BRITISH SCHOOL

Despite being an important cultural capital of the arts, London did not have a repertoire ballet company or a professional school preparing dancers until 1927, when Dame Ninette de Valois, then a dancer with the Ballets Russes, established the Academy of Choreographic Arts in London and the Abbey Theatre School of Ballet in Dublin. As a dancer, Ninette de Valois received mixed training from masters like Edouard Espinosa, Enrico Cecchetti, and Nicolai Legat. The effective amalgamation of different schools, combined with a preference for articulation of movements and clarity of lines, served as the foundation of the British school. Ninette de Valois and choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton, the two dynamic forces behind the development of classical dance in Britain, set their goal of perfecting a singular style of training—now known as the British school—which came to define several leading repertoire companies in Britain, particularly the Royal Ballet, English National Ballet, and the Birmingham Royal Ballet. De Valois and Ashton found support and inspiration for their groundbreaking enterprise among the artists and intellectuals of the Bloomsbury circle.

After the absorption of the dance company of the Old Vic Theatre by Sadler’s Wells Theatre in the 1930s, the Vic-Wells Ballet, successfully led by Ninette de Valois, became one of the leading ballet companies in the world. It performed works from the classical repertoire alongside ballets by national choreographers. The list of prominent dancers whose careers flourished under her guidance includes Margot Fonteyn, Moira Shearer, Antoinette Sibley, Nadia Nerina, Svetlana Beriosova, and Lynn Seymour, among others.

De Valois’s remarkable organizational effort and artistic vision of a fully state-supported national ballet came to full fruition in 1956, when Queen Elizabeth II granted a royal charter and became Patron of the Royal Ballet, the Touring Company of the Royal Ballet, and the Royal Ballet School. The Royal Ballet School became one of the world’s greatest centers of classical training, where rigorous dance pedagogy is complemented by academic education. Like other classical schools today, it is based on slow progression in acquiring ballet technique, meticulous clarity in the execution of movements, musicality, and attention to individual student development. The school fuses Enrico Cecchetti’s training style with elements of the Vaganova system, introduced by Vera Volkova (1904–1975), a Vaganova student who taught at the Sadler’s Wells School in the 1940s and later worked with the Royal Danish Ballet. Volkova’s contribution, along with that of other internationally renowned pedagogues, demonstrates that no national school was ever insulated from outside influence; instead, schools productively enriched each other over the centuries.

NORTH AMERICAN SCHOOL

The Russian factor had a significant influence on the formation of the North American school of classical dance. Anna Pavlova’s appearance at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1910, and the first North American tour of Les Ballets Russes in 1916, captivated audiences with an art form of royal origins that had no historical footing in the United States. The formation of the two leading American repertoire companies—Ballet Theatre (later renamed American Ballet Theatre) in 1939, and the New York City Ballet in 1948—was initiated by Russian émigrés working with Americans. The latter company is inextricably linked to the legendary George Balanchine, the world-famous choreographer who pushed classical dance to new heights.

George Balanchine, born Georgii Balanchivadze in Saint Petersburg in 1904, studied at the Imperial Ballet School, where he performed in the glamorous productions of Marius Petipa as a schoolboy. After the Communist Revolution in Russia, Balanchine began experimenting with avant-garde forms of dance, borrowing elements from jazz, acrobatics, folk dance, and eurhythmics. Escaping Russia in 1924, he worked in Paris, London, Copenhagen, and New York, collaborating with companies from Les Ballets Russes to the Paris Opéra, and with film and entertainment venues. These diverse experiences inspired his vision of a new type of classical ballet company—one that would follow a tradition of its own while expressing the dynamism, complexity, and optimism of the twentieth century.

His ideas resonated with Lincoln Kirstein, an American philanthropist, impresario, and art connoisseur who invested both his fundraising skills and personal capital into the creation of the New York City Ballet, where he served as General Director from 1946 to 1989.

Before launching a full repertoire company, Balanchine and Kirstein focused on establishing the first institution to teach classical ballet in the U.S. Balanchine’s unbending motto, “But first, a school,” proved visionary: the School of American Ballet (SAB) opened in January 1934 with 34 students and became one of the world’s premier classical ballet schools. The SAB’s early faculty was predominantly Russian, as Balanchine trusted the coherence of their training system. Yet the dancers it produced were tuned specifically for Balanchine’s own choreography—with its unique musical, spatial, and anatomical demands. Balanchine never created ballets in abstraction; he tailored his works to the dancers he had and revised his choreography for each new generation.

Over his long career, Balanchine created about a hundred ballets. Defining a single “Balanchine style” is difficult, but key choreographic principles can be traced from his earliest neoclassical works—particularly Apollo (1928), set to a score by Igor Stravinsky. Balanchine paired a neoclassical interest in the expressive capacity of the body with a modernist preference for minimalist plots, costumes, lighting, and stage design. Crucially, his approach to music was transformative: his dancers didn’t move with music—they were music, visualized through movement. He often chose nontraditional balletic scores, though he also restaged classics like Sleeping Beauty and Raymonda.

His collaboration with Stravinsky became a hallmark of modernist artistic partnership. To meet the physical demands of Balanchine’s choreography, students were trained for absolute precision in footwork, speed, and spatial adaptability. While preserving classical vocabulary, the Balanchine style allowed for breaking convention: pushing balances off-center, increasing leg turnout, elevating arabesques and attitudes, and infusing athleticism rarely seen before in ballet.