Ballet is a formalized type of performative dance, which originated in sixteenth and seventeenth century French courts, and which was further developed in England, Italy, and Russia as a concert dance form. The early ballet dancers were not as highly skilled as they are now. It has since become a highly technical form of dance with its own vocabulary. It is primarily performed with the accompaniment of classical music. It has been influential as a form of dance globally and is taught in ballet schools around the world, which use their own cultures and societies to inform the art. Ballet dance works (ballets) are choreographed, and also include mime, acting, and are set to music (usually orchestral but occasionally vocal). It is best known in the form of Late Romantic Ballet Blanc, which preoccupies itself with the female dancer to the exclusion of almost all else, focusing on pointe work, flowing, precise acrobatic movements, and often presenting the dancers in the conventional short white French tutu. Later developments include expressionist ballet, Neoclassical ballet, and elements of Modern dance. The etymology of the word “ballet” is related to the art form’s history. The word ballet comes from the French and was borrowed into English around the 17th century. The French word in turn has its origins in Italian balletto, a diminutive of ballo (dance). Ballet ultimately traces back to Latin ballare, meaning to dance.
Anna Pavlovna (12 February 1881 –23 January 1931) was a Russian ballerina of the late 19th and the early 20th century. She is widely regarded as one of the most famous and popular classical ballet dancers in history and was most noted as a Principal artist of the Imperial Russian Ballet and the Ballets Russes of Serge Diaghilev. Pavlova is most recognised for the creation of the role The Dying Swan and with her own company, would become the first ballerina to tour ballet around the world.
Pavlova was born two months premature on 31 January, 1881 in Ligovo, a suburb (now neighborhood) of Saint Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian Empire. Her mother was an impoverished laundress named Lyubov Pavlova. The identity of her father has been open to debate: she later claimed her father (who was of possible Jewish origin)[1] had died when she was two years old. The newspaper The Saint Petersburg Gazette published an article in 1913 claiming that her father was a banker named Poliakov, and that her mother’s second husband, Matvey Pavlov, had adopted her at the age of three, by which she acquired her last name
Pavlova’s passion for the art of ballet was sparked when her mother took her to a performance of Marius Petipa’s original production of The Sleeping Beauty at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre. The lavish spectacle made a profound impression on the young Pavlova, and at the age of eight her mother took her to audition for the renowned Imperial Ballet School. She was rejected due to her age and for what was considered to be a “sickly” physique, but she was finally accepted at the age of ten in 1891. She made her first appearance in a ballet as a cupid in Petipa’s Un conte de fées (A Fairy Tale), which the ballet master staged especially for the students of the school.
At the height of Petipa’s strict academicism, the public was at first somewhat reserved in their reaction to Pavlova’s unique style—an unusual combination of an extraordinary dance gift that paid little heed to academic rules: she frequently performed with bent knees, poor turnout, misplaced port de bras and incorrectly placed tours. Such a style in many ways harkened back to the time of the romantic ballet and the great ballerinas of old.
Her feet were extremely rigid, so she strengthened her pointe shoe by adding a piece of hard wood on the soles for support and curving the box of the shoe. At the time, many considered this “cheating”, for a ballerina of the era was taught that she, not her shoes, must hold her weight en pointe. In Pavlova’s case this was extremely difficult, as the shape of her feet required her to balance her weight on her little toes. Her solution became, over time, the precursor of the modern pointe shoe, as pointe work became less painful and easier for curved feet. According to Margot Fonteyn’s biography, Pavlova did not like the way her invention looked in photographs, so she would remove it or have the photographs altered so that it appeared she was using a normal pointe shoe.
While touring in The Hague, Netherlands, Pavlova was told that she had pleurisy and needed an operation. She was also told that she would never be able to dance again if she had this operation so she refused to have the operation saying “If I can’t dance then I’d rather be dead.” Three weeks later she died of pleurisy, three weeks short of her 50th birthday. She was holding her costume from “The Dying Swan” when she spoke her last words; “Play the last measure very softly.” The end for Pavlova came in the Hotel Des Indes in The Hague, which shows a plaque on the wall.
In accordance with old ballet tradition, on the day she was to have next performed, the show went on as scheduled, with a single spotlight circling an empty stage where she would have been. Memorial services were held in the Russian Orthodox Church in London. Anna Pavlova was cremated, and her ashes placed in a columbarium at Golders Green Crematorium, where her urn was subsequently adorned with her ballet shoes. In 2001 there was an attempt to move her remains to the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow in accordance with her requests. After considerable controversy, the request was turned down.
