Ballet.

by Bruce E. R. Thompson.

Almost as soon as I could walk my mother taught me how to dance the Highland fling.

My mother wasn’t Scottish, although I think she wished she were. She embraced the Thompson name, claiming it was a Scottish name. She pooh-poohed the argument that “true Scotsmen,” aside from never eating brown sugar on their porridge, spelled their name “Thomson,” without the “p.” She was partly right, and partly wrong. The highland Scots who came to the New World chiefly settled in Canada. To this day they spell their name without the “p.” The lowland Scots were never really part of the highland culture at all. The lowland culture crossed the borders into England and had a significant presence in Ireland as well. In his book, American Nations, Colin Woodard calls that culture the Borderlanders. When they came to the New World, they settled mostly in the Appalachian Mountains and became “hillbillies.” That is where my family comes from. After decades of living in Wyoming, my father’s father never quite lost his backwater Virginia accent.

But my mother did not care that we were not “true Scots.” She loved the sound of bagpipes, and she loved dancing. So I was taught the Highland fling at an early age.

Before I was born, my mother was a ballerina. She says that, when she was pregnant with me she slipped on the ice while on her way to a ballet lesson. That explains why I was born in January. When my sister and I were old enough, we were both given ballet lessons. After a year of being the only boy in a class of supple young girls—all of whom could do the splits better than I could—my mother took us out of the group class. Instead we were given private lessons as a pair. We learned to dance a style called “adagio,” which is less formal than the classical “pas de deux,” but is still a dance for a male-female couple, and still uses many of the classical lifts, drops, and arm positions of classical ballet. We were good at it. Our routine was typically the featured last act of the ballet school’s annual recitals.

It is not possible to dance both the Highland fling and classical ballet without noticing the similarity: the arms lifted high, the toes pointed, the leaps precise (so as not to get your toe cut off when you are dancing around swords). Is it just a coincidence that they are so similar?

Ballet is not—as art forms go—particularly old. In fact the origin of ballet is reasonably well documented, and it does not come from Scotland. It comes from France.

So far as we know, people have danced for fun in every culture and at every period of human history. However, dancing was something to do, not something to watch. Dance as a performance art is a relatively recent invention. Like opera, ballet (performance dancing) was first developed during the Baroque period. Also like opera, it reached its height during the Romantic period.

Courtiers loved to dance, just as peasants did. Court dances were somewhat more refined (i.e. slower and more dignified) than peasant dances; but, in fact, most court dances were originally based on the country dances done by peasants. The oldest known instruction manual on the art of dance was the Orchesography, by Jehan Tabourot, who rearranged the letters of his name to form the pen name Thoinot Arbeau. Arbeau’s Orchesography was an instruction manual for courtiers on how to do the court dances popular at the time.
The person chiefly responsible for the development of ballet as a performance art was King Louis XIV of France, who called himself “the sun king.” Louis was a noted patron of the arts. His extravagant expenditures did much to advance architecture, music, painting, and other arts during his time. (They also bankrupted the French treasury and contributed to the beginning of the French Revolution.) But Louis’ contribution to ballet was of a much more personal nature than mere financial support. Louis was himself an accomplished dancer. In 1651, to encourage the art of dance, he put on an exhibition of dancing. That is, he himself performed for the entertainment of other courtiers. This was the first time that dancing had been treated as something to be watched.

In 1661 Louis founded the Royal Academy of Dance in Paris. The Royal Academy was chiefly a dance school created for the purpose of teaching courtiers how to dance. However, the dance masters at the school were expected to put on occasional exhibitions of dancing. Hence, the Royal Academy was also the first professional dance troupe.

In 1717 the Royal Academy mounted a dance exhibition called The Loves of Mars and Venus. Called a “ballet d’action,” this was the first use of dance to tell a story. Thereafter, “ballet d’action” became the rule rather than the exception. People came to expect ballet to be a theatrical performance, with characters and a plot, like a play or opera.

Of course, there is to this day no notation by which the specific steps, arm movements, leans and dips of the body, and so forth, all of which make up “choreography,” can be recorded. Hence, such famous ballets as Swan Lake must be remembered, and passed down from one generation of choreographers to the next. We have no way of knowing what dance moves were taught at the Royal Academy. Hence we have no real way of knowing whether the style of that time was similar to, or different from, classical ballet as we know it today. Certainly, the school taught male dancers to make great leaps. We can know this because the ability of male dancers to leap is recorded in descriptions of court dancing going back to the time of Henry VIII of England. Henry (as a young man) was renowned for his ability to leap while dancing the galliard. Past that we know almost nothing. However…

Perhaps the most influential ballet ever performed was La Sylphide, first performed in 1832. This is universally considered the first “Romantic” ballet. It was extremely popular, and it became the model for ballet for the remainder of the 19th Century. La Sylphide is a story from Scottish folklore. It is the tragic story of a human who falls in love with a nature sprite (a sylph).

Now, at this point we must venture into the dangerous realm of mere guesswork, but I believe we can guess what happened. To this day, when La Sylphide is performed, the male dancers wear kilts, and the choreography mimics the gentle glides of the strathspey and the bold leaps of the Highland fling. I believe it was always thus. The original choreographer trained the dancers in the techniques necessary to Scottish folk dancing, as was appropriate for a story with a Scottish setting. Because of the popularity of La Sylphide those techniques came to be widely taught as necessary for the performance of ballet in general. The raised arms of the Highland fling became Fifth Position in the arms; the crossing steps of the strathspey became Second and Third Positions in the feet. And so on. Hence, it is a reasonably solid guess that the similarity between ballet and Scottish folk dancing is no coincidence: the origins of classical ballet technique are to be found in Scottish folk dance.

In some ways, this story is my story as well. Who am I? I never became a dancer, but I always valued the poise and strength that dancing gave me. I learned to feel confident in my ability to perform before others. This gave me the courage to become a musician, an actor, a puppeteer, and eventually a teacher. Most of all, I value what I learned about defying the expectations of my gender. I am what became of that little boy who was taught the Highland fling. I associated dance with the warlike wail of the pipes, the braw manliness of the sword-dance, the gallant poetry of Robert Burns. When neighborhood bullies called me a sissy, and teased me for dancing ballet with my sister, I shrugged them off. What could they possibly know?

They never saw Baryshnikov dance.