Ballet day
<p>In 1581, in a hall of the French royal court, dancers performed the Ballet Comique de la Reine, a lavish spectacle of dance, music and verse staged for the wedding festivities of a courtier of Catherine de’ Medici. It ran for hours, cost a fortune, and is generally counted as the first true ballet de cour, the court ballet from which the entire art form descends. Ballet Day, marked on 7 February, is an invitation to look back along that line, from a sixteenth-century banqueting hall to the pointe shoes and proscenium stages of today, and to appreciate an art that has spent more than four centuries refusing to stand still.</p>
<h2 id="a-day-without-a-clear-founder">A day without a clear founder</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>It is worth being honest at the outset: the origins of Ballet Day itself are not well documented. There is no founding decree, no single company or government that established it, and no agreed account of who first set aside 7 February for the purpose. It seems to have grown organically out of the broader culture of dance appreciation, taken up by schools, companies and enthusiasts who wanted a fixed point in the year to share what they love. Rather than dress that uncertainty up as something grander, it is more useful to spend the day on the thing it celebrates, which has a history we can trace with real names, dates and places.</p>
<h2 id="how-ballet-actually-began">How ballet actually began</h2>
<p>Ballet did not start in Russia, where the popular imagination tends to place it, courtesy of the Bolshoi and Mariinsky, and it did not start as a profession. It began as court entertainment in the Italian Renaissance, where wealthy households staged elaborate combinations of dance, mime and music at banquets and weddings. When Catherine de’ Medici, an Italian noblewoman, became queen of France in the mid-sixteenth century, she brought this taste for spectacle with her, and the French court became its great patron. The Ballet Comique de la Reine of 1581 is the landmark that survives in the record.</p>
<p>The decisive figure, though, was King Louis XIV. A keen and accomplished dancer himself, he earned his nickname, the Sun King, from a role he danced as Apollo, god of the sun, in a court ballet in 1653. In 1661 Louis founded the Académie Royale de Danse, the first institution dedicated to codifying dance, and it is from this French court tradition that ballet inherited the language it still speaks. The five positions of the feet, the plié, the arabesque, the pirouette: the steps carry French names because they were named in France, by people working for Louis. His ballet master Pierre Beauchamp is traditionally credited with codifying those five positions that remain the foundation of technique today.</p>
<p>From France the art spread, and it professionalised. In 1681 a woman, Mademoiselle de La Fontaine, appeared as a professional dancer at the Paris Opera, a milestone in ballet’s shift from an amusement performed by aristocrats and courtiers to a craft practised by trained specialists. As performers moved off the courtly floor and onto raised stages, where audiences sat in front rather than around them, the geometry of the dance changed: steps that had been read from above now had to read from one side, which gradually reshaped technique towards the turned-out, frontal lines we recognise today. The eighteenth-century reformer Jean-Georges Noverre pushed the art further still, arguing in his influential 1760 Lettres sur la danse that ballet should tell a coherent story through expressive movement rather than serve as a string of decorative displays, an idea that gave rise to the dramatic ballet d’action. The Romantic era of the 1830s and 1840s, centred on Paris, gave ballet its first great popular icons and its enduring image of the ethereal female dancer rising onto her toes; the ballet Giselle, premiered at the Paris Opera in 1841, remains a cornerstone of that period. Then ballet found a second home in Imperial Russia. There the French-born choreographer Marius Petipa, working in St Petersburg for decades from the 1860s, created or shaped the grand classical repertoire, including The Sleeping Beauty and, with the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, The Nutcracker and Swan Lake. The “Russian ballet” the world reveres is, at its root, a French art form transplanted and brought to extraordinary flower in the Tsar’s theatres.</p>
<h2 id="why-the-day-is-worth-keeping">Why the day is worth keeping</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>Ballet is one of the most demanding things a human body can be trained to do, and one of the most thoroughly disguised. A dancer who makes a thirty-two fouetté turn sequence look weightless has spent a decade or more building the strength, balance and control to hide the effort entirely. A day given over to ballet is partly a corrective to that very illusion: a chance to see the labour behind the grace, the bruised toes inside the satin shoe, the years of daily class behind a single clean line. Appreciating an art is easier when you understand what it costs.</p>
<p>There is a preservation argument too. Ballet is transmitted body to body, teacher to student, in a way that printed notation never fully captures. A choreography survives only as long as someone alive still knows how to dance it and can pass it on. Marking the art deliberately, encouraging young people into the studio and audiences into the theatre, is one way of keeping that chain unbroken. The same impulse to safeguard a living inheritance runs through other cultural observances, from the defence of a tongue marked on <a href="/specialdate/international-mother-language-day/">International Mother Language Day</a> to the shared experience of storytelling celebrated on <a href="/specialdate/world-read-aloud-day/">World Read Aloud Day</a>; ballet, like a language and like a story read aloud, lives only when it is actively handed on.</p>
<h2 id="how-it-is-celebrated">How it is celebrated</h2>
<p>Companies and schools have made Ballet Day increasingly an exercise in opening doors. The Royal Ballet in London, for instance, has run live-streamed “World Ballet Day” events in which several major companies, including the Australian Ballet, the Bolshoi and the National Ballet of Canada, broadcast their morning class and rehearsals to a global online audience, turning the closed world behind the stage door inside out. Smaller schools hold open classes and taster sessions; theatres schedule matinees aimed at first-time audiences. Online, dancers and balletomanes share favourite recordings, archival footage and photographs, comparing interpretations of the same role across generations. For the lapsed and the curious alike, the day is often the push needed to book a ticket, watch a filmed performance such as the Royal Ballet’s cinema relays, or try a beginners’ barre class and discover exactly how hard a plié is to do well.</p>
<h2 id="the-tools-and-symbols-of-the-art">The tools and symbols of the art</h2>
<p>A few objects have become shorthand for ballet itself. The pointe shoe, which lets a dancer balance on the very tips of her toes, is a relatively recent invention, refined through the nineteenth century, and it is far less magical than it looks: its stiffened toe box is built up by hand from layers of fabric, paste and cardboard, and it wears out astonishingly fast. The tutu, that stiff projecting skirt, evolved precisely to reveal the legs and footwork that earlier long Romantic skirts concealed. The barre, the horizontal rail along the studio wall, is where every class begins and where the body is warmed and aligned before it ever moves into the centre. And the French vocabulary, spoken in studios from Tokyo to Buenos Aires, remains the art’s true lingua franca, a four-hundred-year-old inheritance from the court of Louis XIV.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>Louis XIV’s nickname, the Sun King, came from a ballet: he danced the role of Apollo, the sun god, in a 1653 court production, and his love of dancing drove him to found the first royal dance academy in 1661.</li>
<li>Ballet’s step names are in French not because the art is French in origin — it began in Renaissance Italy — but because it was codified at the French court, and the vocabulary stuck.</li>
<li>Professional ballet dancers wear out pointe shoes at a punishing rate; a principal in a demanding role can go through several pairs in a single performance, and major companies order them by the thousand each year.</li>
<li>Swan Lake, now perhaps the most famous ballet of all, was a flop at its 1877 Moscow premiere; it only became a classic after Petipa and Lev Ivanov reworked it in St Petersburg in 1895, two years after Tchaikovsky’s death.</li>
<li>The grand pas de deux convention of the male dancer lifting and supporting the ballerina was largely shaped in Russia under Petipa — earlier Romantic ballet had placed the spotlight so firmly on the ballerina that male roles withered to little more than porters.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="a-closing-reflection">A closing reflection</h2>
<p>The most striking thing about ballet is not its age but its appetite for reinvention. An art that began as aristocratic flattery at a Renaissance banquet became the property of nineteenth-century opera houses, then of Soviet state theatres, then of choreographers tearing the rulebook apart, and it has survived every one of those upheavals by changing its skin while keeping its bones. A day set aside for ballet is really a day set aside for that paradox: an art so rigorously disciplined that it ought to have fossilised long ago, and so restless that it never has.</p>
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