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Ballet - Paul Webb finds that a notoriously elite art form has a surprisingly diverse history
Despite the best efforts of Billy Elliot, ballet in Britain is still often seen as a bastion of the establishment. Ticket prices are high, audiences are well heeled - or, in the Royal Ballet's case, bejewelled - and appreciation of the ballet's formal brilliance remains largely restricted to connoisseurs. Ballet's origins are more diverse than its image suggests, however, and a look at the art form's history shows its reputation for elitism to be surprisingly undeserved.
European classical ballet dates from the mid-17th century. It was popularised by Louis XIV, the Sun King of France, who acquired his nickname from a costume he wore at a court dance. Essentially a court entertainment, ballet expanded its audience in the course of the 18th century, and then flowered in the 1820s and 1830s with the popularity of Romantic ballets such as La Sylphide, in which the ballerina Marie Taglioni danced en pointe (on the tips of her toes), wearing the bell-shaped white tutu that is, for many, the enduring image of the ballet dancer.
Yet, by the 1850s, ballet was largely restricted to light relief in French operas, the smart gentlemen of Paris often delaying their arrival until the ballet section took place, so that they could look at the pretty girls showing off their legs. In Britain, it appeared only in imported operas or as part of music-hall (and later variety) shows. It had a following among the working classes as well as the rich, but poorer audiences were unlikely ever to see a full-length evening of dance.
On the Continent, ballet developed in two main centres of excellence - Copenhagen and St Petersburg - and it was from St Petersburg that ballet made its way to England. The greatest impresario of the 20th century, Serge Diaghilev, was an aristocrat who assembled around himself an extraordinary group of dancers, designers, painters, choreographers and composers to create the Ballets Russes.
The company took Paris by storm in 1909 and arrived at Covent Garden in 1911. An audience that included the art patroness Lady Ottoline Morrell and the poet Rupert Brooke was astonished by
the colour, spectacle and dazzling choreography that turned ballet from essentially safe theatre into the most modern and unpredictable art form in Europe.
One of the many young people inspired to make a career in ballet by the Ballets Russes was an Irish girl, Edris Stannus, who danced for Diaghilev in the 1920s, changed her name to Ninette de Valois
and went on to found the British company that evolved into today’s Royal Ballet. De Valois, known to the company as Madam, was a talented dancer and choreographer of enormous ambition and drive (the nickname owed as much to awe as to affection). Like Diaghilev, she had the ability to gather talented people and to create a world-class company with a distinctive choreography and style of its own.
Her lucky break came from another highly driven woman with a love of the arts, Lilian Baylis. Baylis ran the Old Vic with an eye for the box office, a desire to bring Shakespeare to the masses and a strong Anglican faith: John Gielgud once overheard her in her tiny office at the Old Vic, on her knees and praying, “Dear God, please send me some wonderful actors this season – but make them cheap!” Baylis recognised in de Valois a similarly determined and enterprising woman, and when the Old Vic acquired Sadler’s Wells Theatre in Islington, she let her launch her own ballet season, beginning in May 1931.
Over the 75 years since, the Royal Ballet has been the flagship for British ballet, but it has not entirely dominated the dance scene. Marie Rambert, another Diaghilev dancer, established the Ballet Rambert in 1926. England’s oldest ballet company, Rambert has an international reputation for modern dance. In 2008, it will move into brand new headquarters behind the National Theatre – a sure sign of the financial and artistic health of the art form.
However, all ballet requires subsidy or support, and classical ballet is enormously expensive to stage. To flesh out its public subsidy, it works hard to raise private sponsorship – which is where the very strong and personal connections between the royal family and the Royal Ballet are useful. It is partly these connections, along with the rarefied atmosphere of wealth at Covent Garden, that leads Billy Elliot’s father, nightly at the Victoria Palace in Westminster, to suggest that ballet is not for the likes of his son. In fact, the company recruits its newcomers not just from all classes, but from every nationality.
The Royal Ballet is as diverse as ballet’s own piebald roots suggest. Monica Mason, the current director (the only female head of a major UK arts organisation), is South African-born, while the two male pin-ups of the moment are Carlos Acosta, a muscular black Cuban, and Ivan Putrov, an ethereally elegant young Ukrainian who, like Diaghilev’s greatest male dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky, was born in Kiev. Over the coming months, the 75th-anniversary productions of The Sleeping Beauty and Sir Frederick Ashton’s Homage to the Queen will reflect all the energy and excitement of an art that is emphatically not just for the elite.
The Sleeping Beauty and Homage to the Queen are at the Royal Opera House, London WC2, from
15 May to 3 June and 5-9 June, respectively. For tickets and details see www.royaloperahouse.org
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