Concert dance
Concert dance is choreographed movement created for presentation to an audience. Its forms include ballet, modern dance, and contemporary dance.
Choreography: The composition and arrangement of movement into a dance or other staged sequence. Concert dance is shaped through choreographic choices about movement, space, and time.
Court ballet: A form of aristocratic entertainment combining dance, music, poetry, and spectacle in European courts. Court ballet helped establish dance as a staged art presented before an audience.
Marius Petipa: A French ballet dancer and choreographer who shaped the classical ballet repertory in Imperial Russia. His grand ballets remain central to concert dance’s classical repertory.
Social dance: Dance performed in social settings, often for participation rather than staged presentation. Concert dance is organized for an audience, unlike social dance’s usual participatory setting.
Ballet: A theatrical dance form with codified technique, formal training, and a repertory of staged works. Ballet is one of concert dance’s major traditions, with a distinctive technique and repertory.
Ballet de cour: A French court spectacle of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries combining dance, music, and elaborate staging. Its courtly productions helped shape early traditions of theatrical dance.
Martha Graham: An American modern dancer and choreographer who developed a distinctive movement technique and repertory. Her technique and works established a powerful modern-dance tradition for the stage.
Folk dance: Traditional dance practices associated with particular communities, histories, and cultural identities. Folk dance is commonly rooted in community practice, though it can also be staged as performance.
Modern dance: A theatrical dance tradition that developed partly in opposition to ballet’s conventions and emphasized individual movement languages. Modern dance broadened concert dance beyond ballet’s established movement vocabulary.
Académie Royale de Danse: A French institution founded in 1661 to formalize and develop dance practice. Its institutional influence helped codify ballet, a central concert-dance tradition.