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Women In Ballet


It took a while before women began to dance ballet. Women did not enter the scene professionally until 1681. The most famous women dancers of the early and mid 1700’s were Marie Camargo and Marie Salle.
Marie Camargo shortened her skirts to show her ankles, and wore soft slippers to dance instead of the conventional high heeled shoes worn at the time. Her chosen shoe style allowed and enabled her to do various steps that weren’t possible before then. She has been credited with inventing the ’entrechat’, known as the high spring, in which the feet are crossed in the air. As for Marie Salle, she discarded the dresses of the era, and wore flowing draperies instead.
Their most famous male contemporary was Jean Georges Noverre, whose reforms, anticipating the naturalistic trends of the nineteenth century included the discarding of masks and the wearing of costumes suitable to ballet being performed then.


The Romantic Period...

In Western Europe, the 19th century saw progress in the development of both form and technique. And sometime in the 1820’s there was an innovation “on point”, as the first dancer rose on her toes and danced. There is a possibility that this dancer was Maria Taglioni. This resulting impression of lightness and ethereality marked the beginning of the ascendancy of the woman dancer, a pre-eminence which lasted into the early 1900’s. This romantic period was characterized by literature, art and music, had a profound effect and its counterpart in ballet. Giselle (1841) is the most famous ballet of that period. The great ballerinas of that period in addition to Maria Taglioni were the Italians   Carlotta Grisi (creator of the role of the Giselle) and Fanny Cerritos, the Viennese Fanny Elssler, and the Dane Lucile Grahn. Later on, with the ascendancy of opera, with the works of Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi, there came a gradual decline in ballet dance in Western Europe.


Russian Ballet

The shift towards Russia began in the second half of the nineteenth century. This took place in St. Petersburg, where the imperial school of the Maryinsky Theatre had been established since 1738. During its first century, all the stars, ballet masters, and  choreographers had been imported. However, in 1854, Marius Petipa, a Frenchman was ballet master and instructor. He staged his first ballet in 1858, and he lived in Russia for the rest of his life. And during this era, St. Petersburg developed her own great ballerinas, for whom Petipa created such ballets as Raymonda, La Bayadere, Don Quixote, and most famous of all, The Sleeping Beauty. He also staged Acts One and Three of Swan Lake. His assistant, the first great Russian born choreographer, Lev Ivanov, choreographed for the ‘white act’ and the final act of this ballet as well as for The Nutcracker.

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