Dance history Essay Example for Free

Dance history Essay concert dance is a form of dancing performed for theatre audiences. Like other bound forms, concert dance may tell a story, conduct a mood, or simply reflect the music. But a concert dance dancers technique (way of performing) and special(prenominal) skills differ greatly from those of other dancers. Ballet dancers perform many movements that atomic number 18 unnatural for the body. But when these movements are salubrious up executed, they look natural. The beginnings of ballet can be traced to Italy during the 1400s at the time of the Renaissance. During the Renaissance, people developed a great interest in art and learning.At the same time, trade and commerce expanded rapidly, and the dukes who rule Florence and other Italian city-states grew in wealth. The dukes did much to promote the arts. The Italian city-states became rival art centres as well as competing commercial centers. The Italian dukes competed with one another in giving costly, fancy e ntertainments that included dance performances. The dancers were not professionals. They were noblemen and noblewomen of a dukes court who danced to please their ruler and to stir the admiration and envy of his rivals.Catherine de Medici, a particle of the ruling family of Florence, became the queen of France in 1547. Catherine introduced into the French court the same kind of entertainments that she had known in Italy. They were ordered by Balthazar de Beaujoyeulx, a gifted musician. Beaujoyeulx had come from Italy to be Catherines chief musician. Ballet historians consider one of Beaujoyeulxs entertainments, the Ballet Comique de la Reine, to be the first ballet. It was a magnificent spectacle of about 51/2 hours performed in 1581 in honour of a royal wedding.The ballet told the ancient Greek myth of Circe, who had the magical power to round of drinks men into beasts. The ballet included specially written instrumental music, singing, and spoken verse as well as dancingall based on the story of Circe. Dance technique was extremely limited, and so Beaujoyeulx depended on great costumes and scenery to impress the audience. To make sure that the audience understood the story, he provided printed copies of the verses used in the ballet. The ballet was a great success, and was much imitated in other European courts.French leadership. The Ballet Comique de la Reine open Paris as the capital of the ballet world. King Louis XIV, who ruled France during the late 1600s and premature 1700s, strengthened that leadership. Louis greatly enjoyed dancing. He took part in all the ballets given at his court, which his nobles performed, but stopped after he became fat and middle-aged. In 1661, Louis founded the Royal Academy of Dancing to train professional dancers to perform for him and his court. Professional ballet began with the kings dancing academy.With serious training, the French professionals developed skills that had been impossible for the amateurs. Similar com panies developed in other European countries. One of the greatest was the Russian Imperial Ballet of St. Petersburg, whose school was founded in 1738. The French professional dancers became so skilled that they began to perform publicly in theatres. But in 1760, the French choreographer Jean Georges Noverre criticized the professional dancers in his book Lettres sur la danse, et sur les ballets (Letters on Dancing and Ballets).Noverre complained that the dancers cared too much about show their technical skills and too little about the true purpose of ballet. This purpose, he said, was to represent characters and express their feelings. Noverre urged that ballet dancers stop using masks, bulky costumes, and large wigs to illustrate or explain plot and character. He claimed that the dancers could express these things using only their bodies and faces.So long as the dancers did not look strained or uneasy doing difficult steps, they could show such emotions as anger, joy, fear, and l ove. Noverre developed the ballet daction, a form of dramatic ballet that told the story completely through movement. Most of Noverres ballets told stories taken from ancient Greek myths or dramas. But during the early 1800s, people no longer cared about old gods and heroes. The romantic period began as people became interested in stories of escape from the real world to dreamlike worlds or foreign lands.