An online newsletter for those who love ballet

Ballet is a form of theatrical dance built on a codified vocabulary of movement that took shape in the courts of Renaissance Italy and later France. Its steps carry French names — plié, tendu, arabesque, jeté — because the technique was formalized in Paris in the seventeenth century, when Louis XIV founded the first academy to train professional dancers. What began as court entertainment for nobles slowly hardened into a discipline with its own grammar, one a dancer spends years learning before a single step looks effortless.

The classical style rests on turnout, the outward rotation of the legs from the hip that gives ballet its distinctive line and range of motion. From that foundation come the positions of the feet and arms that organize almost everything else. Dancers train to make enormous physical effort disappear, so that a leap reads as suspension and a balance reads as stillness. The illusion of weightlessness is the whole point, and it is the hardest thing to produce.

Music and ballet grew up together. Composers such as Tchaikovsky and, later, Stravinsky wrote scores meant to be danced rather than merely heard, and the partnership between choreographer and composer shaped some of the most enduring works in either art. A ballet can tell a story, evoke a mood, or exist purely as movement set to sound with no plot at all.

Over four centuries the form spread far from its French and Italian origins, absorbing Russian, Danish, British, and American schools, each with its own accent. The Russian tradition prized grandeur and bravura; the Danish preserved a lighter, quicker style; the twentieth-century American approach stripped away narrative to chase speed and pure line. These schools disagree on emphasis, but they share the same root vocabulary, which is why a dancer trained in one country can, with effort, perform in another.