Ballet Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Ballet - Essay Example At first the stories from Greek mythologies were used for the ballet but in Romantic genre the subjects changed and they started dealing with the conflicts between reality and illusion, flesh and spirit, love stories. Thus the breeze of new era was blowing everywhere which touched the ballet also. Women dancers for the first time learned to dance on their toes. Pointe technique, which requires the performer to dance on the tips of her toes, was a hallmark of Romantic ballet, as was the layered gauze skirt known as the tutu. [2] Marie Taglioni, at first wore filmy calf length costume that later on became the standard for ballet costume. One of the special characteristics of romantic ballet is that women achieved greater importance in the ballet, greater importance than even the men. The purpose of male dancer remained just for lifting the ballerinas i.e. female dancers to show how light weighted they are. The first Romantic Ballet was created by Italian choreographer Filippo Taglioni. Marie Taglioni, in the ballet â€Å"La Sylpide,† danced the part of the Sylphide, a supernatural figure who loved and then destroyed by a mortal man. She was the sensational personality and she had a grace of perfect romantic dancer. In that period in French opera ballet became the effecti ve weapon for achieving grand success. The ballets such as La Sylphide (1832), Giselle (1841), and Coppà ©lia (1870), had typical Romantic story lines. In romantic era the ballets generally used to focus on otherworldly beings. The Australian dancer Fanny Elsser popularized an earthier character. Some people think that the romantic ballet used to be very light and soft. The style used for the romantic ballet would be gothic style. â€Å"Much of the substance of the romantic ballet style was derived from Gothic folklore, the remnant of old superstitions and corruptions of historical facts.†[3] Witches and vamps were used to show