Famous Ballets “Q...-R...-”
for performance, language & visual arts, music, social studies, classrooms, home schoolers.

Raymonda
The Red Shoes

Rite of Spring

Raymonda is a three act ballet choreographed by Marius Petipa. The story line - set in the time of the Crusades - tells the story of Raymonda, a beautiful noblewoman who is engaged to marry the Crusader Jean de Brienne. While Brienne is off crusading a wicked Saracen knight named Abderakhman attempts to abduct Raymonda. She is saved by the intervention of a protecting spirit, the White Lady.

The ballet movie “The Red Shoes”, loosely based on Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tale The Red Shoes, stars Moira Shearer and Leonide Massine.

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The Rite of Spring (Le sacre du printemps) is a ballet with music by Igor Stravinsky, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, sets by artist Nicholas Roerich and staged by impresario Serge Diaghilev.

Stravinsky wrote, "... a sacred pagan ritual: the wise elders are seated in a circle and are observing the dance before death of the girl whom they are offering as a sacrifice to the god of Spring in order to gain his benevolence. This became the subject of The Rite of Spring."

Walt Disney edited parts of The Rite of Spring in his 1940 animated film Fantasia of original stories set to works of classical music. In the fourth “act” The Rite of Spring edited to illustrate “a pageant, as the story of the growth of life on Earth”, from the beginning of simple life forms up to the dinosaurs and their eventual destruction. Listen for the opening bassoon solo which was repeated at the end.

William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet served as inspiration for a ballet by Sergei Prokofiev for the Kirov Ballet.