Today’s dancers dazzle onstage – yet offstage they reveal a human world of physio sessions, heartbreaks, swollen ankles and tough days. They leave soirées at grand opera houses in hoodies and trainers, returning to a life that feels unexpectedly close to our own. The contrast with the so-called golden age of ballet, when the art form took its current shape, could not be greater.
In the early 19th century, the focus of ballet shifted to women, while male dancers were reduced to mere “pedestals”, as critics of the 1840s sneered. With this shift came an outright cult of the unattainable, mythical ideal of the ballerina. The female body took possession of the stage and, soon afterwards, the popular imagination. It became a cultural emblem and screen for collective fantasies all at once.
One of the earliest laboratories for this myth was created by Louis-Désiré Véron, director of the Académie Royale de Musique, today’s Opéra national de Paris. A pharmacist turned impresario, Véron took over a struggling institution and quickly realised that ballet could be used to generate profit, publicity and power. More tactician than aesthete, he cultivated the press, staged rivalries and managed the spectacle as a business. The Académie became a cultural factory and a proto pop-culture phenomenon, turning dancers into capital and fantasy into commodity.
The first true diva to emerge was Marie Taglioni. In 1832, when she danced the title role in La Sylphide, a nocturnal, airborne spirit, she offered Paris a vision of ballet unlike anything it had seen before: a weightless, supernatural spirit floating in a diaphanous tutu and rising effortlessly onto her revolutionary pointe shoes. Through endless repetitions of words such as “purity”, “ideal” and “vision”, the press turned this stage apparition into a myth, and Taglioni into “a Christian virgin, chaste and veiled”. Lifted above ordinary life, she became both an aesthetic model and a moral emblem.
Taglioni was already Paris’ undisputed diva when Véron, sensing that obsession feeds on novelty and contrasts, turned to the rising Austrian star Fanny Elssler. Her arrival in Paris was a cultural shock, as Taglioni’s “French” style (though she was of Swedish-Italian heritage) suddenly seemed under threat.
If Taglioni was air, Fanny Elssler was fire. Earthly and sensual, she brought with her the colours of national dances and abandoned spirits and nymphs to embody seductive gypsies and bayadères. Her signature piece was the Cachucha she performed in Le Diable boiteux (1836), a Spanish dance with castanets; the press praised her unsettling gaze and a body that “shivered” to the rhythm.
With her sensuality, Mediterranean warmth and rhythmic style, Elssler was the perfect antithesis to Taglioni. Audiences took sides, with Taglionistes and Elssleristes facing off with growing fervour. Théophile Gautier memorably captured this contrast: Taglioni was the “Christian ballerina”, while Elssler was the “pagan”. As new stars later appeared, this dynamic of opposites intensified further, with each one sharpening the boundaries of taste and allegiance. Rivalries were cultivated, narratives carefully shaped, and soon Paris found itself enthralled by this nineteenth-century reality TV show.
Soon after, Carlotta Grisi exploded into fame in Giselle (1841), a ballet created for her as the story of a simple peasant betrayed by her aristocratic lover who dies of heartbreak and becomes a nightly spirit. She blended technical purity with vivid dramatic instinct. Unlike Taglioni’s ethereal abstraction or Elssler’s passionate fire, Grisi radiated a warm, breathing lyricism that made her the Romantic ballerina par excellence and drew writers and painters into her orbit.
Grisi’s natural counterpart became Fanny Cerrito. Ondine (1843), created for her in London, already hinted at the reputation she would later build in Paris as an earthy, magnetic, fiercely physical dancer. She dazzled audiences with her speed, elevation and theatrical daring. Between them stood one man who sharpened the contrast: Jules Perrot, Grisi’s teacher and lover, and later the master creator for Cerrito. What followed was no longer purely artistic rivalry but open drama, played out through contracts, premieres and gossip.
In contrast, Lucile Grahn was the silent diva of the century. Reserved, exacting and Nordic, she embodied an ideal of clarity and austere musicality, yet she remained resistant to myth. She caused no scandals and attracted little press attention. Instead, she was seen as too independent, too unwilling to be contained, and thus perceived as dangerous. Even her teacher and partner, August Bournonville, grew wary of her.
Following her departure from Denmark in 1838, Grahn replaced Elssler in La Sylphide in Paris, with many feeling that she surpassed her predecessor. She later directed the Munich ballet and collaborated with Richard Wagner on the choreography for the Bacchanal in Tannhäuser. Her marginality reveals an essential aspect of dancers’ publicity engine: not all greatness was allowed to become legend.
For this engine to run, it required fuel, and the press especially thrived on conflict, both real and symbolic. Ballerinas competed fiercely over roles, salaries and influence, while the public eagerly took sides in disputes that mirrored deeper divisions within society. The Opéra’s audience was divided along political and social factions: an aristocracy clinging to the past, a bourgeoisie looking to the future, and republicans hoping for change.
Loud, partisan, and occasionally violent fan bases emerged, resulting in fights breaking out in the auditorium and performances being boycotted. The divas became the focus of these loyalties: Taglioni’s purity appealed to conservative elites; Elssler’s passion resonated with the rising middle classes. Grisi’s lyricism attracted poets and Bohemians, while Cerrito channeled a more popular, nationalist southern energy, and Grahn’s hard work matched Protestant ideals of order.
What gave ballerinas this prominence, allowing them to function as a canvas for collective fantasies? At first glance, a carefully constructed star system. Ballerinas became the first modern celebrities because they were perfectly suited to the new media landscape. From the 1830s onwards, mass-produced lithography and illustrated newspapers gave their image unprecedented reach. For the first time, an artist’s body circulated on a vast scale across playbills, sheet-music covers, caricatures and collectible cards.
As models of womanhood, they set trends: the Taglioni hairstyle, the Cerrito shoe, the Elssler bodice. Each ballerina became a brand, with their names gracing perfumes, fans, gloves and fabrics. Steamships and railways carried them across Europe, from Paris to London, Vienna, Milan, Moscow and St Petersburg. Elssler famously toured the United States, where she was welcomed by Congress and even the President. They were the first travelling divas, riding the wave of globalisation before the term existed.
On a deeper level, while the ballerina embodied the supernatural and the unattainable, the stage also made the female body visible and consumable. What society forbade, art displayed. Erotic and legitimate at once, dancers revealed body parts invisible in society (the legs!), becoming some of the first sex symbols of modern culture.
At the same time, ballet demanded considerable physical strength. In her memoir Souvenirs, Taglioni recalls exhausting training sessions focused on leaps and on holding a pose for a count of one hundred. The idea of the female body as athletic was entirely new in such a public, glamorous context, especially given the severe limitations on women’s sport (the Women’s World Games would not appear until 1922).
These physical demands required immense dedication and also fostered a rare sense of professional agency. But how far did that agency extend? It operated within, against and through the systems that sought to contain them. Ballerinas were economically active, unusual for women of the time, and artistically influential. They were image-savvy and self-fashioning, able to cultivate recognisable visual identities and to manipulate their public persona, an early form of image management. International mobility gave them leverage against institutions and, at times, a contractual voice. Yet they remained constrained by directors, critics and gender ideologies that cast them as symbols rather than individuals, and they depended on fickle audiences, while often being instrumentalised by social and political forces.
Our divas could not display any signs of disappointment, doubt, training or fatigue. We know how hard they worked only through the accounts of intimate friends and disciples, or through notes never meant for publication. But the real body had to remain invisible, idealised, as the diva’s aura eclipsed the woman who inhabited it. What remains of this today? Things now stand otherwise: the 19th century created the perfect myth of the ballerina, while the 21st allows her a body.
The language surrounding dancers has become lighter, more ironic and more intimate, because the narrative now belongs to them. In interviews and on social media they share their lives: nights out, exhaustion, backstage jokes, defeats, difficulties and moments of happiness, recounting their biographies in real time. This visibility does not destroy ballet’s mystery; it transforms it.
The shift from symbol to subject may be the most profound metamorphosis in the history of ballet. Yet the beauty that mattered has survived and continues to flourish, for our too-crude world still seeks refuge in art, and Giselles, Sylphides, Bayadères, nymphs and spirits continue to fill theatres across the globe.
