A Brief History of Ballet, Pt. 1

For a long time, there was no formalized dance in western culture. Eventually, court performers in Europe were asked to also teach their audiences how to dance, blending the worlds of performance and social dancing, and creating a new art form.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frying, and I'm so Since this is a
season where a lot of people in our listener base
have just seen The Nutcracker, including me, I had just

(00:23):
saw it on Thursday, which is a ballet standard for
Christmas time, it seemed like a good time to delve
into where ballet began and how it became codified. And
we have covered a couple of famous ballet dancers on
the podcast, including Marie Taglioni in two thousand thirteen and
Maria taal Chief in and after each of those we
had a number of requests for a general ballet history episode,

(00:46):
so finally, years later, here we are with a lot
of caveats because this episode is a two parter, and
even so it leaves so much out. Ballet's big innings
in the Royal Court of France meant that in many
ways it became tied to national identity, not just in France,
but in the various places that it developed after that,

(01:09):
which also meant that the political shifts of the Western
world impacted it in a variety of ways, and we
cannot put a comprehensive history of the West into a
ballet episode, or really into any one episode. So it's
just a lot of things touched this particular topic, uh,
in ways that are not easy to be inclusive of everything. Also,

(01:30):
because of the way ballet developed, there is a good
bit of French history and a smattering of other nations.
But again brief. Additionally, if you love ballet, I feel you.
I studied dance for a long time and I would
really really be happy to wax rhapsodic over every single
step in Ghazelle, which is one of my personal favorites,
or talk about the astonishingly beautiful costumes in Balanchine's Jewels.

(01:53):
Oh they're really pretty. Google that if you want to
see some pretty things. But we can't go to in
depth into anyone ballet, although Aaglione in law Selphie does
get a good bit of talk because it's a pivotal
moment in ballet history. So in short, I just want
to reiterate the brief in the title A brief History
of Ballet, even though it is in two parts. Yeah,
I am imagining a whole college course that's like a

(02:18):
history of Europe and Asia through the lens of ballet
that would be fascinating. Um, I had a whole college
course and even it still covered only Western and could
not get to everything, Like it's just too much. And
like I said, there are so many pieces, and I
think part of it. We'll talk about this at the end.
But the way ballet migrated around through dancers traveling and

(02:41):
dancing teachers traveling, it also gets really complex in terms
of the world stage, literally, because everything is touching each
other in ways that might not happen in the development
of some other cultural phenomenon. Right, So humans have undoubtedly
danced in some way or another pretty much for as
long as we have existed. But while most people have

(03:04):
a natural response of moving when there's rhythmic music, it's
not necessarily structured or choreographed. The average person might know
some popular contemporary steps, or you could be like me
and no none of them and just be awkward all
the time. You might break those out at weddings or
other social engagements, but comparatively few have formally studied dance,

(03:27):
and for a long time there was no formalized dance
in Western culture. Over time, performers who had been entertaining
in the courts of Europe, such as jugglers and acrobats
were then also asked to teach their audiences how to dance,
and this blended the worlds of performance and social dancing,
and it created an entirely new profession, that of the

(03:48):
dance educator who taught grace and etiquette as well as
dance steps. The man who's often cited as the first
dancing master in the Western timeline is Domenico to Piacenza,
and truthfully, there were probably other people before him, but
he's the first one that's really documented. Piacenza wrote the
first dance manual in Europe in fourteen sixteen. It was

(04:10):
titled on the Art of Dancing and Directing Choruses. It's
important to note that Piacenza, who was about sixteen when
this work was published, was doing what a lot of
dance instructors were doing at the time, combining both music
and dance in his work. Yeah uh, we'll see more
later on that dance runs very parallel with music, and

(04:30):
see it even once it gets to a very theatrical point,
A lot of opera and dances very linked. Piacenza, who
eventually was knighted in the Order of the Golden Spur
choreographed dances for a variety of social events for nobility,
including weddings and festivals throughout Italy. In the last decades
of his life, several of those dances and their accompanying

(04:51):
musical notations were published. His ideology and teaching focused on
things like really understanding musical tempo and letting it guide
the body and all also maintaining a light and agile
mode of movement, always ready to move on to the
next step. And his writing he stated quote this necessitates
that at each tempo, one appears to have seen Medusa's head,

(05:12):
as the poet says, and be of stone in one instant,
and in another instant take flight like a falcon driven
by hunger. He really saw dance as a union of
intellect and effort to create beauty, and he thought that
it helped to be naturally beautiful to be the best
possible d answer something I think people still think today. Yeah,

(05:33):
I love his advice about like always be ready to
move again, because when you see UH novices learning steps,
that's usually what trips them up is that they are like,
I'm thinking about this step, I have completed this step,
and then other people are moving onto the next step
while they're like, I have completed the step UM. So
that in and of itself is really good advice, but
then it gets kind of lame when it's like, oh,
you better be pretty um. One of Piacenza's students was

(05:57):
Antonio Cornezzano, who was poet and a biographer as well
as a dancing master. A lot of these people had
very diversified resumes. Antonio became the dancing master of some
of Milan's most wealthy and influential families, and he wrote
his own book, Book of the Art of the Dance.
Another of Domenico de Piachens students, Gugliemo Abreo di Pizzarro,

(06:21):
who is often seen as Giovanni Ambroggio because that's the
name he assumed later on in his life, contributed also
to the early Western record of codified dance. In his
fourteen sixty three book treat Us on the Art of Dancing,
he included descriptions of dozens of large scale court dances
from the era. Yeah, at this point, a lot of

(06:42):
what was being written down and and codified was not
about steps, but like the shapes that people should make
in a in a ballroom, to create a dance uh
and Italy continued to be central in Europe in the
incorporation of structured and choreographed dance into its celebrations and
a throughout the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth. On

(07:03):
January ninety one of the most famous productions of the
Renaissance era was staged. It was called Festa del Paradiso
or Feast of Paradise, and that was staged by Leonardo
da Vinci, based on the work of poet Bernardo Balencioni
in Milan. Festa del Paradiso was part performance art and
part architectural marvel, and it was staged to celebrate the

(07:24):
marriage of gian Galileso Sforza and Isabella of Aragon. The
production had lavish scenery that depicted Jupiter surrounded by planets
and stars. The stage revolved in Roman gods and goddesses
were all included in this welcomed Isabella. There have been
entire books written about this one event, but for the
purposes of this discussion, the germane aspect is that there

(07:47):
was an entire prologue of dance performances in honor of
the newlyweds. Yeah, there have been various modern recreations of
this event, but it is just described in all writing
as this is honish ing thing. It's like one of
those things that the people that were there for it
were almost revered for having been at a marked an
important moment in history. And coming up, we are also

(08:11):
going to talk about a woman who has mentioned on
the podcast fairly frequently and who has been the focus
of some of our recent classics, and that's Catherine de Medici.
But first we are going to pause and have a
little sponsor break up. To this point, the slow codification

(08:33):
of dance was happening largely in Italy, but if you
are even passingly familiar with ballet you know that all
of the terminology for it is in French. Uh and
we actually have Catherine de Medici to thank for that.
When Catherine married on Red the second of France in
fifteen thirty three, she brought a lot of Italian customs
and culture into the French court. It wasn't as though

(08:54):
France did not have plenty of culture of its own,
but Catherine missed the very over the top celebrations that
she had been growing up with, so she encouraged the
development of the kinds of dances and events such as
Biletti and Bally that she had loved at home back
in Italy. At this point, these ballets, as the French
called them, were formal social events, although in some cases

(09:17):
the specific steps were adapted as performances. Yeah, but even
those performances were not like set apart from the event.
They were kind of in the middle of it, almost
the way you would have like a dance line at
a modern event where people go through and they show
off their skills. Kind of like that, except much more
formal and not as freestyle. And of course if you

(09:40):
have listened to the podcast, you know that Katherine de
Medici was involved in all manner of political intrigue, and
she was no innocent. So I don't want to try
to paint a picture of her as some benevolent purveyor
of culture from Italy to France. But her influence on
the arts of Europe is significant. In one Balthazar to Bourgeoio,
who had traveled from Italy to the court of France

(10:02):
in fifteen fifty five as a musician, staged the first
ballet that we have the complete record for his creation
was Ballet Comique de la Rene and that's the Queen's
comic ballet. It was created as part of the celebration
of the marriage of Marguerite de Lorand to the Duke
de Joyeus in October. That was October fifte and this

(10:25):
performance included singing and poetry as well as dancing. It
also lasted five and a half hours. Uh. This was
expensive to produce and the price tag for that particular
piece of entertainment was three point six million gold francs.
And yes, there were absolutely people at court who spoke
very critically of that level of expenditure at a time

(10:46):
when France was in conflict and should not have been
throwing money around. But this production also had a massive influence.
For one thing, it's at a trend and inspired courts
of other countries to similarly stage massive theatrical performances. It
also sparked not only the development of ballet as an
art form, but also opera. Ballet Comique de Lorraine was

(11:08):
a narrative. It was the story of Searcy from Homer's Odyssey,
although it's ultimately the King of France to whom Searcy
bows in this version. The performance was given by members
of the courts, and while it may be called the
first ballet. It was not up on a stage. It
was just in the middle of a ballroom. Yeah, like said,
everybody's just kind of at the same level, dancing, sharing

(11:31):
their their production. This performance had been the result of
more than a decade of effort and philosophizing about art
at the Academy depoisy in de Musique, which was founded
in fifteen seventy by Catherine's son, Charles the ninth of France.
He gets the same disclaimer as his mother regarding often
being uh the cause of a lot of political intrigue,

(11:53):
not just a benevolent patron of the arts. The academy
was established on the idea that humans could achieve a
certain level of spiritual grace through the study of the arts,
and this sort of runs parallel to the use of
theatrical spectacles and celebration is a way to counter the
heavy conflict of France at the time, conflict that this
family in the royal staging. These ballets were often party too,

(12:16):
and also often the cause of and in terms of
ballet's history Ballet comique de Lorraine. It started another trend.
In addition to just inspiring other nations to do the
same basic thing that was the ballet de cour or
the court ballet. That just means that it was dances
in which the performers and the audience were mostly all
members of the court, with monarchs sometimes participating as performers.

(12:40):
It was sort of a by us for us art
in an extremely exclusive sense, and it also made dancing
a serious and intellectual form of expression in the French court,
so it could reflect political and religious ideologies. There was
a degree to which these court dances were really being
used to soothe the minds of the aristocra. See. It
was sort of like, look how ordered and beautiful all

(13:03):
of this is. France is obviously doing just fine. Frances,
We're doing great. You got look what we make. We're
so amazing. Uh yeah. It's one of those weird things
where you realize just how completely uh separate the lives
of the haves and have nots were at this period.

(13:23):
The ballet decour and its predecessors were fundamentally just building
on existing dance steps that would be part of any
fancy social function, and because of that, write ups on
staging had always been pretty vague about how to actually
do these steps. It appears that there was a presumption
that the reader of any such documentation would just know
how to do the bassa dants or the gavut, So

(13:44):
instructions tended to focus on the shapes that the dancers
should form up in where they should physically be in
relation to other groups or other dancers. Uh And throughout
this period these dance performances were still part of much
larger productions that included singing in spoken words segments. Finally,
in fIF someone wrote down an instruction manual of how

(14:07):
to actually do the steps of ballet and how those
steps should interact with the music. The author of this
work was Jehan Tabureau, who was a priest. Writing as Twine,
ar Beaux or Cassography not only codified all of these
court dances dating back to the twelfth century, but it
also did so in a way that made it accessible
to everyone. Yes, theoretically, are bows writing could be picked

(14:30):
up by any novice and they would go, now, I
know how to dance. The reign of Louis the fourteenth
famously put France on the map as the nexus of
the arts in Europe, and Louis the fourteenth was in
many ways far more interested in art than politics, and
his decision to bolster all kinds of arts when he
was king shaped the identity of France in ways that
continue to reverberate today, and dance was certainly part of that.

(14:55):
But his predecessor, Louis the Thirteenth, who reigned from sixteen
ten to sixteen forty three, was also really enamored with
the ballet de cour. He was regular and enthusiastic participant
as a performer and as a designer, and under Louis
the Thirteenth, ballets were still very much part of a
party atmosphere at court. They became raucous and filled with
innuendo and even crass humor, and they were wildly popular,

(15:19):
a little too popular to some degree, because in some
cases the king couldn't even get through the crowds that
were gathering to see the performances to make his entrance.
He had all clumped up to see the king and
could not because they were blocking him. It was during
Louis the thirteenth time as monarch that the stage emerged,
bringing the spectacle of ballet up off of the floor,
and it's also when the idea of the audience and

(15:41):
the performers occupying separate spaces really established itself, at least
as related to ballet. Theaters were built with backstage areas
and entrance wings and the types of riggings that enabled
the performance of the ballet to become more of an
artful deception. When the audience had shared the floor with
the performers, there was never any real way to just
lose yourself in the willful suspension of disbelief that the

(16:04):
characters in the story were real. But when the artists
were creating a show separated from the crowd and only
seen in character and all the scenery tricks were concealed,
the audience could get swept up in the magic of
the performance. Incidentally, the phrase suspension of disbelief would not
be coined for another two hundred years, when Coleridge wrote

(16:25):
about that idea. And next up, we are getting to
the man who often gets a lot of credit when
it comes to ballet's development, as I mentioned a moment
ago King Louis the fourteenth. But before that we are
going to have a little break and have a word
from a sponsor. During Louis the Fourteenth's very long rain

(16:48):
that stretched from the mid seventeenth century into the early
eighteenth century, the idea of really perfecting dance steps came
into focus, establishing a true standard of technique, which remains
a key ozone of ballet practice today. And Louis the
fourteenth loved dancing. He began performing at age thirteen, and
he was quite good, both because he had a very

(17:10):
natural talent and because he practiced for several hours every day.
We should mention that during this time, social dance was
also at a fever pitch of popularity. While the king
and other dancers perfected their steps for presentation, they and
the rest of the court were also working on steps
for the ballrooms less theatrical activities. The menuet in particular

(17:31):
became an important dance and was often the grand finale
of a series of dances at a large celebration, and
both social dance and performance dance continued to be intertwined.
For example, Les Plaisi deligen chant that's the Pleasures of
the Enchanted Island was a three day event that featured
performers doing everything from serving food at banquets to dancing

(17:53):
in the finale ballet. This took place at Versailles in
sixteen sixty four, as that property was beginning its train
edition from being a hunting lodge to becoming a palace,
and the whole spectacle both entertained and reinforced the hierarchy,
rank structure, and level of royal favor of everyone involved.
Louis the fourteenth was both the star and an observer,

(18:15):
so for the climactic finish, a professional dancer took over
the lead that Louis the fourteenth had been performing, so
that the king could sit back and watch. Loui the
fourteenth also founded the first formal dance institution in the
Western world, l Academy Royal to Dance, in sixteen sixty one,
and to head up this enterprise, he selected thirteen dancing

(18:36):
masters for the academy, and they had a list of tasks.
They needed to develop standards of dance technique. They needed
to document existing ballets so they could be repeated according
to those standards, and they had to test and a
credit dance teachers. These thirteen masters, who called themselves the Elders,
were of course highly connected to the royal court, and
the problem with all of this was that there was

(18:57):
already a performers guild in France which included dancers as
well as acrobats, musicians, etcetera. And the professional dancers who
appeared in court productions alongside the nobility were already members
of that existing guild, Confrairie de Saint Julien de Menetrier,
which had been founded in Paris in thirteen twenty one.
So it was a long standing tradition, and in addition

(19:20):
to challenging the long standing guild's power, this new dance
academy also argued guild members attempted to divorce dance from music,
which was completely anathema and in their opinion, disrespectful to
both aspects of the arts. While this academy system created
tension and set up some dancing teachers as courtiers, making
them wealthy in the process, the real goal of notating

(19:44):
dance and written form was for Louis the fourteenth to
be able to export ballet. Basically, he wanted French influence
in the arts to be codified so that it could
be admired and emulated, and this was the case with academies.
He established an other sciplines as well, including architecture, painting,
and fencing. Yeah, he's come up in in a number

(20:06):
of episodes on the show, uh and he really was
the beginning of France being the tastemakers of Europe and
then the rest of the world. That was kind of
a very calculated move on his part that they would
be the best at all of the arts. And at
this point LaBelle dance, also known as French noble style
dance or baroque dance, starts to really become a precursor

(20:28):
to what we'd call classical ballet today. But at this point,
though there were women involved in court performances, it was
all really about male performers rather than women, and LaBelle
dance was a male only form. Simultaneously, the ballet cour
was shifting into a new format, Moliere's comedy ballet, which
were shorter, tighter productions than these hours and hours and

(20:50):
hours and hours long spectacles that the court had been
seeing up at this point, or becoming the favored iteration
of these types of performances. They still bind dance and
spoken word theater, and even as they skewered the nobility
and ambition and the dishonor of using dance to move
up socially as the bourgeois gentilan did, they were applauded

(21:12):
for their wits rather than condemned. For basically mocking the audience.
It was also under Louis the Fourteenth's watch that the
five positions of the feet that are key to ballet
were first laid out as established by Pierre Beauchamp, the
director of the Academy Royal de Dance, and he also
devised a notation system that was codified later by Raoul J. Fourier,

(21:33):
and Foyer published this notation and other notes on things
such as armed positions and ideal bodies for dance in
his seventeen hundred book kore Grophie u lau de de
clare la dance. So that's choreography or the art of
describing dance. Meanwhile, the Academy Royale de Musique, founded in
sixteen sixty nine, would eventually become the Paris Opera. Jean

(21:57):
Baptiste Lulie became head of the organization and sixteen seventy two,
and he made a series of moves to ensure the
organization's power and prestige. Included negotiating terms that made it
illegal for other theaters to stage productions of the same
size and scale as the royally established institution. Over time,
ballet performances started to fall under the auspices of this organization. Yeah,

(22:20):
that's a little bit of a political intrigue. They kind
of took power from the Academy de Dance and that
is where we're going to leave off for the moment. Uh.
Next time, we are literally picking up right where we
left off, and we are going to feature a major
milestone in the dance world right off the bat. Do
you have some listener mail before we close out? May we?

(22:42):
I do? I have to postcards. I'm trying to when
we do postcards, I'm trying to do a couple at
a time. Our first postcard that I wanted to mention
is from our listener, Jess Uh. It is from the
Warsaw Uprising Museum. She just wrote, high, I recently visited
the Warsaw Uprising Museum in Warsaw, Poland, an event unknown
to me until I visited, but it plays a big

(23:02):
part in the city and countries national identity and could
be an interesting topic idea for your podcast. Thank you
for your great podcast, Jess. This is a very striking picture.
I want to say it's beautiful, but there's a little
bit of melancholy to it, but it's really lovely, So
thank you Jess for thinking of us. I'm always so
so odd that people take time while they're traveling to
write us a postcard, because I can't even manage that

(23:24):
for my closest friends. Our second postcard comes from our listener, Phoebe.
It is from Baias and Sebastian. Write Steer, Tracy and Holly,
thank you for all you do to make history accessible
and entertaining. I've been listening to your podcast for about
one and a half years now, and while I don't
always get around to every episode, I love all of
them that I do here. There's no shame in that
we all have finite time to listen to things I

(23:46):
can't keep up with my podcast. I will never shame
anybody over that one. Uh this is my third year.
She goes on to say of living in Spain, and
it can get a bit lonely and isolating living in
a foreign country with a foreign tongue. Your podcast is
one of the few I listened to you to make
myself more comfortable here, so thank you for always keeping
me company. I wanted to write to tell you how
much I enjoyed your episode about Catalina di Rauzo, The

(24:08):
Lieutenant nun. I used to live in Pamplona and would
go to Donastia often, and I loved getting to learn
about such a dynamic character from my own backyard. This
is coming to you so late because I wanted to
get you a postcard from there. Uh. So she then
describes what the postcard is, which is um a main
beach which is called lak Anka which means the shell. Uh.

(24:30):
And then she says, keep up the absolutely excellent work
and more about Spain please. Uh she It's so delightful,
and thank you so much, Phoebe. It's a really cool
panoramic postcard. So it's a beautiful long landscape view of
this area and it looks absolutely gorgeous and makes me
want to visit. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so at History Podcast at how stove
works dot com. You minus everywhere on social media as

(24:52):
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(25:12):
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