XPost: alt.arts.ballet, alt.answers 
 From: twp@panix.com 
  
 Archive-name: dance/ballet-modern-faq/part3 
 Posting-frequency: bimonthly 
 Last-modified: Jul. 8, 2002 
  
 ================================ 
 Part 4 of seven parts 
 ================================ 
  
     Copyright (c) 1995-2002 by Thomas Parsons; all rights reserved. 
     This FAQ may be posted to any USENET newsgroup, on-line service, BBS, 
     or Web page, provided it is posted in its entirety, including this 
     copyright statement, EXCEPT that this FAQ may not be posted to any Web 
     page where such posting may result in assignment of copyright.  This 
     FAQ may not be distributed in part or in full for financial gain.  No 
     portion of this FAQ may be included in commercial collections or 
     compilations without express permission from the author. 
  
 ================ 
  
 Contents: 
  
 PART 4: HISTORY 
  
     4.1. Who invented ballet? 
     4.2. I thought ballet was a Russian art. 
     4.3. When was the first ballet? 
     4.4. What is the oldest surviving ballet? 
     4.5. When was the first ballet school started? 
     4.6. How did ballet develop after the founding of that school? 
     4.7. Who was Noverre? 
     4.8. How did ballet develop in the nineteenth century? 
     4.8.1. Who was Carlo Blasis? 
     4.8.2. Who was August Bournonville? 
     4.8.3. The primacy of the ballerina 
     4.8.4. Ballet in Russia 
     4.8.5. Who was Didelot? 
     4.8.6. Who was Petipa? 
     4.9. Dance in the 20th century 
     4.9.1. Who was Diaghilev and what did he do? 
     4.9.2. Who was Fokine? 
     4.9.3. Who was Balanchine? 
     4.9.4. The beginnings of modern dance 
  
 ================ 
  
 4. Ballet history 
  
  Ballet is at once the oldest and the youngest of the arts.  The 
 impulse to dance must be at least as old as the impulse to sing; but the 
 first professional ballet dancers appeared on the scene only about 300 
 years ago.  It is also the only high art whose foundations were laid in 
 recent times by amateurs, and by royal amateurs at that.  The French court 
 put on ballets the way some of our own ancestors may have put on amateur 
 theatricals or played at charades, and the dancers were drawn from the 
 members of the Court, including at least two French kings, Louis XIII 
 and Louis XIV.  Many of the gestures in ballet to-day still reflect the 
 body language of the nobility of the seventeenth century. 
  
  Dance history can be approached in different ways.  You can address 
 the history of dance as an art, listing the great teachers and choreo- 
 graphers who influenced its development; or the history of performance, 
 naming the stars and describing their careers; or the social history, 
 discussing how theatrical dance interacted with the social and economic 
 circumstances in which it found itself.  The material that follows is 
 largely the history of dance as an art. 
  
  Modern, or contemporary, dance is (naturally) a recent development. 
 Where the history of ballet goes back four or more centuries--depending on 
 when you date its origins--modern goes back only about a hundred years. 
 Hence the entries here inevitably have much more to say about ballet than 
 about modern. 
  
  The history presented in this version of the FAQ ends after 
 Diaghilev and the beginnings of modern dance.  We are still too close to 
 more recent developments, and it is difficult to sort out the threads and 
 to distinguish what was most important. 
  
  
 4.1. Who invented ballet? 
  
  No one person did; it evolved gradually from the popular dances of 
 the period.  Many of the steps still bear names relating to the dances or 
 the geographical regions from which they were drawn--for example, _pas de 
 bourr'ee_ and _pas de Basque_. 
  
  
 4.2. I thought ballet was a Russian art. 
  
  Many of the greatest dancers in the 20th century have been Russian, 
 but ballet arose in Italy and matured in France (see questions 4.3 and 4.5, 
 below).  In the 19th century, ballet flowered in Russia (through the work 
 of French and Italian teachers who moved there), and early in the 20th 
 century Russian ballet began to influence Western Europe, largely through 
 the agency of the impresario Serge Diaghilev.  (See question 4.9.1.) 
 Diaghilev's Ballets Russes gave ballet in Western Europe a much-needed shot 
 in the arm, and the influence of Russian dancing, augmented by the various 
 Russian companies who have toured Western Europe in recent years, persists 
 to this day. 
  
  
 4.3. When was the first ballet? 
  
  That's open to debate, because there's no general agreement on how 
 balletic a performance has to be to qualify as a ballet.  Two performances 
 are usually singled out by historians, however.  One is a danced enter- 
 tainment that was put on at a banquet celebrating the marriage of Gian 
 Galeazzo, Duke of Milan, in 1489.  Each course of the banquet was intro- 
 duced by a dance.  But the dances told stories, and so this is occasionally 
 reckoned as "the first ballet."  The other pioneering performance was the 
 _Balet Comique de la Royne_ (in modern French, _Ballet Comique de la 
 Reine_), put on by Catherine de Medici in 1581 to celebrate yet another 
 marriage.  The libretto and choreography for this ballet are generally 
 attributed to Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx, whose definition of ballet we 
 quoted above in Question 2.1.  The dancers were members of the Court.  The 
 performance, which included singing and recitation as well as dancing, 
 lasted more than five hours, and its expense was ruinous. 
  
  We know that other balletic entertainments were put on in between 
 these two events, and it seems pretty clear that dance was presented as 
 an artistic entertainment before 1489, but these are the events most 
 frequently cited. 
  
  Ballet is generally considered a French art, but it should be 
 clear that it has its roots in Italy.  There was that performance in 1489; 
 Catherine de Medici was Italian and may have brought the ballet with her; 
 Beaujoyeulx was an Italian (originally named Belgiojoso); and the very word 
 _ballet_ is derived from the Italian _balletto_.  But the first school 
 (Question 4.5) was in France, the terminology is nearly all French, the 
 most important early books on the subject were French, and it was the 
 French who turned it from an entertainment into an art. 
  
  One of the earliest landmarks in ballet appeared shortly after the 
 _Balet Comique_.  The book, _Orch'esographie_, written by a priest, Jehan 
 Tabourot, under the pseudonym Thoinot Arbeau, appeared in 1588.  In this 
 book, there is no clear distinction between ballet and social dancing. 
 Ballet evolved out of social dancing, and Arbeau's book gives us a snapshot 
 of the era when this evolutionary process was still going on. 
  
  
 4.4. What is the oldest surviving ballet? 
  
  It is apparently _The Whims of Cupid and the Ballet Master_, 
 choreographed in 1786 by Vincenzo Galeotti for the Royal Danish Ballet. 
  
 [continued in next message] 
  
 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)