PRE-HISTORY
The period before written records existed.
What is pre-history?
Ancient Egyptian dances were connected to nature and the annual flooding of this river, whose waters renewed the farmland.
What is the Nile?
Between the 9th and 15th centuries in Europe, this social and political system was organized around land, hierarchy, and obligations among lords, vassals, and peasants.
What is Feudalism?
This French monarch earned the nickname "The Sun King" after appearing in a ballet dressed as Apollo in celebration of his own rise to power.
Who is Louis XIV?
Adopted by theaters during the Industrial Revolution and Romantic era, this technology gave stage crews greater control over atmosphere and effects, helping make Romantic ballet’s supernatural worlds believable.
What is gas lighting?
This Italian-born queen of France patronized the arts and helped foster ballet de cour. The elaborate court celebrations and performances under her patronage displayed the French monarchy’s wealth and prestige and distracted pesky aristocrats from political affairs.
Who is Catherine de' Medici?
Beginning in 1517 and spreading through the 16th century; this religious movement challenged Roman Catholic authority and reshaped religious life across Europe.
What is the Protestant Reformation?
Through gesture, posture, and movement, this physical system communicates meaning and emotion—enabling early humans to express ideas before written language existed.
What is the body?
This term, coined by Greek philosopher Plato, described distorted movement.
What is ignoble?
The devastation of the 14th-century Black Plague pandemic helped inspire images of death leading people from every social class in this final dance.
What is the Dance of Death?
This elaborate French court entertainment combined dance, music, poetry, and spectacle to display royal power and prestige.
What is ballet de cour?
Influenced by Noverre’s calls for ballet reform, this dramatic style of dance removed spoken words and song, allowing movement and pantomime to drive the story.
What is ballet d'action?
This 18th-century French ballerina was celebrated for her technical skill and intricate footwork. She is known for having popularized flat slippers and shorter skirts that showed off her virtuosity.
Who is Marie de Camargo?
By emphasizing human reason and achievement in earthly life, this Renaissance worldview challenged the Catholic Church’s traditional influence over learning and culture.
What is humanism?
This spiritual leader guided tribal dances and rituals believed to connect people with the spirit world and bring healing or success in hunting.
Who is the shaman?
In the multilingual Roman Empire, this gesture-based performance form could tell stories to audiences who did not share a spoken language.
What is pantomime?
This group of people danced at medieval celebrations following competitions of arms, and their expected conduct reflected ideals of honor, courtesy, and refined courtship.
Who are Knights?
This system of government is a form of tyrannical rule demanding religious, economic, and social conformity of its subjects based on a political theory of monarchical divinity.
What is absolutism?
This artistic movement of the late-18th & early-19th centuries responded to the difficult living conditions of the Industrial Revolution by emphasizing emotion, imagination, nature, the supernatural, and individual experience. In ballet, it became especially prominent in the 1830s–1850s.
What is Romanticism?
This defining ballerina of the Romantic era starred in La Sylphide (1832). Her ethereal style helped establish dancing en pointe as an expressive element of ballet and embodied the era’s ideal of the weightless, supernatural heroine.
Who is Marie Taglioni?
The elegance and elaborate ornaments of this artistic style suited aristocratic leisure and expressed a world of refinement distant from ordinary people's experiences.
What is Rococo?
The dances performed at a quinceañera, celebrating a young woman’s coming of age, are a modern example of this type of prehistoric dance.
What are commemorative dances?
Ancient Greeks built these large outdoor spaces to host comedy, music, and dance-drama performances called Athenian tragedies.
What are theatres?
By 300 AD, dancers and performers were not allowed to take part in this sacred ritual unless they renounced their art.
What is baptism?
These people served an important part in court culture by teaching dance technique and courtly comportment to nobility, helping them embody the manners expected of their rank.
Who are dancing masters?
This style of ballet emphasizes increasingly demanding technique. A famous example is a ballerina performing 32 fouetté turns near the end of a virtuosic pas de deux.
What is Classical?
This 18th-century dancer, teacher, and composer called for ballet reform in his Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets. He championed a unified, understandable plot expressed through emotionally expressive movement, with music, scenery, and costumes working together to serve the action.
Who is Jean-Georges Noverre?
This period of British history is often associated with ideals of respectability, family life, and strict gender roles amid industrial and imperial expansion.
What is Victorian?
The basket dance of the Tewa people, with invocations for plant growth and the transmission of human life, is an example of this type of prehistoric dance.
What are dances of fertility?
Alongside its earlier ritual and social roles, dance in ancient civilizations increasingly served this function for audiences and spectators.
What is entertainment?
As Christianity spread through the Roman Empire, church leaders debated whether dance could be joyful worship or a catalyst for sensuality, idolatry, and worldly distraction. They also associated it with the perceived lewdness and immorality of Roman entertainment. This conflict became known as what?
What is the Christian dance dilemma?
This economic system viewed the world as an economic pie with limited amount of wealth, so one country's economic gain meant another country's loss. This drove governments to increase their national wealth and power by hoarding treasure, pushing exports, limiting imports, and acquiring colonies and resources around the world.
What is mercantilism?
This style of ballet was the first to use women’s pointe work to create an illusion of weightlessness, helping supernatural characters appear otherworldly.
What is Romantic?
This 19th-century French dancer and choreographer moved to Russia in 1847 and became a leading figure in the Imperial Theatres. He choreographed 77 major ballets including Don Quixote, La Bayadère, The Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker, and Swan Lake.
Who is Marius Petipa?
Because many European countries looked to France for trends in culture, politics, fashion, dance, and more, we used this analogy for France in class.
What is Europe's cool big sister?