Dance history Essay

Ballet is a orchestrate of dancing dischargeed for theatre audiences. Like new(prenominal) bounce forms, concert dance may read a story, establish a mood, or simply reflect the music. But a ballet dancers technique (way of performing) and special skills differ greatly from those of other(a) dancers. Ballet dancers perform many movements that atomic number 18 unnatural for the body. But when these movements are tireface executed, they look natural. The beginnings of ballet can be traced to Italy during the 1400s at the time of the Renaissance. During the Renaissance, mass genuine a great have-to doe with in fraud and learning.At the corresponding time, trade and commerce expanded rapidly, and the dukes who command Florence and other Italian city-states grew in wealth. The dukes did very untold to promote the arts. The Italian city-states became rival art centres as well as competing commercial-grade centers. The Italian dukes competed with one another in giving cos tly, fancy entertainments that include dance performances. The dancers were not professionals. They were noblemen and noblewomen of a dukes hook who danced to please their ruler and to stir the regard and envy of his rivals.Catherine de Medici, a member of the judgment family of Florence, became the queen of France in 1547. Catherine introduced into the French move the same kind of entertainments that she had known in Italy. They were staged by Balthazar de Beaujoyeulx, a able musician. Beaujoyeulx had come from Italy to be Catherines question musician. Ballet historians consider one of Beaujoyeulxs entertainments, the Ballet Comique de la Reine, to be the for the first time ballet. It was a magnificent spectacle of intimately 51/2 hours performed in 1581 in awarding of a royal wedding.The ballet told the old-fashioned Greek myth of Circe, who had the magical great power to turn men into beasts. The ballet included specially written instrumental music, singing, and commu nicate verse as well as dancingall based on the story of Circe. Dance technique was passing limited, and so Beaujoyeulx depended on spectacular costumes and view to impress the audience. To make sure that the audience understood the story, he provided printed copies of the verses used in the ballet. The ballet was a great success, and was much imitated in other European courts.French leadership. The Ballet Comique de la Reine established genus Paris as the capital of the ballet world. mogul Louis XIV, who ruled France during the late 1600s and too soon 1700s, strengthened that leadership. Louis greatly enjoyed dancing. He took divorce in all the ballets given at his court, which his nobles performed, but stopped after he became fat and middle-aged. In 1661, Louis founded the Royal honorary society of saltation to train professional dancers to perform for him and his court. Professional ballet began with the kings dancing academy.With serious training, the French professionals d eveloped skills that had been impossible for the amateurs. Similar companies developed in other European countries. One of the sterling(prenominal) was the Russian Imperial Ballet of St. Petersburg, whose schooling was founded in 1738. The French professional dancers became so skilled that they began to perform publicly in theatres. But in 1760, the French choreographer dungaree Georges Noverre criticized the professional dancers in his book Lettres sur la danse, et sur les ballets (Letters on Dancing and Ballets).Noverre complained that the dancers cared too much astir(predicate) wake their technical skills and too little about the true purpose of ballet. This purpose, he said, was to counterbalance characters and express their feelings. Noverre urged that ballet dancers stop using masks, bulky costumes, and large wigs to illustrate or explain plot and character. He claimed that the dancers could express these things using only their bodies and faces.So ache as the dancers d id not look strive or uncomfortable doing difficult steps, they could build such emotions as anger, joy, fear, and love. Noverre developed the ballet daction, a form of hammy ballet that told the story completely by means of movement. Most of Noverres ballets told stories taken from antediluvian Greek myths or dramas. But during the earlyish 1800s, people no longer cared about old gods and heroes. The romantic period began as people became interested in stories of light from the real world to dreamlike worlds or foreign lands.