Ballet

Ballet is both a performance genre and a formal system of dance. Its vocabulary includes codified positions, steps and movements, practiced through disciplined training that develops control, balance, strength and flexibility. Performances combine choreography with music and visual elements such as costume, lighting and scenery. Some ballets tell a story; others place greater emphasis on movement, form or atmosphere.

Ballet is not a single unchanging style. Classical ballet preserves inherited steps and conventions, while later choreographers have rearranged or extended that vocabulary. Neoclassical and contemporary works may use ballet technique in different ways, from relatively spare movement to highly theatrical productions.

Ballet took shape in the court culture of Renaissance Italy during the 15th and 16th centuries. It spread to France, where royal patronage helped turn court dances into elaborate productions. A landmark French court work was Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx's Ballet comique de la reine (1581). Under Louis XIV, royal institutions helped formalize dance training: the Académie Royale de Danse was established in 1661, followed by the Académie Royale de Musique in 1669, whose professional dancers contributed to ballet's development as a public theatrical art.

In the 18th century, choreographers increasingly sought to make movement express dramatic action rather than serve only as ornament between musical numbers. Jean-Georges Noverre became a leading advocate of this ballet d'action, in which dance and mime conveyed a connected narrative. The idea helped establish ballet as a form capable of carrying dramatic meaning through movement.

During the 19th century, Romanticism brought new subjects and stage effects to ballet, including supernatural characters and stories set in imagined worlds. La Sylphide (1832) and Giselle (1841) became influential examples. Pointe work—dancing on the tips of the toes—and the light, layered tutu became strongly associated with the Romantic style.

By the late 19th century, St. Petersburg had become a major centre of ballet. Choreographer Marius Petipa shaped works that remain central to the classical repertory, including The Sleeping Beauty (1890), The Nutcracker (1892) and Swan Lake (1895), set to music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. These ballets brought together formal classical technique, large ensembles and elaborate musical and theatrical design.

In 1909, impresario Serge Diaghilev launched the Ballets Russes in Paris. The company brought choreographers, composers, dancers and visual artists into close collaboration; its productions, including works associated with Mikhail Fokine, Vaslav Nijinsky, Igor Stravinsky and Léon Bakst, challenged established expectations and influenced wider European art and design. The company toured internationally and became an important force in 20th-century ballet.

Ballet companies today maintain older repertories while commissioning new works and exploring different movement styles. Training institutions and professional companies remain central to transmitting technique, but choreography continues to change with new artists, audiences and cultural contexts.

Questions of access and representation have shaped the art as well. Encyclopaedia Britannica documents how Eurocentric ideals of appearance and discriminatory casting disadvantaged dancers of colour. American dancer Arthur Mitchell became the first Black principal dancer at New York City Ballet and, with Karel Shook, founded Dance Theatre of Harlem in 1969. The school and company helped widen access to ballet training and performance. These histories show that the art changes not only through choreography but also through who is trained, cast and seen. The result is a broad field in which inherited forms coexist with experimentation rather than a single fixed definition of what ballet must look like.