How did ballet develop in the nineteenth century?
Dance in the nineteenth century was marked by three main developments: the expansion of dancers’ technical powers, the primacy of the ballerina, and the flowering of ballet in Russia. The enlargement of the technical vocabulary and the growth of technique in general was an inevitable consequence of the professionalization of ballet. We see evidence of this growth in the writings of Carlo Blasis (Question D.8.a). One of the most striking technical advances was the development of dancing on the toes, or on pointe. Marie Taglioni, reportedly a superb technician, is commonly said to have been the first dancer to go up on pointe, in 1825, although historians believe that she probably had predecessors. (There is some evidence that Didelot (Question D.8.e) may have had his dancers on pointe.) Taglioni was, in any case, the first to popularize the technique, in the ballet La Sylphide, and ballet was never quite the same again.
