What Is Ballet? Five Positions and Four Hundred Years of Argument

Turnout, the outward rotation of the legs from the hip sockets, is the foundation of the technique and is the reason the five positions of the feet look the way they do. It originated at court, partly because it displayed the leg and the shoe to a seated audience and partly because fencing used a similar stance, and it survived because it is functional on a stage: it opens the hip joint so the leg can be raised higher and to the side, it makes the body legible from the front, which matters in a proscenium theatre, and it improves lateral stability and the ability to change direction. It is also the source of a great deal of injury when forced from the knee or ankle rather than the hip, since the available rotation is limited by the shape of an individual's hip socket, which varies and cannot be trained beyond its structure. The five positions of the feet, codified in the seventeenth century, are simply the stable arrangements available to turned-out legs, and every step begins and ends in one of them.

The development runs through identifiable stages. Court spectacles in fifteenth-century Italy combined dance, music and verse, and travelled to France with Catherine de' Medici. Louis XIV danced leading roles himself, took his epithet from a part as the sun, and founded the Academie Royale de Danse in 1661, which is why the vocabulary is French and why it was standardised at all. Professionals replaced courtiers as the technique grew harder, women appeared on the public stage from 1681, and the first ballet with no words or singing dates from 1717. The Romantic period of the 1830s and 1840s brought the supernatural subjects, the white skirt, gaslight and the rise of dancing on the tips of the toes. The Russian imperial theatres then became the centre, where the French-born Marius Petipa choreographed the full-length works that still dominate the repertoire, including the Tchaikovsky ballets, which are structured around set pieces designed to display technique within a story.

Dancing on the tips of the toes began as a novelty in the 1820s and was made expressive by Marie Taglioni in 1832, in a role requiring her to appear weightless and otherworldly, after which it became standard for women in classical work. The shoe is a piece of engineering: a stiffened box around the toes made of layers of fabric, paper and glue rather than of anything rigid, a shank supporting the arch, and a flat platform at the tip on which the dancer balances. It does not do the work, which is a persistent misunderstanding: the shoe distributes load and the strength comes entirely from the foot, ankle and calf, and a dancer must have years of training before beginning pointe work at all, typically not before around eleven or twelve, because the bones of the foot are not fully ossified earlier. Shoes are individually fitted, frequently modified by the dancer, and last a matter of hours in professional use, so a company gets through thousands of pairs a season.

The technique is taught through named methods that differ in emphasis enough to be visible to an informed eye:

• •The Vaganova method, developed in Russia by Agrippina Vaganova in the 1930s, emphasising the coordination of arms and upper body with the legs and producing the expansive line associated with Russian dancers
• •The Cecchetti method, Italian, highly systematic with set exercises for each day of the week, emphasising anatomy and strength
• •The Bournonville style from Denmark, preserving nineteenth-century choreography with light quick footwork, low arms and a restrained upper body
• •The Royal Academy of Dance and the English style, emphasising clean precise line and musicality
• •The Balanchine style in America, faster, with an extreme athleticism, off-balance positions and a modified use of the arms
• •The universal element is the daily class, an ordered sequence beginning at the barre and moving to the centre, performed by every dancer from student to principal every working day for their whole career

The tradition carries several live disputes. The body ideal remains extremely narrow and the associated rates of eating disorders and injury are well documented, with several companies and schools under pressure to change and some doing so. The repertoire that fills the houses is overwhelmingly nineteenth century, and several of those works contain depictions of other cultures that companies now either revise, as many have with the divertissement scenes in the Nutcracker, or defend. Racial exclusion was near-total for most of the twentieth century, and the persistence of tights and shoes manufactured only in pink until brands began producing a range of skin tones in 2018 is a small and telling detail. The gender division of labour is deeply built in, with men lifting and women on pointe, and choreographers have been exploring what happens when it is not. And the economics are difficult everywhere, since a company requires an orchestra, a large permanent ensemble, sets and a theatre, which no ticket income covers.

Ballet grew from Italian and French court entertainment into a professional theatrical form, with its vocabulary fixed in French after Louis XIV founded an academy in 1661. Its technique rests on turnout from the hip, which produced the five positions and which serves stage visibility and leg height while limiting what any individual's anatomy allows. Pointe work became standard after 1832 and depends on the foot rather than the shoe. National methods differ visibly, and the form is arguing about body ideals, exclusion, and a repertoire that is mostly nineteenth century.