History of ballet in canada essays

History of ballet in canada essays "Magnificence, extravagance, artificiality, a tiny society in which everyone knew every detail of everyones life." The preceding sentence best described the court of Louis XIV, the Sun King, and it was into that world that professional ballet was born. Louis was an accomplished dancer and appeared in many court ballets from the age of twelve until he was thirty-two. Though he continued to perform his favorite ballroom dances, various affairs, such as his sense of royal dignity forced Louis to give up court ballets. At the age of fourteen, Louis delivered the performance, which identified him and gave him his popular image. It occurred towards the very end of a thirteen-hour performance when he entered as the "Rising Sun". Many depicted his performance as mere coincidence for he was indeed as brilliant and powerful as the sun, yet at such a young and rising age. He lived to the age of seventy-two, rarely experiencing an illness in his life. Two definitions of dance exist. One written fifty years before Louis was born and the other shortly after his death show his influence helped to make order out of confusion. In 1588 Thoinot Arbeau, a dancing master defined dance as the following: "Dancing, so to speak, is to jump, to hop, to prance, to sway, to tread, to tiptoe, and to move the feet, hands, and body in certain rhythms, measures, and movements consisting of jumps, bendings of the body, straddlings, limpings, bendings of the knees, risings on the tiptoes, throwings-forward of the feet, changes and other movements." The change is shown by John Weaver defining dance as the following in 1721: " Dancing is an elegant and regular movement, harmonically composed of beautiful attitudes and contrasted graceful postures of the body, and parts thereof." For the first hundred years of professional ballet, its centre of development remained firmly in Paris, where Louis had placed it. Many changes continued to evolve to ...