The dancer Auguste Vestris snubbed authority in life as in art. This cartoon shows him imprisoned at Château de Bicêtre for lèse majestéè: his father, the celebrated danseur noble Gaetan Vestris, scolds his son from the prison gates for shaming the family. Imprisonment, however, did not excuse dancers from their duties: Vestris is being dressed by the king’s guards who will escort him to the Paris Opera to perform.
On July 12, 1789, angry crowds stormed the Paris Opera, seen as a bastion of aristocratic privilege. Performances of ballet and opera were suspended and guards secured the theater.
On July 14, 1789, Parisians stormed the Bastille. On the streets below, the people celebrated the fall of this hated symbol of the ancien règime and erected a sign: “here we dance”—and they did not mean the minuet.
The Noble Sans-Culotte (1794) by the English satirist James Gillray: a revolutionary tosses aside his breeches and gleefully stomps on crown and sash, symbols of royal authority. Undressing and shedding the props of the ancien règime were common themes during the Revolution.
Pierre Gardel costumed after antiquity in his ballet Tèlèmaque (1790). The revolutionary fashion for classical dress changed ballet: Grecian sandals were a precursor of today’s soft, flat shoes and allowed dancers to move with greater freedom.
Parisian fashion dolls, widely exported and copied across the Continent, modeled white gowns invoking purity and antiquity.
Pierre-ètienne Lesueur’s painting The Citizenesses of Paris Donating Their Jewels to the Convention Nationale: women in white as exemplary republicans.
Women in white featured prominently in revolutionary festivals. This engraving of the Festival of Agriculture in 1796 shows a procession of damsels bearing wheat and corn.
Marie Taglioni was admired for her dancing but also, as this portrait shows, for her bourgeois propriety. Women identified with Taglioni in part because she looked like them—not like a queen or princess.
Taglioni’s ballet shoes resembled regular women’s wear, not specialized or blocked instruments of art. Compare these women’s shoes fashionable in France and Britain in the early nineteenth century (left) with Taglioni’s dancing shoes (right): they are the same—though Taglioni would have darned hers for extra support.
Rapid growth of the press coincided with the rise of Romantic ballet, making its ballerinas international stars. Like Taglioni, Fanny Elssler appeared on a range of commercial products, including the ornamental box shown here.
Of all the national traditions, Danish ballet has changed the least. This 1992 photo of Nikolaj Hèbbe as James in La Sylphide shows the same modest restraint Bournonville envisioned when he created the ballet in 1836.
A Folk Tale (1854), with its trolls, changelings, and elf-maidens, was inspired in part by Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Elfin Hill” and remains a symbol of “Danishness” today. This 1991 production has sets and costumes by Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II.
The Spanish dancer Maria Medina costumed after antiquity and shown amidst ancient ruins.
Emma Hamilton’s one-woman pantomime shows performed in her living room in Naples depicted wall paintings and sculptures found at Herculaneum and Pompeii. She was a sensation—owing in part, as this caricature suggests, to her revealing drapery.
Danzatrici (1798-99): Antonio Canova’s paintings of dancers drew on antiquity and inspired ballet masters like Carlo Blasis to develop a distinctively Italian school of dance.
Luigi Manzotti’s wildly popular Excelsior (1881) looks today like Aida for fascists. This poster advertising the original production loudly proclaimed Italy’s mastery of technology, people, places.
Enrico Cecchetti’s funeral procession in Milan in 1928: a reminder of just how much ballet mattered at the time.
The first Russian ballerinas were serfs: Tatiana Granatova-Shlykova, shown here lavishly costumed in European dress, was trained in the French noble style and worked for Count Sheremetev on his estate at Ostankino.
The Sleeping Beauty (1890) was a portrait of court etiquette, as shown in this scene from the original production. What made the ballet so Russian was the way it absorbed western traditions into a seamless Imperial style: Beauty was a Russian ballet about the French court designed by a Francophile Russian, choreographed by a Russified Frenchman to music by a Russian composer for an Italian ballerina.
Like The Sleeping Beauty, the precious Fabergè eggs coveted by the tsar—jewel-encrusted worlds in a shell—were created at a time when the court was increasingly isolated and deaf to the violence threatening the Imperial order.
A couple dressed in traditional seventeenth-century Russian dress for a ball at the Winter Palace around 1902. Beards, sign of a “true” Russian, were de rigueur.
The Ballets Russes performing Vaslav Nijinsky and Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913. With its un-balletic turned-in feet, angular and collapsed arms and bodies, pagan and peasant themes, Rite instantly became an icon of modernism.
Artists across Europe were drawn to ballet, including Henri Matisse, Andrè Derain, Auguste Rodin, and Pablo Picasso. Picasso married a dancer from the Ballets Russes and created designs for Sergei Diaghilev’s ballets; he also painted dancers such as this ballerina (c. 1919).
Diaghilev and Igor Stravinsky relaxing in Spain in 1921. Born and raised in Imperial Russia, they revolutionized ballet: not in Moscow or St. Petersburg but in Paris and across western Europe.
Revolutionary Russia produced the most radical choreography of the early twentieth century. In 1923, Georgi Balanchivadze (George Balanchine) performed his ballet ètude with his wife Tamara Gevergeyeva (Geva): barefoot with limbs tangled and splayed.
Balanchine and Stravinsky’s Apollon Musagète (1928) was a watershed ballet. In it, they turned away from Russia and drew instead on images from antiquity and the Renaissance. This moment in the ballet, performed by Alexandra Danilova and Serge Lifar (top), recalls Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam (bottom).
The ballerina Matilda Kschessinska, mistress to the future and ill-fated Tsar Nicholas II, who built her a mansion and lavished her with privileges. When the Revolution came, the Bolsheviks confiscated Kschessinska’s riches and ransacked her house, which Lenin then made his headquarters.
Ballet survived the Revolution surprisingly intact. Under Soviet rule, dance students—fondly known as “ballet babies”—were escorted to dance classes just as they had been under the tsar. Madame Likoshetstova, their “mother” for some thirty-eight years, remained in her post.
Louis XIV as Apollo and the rising sun in Le Ballet de la Nuit. Plumes denoted wealth and stature; the sun theme is expressed on Louis’s headpiece, chest, wrists, knees, and ankles.
Louis Michel van Loo’s portrait of Marie Sallè perfectly captures the eighteenth-century shift away from male performers and pageantry, toward women and sentiment. The fine line between ballerina and courtesan was also his subject: follow the gaze of the male table leg!
Ballet and fashion were intimately linked. This image of a dancer as a sylphide (left) closely matches that of Queen Marie Antoinette (right).
The queen also liked to dress down and play at being a shepherdess (left); the ballerina Madeleine Guimard followed her lead, as seen in this painting by Jacques-Louis David (right).
The Parisian dancer Antoine Paul in 1820. Paul was the opposite of a danseur noble: muscular, acrobatic, lacking in restraint and taste. Dancers like Paul invented modern ballet technique, but in so doing heralded the decline of the male dancer in France.
Marie Taglioni used the innovations of male dancers like Paul (above) to forge a paradoxical blend of physical power and ethereal restraint. Notice the similarities in form and the use of pointe technique: Taglioni feminized the male bravura style and put the ballerina, as sylphide, at the forefront of ballet.
The Italian ballerina Carlotta Brianza as Princess Aurora in the original production of The Sleeping Beauty (1890) in St. Petersburg. Brianza was a formidable technician whose pointe work a
mazed Russian audiences: observe her hard-blocked shoes, strong, beefy legs, and effortless balance.
Tamara Karsavina in Mikhail Fokine’s The Firebird (1910), performed in Paris by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Karsavina’s lavish costume, inspired by Russian peasant dress, changed the look of ballet: gone were tutu and tiara in favor of exotic and sensual Russian ballet.
Vaslav Nijinsky in Afternoon of a Faun (1912) in Paris. Turned-in feet, tense body, broken lines, stylized hands, and a skin-tight costume were only the beginning of Nijinsky’s modernist remaking of dance. Nijinsky brought the male dancer back to the center of ballet—not as an aristocratic prince, but as a virile, sensual creature from the east.
Margot Fonteyn in The Sleeping Beauty in 1949. Fonteyn’s elegant, restrained line, perfect proportions, and unadorned style exemplified twentieth-century British ballet. But beneath the polite exterior lay tremendous strength and skill. Her ramrod back and technical control were unmatched.
The Bolshoi Ballet’s Maya Plisetskaya, seen here as the deceitful black swan in Swan Lake, was the opposite of Margot Fonteyn: a bravura dancer with a raw, charismatic technique. Her dancing was imbued with the grandeur and posturing of Soviet poster art, combined with a bold independent spirit and go-for-broke energy.
Natalia Makarova as the white swan in a modern production of Swan Lake in New York soon after her defection in 1974. Makarova was a product of the Kirov school: refined, expressive, elegant.
Jacques d’Amboise and Patricia McBride of the New York City Ballet in Jerome Robbins’s Afternoon of a Faun (1953). The relaxed, thoughtful style marked a sharp break from Marius Petipa’s—and George Balanchine’s—more formal dances.
The opening scene of George Balanchine’s Serenade: pristine, simple, almost religious.
“Rubies,” to music by Igor Stravinsky, from George Balanchine’s evening-length plotless ballet Jewels (1967). The extreme extensions, jazz-age hip thrusts, unconventional partnering (by the ankle), and syncopated rhythms represented a new kind of ballet.
The Nutcracker for a machine age. This 1929 production, choreographed in Leningrad by Fedor Lopukhov, was one of several efforts to rework the Russian Imperial classics in a new and revolutionary image.
Machine Dance performed by students of the Moscow Ballet School in 1931. This picture was taken by the American photographer Margaret Bourke- White, who admired the dancers for their assembly-line precision.
Agrippina Vaganova exemplified an old-world Imperial style. It was from this ornamented classicism—not from the machine-age dances above—that she and others would develop an enduringly influential Soviet school of ballet.
Galina Ulanova’s dancing in Romeo and Juliet (1940) made her a household name. A film version of the ballet (1954) was broadcast across the Eastern Bloc: fantastically popular, it was the Soviet Union’s West Side Story.
Ulanova, people’s artist of the USSR, was the country’s most beloved and celebrated dancer. This photo of the ballerina in civilian dress and fully decorated emphasizes her role as an exemplary Soviet citizen.
The Bolshoi Ballet’s performance of Romeo and Juliet in London in 1956 with Ulanova in the title role was a major Cold War event. Audiences queued for three days to get tickets and Ulanova, shown here, received thirteen curtain calls. As one observer recalled, “We were all screaming and yelling, like at a football match.”
The Bolshoi Theater in 1947, draped with portraits of Lenin and Stalin. Politics and art were never far apart in the USSR, and the Bolshoi Ballet was held up as proof of Communism’s success: “It is our pride,” Nikita Khrushchev once remarked.
Khrushchev in his private box at a performance at the Bolshoi Theater in 1959, accompanied by British prime minister Harold MacMillan and British ambassador to Moscow Sir Patrick Reilly, among others.
In November 1962, shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, attend the opening night of the Bolshoi Ballet in Washington, D.C.
Vanessa Bell’s 1927 painting of the Ballets Russes ballerina Lydia Lopokova with her adoring husband, John Maynard Keynes, captures the heady mix of art, sex, and politics that made ballet a preeminent twentieth-century British art.
The Second World War gave British ballet a new seriousness. Ninette de Valois, who co-founded the Royal Ballet, worked with ENSA (Entertainment National Service Association) to entertain the troops.
During the war, male dancers disappeared from the stage to serve: Sir Anton Dolin, one of Britain’s finest dancers, takes up his duties in a bunker as an air-raid warden.
British ballerina Moira Shearer and Russian dancer Lèonide Massine in a poster advertising The Red Shoes in 1948. The film made Shearer an international star and was one of the top ten films in Britain that year.
Rudolf Nureyev, fashionably dressed in Lenin cap and boots, signing autographs in London. Nureyev was raised in poverty in a remote region in the far east of Russia: his defection and rise to super-stardom in Paris, London, and New York were one of the most astonishing stories of the Cold War. © 2009 Roger Urban @nureyevlegacy.org
The legendary partnership of Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev captured an era. In their dancing east met west: Fonteyn’s pristine 1950s Englishwoman fell into the arms of Nureyev’s exotic and sexy 1960s mod man.
Portrait of Britain: Frederick Ashton was a master at depicting British society and manners in dance. Here, a portrait-pose from Enigma Variations (1968), a ballet evoking fashionable nostalgia for Edwardian themes and fashions.
Another portrait of Britain: the prestigious Order of Merit at Buckingham Palace in 1977. Ashton was there with other political and cultural leaders, including J. B. Priestley, Sir Isaiah Berlin, Harold Macmillan, Kenneth Clark, Sir Ronald Syme, Dame Veronica Wedgwood, Sir William Walton, the Duke of Edinburgh, Henry Moore, Malcolm MacDonald, and Her Majesty the Queen.
Lynn Seymour with David Wall in Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling: angry young dancers in search of a more relevant art.
Maurice Bèjart’s Stimmung, to music by Karlheinz Stockhausen, premiered in 1972 at the Universitè Libre de Bruxelles: sex, sweat, and pretense masquerading as art.
Ballet entered America through popular culture. The Black Crook (1866) was a hugely successful extravaganza, staged by two Hungarian brothers, with a company of over seventy dancers performing acrobatic moves like these.
It would be hard to overstate the importance of Anna Pavlova. Her charismatic performances and tours crisscrossing the United States inspired many of the future leaders of American dance. She was a household name—and a commercial asset, as this advertisement for Pond’s cold cream suggests.
America had many kinds of dancing: Katherine Dunham, dancer, anthropologist, and choreographer, ranged from scholarly fieldwork to Broadway shows. George Balanchine admired her work.
Fred Astaire: elegant and off-balance, smooth and syncopated, he melded ballet, jazz, and ballroom—the old world and the new—in a seamless popular style. George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins both said he was one of the best dancers they had ever seen.
Kurt Jooss’s path-breaking ballet The Green Table (1932) reflected interwar pessimism and a widespread sense of impending doom. Internationally performed, it influenced a generation of dancers and choreographers in Europe and America.
Antony Tudor’s Dark Elegies (1937), to Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. Tudor challenged ballet conventions with his somber atmosphere and plain-verse movements. Tudor was English, but these stringent, almost Puritan dances about community, loss, and repressed feelings found a natural home in America.
Nora Kaye claiming her kill in Jerome Robbins’s ballet The Cage (1951), in which female insects attack and murder a male intruder.
Robbins rehearsing for the film of West Side Story in 1960.
James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.
Robbins’s decision to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953 was a defining moment in his life: a betrayal, as he later saw it, o
f his own ideals in his desperation to “fit” into mainstream America.
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