Opera Ballet (ballets de cour) is the name given to ballets performed in the 17th century that occurred within an Opera. Jean-Baptiste Lully is considered the most important composer music for Opera Ballet and instrumental to the development of the form. During his employment by Louis XIV as director of the Academie Royale de Music he worked with Pierre Beauchamp, Molière, Philippe Quinault and Mademoiselle De Lafontaine, (the first professional female dancer and Premiere danseuse of the Paris Opera) to develop ballet as an art form equal to that of the accompanying music.
Beauchamp, superintendent of the ballet and director of the Academie Royale de Danse codified the five positions based on the foundations set down by Thornot Arbeau in his 1588Orchesographie. Emphasising the technical aspects of dance Beauchamp set out the first rules of ballet technique. Pierre Rameau expanded on Beauchamp's work in Dancing Master1725 further detailing carriage of the body, steps and positions. Rameau's Les Indes Galantes (1735) is considered to be the work that signaled the divergence of social (ballroom) dance and ballet. The emphasis on turned out legs, light costumes, female dancers and long dance sequences (all first seen in L'Europe Galante (1697)) with light, flexible footwear was a turning point in ballet practice that lead to Pre romantic ballet era.
However, during the 19th century the ballet in Lithuania was extremely enriched by the guest performances of French, Italian, later Russian ballet troupes.
Ballet in Lithuania truly revived in the autumn of 1920, when Lithuanian Opera and Ballet Theatre was founded (it was opened on December 31, 1920 with the premiere of opera "La Traviata" by Verdi).
The ballet studio of the theatre has stopped its work (only in 1952 the Department of Choreography was founded at the Vilnius Art School, which is the present Vilnius Ballet School).
Ballet is the name given to a specific dance form and technique.
Ballet has its roots in Renaissance court spectacle in Italy, but was particularly shaped by the French ballet de cour, which consisted of social dances performed by the nobility in tandem with music, speech, verse, song, pageant, decor, and costume.
Ballet began to develop as a separate art form in France during the reign of Louis XIV, who was passionate about dance and determined to reverse a decline in dance standards that began in the 17th century.
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