When we speak on technique we must remember how the discussion first came to be. One must ask the questions who, what, when, where, why and how, and fully understand the answers to each question, for they are the history of dance and it's fundamental foundations. .
The who or whom, to which I am first referring to are Pierre Beauchamp, a French dancer and ballet master; Raoul-Auger Feuillet, a French dancer and choreographer; Jean George Noverre, also a French dancer and choreographer; and King Louis XVI, French nobleman and early "performer-. These people are forefront in my analysis of Technique because they each played an important role in the early development of Dance Technique. Each as dancers, choreographers, ballet masters, and as influential people of there time changed ballet from its original non-professional level to what it is today! .
The bare beginnings and foreshadowing of dance Technique came about because of the court dances that were around in France in the mid to early 1500's. One might thing that these dances were for nobility to flaunt their power and wealth solely, but that was not the cast for many of them that had much deeper meaning or an ulterior motive, if you will. Where artistic innovation was not the motivating force, some took a political standpoint like the Ballet des Polonaise, brought about by Catherine de' Medici. Commissioning her musicians and designers in 1573 she produced lavish entertainment of song and dance. It was a matter of diplomacy- a gesture to impress the Polish ambassadors who had arrived to negotiate a royal marriage. Many other ballet events subsequently came about such as Ballet Comiqui, Ballet Masquerade, sequences of episodes loosely connected by a thread of plot, Ballet à entrées a series of thematically related dances, and Ballet de cour, a form that merged elements borrowed from the Masquerade of the Italians and the figured dances of the French.
