélène in the cemetery scene in Robert
le Diable (Robert the Devil, 1831) inspired kudos from admirers Théophile Gautier,
Hector Berlioz, and Robert Schumann. The media rhapsodized on the romantic toe dancer,
the danseuse who seduced with decorous demi-pointe (half toe). The soft technique, which
prefaced modern dance, suited her fairy-like title role in Zéphire et Flore (The Breeze and
Flora, 1831).
Prima Ballerina
For Marie Taglioni’s vigorous pointe work at Covent Garden in her father’s choreography
of La Sylphide (1832), the adoring corps de ballet festooned her dressing room with
flowers. Because Marie wore out three pairs of kidskin and satin pointe shoes per
performance, fetishists paid high prices for her discarded slippers and wings.
Lithographers sold posters of her in ballet blanc (all white) costume as a sylph, as a
charming villager in Nathalie, ou La Laitière Suisse (Natalie, or The Swiss Milkmaid,
1832), or the transfigured fairy in La Fille du Danube (Daughter of the Danube, 1836).
The dancer amazed ballet fans of both genders. In London, Queen Mary and Princess
Victoria took lessons from Taglioni. Women emulated her conservative hair style and
wispy shawls. Men admired her graceful limbs and tiny feet. Little girls coveted La
Sylphide dolls, sheet music, seraphic dresses, and cakes and caramels named for Marie.
Taglioni’s otherworldly aura coincided with dramatic changes in staged performances,
particularly gas lighting and Gothic settings reflecting the Romantic Movement. During a
six-year residency in St. Petersburg at a salary of £30,000 and summers in Stockholm,
London, and Vienna, she generated anticipation for her poignant role as La Sylphide, an
amalgam of artistry and femininity. Tsar Alexander II attended some two hundred
productions and rewarded the dancer with diamonds.
More stirring roles demonstrated mounting assertiveness in Taglioni. To rid the
orchestra pit of roués peering under dancers’ skirts, she reserved the space at the Paris
Opera for ladies. She clacked castanets during the mazurka in La Gitana (The Gypsy,
1838) and leaped from metal plates on springs in L’Ombre (The Shadow, 1839). In 1843,
her father separated from her for a decade to design dances for the Polish National Ballet,
with which she frequently performed. While costarring with Jules Perrot in La Révolte au
Serail (The Revolt of the Harem, 1844), she mimicked female disgruntlement at
powerlessness and the sexual bondage of harem wives to King Mahomet of Granada.
The Mature Dancer
An illustrious career generated a huge fan base, which, in 1842, demanded forty-two
curtain calls in Vienna. Because the Paris Opera dropped her signature ballet from the
program, fans inscribed the outer walls with the demand, “La Sylphide or Death!” In Jules
Perrot’s Pas de Quatre (Quartet, 1845), a delicate divertissement performed for Queen
Victoria and Prince Albert, Taglioni shared the spotlight with Fanny Cerrito, Lucile Grahn,
and Carlotta Grisi, Perrot’s common-law wife. The following year, Taglioni joined Cerrito
and Grahn in a sequel, Pas des Déesses (Dance of the Goddesses, 1846). She remained in
Vienna until her departure from the stage in June 1851 following a performance of Faust.
In retirement at Lake Como at age forty-three with husband Count Gilbert des Voisins,
the Countess taught ballet, deportment, and social dance while rearing her children, Marie
and Georges Philippe. During the restructuring of the Paris Opera Ballet in 1860, she
served on the committee selecting emerging talent. Newcomers to ballet en pointe formed
a cadre of ethereal Taglioni imitators.
Taglioni returned to ballet in 1860 to choreograph Le Papillon (The Butterfly),
featuring her pupil Emma Livry. Because Taglioni lost her savings during the Franco-
Prussian War (1870–1871) and struggled in widowhood to pay her husband’s gambling
debts, she continued teaching into her late seventies. At her death in Marseilles on April
24, 1884, apocryphal stories circulated about her dance for a highway robber and about
Russian balletomanes cooking and eating her shoes. Art critics honored her delicate stage
presence as “la grande Taglioni, a spirit of the air.” In 1967, the National Ballet of Canada
debuted La Prima Ballerina, a historical dance based on her life.
See also art, ballet in; en pointe; shoes, ballet.
Source: Chazin-Bennahum, Judith. The Lure of Perfection: Fashion and Ballet, 1780–
1830. New York: Routledge, 2005.
TALLCHIEF, MARIA (1925–2013)
The nation’s first prima ballerina, Elizabeth Marie Tallchief succeeded at ballet, company
management, and choreography. Born on January 24, 1925, on the Osage reservation in
Fairfax, Oklahoma, she and younger sister Marjorie Louise were the daughters of Scots-
Irish Ruth Porter of Kansas and Osage oil baron, land owner, and amateur rodeo rider
Alexander Joseph Tallchief. During summers in Colorado Springs, Maria studied piano
and learned steps as a preschooler. Her grandmother, Eliza Tall Chief, taught her
ceremonial spectacles and Osage rituals.
While growing up in Los Angeles, the sisters performed piano concerts and, under tutor
Ernest Belcher, mastered the Cecchetti method. Advancement to classes with David
Lichine and Bronislava Nijinska in 1937 readied Maria for a public performance of
Maurice Ravel’s Boléro (1928) at the Hollywood Bowl. After high school graduation in
Beverly Hills in the class of 1942, she danced in a film musical, Presenting Lily Mars, and
debuted Nijinska’s the neoclassical Etude (1943), an angelic scenario set to J. S. Bach’s
Brandenburg Concerti.
An Early Break
Tallchief relocated to New York City and altered her surname to one word for a Canadian
tour of the flirtatious one-act ballet Gaîté Parisienne. Until her early twenties, she studied
at the School of American Ballet and earned $160 per month dancing with the Ballet
Russe de Monte Carlo, beginning in Chopin Concerto as understudy to Nathalie
Krassovska. In 1943, she replaced Krassovska and performed in Nikolai Rimsky-
Korsakov’s The Snow Maiden, Leonide Massine’s Le Beau Danube, and Nijinska’s
Ancient Russia (1943).
Russian choreographer George Balanchine gave Tallchief a boost with a solo in the
1944 debut of the operetta Song of Norway, for which she understudied the part of
Alexandra Danilova. Balanchine featured Tallchief in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (The
Middle-Class Gentleman), in Apollo at the Paris Opera before Sweden’s King Gustav V,
and at the debut of Night Shadow (1946). On August 16, 1946, Balanchine married Maria.
With the formation of the New York City Ballet, Tallchief became the ensemble’s first
lead dancer. She danced Sugar Plum Fairy, the darling of The Nutcracker, and Eurydice
opposite Nicholas Magallanes, who played the title figure in Orpheus (1948). For the New
York City Ballet in 1949, her performance of Firebird opposite South African dancer
Michael Maule and her partnering with Nicholas Magallanes in The Fairy’s Kiss displayed
precision, speed, and remarkable stage presence. She continued to generate headlines for
virtuosity in Swan Lake, Orpheus, Prodigal Son, and Sylvia and for television appearances
and a lead part in the film Million Dollar Mermaid (1952), simultaneous with the
annulment of her marriage.
Stardom
Tallchief continued to stay in Balanchine works, notably, Allegro Brillante (1956) and
Gounod Symphony (1958). Guest appearances took Tallchief to Chicago, San Francisco,
South America, Japan, Hamburg, and Copenhagen and netted her a star’s annual salary of
$24,000. Following marriage to building contractor Henry D. “Buzz” Paschen in June
1956, she paused in 1959 to give birth to Elise Maria Paschen.
After contracting with American Ballet Theatre in 1960, Tallchief paired with Danish
danseur noble Erik Bruhn, teamed with Maule and the Joffrey Ballet, and became the first
American to dance with the Bolshoi. In July 1961, Dance Magazine featured her on the
cover within months of her pas de deux with Rudolf Nureyev and the lead in Birgit
Cullberg’s Miss Julie. In 1965, Alvin Ailey designed Ariadne, for her, in which she helps
Theseus against the Minotaur.
Tallchief gave guest performances for the Hamburg Ballet and retired to Chicago in
1966. Into the 1970s, she directed the dance troupe of Chicago’s Lyric Opera and formed a
dance academy. In 1981, she joined sister Marjorie in establishing the Chicago City Ballet
and directed Suzanne Farrell in a Thanksgiving presentation of Cinderella.
Tallchief shared her memories in the documentary Dancing for Mr. B (1989) and shaped
the Chicago Festival Ballet. At age seventy-one, she accepted a lifetime achievement
citation at the Kennedy Center, followed by a National Medal of Arts from President Bill
Clinton, induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, Washington Press Woman of
the Year, and a citation from the Chicago History Museum. Following a hip fracture, she
died on April 11, 2013. A mural in the Oklahoma Capitol salutes her membership among
four Native American dancers born in the 1920s.
Source: Kaplan, Larry. Maria Tallchief: America’s Prima Ballerina. Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2005.
TAYLOR, PAUL (1930–)
A brash American modernist, choreographer Paul Taylor designs dance as a microscope
for examining war, sensuality, and social ills. A native of Wilkinsburg outside Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, he was born to physicist Paul Belville Taylor Jr. on July 29, 1930. After his
parents divorced, he and his older siblings—Thomas, Sophia, and Elizabeth “Bettie”
Taylor—grew up in Washington, D.C., under the care of their mother, Elizabeth Rose
Pendleton, the manager of the Brighton Hotel.
In his teens, Taylor suffered from isolation while living with a rural foster family and
attending a boarding school. While enrolled in painting courses on a swimming
scholarship at Syracuse University and working as a chauffeur in summer, he became
enamored of modern dance. Mentored by dance masters Martha Graham and Martha Hill
at Juilliard, he embraced the romanticism and comedy of ballet, which he blended in Hobo
Ballet (1952) and Jack and the Beanstalk (1954) with spontaneous gestures, pedestrian
postures, and down-to-earth phrasing.
The Paul Taylor Company
After college, Taylor formed a company in 1954 to interpret his eclectic dances set to
scores from the medieval mass and motets, Renaissance and classical music, ragtime,
reggae, klezmer, jitterbug, elevator music, and avant-garde composers. His first successes
explored pure movement in 3 Epitaphs (1956), a primal scenario set to New Orleans
funeral jazz, and surveyed human interaction in space in Duet (1957). For George
Balanchine’s New York City Ballet, Taylor danced a solo variation of Episodes (1959).
Simultaneously, he served Martha Graham’s dance company after 1955 in solos for
Aegisthus, Hercules, and Theseus in three Greek works—Clytemnestra (1958), Alcestis
(1960), and Phaedra (1962), the myth of a fatal love between the title figure and
Hippolytus, her stepson.
After an international tour and the debut of Tablet at Italy’s 1960 Spoleto Festival,
Taylor won respect in the dance world for the unique musicality and inventive crouches
and leaps in Junction (1961) and his first classic, Aureole (1962), which premiered at the
American Dance Festival in New London, Connecticut. He introduced American flag
motifs and themes with From Sea to Shining Sea (1965), later performed by Mikhail
Baryshnikov, and chose a Beethoven string quartet for Orbs (1966), in which Taylor
performed the Sun in a silver-spangled white unitard. He shocked audiences with the
grimly carnivalesque Big Bertha (1970) and pleased them with Book of Beasts (1971), a
monster tale later danced by Rudolf Nureyev.
After Taylor’s tours of Europe and Mexico and retirement from dance at age forty-four
because of hepatitis, he designed the mystic scenario Runes (1975), a study of
abandonment in Esplanade (1975), a contrast between animal instinct and human foibles
in Cloven Kingdom (1976), and Airs (1978), which debuted in Syracuse, New York, to
concerti by George Friedrich Handel. Taylor’s subsequent stage experiments with dance
genre ranged from a droll pastoral, Arden Court (1981), to primal ritual in To Make Crops
Grow (1982).
Creative Drive
While avoiding the Jungian psychology of Martha Graham’s canon, Taylor permeated
enchaînements with lyrical humanism and technical challenge, the hallmarks of Sunset
(1983), danced to a serenade by Edward Elgar, and Last Look (1985), that some interpret
as a fearful view of a mental ward. Shortly after exploring his view of an insular American
religious community in the Emmy-winning Speaking in Tongues (1991), he staged an
indigenous U.S. ballet, Company B (1991), commissioned by the Kennedy Center and
Houston Ballet to the Andrews Sisters singing “Oh, Johnny,” “I Can Dream, Can’t I?,”
“Bei Mir Bist du Schön,” and other World War II tunes.
In 1993, Taylor formed Taylor 2, a six-member ensemble suited to venues limited in
size or finance. In subsequent years, his two companies toured as far abroad as China and
India. WNET public television filmed The Wrecker’s Ball: Three Dances by Paul Taylor
(1996) and two segments of Great Performances: Dance in America. In 1998 the Four
Oaks Foundation produced Dancemaker, a documentary on his career, which earned an
Oscar nomination.
Taylor staged Piazzolla Caldera (1997), an engaging corps de ballet number danced in
heels, black hose, and tights to a sultry Argentine tango. He conveyed the post-9/11
spiritual revival with Promethean Fire (2002), a progression of body mechanics set to J. S.
Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue,” and reprised the hippie era in Changes (2008), set to the
Mamas and the Papas singing “California Dreamin’,” a 1960s folk-rock anthem. For
House of Joy (2012), his ensemble pantomimed character reactions in a brothel.
Taylor won citations from Dance Magazine and Capezio and earned from Vanity Fair
magazine the title of world’s greatest choreographer. His awards include Kennedy Center
Honors, a MacArthur genius grant, American Dance Festival Award, French Legion of
Honor, Guggenheim fellowship, a National Medal of Arts from President Bill Clinton, and
honoraria from the New York City mayor and state governor and Library of Congress.
While he continues to create as of 2015, his sixteen-member troupe stages a repertoire of
140 dances.
Source: Bremser, Martha, and Lorna Sanders, eds. Fifty Contemporary
Choreographers. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2010.
TECHNIQUE
Training in pure and precise ballet technique develops muscle memory of the basic, most
pleasing aspects of dance. From around 1425, Italian theorist and composer Domenico da
Piacenza, founder of the Lombard school of dance, formalized five principles of dance
execution: aere, maniera, misura, misura di terreno, and memoria. Renaissance standards
developed dance from the airy first category to the second, smooth side-to-side elision.
The third category coordinated flexible combinations involving a range of tempos from
adagio to allegro. The last two divisions characterized body postures and the
memorization of step combinations for la danse figurée (patterned choreography), which
directed the audience toward stage performances.
From the late 1500s, group dance involved performers and viewers in partnering and
line dance, often in parallel rows. The polonaise, a self-conscious Eastern European
processional, rose in importance among nobles as a formal parade before the royal court.
The precise march rhythm advanced prim couples in two steps on arched feet. The third
step involved the flexed knee on the working leg and a forward thrust of the opposite leg.
By 1790, the polonaise reflected the nationalism of proud Poles.
Professionalism in the 1700s placed demands on choreographers to standardize ballet
for ease of instruction and performance, a task that Vienna’s Charles VI placed on
Austrian dancer-choreographer Franz Hilverding in 1711. Eighteenth-century French
theoretician Jean Georges Noverre directed troupes away from the stylized pomp of Louis
XIV and his court presentations toward the flawless technique of ballet d’action (theatrical
dance). To ally mimicry with dance, in 1755, he studied at the Theatre Royal in Drury
Lane under Shakespearean actor David Garrick. In the 1770s, Gaëtano Vestris introduced
facial mobility free of masking as a forerunner of demi-caractère (melodrama), a merger
of classical technique and theatrical mime.
Gendered Dance
A gender shift in 1827 resulted from the introduction of dancing sur la pointe, the
specialty of Italo-Swedish-Polish dancer Maria Taglioni. One of the most influential divas
of ballet, she mastered toe dancing under the rigorous coaching of her father, dance master
Filippo Taglioni. The poignant feminization of La Sylphide (1832) returned women to
dominant roles.
In place of muscular danseurs performing jetés, Marie Taglioni inspired a generation of
women to tone backs and thighs for the difficult bourrées on toe. Her demure ballet blanc
(dance in white) injected modesty in place of the harridans, pagans, and gypsies of popular
dance. Toe work remained a standard challenge to future ballerinas, who emulated
Taglioni’s effortless execution. In Scandinavia around 1840, August Bournonville directed
the Danish school of ballet away from Taglioni’s gendered polarity. Instead, he taught the
Royal Danish Ballet to abandon flamboyant male leaps and coy affectations for ballerinas.
In place of overacting, he promoted a healthy energy and fluidity in all dancers.
To strip dance of its courtly beginnings, Bournonville framed combinations in humble
actions requiring lowered heads, shoulders, and hands. With downcast eyes, troupes
focused on lyric choreography rather than theatrics. In 1860, Bournonville’s pupil,
Christian Johansson, a pedagogue at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, ventured
away from French delicacy to reequip male dancers with a heroic bravura derived from
dexterity and precision.
Conservative instruction continued to dominate southern Europe. Under Blasis’s
traditional pedagogy, students toned core muscles at the barre six days a week. They wore
professional slippers, which shaped heel, toe, instep, and metatarsus for flexibility and
stability. With head, torso, hips, and feet in alignment, they practiced even breathing and
precise proficiency devoid of personal interpretation.
In opposition to the hyperextensions of romantic dance and Gallo-Danish ballet master
August Bournonville’s épaulement, the carriage of the torso, Carlo Blasis, Italian dance
master at the La Scala School of Ballet in the 1840s, adapted the dominant female ballet
by featuring energetic, swaggering males opposite females in svelte, enticing attitudes. He
insisted on full turnout of legs and feet parallel to the shoulders for clean, aesthetic lines
paralleling port de bras (arm positions). He emphasized the bold majesty of male roles
opposite the enticing grace of female footwork. In 1922, Manual of the Theory and
Practice of Classical Theatrical Dancing distilled Blasis’s methods through the classroom
practices of Italian dance master Enrico Cecchetti, founder of the Cecchetti method.
Cecchetti grouped the weekly regimen into a set of exercises for each of six days.
Expressive Modernism
The deliberate neoclassical deconstruction of ballet in the 1920s by Russian choreographer
George Balanchine preceded the inroads of modernism and contemporary dance that
outraged Russo-Armenian traditionalist Agrippina Vaganova. The deliberate violation of
balletic grace contributed to the expressionism of the 1930s. Kurt Jooss, German
choreographer of the one-act pacifist ballet The Green Table (1932), developed a
technique he called essentialism. To mime the timeless essence of character poses, he
created combinations from standard steps, but superimposed the profiteer’s oily stealth;
the ambassadors’ fist clenching, head jerks, and finger thrusts; and the skeleton’s robotic
march as dramatic enhancements to the theme of wartime exploitation and death.
On the Pacific coast in the 1940s and 1950s, dance teacher and movie choreographer
Lester Horton compounded global dance components from Indonesia, Japan, the
Caribbean, American jazz, and Indian movement by Ojibwa, Penobscot, Red River, and
Iroquois tribes. The Horton style, a holistic theory underlying Revue Le Bal Caribe
(1953), coordinated torso strength with communication from eye, head, and limbs, a basis
for the stage success of Carmen De Lavallade, Janet Collins, James Mitchell, and Alvin
Ailey. By integrating dancers in the first U.S. multiracial academy, Horton broadened
stage performance to a world dance heritage consisting of combinations and themes from
varied ethnicities.
Alvin Ailey’s Revelations (1960) launched the Horton style with slow enchaînements,
hip-swaying ensemble V’s and parallel lines, and partnering that raised female figures
from historic black bondage. Simultaneous with Ailey’s loosening of postures, Tartar
master dancer Rudolf Nureyev introduced male dancers to a purer, more precise piqué
arabesque and renversés en arrière (reversed direction) as a means of raising the stature of
men in duets. In 1974, the defection of Russo-Latvian star Mikhail Baryshnikov to
Toronto tantalized a huge fan base with his airy changements, triple cabrioles, and
mesmerizing ballon, the illusion of remaining suspended in air during jetés (leaps).
The layering of modern gestures, horizontal glides, and emotive facial expressions with
balletic postures and steps set modern dance apart from its historic past. Jir˘í Kylián, a
Czech choreographer for the Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT) developed the corps de
ballet into three-dimensional geometric shapes. In August 1981, the NDT staged Kylián’s
Forgotten Land, a series of duets that emphasized organic ballet, a coordination of steps
and movements with breathing. For Svadebka (Village Wedding, 1982), a resetting of
Bronislava Nijinska’s Russian peasant nuptial from Les Noces (The Wedding, 1923), he
featured soloists emerging from a central wedge of performers. To retain a sense of unified
emotion, the separate figures converged into the ensemble.
See also barre, warm-up; Balanchine, George; Blasis, Carlo; en pointe; folkloric ballet;
partnering; terminology, ballet; Vaganova, Agrippina.
Source: Warren, Gretchen W. Classical Ballet Technique. Clermont, FL: Paw Prints,
2008.
TERMINOLOGY, BALLET
See image in photospread.
As ballet evolved from amateur court entertainments into an artistic profession,
choreographers incorporated a vocabulary drawn from French originals. Seventeenth-
century dance focused on the geometrics of la danse figurée (patterned choreography).
The stage manager grouped couples in folk and social dances and the polonaise, a
promenade that followed two forward steps with a thrust of the leg. The sudden shift in the
processional added a ballon (bounce) to the advance, one of the few dramatic movements
permitted by boned corsets, panniered skirts, and tightly buttoned uniforms. By 1700, the
original attitudes and moves attained style with the addition of chassé, jeté, sissone,
entrechat, pirouette, and cabriole. In 1758, Austrian dance master Franz Hilverding
performed for the Russian court of Tsarina Elisabeth II a skillful enchaînement
(combination)—entrechat quatre et pirouette, a four-beat leap followed by a turn.
The nineteenth century introduced fused genre, particularly Salvatore Viganò’s
coreodramma (dance drama), a merger of lyric ballet and graphic mime in 1804 at Milan’s
La Scala. Italian theorist Carlo Blasis, subsequent dance master of the La Scala Ballet
School, collected a glossary of neoclassic ballet terms in Elementary, Theoretical, and
Practical Treatise on the Art of Dance (1820), the first comprehensive manual on ballet
technique. He outlined the parameters of contrasting division of dance—dans classique
(serious ballet), demi-caractere (melodramatic), and comic or grotesque dance. His
introduction of attitude progressed to variations and combinations, notably, pirouette en
attitude (turn with back leg bent upward at ninety degrees).
The epochal performance of La Sylphide at Covent Garden in 1832 filled critiques and
news reports with the terminology of romantic ballet, particularly pas de shal (shawl
dance). Theorists discussed the alterations that diva Marie Taglioni made to toe shoes for
her steps in demi-pointe (half toe) and en pointe (on toe). The seasons of stage works
featuring nymphs, elves, wilis, peris, ghosts, and fairies, such as La Fille du Danube
(Daughter of the Danube, 1836) and L’Ombre (The Shadow, 1839), introduced the
descriptive ballet blanc, a reference to gauzy, all-white costumes, some fitted with tulle or
organza wings and graced with flower garlands to symbolize the elusive ideal of romance.
 In the 1840s, Danish choreographer August Bournonville reduced flamboyant
movements of French and Russian romanticists by limiting proud thrusts of head, hands,
and feet. His placement of the working foot sur le coup de pied (around the ankle)
suppressed affectation. By directing the épaulement (torso carriage) toward tiny
battements (beats of the feet), relevés en pointe (rising on toe), and gargouillades (leg
circles to the side), the Bournonville method gave the illusion of floating.
Bournonville allied closure of steps with downbeats to emphasize charm and
effortlessness rather than physicality. For the pas de deux (duets), he banished virtuoso
posturing by equalizing roles of male and female and directing their intentions toward
each other rather than to the audience. In 1860, his pupil, Swedish dancer Christian
Johansson, an instructor at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, retermed changement
de pieds as flic-flac, an onomatopoetic description of the quick battements.
The rise of female roles en pointe (on toe) diminished male dancers to the supports for
virtuoso ballerina performances. Further reducing men to stage props, the first production
of Coppélia (1870) featured a female principal en travesti (in a “breeches” part), a
crossing of genders for the titillation of Paris sophisticates. The substitution caused the
media to contrast the contributions of la danseuse (female dancer) with le danseur (male
dancer).
Theatrical Ballet
Dance innovations of the late nineteenth century demanded new terms, as with figurants
(auxiliary dancers), an addition to the corps de ballet for Czech director Augustin Berger’s
presentations of Excelsior (1881), a spectacular tableau surveying the Industrial
Revolution. The media stressed the term pas de caractère (character dance), an
individualized phrasing that French ballet master Marius Petipa devised for The Sleeping
Beauty (1890) to identify the Bluebird, Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, Cinderella,
Beauty and the Beast, Puss in Boots, White Cat, Lilac Fairy, and her foil, the wicked sprite
Carabosse. Each received an entrée, a promenade setting the character’s walk, attitude,
and role in the story as well as an ensemble role in the apotheosis, in which Apollo crowns
the gloire des fées (glory of the fairies). At the peak of exaltation of the toe dancer, Petipa
created the term prima ballerina assoluta (supreme first ballerina) in 1894 to honor
Pierina Legnani, a performer he considered the unrivaled best dancer in Europe.
Michel Fokine, the choreographic genius of the Ballets Russes, enlarged on the
meaning of en dehors (to the outside) and en dedans (to the inside). In Petrouchka (1911),
Fokine directed the Moor’s swagger and self-satisfaction to the other dancers and
audience. The Moor’s opposite, the title figure, expressed the frustration of incarceration
in a stuffed doll body with the inner-directed spinal droop of the chronic depressive.
Beaten down by the puppet master, Petrouchka had no options other than despair and
defeat.
In 1922, Manual of the Theory and Practice of Classical Theatrical Dancing
standardized the teaching method of Italian ballet master Enrico Cecchetti. He introduced
the five positions with four variations: à terre (on the ground), pointe tendue (with
stretched toe), demi-position (with raised toe), and en l’air (off the floor). The text
emphasized that a strong instep elevated pas sautés (jumps) by bearing the body’s full
weight.
In Russia, the onus of Soviet propaganda forced the dance toward a grim realism, the
basis for dram-balet (propaganda ballet), an esthetic extracted from theatrical drama. In
Leningrad (formerly St. Petersburg), proletkult, a socialist cultural redaction by Kirov
director Vsevolod Meyerhold, regimented the Mariinsky ensemble like military recruits.
Dancers aped the robotic actions of factory laborers and soldiers. Epitomized by the Kirov
performance of The Fountain of Bakhchisarai (1934), state suppression of imaginative
mime, solos, and large corps de ballet reduced performances to a one-dimensional field
honoring military heroes and the drudges of collective farms. Under the influence of
pedagogue Agrippina Vaganova and her focus on port de bras, by the late 1950s and
1960s, the Kirov resurrected Russian enthusiasm for symphonic dance.
In 1976, the revival of story ballet in stage works created needs for the terms
“neoromanticism” and “bio-ballet,” which described such historic narrative dance as Ang
Sultan (The Sultan, 1973), Farah (1976), Ivan the Terrible (1977), and Nijinsky (2000), a
specialty of Tokyo Ballet. In Hamilton, Ontario, the National Ballet of Canada premiered
La Prima Ballerina (1967), an episode from the life of diva Marie Taglioni. By picturing
her in the hands of bandits and liberated to appear on stage, choreographer Heino Heiden
produced a ballet-within-a-ballet, a pastiche that delighted viewers at the World Festival of
Expo 67. The Toronto-based ensemble also debuted French-Canadian Jean Bernard
Grand-Maître’s Frames of Mind (1993), a deconstruction of classicism, a postmodern
form of technical analysis drawn from literature.
See also Barre, Warm-up; Pas de Deux.
Source: Kassing, Gayle. Beginning Ballet. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2013.
TETLEY, GLEN (1926–2007)
A controversial contributor to hybrid ballet in Australia, England, Germany, Canada, and
the United States, Glen Tetley merged classical lyricism with modern dance. A native
Ohioan from Cleveland, he was born Glenford Andrew Tetley Jr. on February 3, 1926, to
Mary Eleanor Byrne and businessman Glenford Andrew Tetley Sr. With sisters Shirley
and Byrne, Tetley grew up in a Baptist household outside Pittsburgh. He studied chemistry
at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania and served in the U.S. Navy.
While finishing his education at New York University in 1948, Tetley was awed by the
American Ballet Theatre’s Romeo and Juliet and changed his career plans from medicine
to dance. He trained under Antony Tudor at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School and
collaborated with modernist Martha Hinkson, a teacher of Martha Graham. On Broadway,
he joined the Joffrey Ballet and danced in Hanya Holm’s Ballet Ballads (1948), Kiss Me,
Kate (1948), and Out of This World (1950).
An Eclectic Career
Tetley owed his versatility to multiple interests and carefully garnered energies. In 1951,
he danced the role of a shepherd on NBC-TV in Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the
Night Visitors, the first televised opera. In one year—1959—Tetley choreographed
Mountain Way Chant for Alvin Ailey’s American Dance Theater, performed the role of the
snake in Martha Graham’s Embattled Garden, and soloed in Agnes de Mille’s Juno, a
ballet rich in Irish traditions. In 1961, he danced in Jerome Robbins’s On the Town, the
beginning of an eclectic philosophy of stage movement.
For the Glen Tetley Dance Ensemble, in 1962, the choreographer featured three
commedia dell’arte characters in Pierrot Lunaire (Pierrot by Moonlight), starring himself
in whiteface dancing a gymnastic pantomime to the atonal cantata of Arnold Schoenberg.
The work was the first of his canon of sixty ballets that grew to contain Sargasso (1964),
The Anatomy Lesson (1964), Ricercare (Etude, 1966), Ziggurat (1967), and a tai chi suite,
Embrace Tiger and Return to Mountain (1968) for the Rambert Dance Company (RDC).
Because Tetley’s work gained more credence in northern Europe than in the United States,
in 1969, he chose to direct the Nederlands Dans Theatre.
Tetley experimented with sexual themes and nudity in Mutations (1970) and chose an
electronic score for the audacious Field Figures (1970) for the Royal Ballet. He cast Lynn
Seymour and Rudolf Nureyev in the avant-garde Laborintus (1972) and debuted a quartet,
Gemini (1973), with the Australian Ballet in Sydney. While heading the Stuttgart Ballet,
he featured Marcia Haydée in Voluntaries (1973), honoring choreographer John Cranko,
and adapted Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) for the Bavarian State Opera
Ballet in Munich. At the request of Erik Bruhn, in 1976, Tetley relocated to Toronto to
lead the National Ballet of Canada.
Broadened Opportunities
Still vigorously pursuing varied options, Tetley premiered Sphinx (1977) at the Kennedy
Center, cast Natalia Makarova in Contredances (1979) for the American Ballet Theatre,
and, for the RDC, featured Christopher Bruce as Prospero in The Tempest (1979), adapted
from a Shakespearean fantasy set in Bermuda. He mounted Dances of Albion—Dark
Night: Glad Day (1980) for the Royal Ballet, Odalisque (1984) to the music of Erik Satie,
Pulcinella (1984) for the London Festival Ballet, and Revelation and Fall (1984) for the
Australian Dance Theatre. On commission from the National Ballet of Canada, he created
Alice (1986), a psychological examination of Alice in Wonderland, and Tagore (1989), a
salute to the Indian poet. Tetley softened his stark physicality for his late works, La Ronde
(1995), featuring Darcey Bussell, the rapturous Amores (Loves, 1997), and Lux in
Tenebris (Light in Shadows, 1999), an elegy commissioned by the Houston Ballet
honoring his mate, dance master Scott Douglas.
Tetley received acclaim from the Royal Academy of Dance, Tenant Caledonian Award,
Ohioana Career Medal, Royal Norwegian Order of Merit, and Priz Italia RAI Prize,
awarded for a televised Firebird danced by the Royal Danish Ballet. To celebrate his
eightieth birthday, the Norwegian National Ballet performed The Tempest. When Tetley
died of melanoma in West Palm Beach, Florida, on January 26, 2007, the dance
community proclaimed him the founder of fusion dance, a merger of multiple ballet styles.
See also Nederlands Dans Theater.
 Source: Bremser, Martha, and Lorna Sanders, eds. Fifty Contemporary
Choreographers. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2010.
THARP, TWYLA (1941–)
A model of wit and energized dance expression, Twyla Tharp courted public involvement
in the arts by incorporating ballet with jazz, country music, and pop culture. A native of
rural Portland, Indiana, she was born on July 1, 1941, to piano teacher Lucille Confer and
car and tractor dealer William Albert Tharp. The eldest of five, Tharp learned heartland
values from two sets of Quaker grandparents. At age eight, she relocated to Rialto,
California, with her sister Twanette and twins Stanford and Stanley and helped operate the
family drive-in movie theater.

A model of wit and energized dance expressionism,

Twyla Tharp courted public involvement in the arts
by incorporating ballet with jazz, country music, and
pop culture. Photo by Greg Gorman, Alexander
Brady, education director, www.twylatharp.org.

While enrolled at Pacific High School, Tharp studied dance, gymnastics, baton, piano,
French, and German, a mélange that inspired her eclectic philosophy of stage
performance. Transferred from Pomona College in 1961, she pursued art education in
New York at Barnard and developed studio practice routines with Martha Graham and
Merce Cunningham. After a short-lived marriage to hippie student Peter Young in 1962,
she entered Paul Taylor’s ensemble and attended concerts by Alvin Ailey, José Greco, and
Anna Sokolov.
The Tharp Style
By age twenty-four, Tharp created her first ballet, Tank Dive (1965), and began training
her own company of dancers in disjointed movements, detached style, and enchaînements
out of synchrony, sometimes executed behind the audience. Marriage to a second husband,
minimalist painter Robert Huot, and motherhood to son Jesse Alexander in 1971 did not
slow her career. She adapted Jelly Roll Morton’s New Orleans blues for Eight Jelly Rolls
(1971) and Bix Beiderbecke’s “In the Mist” for The Bix Pieces (1971), which incorporated
baton twirling.
Tharp specialized in contrast. For The Raggedy Dances (1972), she allied Scott Joplin’s
“Maple Leaf Rag” and “The Entertainer” with Mozart’s “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”
The same mix of era marked As Time Goes By (1973), a traditional ballet set to a Franz
Joseph Haydn symphony. She continued experimenting with the scores of Fats Waller,
Bob Dylan, Jimmy Yancey, James Brown, and Chuck Berry and Joseph Lamb’s
“Bohemian Rag.”
On a commission from Robert Joffrey for a Chicago premiere, Tharp chose the Beach
Boys’ pop songs for Deuce Coupe (1973), which marked her entry into hybrid dance. The
American Ballet Theatre (ABT) commissioned Tharp’s flirty, comic Push Comes to Shove
(1976), an avant-garde work starring Russo-Latvian soloist Mikhail Baryshnikov in the
role of a slinky-hipped ladies’ man. For Happily Ever After (1976), Tharp tapped the
American “Texas Quickstep” and “Alabama Jubilee” for stars Rose Marie Wright and
Tom Rawe and Tony Rice’s fiddler’s tune “Billy in the Low Ground” for Tharp’s cameo
solo.
Career Moves
Tharp embraced challenges from the extremes of the entertainment industry for her
unpredictable dance patterns. She designed segments of “Electric Blues” and “Aquarius”
in the cult film Hair (1978) for United Artists and Donald O’Connor’s performance of “I
Could Love a Million Girls” in Ragtime (1980) for Paramount. She advanced to Broadway
to dance the part of Jane in When We Were Very Young (1980), choreographed electronic
percussion in The Catherine Wheel (1981), and a poorly received American adaptation of
Singin’ in the Rain (1985), starring Don Correia and Mary D’Arcy. In this same period,
she choreographed White Nights (1985), a popular ballet film starring Baryshnikov
opposite tap dancer Gregory Hines in a soft shoe spoof of kick boxing.
Under contract to ABT in 1988, Tharp produced sixteen works for the ensemble. In
1991, Baryshnikov toured the United States with a Tharp stage spectacle, Cutting Up. She
staged a rock ballet, Movin’ Out (2000), a period piece from the Vietnam War danced to
Billy Joel’s tunes “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me,” “Piano Man,” and “Big Shot.” The
production won Tharp a Tony and Drama Desk Award for choreography and nominations
for direction. In addition, she holds the 2004 National Medal of the Arts, a Capezio Dance
Award, university doctorates, MacArthur genius grant, and honors from Dance Magazine
and the Kennedy Center.
 Source: Siegel, Marcia B. Howling Near Heaven: Twyla Tharp and the Reinvention of
Modern Dance. New York: Macmillan, 2006.
TOKYO BALLET
For some seventy years, the Tokyo Ballet (TB) has infused Japanese audiences with a
delight in professional dance. As early as 1920, a performance of The Dying Swan by
touring ballerina Anna Pavlova aroused interest in classical story dance. During World
War II, Miki Ichiro, director of the Tokyo Ballet Theater, envisioned a great future for an
expanded Japan and global fame for an art program highlighted by ballet.
In August 1946, intercultural dance returned to postwar Tokyo with a production of
Swan Lake, danced before stage sets painted by Fujita Tsuguharu. Because of the
enthusiasm of art lovers Masao Shimizu and ballerina Mikiko Matsuyama, the nation
adapted Russian ballet into a Japanese genre in 1948 and fostered a Sino-Japanese cultural
exchange. Amity between Japan and Russia earned Japanese ballet a subsidy from the
Soviet Ministry of Culture and the advice of two teachers visiting from the Bolshoi,
Alexei Varlamov and Sulamith Messerer.
The Tokyo company, originally called the Tchaikovsky Memorial Tokyo Ballet, formed
in 1964 with pupils recruited from Tokyo Ballet Gakko, the city’s first classical dance
academy. Founded in 1960 by Koichi Hayashi, the school offered pupils a technically
exacting Russian-style curriculum featuring the Vaganova method. Initially, the Tokyo
ensemble presented Asian and Western works under the direction of Tadatsuko Sasaki.
Multicultural Minglings
In 1966, the troupe scheduled its maiden tour to Leningrad, Kazan, and Moscow, Russia.
Trained in the fine arts, Sasaki expanded members’ horizons with Tokyo’s World Ballet
Festival and with guest performances by the Royal Danish Ballet, American Ballet
Theatre, and Paris Opera Ballet. The Japanese dancers received tutoring by such experts as
Cuban instructor Roberto Alonso, Sino-West Indian choreographer Ailian Dai, and French
diva Claude Bessy. The company also surveyed demonstrations by Italian soloist Roberto
Bolle and Roman principal dancer Viviana Durante.
In 1970, TB visited three European venues—Turkey, Germany, and Italy. At La Fenice
Theater in Venice in 1975, the ensemble performed Orient-Occident, featuring Lee San Ha
and Makoto Fukuyama paired to the music of Greek-French composer Iannis Xenakis. In
subsequent years, the company added Argentina and Brazil to their itineraries as well as
London; Paris; Washington, D.C.; Denver; San Francisco; and Donostia, Spain.
Performances outside Asia brought the total to 710 presentations in thirty countries,
including Versailles, Berlin, Milan, Athens, and Vienna. Connections with global arts
enticed more foreign companies to dance for Tokyo audiences.
By 1981, the Japanese government subsidized the Performing Arts Foundation to fund
half the ensemble’s cost. TB raised the other half through ticket sales. At the four-level
Tokyo Bunka Kaikan Theatre, the group repertoire incorporated standard narrative ballet
—Sylvia, Swan Lake, Giselle, La Fille du Danube (The Girl of the Danube), Raymonda,
Don Quixote, Paquita, La Sylphide, Don Giovanni, La Bayadère, and Les Sylphides—as
well as early twentieth-century classics—Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), The
Firebird, Le Spectre de la Rose (The Spirit of the Rose), L’Après-Midi d’un Faune
(Afternoon of a Faun), Le Palais de Cristal (The Crystal Palace), and The Lady of the
Camellias, featuring principals Naoki Takagishi and Yukari Saito.
Hybrid Ballet
TB achieved a world first in 1986 by debuting Maurice Béjart’s The Kabuki, an amalgam
of Kabuki and samurai costumes, chant, shamisen instrumentation, and libretto featuring
conventional ballet steps set to the original score of Toshiro Mayuzumi. Additional
productions included Seven Haiku of the Moon (1989) and Bugaku (1962), M (1993),
Perfect Conception (1994), and two for the new millennium, Seasons: The Colors of Time
and Maurice Béjart’s Bhakti (1968), set to the traditional music of India. In February 2000,
primo ballerino Yasuyuki Shuto performed Nijinsky, a stellar bio-ballet that sold out the
Parco Theater for three weeks. The 2007 Asahi Performing Arts Prize honored the
company’s artistic achievements.
In the 2010s, the eighty-six-member ensemble drew professional dancers to
productions, including Marcelo Gomes, Denis Matvienko, Polina Semenova, and
Japanese-American dancer Yoko Ichino. Choreographers Béjart, John Neumeier, and Jir˘í
Kylián accepted commissions from the company and created Béjart’s Danses Grecques,
Neumeier’s Spring and Fall (1998), and Kylián’s Stepping Stones (1991), an emblematic
survey of ancient cultures that have influenced civilization. During the 2013–2014 season,
the Tokyo Ballet combined choreographer Harald Lander’s salute to barre work in Études
with productions of Carmen and Marguerite and Armand for adults with a children’s
feature, The Sleeping Beauty.
To increase Tokyo Ballet’s world outreach, in 2014, the company appointed Ukrainian
dancer Vladimir Malakhov as ensemble artistic director and coach of talented youth.
Malakhov and guests Manuel Legris and Sylvie Guillem contributed to the success of the
company’s fiftieth anniversary gala, which featured scenes from Eugene Onegin, Bolero,
Petrouchka, and La Bayadère (The Temple Dancer), a tragic romance set in India.
Source: Wetmore, Kevin J., Jr. Revenge Drama in European Renaissance and Japanese
Theatre: From Hamlet to Madame Butterfly. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
TOTENTANZ
The German version of danse macabre (dance of death) communicated the cynicism of
fourteenth-century survivors of the Black Plague as they performed a round dance in
paintings, woodcuts, frescoes, tales, symphonies, passion plays, and tableaux. In each
representation, the personified Death, grinning his indifference to suffering and demise,
equalized the outlook for participants, from emperor to peasant. In their procession hell-
ward, Death’s candidates shared a future of annihilation and decay.
At the Elysée Palace in Paris on July 3, 1932, German Tanztheater (dance theater)
founder Kurt Jooss of Stuttgart debuted a surreal antiwar allegory, The Green Table,
subtitled Danse Macabre in Eight Scenes. The expressionist satire restaged the medieval
Dance of Death. During the advance of Nazism over the Weimar Republic, ineluctable
death images, set to piano music by Jewish composer Fritz A. Cohen, highlighted the
fruitlessness of European peace talks and the horrific results of insincere arbitration. For
postures, Jooss emulated eukinetics, the analytic body language initiated by Austro-
Hungarian dance theorist Rudolf von Laban.
Jooss based his grotesque caricatures on the Lubecker Totentanz (Dance of the Dead,
1463), Bernt Notke’s late medieval painting of mortality’s stalking of humankind. In a
chaotic dance idiom, Jooss’s libretto hammered home the inevitability of death, which
overtakes various archetypes on the same nefarious terms by which they lived. Posing
masked politicians in black around a conference table, the opening scenario, set to an
ironic tango, declared with gunfire the outbreak of war after negotiations break down. A
skeletal automaton relentlessly gathers his prey—a nationalist waving a flag, a patriot
garbed in red and white, a prostitute soliciting the military, refugees clustered for flight,
and a soldier sporting a Roman helmet. The ballet concludes with a reprise of the
ambassadors in black returning to sterile peace parlays.
For its survey of class, gender, and race in war, at the Concours International de
Chorégraphie (International Choreograph Competition), Jooss’s postmodern dance won
first prize of 25,000 francs. The Green Table resurfaced in New York in 1933, the year that
Adolf Hitler gained the chancellorship of Germany. In 1944, Jooss created a tragic sequel,
Pandora, a poignant prophecy of cataclysm one year before the United States dropped
atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. German totentanz remained a chilling
repertory piece for the City Center Joffrey Ballet, Tokyo’s Star Dancers, Royal Winnipeg
Ballet, Batsheva Dance Company of Tel Aviv, and Ballet Nacional Chileno. After Jooss’s
death in 1979, his daughter, Anna Markard, kept The Green Table before the public with
some forty restagings of war’s misery.
Source: Markard, Anna. Kurt Jooss, The Green Table. New York: Routledge, 2004.
 • U •
UNIVERSAL BALLET
A progressive South Korean dance ensemble known for synchrony and technical detail,
the Universal Ballet (UB) serves as a holy monument to a fallen leader. Begun in
Washington, D.C., in 1984, the troupe formed following the traffic death of Heung Jin
Moon on January 2. For funding, they relied on donations from disciples of the Reverend
Sun Myung Moon, head of the Unification Church.
UB featured prima ballerina-dance master Adrienne Dellas. Essential to the company’s
future, Julia Pak Moon, Heung’s fiancée and spiritual wife, trained in Seoul. She took the
lead in Cinderella in 1984 and partnered with danseur Ross Stretton in July 1988 in a duet
from Shim Chung (The Blind Man’s Daughter, 1988). On a diplomatic mission to Russia
in 1989, she danced Giselle in Leningrad, becoming the first Korean-American to perform
with the Kirov. Before her retirement in 2001 to direct the seventy-member UB, she
introduced narrative dance—Ulysses, Le Corsaire (The Pirate), and Coppélia—to its
repertoire and began commissioning Korean works.
The UB invited a series of guest dancers from the American Ballet Theatre to give
concert performances and, in fall 1990, collaborated with the Kirov to establish its first
global satellite school, a non-sectarian U.S. Kirov Academy of Ballet. For a 1993
presentation of Paquita, company dancers adopted Vaganova technique blended with the
gentle, lyrical style of Korean folk dances. Under Russian director Oleg Vinogradov and
ballet soloist and coach Yelena Vinogradova, in March 1998 the ensemble made its first
U.S. tour and performed Swan Lake in Spokane.
In California and Washington in 2001, the troupe performed the folk abduction tale
Shim Chung (The Blind Man’s Daughter), a gothic sea story of characters stalked by a
dragon. The dancers mounted Romeo and Juliet in New York and Long Beach, California,
and, in 2004, traveled to Korea to stage La Bayadère (The Temple Dancer), set in ancient
India. For their quarter-century anniversary, the UB added John Cranko’s Eugene Onegin
to the repertoire. Subsequent tours of Shim Chung, The Nutcracker, The Sleeping Beauty,
Don Quixote, Giselle, and Romeo and Juliet have taken the ensemble to San Francisco,
Taipei, Singapore, Vancouver, and Seoul.
Source: Van Zile, Judy. Perspectives on Korean Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press, 2001.
 • V •
VAGANOVA, AGRIPPINA (1879–1951)
The author of a classical curriculum taught to students of St. Petersburg’s Imperial Ballet
School, theorist Agrippina Yakovlevna Vaganova codified techniques of strengthening
arms and neck for movements coordinating the whole body. Born of Russo-Armenian
heritage on June 26, 1879, to an army veteran who ushered at the Imperial Ballet Theatre,
she attended performances in early childhood. Her father used his official position as a
means of sending his children to the state school.
Enrolled at age nine, Vaganova trained under Eugeniya Sokolova, Ekaterina Vazem,
Christian Johansson, and Lev Ivanov and mastered the eighteenth-century styles of Pavel
Gerdt and Nikolai Legat. After graduation at age eighteen, she preserved valuable details
of Petipa’s choreography of The Nutcracker (1892), in which she played a farmer’s wife.
Without gaining the commendation of director Marius Petipa, in her teens she danced in
Swan Lake (1895) and La Perle (The Pearl, 1896).
Becoming a Teacher
At age twenty-four, Vaganova choreographed the part of the Chinese automaton in Fairy
Doll (1903), an imperial court production suited to student execution, but she remained in
the shadow of prima ballerinas Anna Pavlova and Tamara Karsavina. Gravitating toward
theory, in 1905, Vaganova openly challenged the radicalism of Michel Fokine and staked
her reputation on classic Russian technique. She established a common-law marriage with
a retired colonel in the imperial army in 1907 and gave birth to a son.
Following Vaganova’s performance in Coppélia in 1912, the conservative Russian
media declared her “the best of the custodians of the golden treasures of classical
choreography.” A restaging of Le Talisman (The Amulet, 1889) in 1915 at the Mariinsky
Theatre starred Vaganova as a daughter of the gods; in 1916, she danced as principal in La
Source (The Spring, 1866), directed by Nicholai Sergeyev. Opinions of her talent varied
from superlative to Tamara Karsavina’s declaration that Vaganova ruined Giselle because
of her disproportionate body. Such disparagement ended Vaganova’s plans for a stage
career.
After the suicide of her husband on December 25, 1917, Vaganova danced in music
halls and movie houses as financial resources for rearing her son, niece, and nephew. From
prima ballerina in 1918, she advanced to instructor of senior-level women at Moscow’s
School of the Baltic Fleet, where she refined the Vaganova Method. In defiance of the
acrobatics proposed by the Soviet Ministry of Culture, in 1921, she prepared students to
join the Kirov Ballet and replicate the French battements (beats), Italian bravura, and
Russian emotion and lyricism underlying the classical works of Marius Petipa. She
characterized soft, effortless ports de bras (arm movements) as the finishing touch to
steps.
The Vaganova Method
Beginning in 1931, Vaganova directed the Leningrad troupe and restaged a liquid,
youthful Swan Lake in 1933 that concluded with blood stains on the bird’s feathers. Under
her influence, the Kirov mounted The Flames of Paris (1932) and The Fountain of
Bakhchisarai (1934), two models of Soviet dram-balet (propaganda ballet). She compiled
Fundamentals of Classical Dance (1934), a world-famous ballet syllabus. Central to her
lessons, the uniqueness of Russian technique demanded synchrony and balance from the
strength and alignment of core muscles along the spine. As a gesture to Soviet sponsors, in
1935, she added heroic finesse to La Esmeralda and Chopiniana.
Advancing to trainer of dance teachers and choreographers, Vaganova joined the faculty
of the Leningrad Conservatory and, in 1946, earned the Stalin Prize for contributing
athleticism to Russian dance. Her career continued until her death on November 5, 1951.
Her influence on modern dance inspired the naming of the St. Petersburg college the
“Agrippina Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet.” Soviet culture ministers dispatched the
Vaganova method to fledgling ballet troupes as far afield as Shanghai, Tokyo, and Cairo.
Source: Krasovskaya, Vera. Vaganova: A Dance Journey from Petersburg to Leningrad.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005.
VARIATION
See image in photospread.
A bravura moment in ballet staging, the appearance of a soloist introduces a classical
variation, a departure from the group dance of the corps de ballet, as with Zoltán Nagy’s
bravura performance in a 2008 Hungarian National Ballet production of Spartacus.
Performers strive to defeat gravity by giving the illusion of floating on air through leaps,
raised arms, and leg extensions. In presenting virtuoso combinations, the dancer enlarges
on the personality and motivation of the character, as with the despair of the puppet in
Vaslav Nijinsky’s starring role in Petrouchka, lyric soloist Chao Lemeng in the Chinese
hero story Mei Lanfang, and Cuban diva Alicia Alonso’s Latina bravura as the title
character in Carmen.
In the late 1600s, French ballet master Pierre Beauchamp highlighted a professional
male dancer in a sarabande, a shift from partnered dance to single performance.
Choreographers seized on variation as a means of showcasing title figures and their
balletic strengths, as with Marie Anne Camargo’s Basque entrechat quatre in Pyramus
and Thisbe (1752) and the entrance of the title character in Salvatore Viganò’s heroic
ballet Coriolano (1804), a Shakespearean production at Milan’s La Scala.
The introduction of toe dancing or steps en pointe in L’Anneau Magique (The Magic
Ring, 1822) set ballerina Amalia Brugnoli apart from the ensemble and launched her
career in a series of title roles, beginning with Zéphire et Flore (The Breeze and Flora,
1831) and La Sylphide (1832). Ballet art and photography featured variations as the
pinnacles of romantic dance, for example, Gallo-Italian ballerina Émilie Bigottini’s
pirouettes in Cendrillon (Cinderella, 1823), Fanny Elssler’s mimetic performances in Le
Diable Boiteaux (The Lame Devil, 1836) and La Chatte Métamorphosée en Femme (The
Cat Changed into a Woman, 1837), and Tamara Karsavina as the flamboyant lead in The
Firebird (1910).
Solo performances elevated dancers above ensembles and established ballet stardom for
characterizations of Cupid, Giselle, Esmeralda, Paquita, Faust, Swanhilde, Odile, and Don
Quixote. The variation often emerged from a pas de deux, as with the individualization of
Romeo in Romeo and Juliet and Franz, the protagonist of Coppélia. At the birth of the
Czech National Ballet, the premiere of Vaclav Reisinger’s Hashish (1884) featured a corps
de ballet of twenty backing soloist Augustin Berger. At the dawn of a new century, Italian
character dancer Enrico Cecchetti reclaimed the prominence of male variations as
Casandré in Les Millions d’Arlequin (Harlequinade, 1900), a romance evolved from the
commedia dell’arte
Into the twentieth century, Vaslav Nijinsky aggrandized the male soloist with stunningly
muscular variations in Scheherazade (1910) and Le Spectre de la Rose (The Spirit of the
Rose, 1911) and moody posturing in L’Après-Midi d’un Faune (Afternoon of a Faun,
1912). The Paris Opera increased ticket sales with Suite de Danses (1913), an olio of
thirteen solo pieces. Androcentric variations dominated Spartacus (1956), a boost to the
career of Tartar dancer Irek Mukhamedov, and a standout abstract number for Paul Taylor
in George Balanchine’s Episodes (1959). A young Mikhail Baryshnikov set his course as a
soloist after winning at the 1969 First International Ballet Competition in Moscow for his
tour en l’air and triple cabrioles in La Bayadère (The Temple Dancer).
On American television in 1963, Rudolf Nureyev presented contrasting variations from
The Sleeping Beauty and Gayane, an agrarian subject set in Kurdish Armenia. Judith
Jamison, the tall soloist of Alvin Ailey’s company, set new standards for feminist ballet
with Cry (1972), a tribute to womanhood. For the Boston Ballet after 2005, Misa
Kuranaga performed variations from Paquita. In July 2014, Michelle Khoo of
Vancouver’s Goh Ballet won a gold medal in a Vienna competition for a variation from
Flames of Paris.
See also en pointe.
Source: Lopuchov, Fedor V., and Stephanie Jordan. Writings on Ballet and Music.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.
VESTRIS, GAËTANO (1729–1808)
A Florentine danseur noble, Gaëtano Apolline Baldassarre Vestris attained fame for
conceit as well as precision and demeanor that dignified the human body. He was born on
April 18, 1729, to a theatrical dynasty, which included his older sister, Maria Teresa
Francesca Vestris, and younger brother, actor-dancer Angiolo Maria Gasparo Vestris.
Their parents, dancer-singer Violante-Beatrix de Dominique Bruscagli and pawnbroker
Tommaso Maria Ippolito Vestris, suffered financial difficulties that kept them on the run to
Naples, Palermo, Bologna, Venice, Genoa, Vienna, Dresden, Milan, and Paris.
At the Royal Academy in Paris in 1748, Gaëtano Vestris studied under Louis Dupré, a
choreographer known to Polish royalty and to audiences in Dresden and London. In 1749,
Vestris and his sister Teresa debuted at the Paris Opera in a pas de deux in the embellished
style known as belle danse (esthetic danse). To display his handsome profile at Versailles
and the opera, Vestris mastered arm movements set to adagio steps for performances of
mythic heroes and deities. As soloist after 1751, he performed varied parts—shepherd,
gardener, sea god, Orpheus, gladiator, satyr, Turk, faun, prince, Hercules, a Roman
patrician—in choreography by Pierre Gardel, Jean-Barthélemy Lany, and Jean-Georges
Noverre.
Becoming a Star
As a member of the Royal Academy, Vestris set the tone of light, graceful deportment and
aristocratic dress, which the middle class imitated. He preferred the music of court
composers Jean-Baptiste Lully and Jean-Philippe Rameau. In 1754, a quarrel with Lany
advanced to a challenge to a duel, for which Vestris lost his job and began a seven-month
house arrest at an upscale hotel, La Conciergerie of St. Germain l’Auxerrois. Upon
release, he performed in Berlin and Turin and came home in triumph to Paris to dance in
the opera Roland (1685), a chivalric tribute to the medieval French hero.
Vestris juggled two positions—his primary role at the Paris Opera and as lead dancer
with Noverre’s Stuttgart-based company. In 1761, Vestris joined Jean Dauberval in
directing productions for the company, including Endymion and Le Nid d’Oiseau (The
Bird’s Nest, 1786). At the height of genre noble, he headlined performances in Vienna and
Warsaw and starred in 1767 at the Paris Opera in Dardanus, set to Rameau’s tragic music.
For a 1770 production of Medée et Jason (Medea and Jason, 1763), Vestris introduced the
unmasked mimicry of character roles, a preface to demi-caractère (melodrama), a merger
of classical technique and theatrical dance.
At age forty-one, Vestris abandoned the stage to write ballets and to cultivate the career
of his son, comic character dancer Marie Jean Augustin “Auguste” Vestri’allard, born to
Gaëtano’s mistress, pastoral dancer Marie Allard, and adopted by Vestris. Retired with a
yearly pension of 4,500 livres, in 1776, Vestris passed his teaching job to Noverre. During
a year as artist in residence in 1780–1781 in the King’s Theatre in London, Vestris
instructed ballerinas to flirt with viewers by incorporating coquetry into the dance. His
sensual style infused the corps de ballet and caused Parliament to suspend sessions to
allow lords to attend the production.
Dancing with his son in 1780, a more athletic dancer, the elder Vestris earned £1,400
for performing Ninette à la Cour, ou Le Caprice Amoureux (Ninette at Court, or The Love
Caper, 1763) to a packed theater. In March 1781, two ballets—Les Caprices de Galathée
(Galatea’s Fantasies, 1757) and Medée et Jason—earned raves from the British press. A
colonial American dancer, John Durang of Philadelphia, attempted imitations of Gaëtano
Vestris, but relied on a trampoline to attain his rival’s loft.
In the 1780s, Vestris concentrated on the management of the Paris Opera Ballet School.
Loss of his savings as a result of the 1789 French Revolution forced him to return to the
London stage in spring 1791 as dancer-choreographer and to give private lessons to
English gentlewomen. In 1792, Vestris married a German wife, Anna Fredrike Heinel of
Stuttgart, his former mistress and a noted character dancer in Le Prix de la Valeur (The
Price of Valor, 1771). He taught French pupil André Carey, who flourished as soloist and
dance master of the Royal Swedish Opera Ballet.
In his last years, Vestris thrived on the successes of his students, his son, a revered
principal dancer at the Paris Opera, and grandson, Auguste Armand Vestris. The elder
Vestris died in Paris on September 23, 1808, leaving Armand to continue the Vestris
dynasty as dancer and teacher. The flamboyant Vestris style of dance training remained a
staple of classical ballet until the 1830s, when Filippo Taglioni founded romantic ballet
based on chaste, modest ports de bras and toe dancing.
Source: Craine, Debra, and Judith Mackrell. The Oxford Dictionary of Dance. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
VIENNESE BALLET
A city renowned for music and gaiety, from the seventeenth century Vienna invested
heavily in orchestras, opera, and ballet. Empress Eleonora Gonzaga introduced ballet to
Hapsburg royalty in 1622, when dance came under imperial direction of Ferdinand II, the
Holy Roman Emperor. A pastime for aristocratic women, ballets involved high-born
females in arranging and dancing in performances. By 1700, Vienna supported a
professional troupe. In 1710, the Kärntnertortheater, the royal court venue funded by Holy
Roman Emperor Joseph I, offered comedy and intermezzi (play-within-a-play) for the
Austrian middle class.
A lover of the arts, Emperor Charles VI, who succeeded his brother Joseph in 1711,
supported Viennese dance by accompanying performances on the harpsichord. Out of
regard for balletic artistry, the emperor granted a scholarship to future Austrian dancer-
choreographer Franz Hilverding. The ballet master studied Parisian dance experiments of
Michel Blondi, Marie Sallé, and Antoine-François Riccoboni before returning to Vienna to
put new techniques into practice.
Under the patronage of the Empress Maria Theresa, in 1740, the Vienna ensemble
danced Hilverding’s staging of the heroic ballet Don Quixote, which focused on the title
character’s foibles. The performance exhibited an intellectualism that favored folk
characterization rather than the pervasive acrobatic slapstick derived from Italy’s
commedia dell’arte. As dance master at the recently erected Burgtheater, in the late 1740s,
Hilverding introduced Turkish and mythic ballet dramas to the Viennese court, notably,
Ipermestra (1744), the tale of a virtuous bride.
Theatrical Ballet
By 1750, Vienna’s companies sparkled in European arts as the sources of ballet drama, a
new dance genre that stood apart from plays and opera. Promoted by court theater
manager Giacomo Durazzo in 1753, ballet came into its own as a source of unified plot
and action. At the Kärntnertortheater, Hilverding’s Pygmalion (1753), a pinnacle of
humanistic art, elevated the mythic sculptor to hero as he taught Galatea, his living statue,
her first steps. For realism, Hilverding turned the corps de ballet into stone masons and
iron workers and set the stage with block and tackle to shift stacks of marble.
 In the midst of Enlightenment ferment, Hilverding choreographed a masterwork, Le
Turc Généreux (The Generous Turk, 1758), set to the music of violinist Josef Starzer. The
ballet d’occasion (special event dance) honored a state visit by legates of Mustafa III, the
sultan of the Ottoman Empire. The Viennese company posed diagonally as French sailors
and harem girls in expression of dynamic drama, a revolt against dry academic
choreography.
In an era of richly funded ballet music, Vienna became Europe’s culture magnet and
artistic reference point. During a sojourn in Russia in 1758 to the court of Tsarina
Elisabeth II, daughter of Empress Catherine I, Hilverding introduced Austrian dancers
Santina Zanuzzi and Pierre Aubry, Jeanne Mécour, soloist Louis Mécour, and composer
Starzer. For resettings of Russian narratives in Austrian style, Hilverding executed the
enchaînement (combination) of entrechat quatre et pirouette, a four-beat leap followed by
a turn, a burst of skill intended to impress the Russians.
In the 1760s, the Viennese state ensemble danced to orchestrations by Christoph Gluck,
the German composer of the pantomime ballet Le Festin de Pierre, ou Don Juan (The
Feast of the Stone, or Don Juan, 1761). A model of passi d’azione, or dramatic dance,
choreographer Gasparo Angiolini’s rendering emphasized the steps themselves as
elements of drama. After publishing a treatise on Don Juan, Angiolini took Hilverding’s
place at the Kärntnertortheater and collaborated with Gluck on Orfeo ed Euridice
(Orpheus and Eurydice, 1762). On return to Vienna from Russia, Hilverding fought his
rival by staging Le Triomphe de l’Amour (Love’s Triumph, 1764), featuring in the corps
de ballet Archduke Maximilian Francis and his siblings, Ferdinand and Marie Antoinette.
Angiolini overestimated audience approval of historical drama by mounting Sémiramis
(1765), an Assyrian tragedy originated by Voltaire. To the choreographer’s chagrin, he
presented the work at the wedding of Maria Josepha of Bavaria to Emperor Joseph II, who
disliked dance.
After Hilverding’s death in 1768, the choreography of Jean-Georges Noverre, the
founder of ballet d’action, replaced the stilted pantomime of opera-ballet with a narrative
dance program. His introduction of multiple tableaux and theatricality attracted performers
from Italy and France. Following an education system similar to that of the Paris Opera
and Russian Imperial Ballet, in 1771, the Austrians opened an academy that predated
dance schools in Stockholm, Warsaw, and Milan. When Noverre moved on to Stuttgart, he
took with him the style and substance of Viennese artistry. Under Joseph II in 1785, stage
productions returned to court control and banned curtain calls.
In 1791, Emperor Leopold II restored dance to court prominence and welcomed
medleys, historical ballet, and the popular comedy Das Waldmädchen (The Forest Maiden,
1796), scored by Paul Wranitzky. During the Napoleonic era, which began with the
overthrow of Vienna in 1796, ticket prices increased to relieve a state fiscal crisis. Dancer
Maria Viganò introduced Austrian audiences to the empire-waist column dress with
sandals, an improvement over awkward heeled shoes, boned corsets, and cumbrous
gowns. Her husband, choreographer Salvatore Viganò, managed a fifty-member Viennese
troupe and masterminded the premiere of Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus (Creatures of
Prometheus, 1801) to the music of Ludwig van Beethoven.
As the Kärntnertortheater became the popular venue for Viganò’s dances, the imperial
Burgtheater gravitated away from ballet. In 1815, German dance master Friedrich
Horschelt assembled the Kinderballett (Children’s Ballet), a juvenile company of
Viennese street beggars as young as age six who performed Cinderella and other fairy tale
dances. One ten-year-old, Johann Raab, developed skill at character parts.
In 1817, Emperor Francis I proposed discontinuing ballet to save on massive production
costs. Art lovers dissuaded him, but did not stop his subordinating dance to limited scenes
in opera. Fanny and Theresa Elssler, budding Austrian divas, trained under Horschelt and
extended their studies with Jean-Louis Aumer, a prolific French choreographer who staged
Ossian (1819) and Alfred le Grand (1820) in Vienna before advancing to the Paris Opera
Ballet.
A Multinational Art
Gifted performers from various places interspersed Viennese ballet with outside
influences. In 1821, Italian dance instructor Filippo Taglioni, the father of romantic ballet,
received court appointment as Vienna’s ballet master. In a popular narrative dance, diva
Amalia Brugnoli, teamed with Paolo Samengo, exhibited dancing en pointe in L’Anneau
Magique (The Magic Ring, 1822), a performance that influenced young Marie Taglioni. In
the same year, Horschelt’s Kinderballett featured nine Viennese girls. One of the nine,
Austrian prima ballerina Theresa Heberle, debuted in the 1820s.
In 1823, Franz Schubert premiered ballet music and intermezzi for Rosamunde,
Princess of Cypress, featuring the libretto of Helmina von Chézy. Censure of the ballet
Guillaume Tell (William Tell, 1829) kept libertarian themes off the stage to prevent a
revolution in Austria like the revolt that had swept France in 1789. Into the 1830s, as
Austria surpassed Germany as a dance haven, color and style replaced substance. During
the waltz craze, ballet lovers at the Kärntnertortheater filled all 2,400 seats, especially for
performances by Jules Perrot, Carlotta Grisi, and Marie Taglioni.
In August 1837, Fanny Cerrito, a Neapolitan dancer, dazzled Viennese audiences with
her own choreography. For The Harvest Dance (1846), a cast of fourteen members of
Vienna’s juvenile company dressed in aprons and work clothes to mimic the field work of
Austrian peasants. In 1848, after touring Frankfurt, London, Prague, and Paris and
developing child dancers, ballet teacher Johann Raab returned to Vienna to instruct the
state company.
In search of cosmopolitan costumes and manners, Gallo-Danish choreographer August
Bournonville superintended the Viennese company from 1855 to 1856, when he
introduced ballerina Juliette Price in Robert le Diable (Robert the Devil). When director
Franz von Dingelstedt improved ballet staging conditions in 1874, Bournonville chose
Vienna as a tour stop for the Royal Swedish Ballet. Some months later, Austro-Hungarian-
Jewish composer Karl Goldmark created a stir with The Queen of Sheba (1875), a long-
lived repertory piece saturated with exotica.
 During the management of Adolf Wilbrandt, the Viennese ballet influenced eastern
European troupes, particularly the Hungarian National Ballet, which formed in 1884. The
wealthy Austrian court enticed talented Italian dancers with elaborate pictorial productions
keyed to historical realism. Paul Taglioni mounted a disastrously expensive staging of
Sardanapal (1865), a summation of the excesses of an Assyrian king in the seventh
century BCE. Pupils studied under German ballet master Karl Telle, creator of twenty
productions, including Melusine (1883), Merlin (1886), and Sappho (1893), which
recognized a Greek poet and academy principal on the ancient island of Lesbos. Viennese
choreographer Josef Hassreiter tapped the romantic market with Die Puppenfee (The
Dollmaker, 1888). Princes, dukes, and financiers flocked to see female dancers in animal
and doll costumes that reduced women to clockwork toys.
World Influence
In the early years of the twentieth century, Jewish librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal
discerned that Vienna’s opera-centered dance program had declined because of cliché-
ridden traditions. American and western European guest performers introduced the
Viennese ballet company to modernism. Vienna welcomed unconventional performers—
Maud Allan in 1903, Ruth St. Denis in 1907, and Anna Pavlova, a guest dancer in 1908.
An exotic outsider, Isadora Duncan, danced barefoot in 1902 her unscripted
interpretations. The flowing classical tunic and expressionistic combinations danced to
Johann Strauss’s “Blue Danube Waltz” intrigued the more adventurous choreographers
Hassreiter and Karl Godlewski and dancer Grete Wiesenthal, who scorned classical dance.
Hass-reiter incorporated modern combinations in Rübenzahl (1907) and Mondweibchen
(Moon Woman, 1910). Applying circus techniques, Godlewski choreographed The
Snowman (1910) and mimed the part of a Harlequin in The Veil of Pierrette (1911). The
direction of art deco staging influenced teachers of contemporary dance Gertrud
Bodenwieser, Lilian Harmel, and Hilde Holger, the inventor of mechanical dance in
robotic costumes.
Richard Strauss, codirector of the Vienna Ballet with Franz Schalk, felt trapped by
mounting dehumanization of the arts. From the presentation of Salomé (1905) into the
1930s, he impacted the arts climate with melodies for Elektra (1909), Intermezzo (1924),
and Daphne (1938), which featured a bacchanale. Following the success of choreographer
Heinrich Kröller’s Carnaval (1922) and the cosmopolitan suite Ballettsoirée (Dance
Evening, 1923), Strauss’s collaboration in popular theater with Kröller in Schlagobers
(Whipped Cream, 1924) failed in the economic downturn between world wars.
In the political mayhem following anschluss (German occupation) in Austria,
performers presented ballets to a closed house of soldiers and munitions workers. A
proposed performance of William Tell again aroused controversy for extolling a Swiss
rebel. Strauss complained that he needed to create joyful music such as “Wirbeltanz”
(Whirling Dance) to negate the era’s tragedy. As Jewish performers and stage
professionals died in death camps or committed suicide, the menacing fascism and anti-
Semitism of Nazi Germany further suppressed escapist stage nostalgia.
 In the aftermath of World War II, disaffected artists sought stronger connections with
outsiders. Michael Birkmeyer, the premier soloist of the Vienna State Opera Ballet,
believed world dance achieved a higher plane than the stale, union-dictated performances
in Austria. In 1961, he came under the mentoring of Russian defector Rudolf Nureyev,
who incorporated an upbeat staging of Don Quixote into the Vienna State Opera Ballet
repertory. In 1977, elegant American dancer Judith Jamison portrayed Potiphar’s wife in
Josephslegende, a biblical dance by John Neumeier that Viennese librettist von
Hofmannsthal wrote in 1912.
Viennese dancer Peter Mallek returned Austrian ballet to classical tradition in 1980 by
creating the Vienna Festival Ballet. The youthful ensemble toured Great Britain with
fresh, colorful revivals of story ballets—The Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker, Cinderella,
Coppélia, and Swan Lake. The festival atmosphere drew the notice of Finnish competitor
Jorma Uotinen, who mounted a successful debut of La Nuit Gelée (The Frozen Night,
1995). In the early 2000s, Viennese arts director Boris Akimov, who trained with the
Bolshoi, staged works by John Cranko and John Neumeier. Akimov introduced Austrian
dance style in Russia by staging The Snow Maiden in Moscow.
See also Taglioni, Marie.
Source: Yates, William Edgar. Theatre in Vienna: A Critical History, 1776–1995.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
VON LABAN, RUDOLF (1879–1958)
The inventor of eukinetics, analytic body language, choreologist and kinetics researcher
Rudolf von Laban legitimated the status of modern dance. A Gallo-Austro-Hungarian of
Huguenot descent, he was born to Marie von Laban in Pozsony, Slovakia, on December
15, 1879. He and his younger sister Renée grew up in an aristocratic household in Vienna
and Sarajevo, where their grandmother engaged them in storytelling.
Von Laban collected data on historic dances and joined a Czardas company dedicated to
Hungarian folk dance. His father, Field Marshal Laban de Váraljá, the provincial governor
of Bosnia-Herzegovina, introduced him to Slavic sword dance troupes and accompanied
him to an Islamic monastery, where Rudolf viewed Sufist dervishes experiencing spiritual
ecstasy through dance.
After enrollment in Vienna at the Theresian Military Academy, at age fifteen von Laban
rebelled against army life by taking passage on a ship as cabin boy. While studying
anatomy and three-dimensional movement at the Kunstakademic in Munich, in 1900, he
married German painter Martha Fricke, mother of their daughter Azraela and son Arpad.
Her death triggered a lifelong struggle with manic depression, which von Laban expressed
in his dance Der Spielmann (The Fiddler, 1916).
Von Laban majored in poster painting and architecture in Paris, where he observed
cabaret dance at the Moulin Rouge and dabbled in stage design. In 1909, he absorbed the
principles of expressionism and contemporary dance in Munich and reformed movement
arts to include time, space, weight, and flow. He married German singer Maja Lederer in
1910 and supported his household in Nice by costuming winter carnivals and masked balls
in art deco style. He observed artistic gymnastics and dances by the Ballets Russes and
proposed stage management that left the curtain up during changes of scenery.
Experimental Teaching
In 1913, von Laban took a post as arts director to Bohemians at Monte Verità, a Swiss
commune. From his dance academy in Zurich, he expanded concepts of socializing and
village dance festivals at schools in Italy, Latvia, Germany, and France. During World War
I, he employed dance therapist Mary Wigman at Leipzig to expound on the dynamics of
mystic dances based on myth and legend. He espoused a syncretic spirituality based on
hermetic and Sufist writings and formed Labangarten, a children’s troupe. As the
antithesis of dehumanization promoted by the Industrial Revolution, he led his company in
dancing nude and barefoot on grass.
Under Karl Jung’s theories of primitive ritual, at Ascona, Switzerland, in 1917, von
Laban choreographed Song to the Sun, Song to the Setting Sun, Demons of the Night, and
The Rising Sun. He formed balletic choirs, choreographed Wagnerian opera for festivals,
and presented an original ballet, Prometheus (1923). Some of his chains and satiric group
dances, which premiered at the Hamburg Zoo and theaters in Wurzburg, Stuttgart, Zagreb,
Lübeck, Essen, and Berlin from 1924 to 1927, were choreographed to gong and piano or
to no sound. At Nuremberg in 1926, a head injury from a fall from the stage during his
portrayal of the title role during a staging of Don Juan ended his dance career.
With Nazi approval, von Laban pursued folk ballet by children presenting Aryan traits.
At his Choreographics Institute, he taught Lisa Ullmann, a dancer from Berlin. After he
published five works on gymnastics and dance and initiated Schrifttanz, a ballet magazine,
his treatise Kinetographie Laban (1928), proposed a movement coding system called
Labanotation. He applied the neums (primitive symbols) to his staging as director of
Prussian state theaters in Berlin and to the staging of pacifist, anti-poverty ballets and civic
pageants.
Von Laban’s sponsor, Nazi culture director Joseph Goebbels, banned a 1936
performance of From the Thaw Wind and the New Joy for its lack of pro-Hitler, anti-
Semitic propaganda. The theorist entered house arrest at Schloss Banz and, in 1937,
escaped from Germany. He traveled through Paris to England’s Dartington Hall at Totnes
to join Ullmann and Birgit Cullberg in a study of dance with choreographer Kurt Jooss.
Postwar Theories
Von Laban began an investigation of three-dimensional staging of basic ballet steps, which
he called choreutics. At the end of World War II, Ullmann initiated the Laban Art of
Movement Guild, a group formed in Manchester that harmonized space and danced
democratized patterns beyond the constraints of classic ballet steps and musical rhythms.
With colleague Warren Lamb, von Laban developed a scientific analysis of gesture and
posture called the Laban-Lawrence Personal Effort Assessment.
Von Laban extended his motion theories to ergonomics, the subject of Effort (1947), a
guide to nonverbal communication and the expenditure of energy. Through behavior
modification, he humanized everyday movement and emotions in the workplace and
among psychiatric patients. For youth, he issued Modern Educational Dance (1948) and
Mastery of Movement on the Stage (1950) and promoted therapeutic and recreational
ballet. He died on July 1, 1958.
Source: Davies, Eden. Beyond Dance: Laban’s Legacy of Movement Analysis. New
York: Routledge, 2006.
 • W •
WASHINGTON BALLET
A professional group radiating from a post–World War II arts revival, the Washington
Ballet (WB) provides the U.S. capital with classic and contemporary works. The
establishment of the Washington School of Ballet in 1944 by Mary Day and Lisa Gardiner,
a student of Anna Pavlova, built a base of juvenile dancers for recruitment. At global
competitions in Moscow, Helsinki, Lausanne, and Varna, Bulgaria, soloist Kevin Mc-
Kenzie won a silver medal. In mid-century, twenty advanced performers danced Carl
Orff’s Carmina Burana (1959) at the National Cathedral, performed with the National
Symphony Orchestra, and toured in New York and West Virginia.
Mary Day guided the WB in clear, uncluttered stage execution and strict musicality. In
the Dominican Republic, the neophyte troupe performed with Cuban diva Alicia Alonso.
Frederic Franklin, a soloist with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, directed the company.
By December 1961, the ensemble debuted The Nutcracker. For the next fifteen years,
dance education paired with academic classes.
An Official Company
Subsidized by the National Endowment for the Arts, the WB made an official beginning in
1976 with performers hired by administrator Peter Grigsby. The group danced works
choreographed by Singapore artist Choo San Goh, notably, Synonyms (1978), Birds of
Paradise (1979), Momentum (1979), and Double Contrasts (1978), set to the music of
French composer Francis Poulenc. In 1979, the company featured as guest soloist Mikhail
Baryshnikov, who partnered with diva Marianna Tcherkassky in Goh’s Configurations
(1982), featuring geometric patterning of the corps de ballet.
In 1980, teen ballerina Amanda McKerrow brought home a gold medal from the Fourth
International Ballet Competition in Moscow for her pairing with English principal Simon
Dow for the grand pas de deux from The Sleeping Beauty. Invigorated by stage success,
global notoriety, and public school initiatives, director Elvi Moore encouraged in-house
creativity and WB tours of Malaysia, Singapore, China, Japan, Russia, Spain, and South
America. The group performed Paul Taylor’s Esplanade in 1987, Vaslav Nijinsky’s Jeux
(Games), and George Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments in 1989, and John Cranko’s
Brouillards (Fog) and Edvard Grieg’s Holberg Suite in 1990.
The 1990s introduced more diversity of dance design and themes. To delight young
balletomanes, the company staged Hansel and Gretel in 1995. Performers stressed
American themes in the dramatic enactment of community life for Philip Jerry’s score of
Our Town in 1996 and, in 1998, Witches of Salem, set to Aaron Copland’s score for the
necromantic suite Grohg.
In 1999, Cuban-American artistic director Septime Webre planned a tour of Havana, the
first by an American dance ensemble in four decades. Webre created symbolic and
narrative works—medieval insecurities in Carmina Burana and the Cuban folk medley to
Juanita y Alicia (Juanita and Alice, 2000), Bizet’s pulsing rhythms for Carmen (2001), the
tunes of Sweet Honey in the Rock for Journey Home (2002), and Cinderella and The Poet
Acts (2003), which Jared Nelson and Brianne Bland executed to the eerie music of Phillip
Glass’s score for the film The Hours. For variety, in 2002, the troupe danced Anthony
Tudor’s Dark Elegies and Twyla Tharp’s Brief Fling, followed in 2003 by William
Forsythe’s In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated. For 2006, WB scheduled Oui/Non
(Yes/No), The Great Gatsby, State of Wonder, Jerome Robbins’s In the Night, and Always,
No Sometimes to a Beatles suite.
A Future of Challenges
In recent years, Principal Kee Juan Han, the Singapore-born manager of the Washington
School of Ballet, won an award for quality teaching. Athlete-soloist Brooklyn Mack
disproved stereotypes of African American ineptitude by winning the 2009 Helsinki
International Ballet Competition and a first prize in Bulgaria for excerpts of La Bayadère,
Flames of Paris, Diana and Acteon, and Le Corsaire (The Pirate). The Washington Ballet
has ventured into Marius Petipa’s mock heroic Don Quixote in 2009, Maurice Ravel’s
impressionistic Boléro in 2010, and the surrealistic Alice in Wonderland, performed at the
Kennedy Center in 2011, and participated in the 2011 International Dance Festival in
Bodrum, Turkey.
The company performed historical fiction with The Sun Also Rises (2013), adapted
from Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel about post–World War I disillusion. Character roles
of Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley, played by Jared Nelson and Sona Kharatian,
followed the whims of ragtime, jazz, and kazoo melodies and the multimedia projections
of video and typewriter. While programming Coppélia, Giselle, and La Sylphide along
with Tour-de-Force: Balanchine and Fluctuating Hemlines, the ensemble treated children
to The Nutcracker, Peter Pan, and Where the Wild Things Are, a virtuoso execution of
mime, oversized costume, and physicality.
Source: Kisselgoff, Anna. “Mary Day, Teacher of Ballet, Dies at 96.” New York Times
(13 July 2006).
WORSHIP DANCE
An expression of adoration, moral truth, saints’ lives, or pleas for healthy families and
ample harvests, liturgical dance enhances the worship experience. Developing apart from
folk dance and professional ballet, prayerful choreography has thrived among the Hebrews
of ancient Israel, the Sufic dervishes of Persia, Confucian ritual dance in China, Australian
Aboriginal dreamtime corroboree, and the cham dancers of Tibet and Bhutan, who
performed as an offering to Buddha. From the Middle Ages among Hindus in India,
Thailand, and Cambodia, Apsara temple dance mimed scenes from the Ramayana (ca. 500
BCE) as lessons in righteousness.
An expression of adoration, moral truth, saints’ lives, or pleas for healthy families and ample harvests,
liturgical dance enhances the worship experience, as expressed by members of the Leaven Dance Company
in Stowe, Ohio. Kathryn Mihelick, director, Leaven Dance Company, Stowe, Ohio, www.leavendance.org.

Divine dance typically unites the body with Earth through bare feet or slippers, which
seek rhythm and order in such liturgical acts as eurythmics, prophecy, the West African
offering ceremonies of Brazilian Santeria, and outlining a maze, a form of centering
integral to Wiccan ritual. Adjuncts to sacred gestures range from candles, banners, flags,
and streamers to headdresses, capes, and flowing robes and caftans, a visual aid to sacred
festivals. Props included painted skulls, whistles, rattles, amulets, censers, altar vessels,
cymbals, hand drums, and shofars. For Polynesian hula, flower garlands performed double
duty as costumes and sources of fragrance.
Russian spiritual guru George Gurdjieff taught a group form of sacred dance derived
from a collection of two hundred Asian and African ceremonial rhythms and postures. In
1914, he choreographed his first spiritual ballet, The Struggle of the Magicians, in which
dancers imitated the elliptical swirling of planets in the solar system. To the piano music
of Russian ballet composer Thomas de Hartmann, in the 1920s, participants in England,
Berlin, Fontainebleau, Ukraine, and Istanbul prayed, whirled, and praised God in
sequences reminiscent of designs on classic urns and traditional Afghan kinesthetic
trances.
 To advance self-knowledge, Gurdjieff gave demonstrations of spiritual dance in Paris
and North America. In 1935, he dispatched disciple Jane Heap to London to train and
direct new dance groups. A dance studio at the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York began
holding class for five hundred pupils in 1953. Into the late twentieth century, a disciple,
Jeanne de Salzmann, taught Gurdjieff-style dance in New York and Paris.
In the 1960s, charismatic Christian churches welcomed worship troupes as forces for
praise and spiritual rejuvenation. Audiences interpreted as divine grace the beauty, color,
and movement of soloists and circle and line dancers. Paralleling glossolalia (speaking in
tongues), dance manifested spiritual gifts and altered mind states that promoted healing
and unity with God. In 1987 in Bathurst, Australia, Mary Jones founded the International
Christian Dance Fellowship, a network of performers of messianic, prophetic, therapeutic,
and intercessory dance. The movement spread to Pretoria, Jerusalem, York, and Kuala
Lumpur and throughout the United States, Qatar, Trinidad, Tobago, Puerto Rico, Canada,
and Great Britain.
See also Apsara dance; Ballet Afsaneh; Duncan, Isadora.
Source: Zehr, Leslie. The Alchemy of Dance: Sacred Dance as a Path to the Universal
Dancer. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2008.
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 About the Author
Mary Ellen Snodgrass of Hickory, North Carolina, writes and reviews reference books. A
member of Phi Beta Kappa, she holds degrees in English and classics from the University
of North Carolina at Greensboro and Appalachian State University and certification in
gifted education from Lenoir Rhyne University. She taught high school and university
classes for twenty-three years, reared six foster children, produced a column for the
Charlotte Observer, and served as a state humanities lecturer and member of the NC
Library Commission.
Snodgrass’s honoraria for published works include New York Public Library Choice
awards for Japan vs. U.S.A. (1993) and Encyclopedia of Feminist Literature (2006). Her
Encyclopedia of Utopian Literature (1995) earned reference book of the year citations
from Choice magazine, American Library Association, and Library Journal. For
Encyclopedia of Fable (1998), she won a second Library Journal reference book of the
year, followed by a Booklist Editors Choice for Encyclopedia of the Underground
Railroad (2007) and a Library Journal award for Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion
(2013).