Ballets

The word covers an enormous range of works, from evening-length narratives with painted scenery and a full orchestra to short abstract pieces for a handful of dancers. What holds them together is that the choreography, not spoken words, carries whatever the work has to say.

The great nineteenth-century story ballets remain the most familiar. Giselle, Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker are built in acts, alternating passages that advance the plot with set-piece dances that pause it. A grand pas de deux, a run of national dances, a scene for the full ensemble — these divertissements exist partly to show off the dancers and partly to give the audience a spectacle apart from the story.

Not every ballet tells a tale. In the twentieth century choreographers made works with no plot at all, where the interest lies entirely in how bodies move through space against the music. A plotless ballet can be as gripping as any drama, but it asks the audience to watch differently, following pattern and phrasing rather than character.

How ballets survive

A ballet has no fixed text the way a play does. It lives in the bodies of the dancers who know it and in whatever notation, film, or memory happens to record it. Older works reach the present through a chain of stagings, each ballet master passing the steps to the next generation, and small changes accumulate along the way. Two companies may dance versions of the same nineteenth-century ballet that differ noticeably in steps, mime, and even plot, because each descends from a different line of transmission. Reviving a lost or half-remembered ballet becomes a kind of detective work, pieced together from sketches, old notation, and the recollections of those who once performed it.