Crisis and Rebirth of Ballet

Between imperial spectacle, modernist rupture, and renewed classicism

Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Decadence, Symbolism, Realism, Verismo, and a historical return to Neoclassicism succeeded one another. It was the moment in which ballet definitively changed its skin. After the Milanese Romantic season, the center of gravity had long shifted toward Imperial Russia — yet Italian dancers and choreographers dominated the Tsarist theatres. There, earlier tradition was reworked in monumental form. Ballet was no longer merely an ethereal dream but became a vast scenic machine. In Saint Petersburg, the late-nineteenth-century academic classical model prevailed: large-scale multi-act structures alternating narrative pantomime and purely technical numbers. Central was the grand pas, rendered ever more extreme by the near-limitless expansion of the corps de ballet. Even in Italy, ballet became grand choreographic architecture, in which music assumed decisive importance. The accompanying score rose to symphonic structure thanks to composers such as the Paduan Riccardo Drigo, who became Director and Composer of the Imperial Theatres in Russia, writing masterpieces such as I milioni di Arlecchino and reorchestrating classics. Ballet entered the era of grand orchestration, while on stage the acrobatic virtuosity of Italian dancers triumphed: the Milanese Pierina Legnani introduced the legendary 32 fouettés, establishing an unmatched technical standard.

Decadence and the Crisis of Romantic Innocence

At the end of the century, the Italian cultural climate changed. Decadence, guided by figures such as Gabriele D’Annunzio, introduced ambiguity, sensuality, and previously unknown inquietude. Fascination with the artificial led to a reconsideration of the body — no longer purely ethereal or virtuosic, but enigmatic, sometimes unsettling. Italian ballet began exploring ambiguous figures, nocturnal atmospheres, stylized eroticism, and psychological tension. Romantic purity fractured. The fairy-like ballerina yielded to the femme fatale.

Symbolism and the Avant-Garde: Gesture as Allusion and Rupture

Within the Symbolist climate, gesture no longer needed to narrate linearly but to evoke. Dance became suspended, indirect, atmospheric. Italian choreographers sought mood rather than explicit storytelling. This tendency prepared the ground for one of the most radical twentieth-century ruptures: Futurism. In 1917, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the “Manifesto of Futurist Dance.” A new conception of spectacle emerged — an interdisciplinary laboratory involving innovative composers, avant-garde painters such as Enrico Prampolini, and radical performers like the Milanese Giannina Censi with her “aerodanze.” Italian avant-garde dance broke decisively with classicism through angular movements, inward-rotated feet, accentuated weight, and rejection of the ideal of lightness. The body no longer rose; it struck the ground, imitating the rhythm of machines and airplanes.

Realism, Verismo, and the Triumph of Excelsior

Parallel to avant-garde experimentation, the climates of Realism, Verismo, and bourgeois Positivism affirmed that dance could represent everyday life, social conflict, and concrete human history. The body was no longer merely symbol or myth but individual presence. The absolute apotheosis of this current in Italy and beyond was Excelsior (1881), the monumental ballet created at La Scala by choreographer Luigi Manzotti with music by Romualdo Marenco. This colossal spectacle abandoned fairies and spirits to celebrate scientific achievements: the steamship, the telegraph, the Suez Canal, the Mont Cenis Tunnel. This theatrical line would later converge with twentieth-century dance theatre and subsequent experimentation.

Crisis of the Academic Model

Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the classical model remained dominant in official theatres but came under pressure. Academic virtuosity appeared rigid; pure technique was questioned in the name of new bodily freedoms. Alternative movements such as free dance rejected pointe technique and technical corsetry. Ballet stood at a crossroads: preserve the imperial academic system or transform radically. Once again, an Italian figure would preserve and codify classical ballet worldwide: Enrico Cecchetti. Through his celebrated “Cecchetti Method,” he systematized ballet pedagogy with unprecedented scientific and anatomical rigor, becoming master to the new generation of the twentieth century.

The Twentieth-Century Return to Neoclassicism

After the First World War, amid disillusionment and a search for order, a neoclassical tendency re-emerged in Italy. Ballet was to represent rigorous classical technique, modern abstraction, narrative reduction, and renewed centrality of music. Italian intellectuals and composers such as Alfredo Casella (author of La Giara based on Luigi Pirandello), Ottorino Respighi, and Gian Francesco Malipiero created refined scores for this new direction. Ballet returned to structural purity — but now with twentieth-century awareness.

From Romantic Myth to Contemporary Plurality

By the end of this trajectory, through Decadence, Symbolism, Realism, and Modernism, ballet was no longer a unified system but a plural language and experimental field — a terrain of conflict between tradition and avant-garde. The Italian twentieth century would not produce one ballet but many: academic, neoclassical, expressionist, abstract, political. The myth of the Romantic ballerina did not disappear; it coexisted with fractured and angular bodies.

Historical Balance

From its Renaissance courtly origins to twentieth-century Symbolism, ballet underwent three great metamorphoses: from Baroque geometry of power to the ethereal dream of Romanticism, and finally to the crisis and reinvention of the fin de siècle. In each of these epochs, Italian ingenuity, virtuosity, and theoretical reflection functioned as the quiet engine of an art that conquered the world.