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Ballet Essentials: Where to Begin
Five ballets that define the form and open every door
5 selections · Stage Door Society Editorial
Before Your First Performance
Ballet's vocabulary is physical — bodily, spatial, musical — and requires a different kind of attention than theatre or opera. These five works are chosen because they reward the uninitiated viewer as richly as the expert.
The Selections
Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty represent Petipa at his most architecturally ambitious: extended classical structures that demonstrate the full grammar of the 19th-century ballet. The Nutcracker is familiar but underrated — Tchaikovsky's score is genuinely extraordinary, and the Sugar Plum pas de deux is one of the form's great achievements.From there: Fokine's Firebird, Stravinsky's incandescent debut with the Ballets Russes. And finally Romeo and Juliet — Prokofiev's ballet score, arguably the twentieth century's greatest contribution to the form.
A Note on Productions
Ballet is more production-dependent than opera. The same work staged by the Royal Ballet, the Paris Opéra Ballet, and the Bolshoi will feel like three different pieces. Where possible, seek historical recordings of defining productions alongside current stagings.
