HOW BALLET HAS EVOLVED FROM PETIPA TO TODAY.
All this is ballet

At the turn of the century, the glamour and impeccable reputation held by the Imperial Ballet of Saint Petersburg was the achievement of Marius Petipa, the company’s imperial ballet master from 1862 to 1903. He developed a virtuoso ballet style and his creativity as a choreographer is evident in many of his classical masterpieces, which are also very popular ballets, such as "Swan Lake", "Sleeping Beauty", "The Nutcracker" (all with original score by Tchaikovsky) as well as "Don Quixote", "La Bayadére" or "Raymonda". He produced a total of 54 ballets, 35 ballet operas and restored 17 older ballet works. Numerous authors chronicled his life and works, also portraying him as the "Napoleon of ballet", whose impact on the history of stage dancing still resounds in our times.

Around 1909, a ballet renaissance emerged in Western Europe, especially influenced by the "Ballets Russes", which the passionate empresario Serge Diaghilev brought from Saint Petersburg to Paris. A structural change began to take place, and in this process of change, the choreography became dominant over the ballet’s Libretto and score, making the choreographer the real author of a ballet. Mikhail Mikhailovitch Fokine (aka Michel Fokin), co-founder of modern ballet, choreographer and foremost a great ballet theorist, formulated the fundamental characteristics of this change in a letter to the editor. Fokin liberated ballet from any meaningless movements, encouraged the closest possible union between the form of dance and the music, and highlighted the importance of a soul-felt expression when performing the art. The ballet "Les Sylphides" was the first choreographic artwork in this spirit, created by Fokine himself in 1909. It was undoubtedly the music that shaped most of his choreographies, for example, of the ballets "The Firebird", "Petrushka" and "Le Sacre du Printemps" (The Rite of Spring), all scores composed by Igor Stravinsky, and manifested again in the choreography of "Daphnis and Chloé", composed by Maurice Ravel. But other elements also strongly influenced his choreographies; an example would be "Parade", where the interaction of a Jean Coteau Libretto, a score by Eric Satie and Pablo Picasso’s set design created a unique ballet.

The October Revolution marked a turning point in the history of ballet, encouraging, at first, all kinds of choreographic experiments, to shortly afterwards suppress the free spirit of the Arts. This drove a personality into exile whose name will be remembered as a synonym for innovation in the history of ballet of the 20th century: George Balanchine. Since 1925, he was the last choreographer for the famed "Ballets Russes" company, following the footsteps of Fonkin, Vaslav Nijinsky, Léonid Massine and Bronislava Nijinska, Njinsky’s sister.

George Balanchine was an exceptional artist and a genius, who masterfully created with the music, text book, choreography and stage design a synthesis of the arts. The neoclassical ballet became visible for the first time in Balanchine’s choreographies and would dominate the Western stages for decades, whereas in the former Eastern bloc, influenced by Soviet ballet, a dance style evolved that was utterly marked by Soviet themes.

Besides Balanchine, the most important talents of the neoclassical ballet were, above all, Frederick Ashton, Bronislava Nijinska and Jerome Robbins. In most of their choreographies, the dancers performed in tricots and tunikas, and the stage design consisted primarily of a pale blue backdrop. The music was not considered a melody, but a measure of time units, as was the case with Balanchine. In some cases, the choreographies were adapted without music, as, for example, in the 1959 Jerome Robbins production "Moves"; or the music was replaced by sounds or texts, as in parts of "Dreams", choreographed by Anna Sokolow in 1961, Maurice Béjart’s "À la recherche de ..." of 1968, or Hans van Manen’s "Situation", from 1970. In Western Europe and America, ballet experienced a comeback; simultaneously, the free dance movement was evolving and stimulated ballet with new ideas. "The body should be free when dancing, the dance should give the body new feeling of well-being…". The schools founded by Isadora Duncan were very popular and very important for the evolution of free dance, especially after World War I. Rudolf von Laban, Mary Wigmann, Dore Hoyer and Kurt Jooss represented the free dance in Germany. Martha Graham was one of the most extraordinary talents of modern dance; she developed a dance codex and then taught it at her own school. Great dancers such as José Limón, Paul Taylor, Anna Sokolow, Glenn Tetley, and especially Merce Cunningham allowed the experiences of the two World Wars, and the increasing environmental damages by mankind to converge into their experimental ballets.

For a long time, the great choreographers came almost exclusively from America, whereas the Europeans had little to offer. In France, the French neoclassical ballet was flat out, after briefly flaring up with Serge Lifar and the short life span of a ballet on Champs Elysées. In Great Britain, and also in Germany, attempts were made to revive the ballet d’action as a 19th century art form, amongst others by John Cranko and Kenneth Macmillan. Then, Maurice Béjart, and his Ballet du XXe Siècle, introduced new ideas to ballet and thus captivated a new audience for ballet. The choreographers Rudi van Dantzig, Jiri Kylián and Hans van Manen, who all worked in the Netherlands, were also new supporters of the evolution of European ballet.

As opposed to the half-hourly, abstract one-act plays that dominated ballet since the beginning of the 20th century, since 1975, the new ballet in Europe is prone to show multi-act, sold-out performances. However, these do not show any similarities to the ballet d’action of the 19th century, but strongly turn to portraying more realistic themes such as human conflicts and social problems.

The German ballet was able to access the international ballet scene thanks to the outstanding work of John Cranko and John Neumeier, as well as of many choreographers such as Pina Bausch, Gerhard Bohner, Robert Gilmore, Reinhild Hoffmann, William Forsythe, and many more. Even though the acclaimed avant-garde scene is highly valued by the German audience, it still cherishes the classical ballet, as embodied to perfection by the Russian State Ballet. In Viacheslav Gordeev’s own words, classical ballet is "the origin of every ballet danced nowadays" thus making it crucial to modern ballet’s culture.

Mihaela Vieru