Royal Academy of Dance codifies ballet

In March 1661 Louis XIV issued letters patent creating the Academie Royale de Danse in Paris, a body of thirteen leading dancing masters charged with preserving and improving the art of dance. The king had danced in court ballets since boyhood and took the role of the rising sun in the Ballet de la Nuit in 1653, the image behind his title of the Sun King. The new academy turned dance from a courtly pastime into a regulated profession with shared standards.¹²

Ballet itself was an Italian Renaissance invention. Dance masters at Florentine and Milanese courts wrote down the steps of noble social dances, and Catherine de' Medici brought the tradition to France, where the Ballet Comique de la Reine of 1581 combined dance, music, poetry and spectacle. Under Louis XIV, a centralizing state with money to spend on prestige, these entertainments became instruments of royal image-making. His dancing master Pierre Beauchamp is traditionally credited with fixing the five basic positions of the feet, though historians cannot document exactly who first set them down. In 1700 Raoul-Auger Feuillet published a system of dance notation, so choreography could be recorded and taught from the page.¹²³

The decisive step came when ballet moved from the court to the stage. Louis founded the Academie d'Opera, the future Paris Opera, in 1669, renamed the Academie Royale de Musique in 1672, and the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, who had danced beside the king, made dance a regular part of opera. Professional dancers replaced aristocratic amateurs, and women first appeared on the Opera stage in 1681. The technical terms that grew from this system, such as plie, tendu, jete and pirouette, are French and remain the working language of ballet classrooms from Moscow to New York.¹²