BEST DANCERS OF SWEDEN COUNTRY

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BEST SWEDEN DANCERS PROFILES :
Royal Swedish Ballet got its first professional ballet company when King Gustaf III founded a Swedish Opera in Stockholm in 1773. Theatre was the king's great passion, and he loved acting and writing his own plays. He never appeared as a dancer, however, obviously because of the physical difficulties this gave him - he had a slight limp. But right from the start, ballet came to play an important part in the activities of the Opera. In only a few months after the Opera's opening the French ballet master Louis Gallodier had managed to summon an ensemble numbering thirty dancers.

The dancers of the Opera not only promised to become quite good but also became quite numerous. Already in 1786 the company numbered an impressive 71 dancers to be compared with the 75 of the Royal Ballet of today. In other words there was a heavy commitment to the ballet company. The king was paided enormous fees in order to tempt distinguished dancers to come to Stockholm. Noverre's pupil Antoine Bourneville was one of the most famous. He came to Stockholm in 1782 and took the Swedish audiences by surprise with his technique, physical beauty and charisma.

During the first decades of the 19th century the Swedish ballet still stayed in frequent contact with France, and the Italian Filippo Taglioni was active as a dancer and choreographer in a couple of turns. Taglioni's daughter Marie - a future star of international ballet - was born in Stockholm in 1804. It so happened that she performed in the city of her birth only once, in 1841, with extracts from that romantic ballet repertoire which she had come to incarnate.

Swedish pupils, Jean Borlin, became principal choreographer and the wealthy young art collector Rolf de Mare took on a role similar to Diaghilev's for the company. The Swedish ballet in Paris existed for five hectic and intensive years, 1920 - 1925, and got a central position in the new art of its time. It became a sort of stage laboratory for the international avant-garde and attracted many of the foremost painters, composers, musicians and poets in Paris.

Best Sweden Dancers