" The Barre" second part (the article was published on the online magazine of Ballet Festival of India in November 2017)

In the 18th century we have the “Ballet d’action”, the Vestris family as teachers and dancers, the two prima donnas Madame Sallé and Madame Camargo. We are now entering the professional era at the “Opéra de Paris” but still no sign of barre practice. Dresses are shortened, the male “tonnelets” and female “paniers" (corsets and sort of nets supporting the dress) removed, and the first “arabesque” becomes a regular step showing the ankle of the ballerina, still wearing heeled soft shoes.
Jean Jacque Noverre in his “Lettres sur la Danse” (1760) - Letters on Dancing- wrote a lot about the “ballet d’action” in need of better trained dancers with expressions, feelings and realistic content in choreographies, but no mention of the barre yet.

    The Classroom, E.Degas, a detail

It is only in the 19th century, the great romantic era that the barre started being used surely with Carlo Blasis (1797/1878). He was a famous writer , choreographer and teacher, an innovator as far as all the technical aspects of what is now everywhere called “Ballet”. He was director of the La Scala opera theatre in Milan. Barre practice was very different from today - very short with only a few exercises, but with long repetitions of 16 to 24 Battement Tendus and very slow Grand Pliés.

The beautiful paintings of Edgar Degas show very clearly dancers with their legs on the barre in a class where Jules Perrot is teaching. Perrot used to partner with Maria Taglioni who officially introduced the pointe shoes. They both went to Russia and together with choreographer Marius Petipa taught Ballet to the Russians.

                                      

Did you know?

In his “Lettres sur la Danse" Noverre mentions a machine called “tourne-hanche” (turn-hips) and he is very much against it to the point that in his 12th letter he clearly remarks : “this machine is distorting the body of the dancer instead of improving it”.

At the beginning of the 20th century a very famous teacher Enrico Cecchetti from Italy went all over Europe to teach and was employed by Diaghilev’s “Ballets Russes”. He reorganised all the exercises for the ballet class. It is interesting to note that in his system the barre started with Pliés and were followed immediately by Grands Battements, and there were no Battements Fondus. Today generally we practice the Grands Battements at the end of the barre.

Sometime after the war, around 1950, a Russian dancer and teacher Boris Kniaseff started the floor barre (barre au sol) for the only reason that the Russian company on tour in Paris didn’t have a classroom with barre. Therefore to train for the daily practice he thought of doing the same exercises by sitting and lying down on the floor. He stayed over in France and opened a school with his wife Olga Spessivtseva ( the greatest Giselle ever).

Of course the Kniaseff method was codified in a few years and contributed a lot to the success of the French dancers. He only passed it on to a handful of loyal students. From then on other systems have evolved and developed by teachers so much that nowadays all the preparation for young pupils and warm up of dancers is done initially with floor exercises.

Here a link to the evolution of the barre practice in three different centuries. Really worth to take a look! www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EjfGgvsldM