At times, in ballet today, it seems that no one stays at home. There is a constant international flow or artists, dancers, choreographers, and teachers these days. Danes are in charge of New York City Ballet and London Festival Ballet. Russians direct American Ballet Theatre and the Paris Opera Ballet. A Brazilian heads Stuttgart Ballet, an Englishwoman guides the Australian Ballet. Star dancers and teachers roam the globe, and fledgling talents regularly go abroad to begin their careers.
None of this is a new development, although the pace and frequency of short-term affiliations have increased with high-speed travel. In fact it has been a permanent state of affairs almost since the inception of ballet many centuries ago. When court ballet was established in France in the sixteenth century, it was an Italian, Balthasar de Beaujoyeux, who gave ballet its greatest fillip with his sensationally successful Ballet Comique de la Reine, created for a royal wedding. In the early eighteenth century, Marie Salle, a young French ballerina with revolutionary ideas about costume reform, regularly crossed the English Channel to become the rage of London. She made it easy for a cluster of her stellar compatriots to appear there later that century; by the 1780s they dominated the King's Theatre.
Putting Down Roots
Theater people are of course immensely adaptable, and ballet is as much a part of the theater as are drama and opera. Whatever country they find themselves in is acceptable to dancers. In the 1930s, for instance, a company of nomadic and assorted nationals, under the compendium title the Ballets Russes of Colonel de Basil, followed extraordinary itineraries all over the world. As their fantastic caravan pursued its very mixed fortunes, up the Andes and down the Everglades, stateless White Russians, Poles, Rumanians, and Czechs abandoned the company to put down roots far from their native soil. They made careers from Monte Carlo to New York, from Rio to Sydney, and being dancers they hardly noticed the difference. As long as they had studios with mirrors and bares for daily class, theaters and audiences, colleagues to gossip with, and later, young dancers to teach, they were at home, even if their grasp of a language or their understanding of a community remained imperfect.
Ballet, of course, is able to communicate internationally. An inability to speak Russian or Hungarian makes no difference to one's enjoyment of Swan Lake in Leningrad or Budapest. For that reason alone ballet is the best choice worldwide for business entertaining or state visits. With choreographers and teachers, demonstration and example can take the pace of words, while the French phrases in which ballet technique has always been defined constitute a professional lingua franca. All the same, national differences exist. They derive from tradition and training, from physical characteristics and emotional attitudes, and from the general social structure of a country. Dancers declare their origins in the flexibility of their backs, the carriage of their arms and head, the way they jump and turn.
It was from France rather than from Italy that influences spread to Russia and Denmark, however, always with changes brought about by the new environment. Where Denmark was concerned, August Bournonville, who studied in Paris in the 1820s, returned home as ballet master of the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen in 1828. He had watched the new Romanticism take
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