Sentence examples for ballet from inspiring English sources
The word "ballet" is correct and usable in written English
You can use it to refer to the classical dance form, or to a performance of that dance form. Example sentence: My daughter has been taking ballet lessons since she was three.
noun
A classical form of dance.
Billy Elliot winningly forsook his mining heritage to pursue a post-industrial career in ballet, pirouetting past the picketlines, but his dream was ultimately embraced by the community, whose whip-round gets him to the big London audition.
Two years on from that first visit, I recall a gazelle-like, beautiful human being floating about in the covers, a man with the balance and grace of a ballet dancer – he was an as yet unknown David Gower, still a season away from swivelling pulling his first ball in Test cricket for four.
He's done so by using the notation with which Beauty was recorded in 1903 by the ballet master Nicholas Sergeyev.
During rehearsals, he's careful to insist that, within the limits of period etiquette, his courtiers and peasants behave like real individuals, rather than ballet ciphers.
Behind the scenes, the company was forging ahead: Antony Tudor continued as the most significant choreographer, Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins made some of the defining works of ballet Americana (Fall River Legend, Fancy Free), George Balanchine created his masterly Theme and Variations, and a generation of American-trained dancers, notably Nora Kaye and Alicia Alonso, emerged.
A few years ago, when Guardian critics were asked to imagine their ideal stage collaboration, I voted for a new version of Nijinska's lifestyle ballet Le Train Bleu, to be re-designed by Prada (the original, 1924 costumes were Chanel) and re-choreographed by De Frutos.
But the fact that its pre-teen title character is an aspiring ballet-dancer lifts it into the sort of follow-your-dreams whimsy that wouldn't be out of place in a Frank Capra movie.
"I don't think there are any barriers to coloured dancers at all," says 24-year-old Gittens, who was born in Trinidad and coached by her ballet-teacher mother.
The Royal and Derngate in Northampton ran an initiative for first-time ballet-goers, whereby they could watch a screening of the Bolshoi in action and then go to a live dance performance in the Derngate.
At the age of nine her family moved to Canada, and Gittens continued her training at the Goh Ballet Academy in Vancouver where, she says, she "learned to be fearless".
A ballerina who lived in a single motel room with her mother and five siblings during her teenage years will become the American Ballet Theatre's first black soloist in 20 years.
