Court ballet

During its heyday, France consisted of alternate outputs of performers - members of the royal family, courtiers and a number of professional dancers. The last exit, called the "big ballet" ( French grand ballet ), usually united all the dancers.

The first sources of court entertainment are the folklore foundation in the art of jugglers and bass dance of palace festivals.

With the beginning of the 15th century , it became fashionable at the courts of Italian nobility to emphasize their own splendor with highly artistic means. In this regard, a new court figure appears - the master of dance as a theorist of dance art.

Thanks to the theoretical works that have been preserved in the libraries, the names of Domenico from Piacenza , his students Antonio Kornatsano and Guglielmo Ebreo have been preserved in the history of the era. They all shared the same theoretical vision of dance and used the same terminology, so we can talk about the original Italian ("Lombard") school, which established the first rules, aesthetics and ethics of court dance.

In 1533, the Florentine Catherine de Medici married the French king Henry II and brought fashion from the homeland to theatrical and ceremonial performances, including gallant public dances ^[1] .

The Academy of Poetry and Music , founded in 1570 by the poet Jean-Antoine de Baif and composer Joachim Thibault de Courville, made an even greater contribution to the development of court ballet. The aim of the academy was to revive the art of antiquity in order to harmonize dance, music and language in a way that would lead to an improvement in morals.

The first organizers of the palace festivities were Italian dance masters , representatives of the dance school that had developed in Italy in the 16th century.

Balthazarini di Belgioioso ( ) staged at the French court the first performances with a sequentially developing action, including the word, music, dance: “The Ballet of the Polish Ambassadors” (1573) and “The ” (1581).

The court ballet was developed during the reign of Louis XIII , before the beginning of the Fronde era, in which there was a break.

Under Louis XIV, court ballet is experiencing its heyday. In the years 1651-1670, the king supported “ballets in exits” by personal participation, for example, at the age of fifteen he played the role of the god Apollo in the production of “The ”.

With the support of Cardinal Mazarin, court ballet is gradually becoming an instrument of political propaganda, emphasizing the splendor of France and its monarch.

In 1670, Louis XIV refuses to participate in productions, which completes the era of court ballet, but at the same time allows such masters as J.-B. Lully lay the foundations of new musical and theatrical genres - opera-ballet and .

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