Neoclassical ballet

The Neoclassical ballet is a reform movement since the 1930s, which was mainly founded by choreographer George Balanchine.

Neo-Classicism in ballet touches so far with the musical neoclassicism, when he was in his early days connected with music by Igor Stravinsky and the Ballets Russes. Balanchine's Apollo musagète (1928 ) is often referred to as the first neoclassical ballet.

In the history of ballet, the time from mid valid until the end of the 19th century classical music. With antique fabrics and classical figures, these have nothing to do, rather with the folk tales and mythical creatures of Giselle or Swan Lake. The rediscovery of classical antiquity since about 1900 was possible because they are no longer necessarily the allegorical dance in the ( exclusive and anti-bourgeois ) of the court theater was associated 16th to 18th century.

The artistic intentions of neoclassical ballet are different from those in the musical style of the same name: he saw himself as a reform of the "classical" ballet techniques and narrative ballet. In Neoclassicism not the stylistic device of court dance were quite refreshed, but revived the tradition of the romantic narrative ballet. Such a reform seemed some dancers and choreographers necessary because the innovations of modern dance or modern dance compared to the repertoire gained increasing influence. Compared to the fairy tale acts and the magic of classical repertoire ballets equipment sat neoclassicism at least initially, on a sober, minimalist, abstract aesthetics.

Significant representatives alongside Balanchine are Frederick Ashton, Bronislava Nijinska or Jerome Robbins. A special place in the neo-classical ballet music has Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet (1936 ), which found numerous choreographic transformations.

After the antipodes Balanchine and Martha Graham, who had the modern dance developed, had converged again in a joint production ( Episodes, 1959), was followed by a new generation of neo-classicism to which about John Cranko, Maurice Béjart and Kenneth MacMillan belong. To date, there are currents of neoclassicism as a counterweight to the modernization efforts of the dance theater.

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