Jennifer Homans, a former ballerina and dance critic, has written a definitive and dense history of ballet. She follows ballet's beginnings in the 16th century as an outgrowth of Italian Pantomime to its transformation to a more familiar genre when it migrated to France. Louis XIII and his son Louis XIV were both enamoured of ballet and both performed publicly in highly stylized choreographed dances. These dances were of mythological subjects, often centered around the god Apollo, the sun god, leading Louis XIV to be known as the Sun King. At this time dance was not performed on a raised stage, which eventually allowed larger audience participation. Louis' ballet teacher, Beauchamps was the first to define the five ballet positions, and his proscribed movements became the pattern for all French ballets. In a slightly modified form they are still used world-wide today.
Holmans takes us though the ages ballet's transformation from France to Denmark to Russia to Italy and back to France and then England. At first only men performed the dances, and it was de rigour for all courtiers to learn the intricate and graceful steps of dance. Woe betide the clumsy individual who was made a laughing stock by his peers.
When ballet was taken up with fervor by the Danes, more changes were made and the Danish ballet academy under August Bournonville began a tradition of formality that still influences their choreography today.
The French Revolution both political and social changed ballet again. Once women began dancing, stories ceased to be "about men, power, and aristocratic manners... Instead it was an art of women devoted to charting the misty inner worlds of dreams and the imagination." Romanticism took hold. Giselle and La Sylphide were the first modern ballets.
In Russia only serfs were allowed to study the dance until the gifted French choreographer Petipa arrived in the mid-19th century and changed both their style and tradition. His famous collaboration with Tchaikovsky, on Swan Lake, Giselle, The Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty, is still enjoyed and respected today.
Finally we come to modern times and the names become familiar, Nureyev, Fonteyn, Baryshnikov, Balanchine, Maya Plisetskya, Frederick Aston, Jerome Robbins, and many others. Holmans history is tremendously thorough. I enjoyed reading about the 1960s and 70s as those were the times when I fell in love with the ballet and was lucky enough to have seen the major ballet stars of that era.
Holman's ends her history pessimistically (though I don't agree with her assessment). She compares the ballet tradition to the Sleeping Beauty. Today ballet is a sleeping art. She states, "Over the past two decades ballet has come to resemble a dying language: Apollo and his angels are understood and appreciated by a shrinking circle of old believers in a closed corner of culture. The story ---- our story---may be coming to a close.
If Holmans is correct than I am doubly grateful that I was able to experience the great ballets of the last decade of the 20th century.
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