History of Ballet

It is customary to look upon the 1581 performance of the Ballet Comique de la Royne at the Palais du Petit Bourbon in Paris as the birth of ballet itself, making ballet the youngest of the major performing arts. However, since we are also interested in where ballet came from, we will look at pre-ballet dance and its development into the discipline of ballet as well as the development of ballet after 1581, including the French influence, then the Russian influence, and finally the beginning of the Twentieth Century and North America.