How Does Ballet Affect Society

Throughout history, people fight, the economy shifts, empires collapse, and new ones rise from the ashes. In other words, societies change, sometimes in major ways and sometimes in ways barely noticeable. However, despite the constant transformations that our world undergoes, art remains the way a society expresses itself, and it evolves and changes along with society. Ballet is one such art form. Contrary to popular belief, ballet is not an art that lives in the past but one that has grown and changed so much that some aspects of it would be unrecognizable to its originators. How has ballet evolved with society and culture throughout history, and how has it changed since its birth?
Ballet began not as a stage performance like the ones we see
During the classical period, Russia took center stage in the ballet world, producing the period’s most famous dancers and choreographers, such as Anna Pavlova and Marius Petipa. Thus, the Russian Revolution of the early 1900s and the political upheaval that followed changed ballet yet again. Much as it did during the French revolution, ballet lost a good deal of its importance during the revolution. During the Soviet era that followed, dancers lost a good deal of their artistic liberty. Just like everything else in Russia at the time, performing companies and training schools were placed under control of the state. Ballet reverted to a less expressive style. Soviet leaders used ballet as a device to force propaganda on the people: for example, the ballet The Flames of Paris is based on stories of the French Revolution and was used to spark revolutionary fervor in Russia. The political climate in the Soviet Union caused many dancers, frustrated by their lack of freedom, to defect to Western countries, particularly the U.S., where they had more independence (among them, the famous Mikhail Baryshnikov, Rudolph Nureyev, and Natalia Makarova). (“Dancing their Way to Freedom” para.