Ballet: marriage between dynamic technique and dramatic storytelling

“The ballet is the supreme theatrical form of poetry”. The ballet Giselle successfully embodies common features of romantic poetry without the use of words, but appealing to the senses which ran high among the romantics during romanticism. As a matter of fact, romantics had a blind faith in their intuition, instincts, feelings, emotions and senses; they considered them to be a guide for wisdom and conduct as well as the route to salvation for civilization. Even though literature and ballet use different storytelling devices, imagery portrayed in Romantic literature is successfully and accurately made tangible in the ballet Giselle, the epitome of the Romantic ballet, through music, choreography, mime, staging and costumes. Indeed, the fusion of these elements echoes the romantic literary and artistic movement.

Just like painters use different kinds of strokes or poets different rhythms, choreographers use various types of movements to embody different emotions, feelings, ideas or images. “The ballet’s function is ‘symbolic’; each step is ‘a metaphor’, (...) Only our poetic instinct can decipher [a ballerina’s] ‘writing of the body’. Her dance is a ‘poem freed of all the apparatus of writing’.” Due to the fact that the Wilis were spirits, the ballerinas wanted to give the impression of floating. Thus, the romantic fragile, ethereal, supernatural, ghost-like figure was exceptionally achieved through pointe work which introduced a whole new arena of movement that enhanced the qualities of grace and lightness so desired by the choreographers. Now one of the basic elements of ballet, dancing on pointe embodied the romantic ballerina’s pursuit for the ethereal as a romantic ideal of feminine perfection. One of the choreographers, Perro...

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...s deep into the human being even having the ability to show its effect through the skin. Dancing echoes the strong lead set by the music and as Agnes de Mille said: “the truest expression of a people is in its dances. Bodies never lie.”

Works Cited

Cohen, Marshall, and Roger Copeland. What is Dance?: Readings in Theory and Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Cass, Joan. The Dance: A Handbook for the Appreciation of the Choreographic Experience. North Carolina: McFarlan, 1999.

Murray, John Christopher. Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004.
Crisp, Clement, and Edward Thorpe. El fascinante mundo del ballet. Barcelona: Parramón, 1982.
McCormick, Malcolm. Costume in Western Traditions: An Overview, in International Encyclopedia of Dance, Vol. 2, Selma Jean Cohen, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.