Historical schooling: ballet style and technique

Abstract

ABSTRACT Aiming to challenge the notion that the ballet lexicon is ahistorical, this study focuses on the ballet classroom. Training plays a vital role in how ballets are performed, and past choreography needs a different approach from that of contemporary ballets. Previous studies of classroom movement, while acknowledging different Schools, have not dealt with the effect on the dancer of diverse training systems. To explore this, I filmed three students from the Royal Ballet School, who learned sections from a syllabus, constructed by Ninette de Valois in 1947, to investigate how aesthetic values, implicit in the syllabus, differed from those of today. Contemporary source material was used to examine the values of the era revealing the extent to which those principles significantly influenced the syllabus. To test this, the study compared the English values with those of George Balanchine and contemporary American writers. Balanchine’s classroom technique was also largely constructed at about the same time as de Valois’s. The findings show that embodying the past through earlier values can be an effective way of communicating with today’s dancers, highlighting how such principles change.