Programme description
Ballet has a history that most dancers never get to study properly, because training schedules leave little room for sitting down. This course corrects that. Delivered entirely online across ten weeks, it covers the development of ballet as an art form, its relationship to the political and social conditions of each era, and the aesthetic arguments that have shaped what we consider good dancing.
Readings draw from primary sources where available — Noverre, Fokine, Balanchine — alongside contemporary dance scholarship. Each week includes a lecture video of approximately 45 minutes, a curated selection of archival footage, and a short written response task.
Topics across the ten weeks
- Court ballet and the origins of codified technique
- The Romantic era and the rise of the ballerina
- Petipa and the Imperial Russian style
- Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes
- Soviet ballet and its global reach
- Balanchine and neoclassicism
- Contemporary and postmodern responses to the classical tradition
Suitable for dancers, students, arts writers, and anyone who has watched a performance and wanted to understand what they were actually looking at.