From earliest times, dance has been a solo art form. It has been used to inspire, to move and to seduce the watcher. The best-known and most highly evolved dance form in Western Europe is ballet. Ballet had its origins in Renaissance court spectacle in Italy but developed in France where court ballets reached their peak under Louis XIV, nicknamed The Sun King, a role he played in a ballet. In 1661 he founded the Académie Royale de Danse. He stopped dancing in 1670 and thereafter dancers became professional, highly trained athletes. To this day most ballet terminology remains French.

La Sylphide, first performed in Paris in 1832 initiated the period of Romantic ballet and introduced innovations in theme, technique and costume. Marius Petipa, a Frenchman, became the chief choreographer of the Imperial Russian Ballet. He developed the full-length, narrative ballet and his best-known works are Swan Lake (1877) and The Sleeping Beauty (1890) both set to commissioned scores by Tchaikovsky. Despite the Revolution of 1918, Russia dominated ballet world for much of the 20th century. The migration of Russian choreographers, like George Balanchine in the 1930s, and dancers such as Rudolph Nureyev in 1961 and Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1974 helped revitalise ballet in Europe and the United States.