Classic
ballet

The origins of "classical" ballet can go back to 1661 and the creation of the Académie royale de danse by Louis XIV. That's when the five arm and leg positions were first outlined. It wasn't yet called classical dance, but "belle danse" or noble dance, whether it comes as entertaining associated with lyrical singing (ballet comedy, ballet opera) or it later emphasizes on dramatic action (pantomime ballet, action ballet).

At the beginning of the 19th century, more expressive and flowing movements are needed and enabled by the improvement of stage costumes. Romantism opens a free road to passion and individual feeling, accessorizes the desire to rise with pointes, and places the female dancer in the center, while consigning male dancers to lower-level roles. Created in 1832, the Sylph embodies this evolution: fantastic creatures dancing in pointes replace divinities in Olympus. Then, as a way to show that mythological subjects gave up, noble dance becomes classical ballet. The term "classical' refers to an aesthetic movement which grew during Renaissance. This "golden age", carried by Italians, had the ultimate ideal to imitate notions of perfection, harmony, and balance, which were associated with Greek and Roman Antiquity.

As of the middle of the 17th century, France conveys the principles of noble dance throughout Europe. From Copenhagen to Saint Petersburg, where French will come and go until Marius Petipa, famous choreographer, will have retired in 1901. Petipa creates ballets, sprinkled with scenic entertainment and showing the way to future music-hall revues. He dares to sign pieces where emotion isn't always linked to dramatic action, but to moments when the choreography becomes the clay forming intemporal poetry. He opens the way to academic dance, sort of lexicon including many characteristics of French school, the swiftness of Italian school, and the lyrism of Russian school. This French vocabulary is then spoken all around the world and later gives birth to English, American, Cuban schools and more, by spreading to new territories in the whole wide world as of the 20th century.

While relying on 4-century-old principles, classical ballet techniques continued to adapt to enable artists to express their own era. Up until that moment when “en dehors”, the five positions and aplomb, idealizing the dancing body, became too rules to break. Since then, and to commemorate renewal, terms from the 20th century such as belle danse, noble dance and classical dance have left room for the term “neoclassical”.

This is a first approach to this wide question. To learn more about it, read Thierry Malandain's article: