The first European “ballets” had more in common with the circus than with modern dance. In the 15th century, Italian princes started throwing dinner-balls to celebrate marriages or important treaties. These spectacular entertainments included horse shows, living tableaux, feasting and dancing. Although they seem extravagant they were staged by philosophers and artists - including Leonardo da Vinci - who wanted to revive ancient Greek values like balance, harmony and proportion: the same qualities that define classical ballet.

When Catherine de Medici married Henry II of France in 1533, she brought her Italian passion for staged spectaculars to the French court. She also brought a valet, Balthasar de Beaujoyeaux, who composed music, played the violin and choreographed the first ever court ballet, the Ballet comique de la reine, in 1581. The name of the new art form was the French version of an Italian word (ballare - to dance), and even today most of the terms used in ballet - from pirouette to pas de deux - are French.

Louis XIV of France got his nickname, The Sun King, when he appeared as the sun in a court entertainment called the Ballet de la Nuit, in 1653. Most ballet was performed by aristocratic amateurs, and many of their customs still survive in modern dance. Turned-out feet, for instance, began as a way of showing off expensive buckles and bows. Louis set up the world’s first Royal Dance Academy in 1661, to set the rules of classical ballet and train professional dancers for the stage.

Women became less modest in the early 18th century. Marie Sallé scandalously wore flimsy costumes that gave her more freedom of movement, and Marie-Anne Camargo lifted her skirts a little to show off her footwork. These tiny freedoms paved the way for the Romantic ballet of the early 19th century, in which women dominated and the male roles became so minor that often they, too, were danced by women dressed as men.

In 1796 the French dancer Charles Didelot put on the most revolutionary ballet ever. Flore et Zéphire gave men and women different roles, and completely different steps from each other. It introduced simple lifts, and in the process practically invented the pas de deux. It also featured naturalistic mime and pioneered the technique of dancers performing on the tips of their toes (helped by wires). Tights for men was another of Didelot’s innovations.

There are many arguments about who was the first dancer to lift herself onto the tips of her toes without using wires. Geneviève Gosselin, of France, and the Russian, Avdotia Istomina, were dancing on pointe in the 1820s, but mainly as an acrobatic trick. It was the great Italian dancer Marie Taglioni who perfected the technique. In 1832, in the archetypal Romantic ballet La Sylphide, she created the white-skirted, floating appearance that became the hallmark of the ballerina for the next 100 years.

The Frenchman Marius Petipa arrived in St Petersburg in 1847, as a dancer. Twenty-two years later he was in charge of the Imperial Ballet. Petipa was fond of extravagant scenery and costumes, and liked to fill the stage with dancers. But he also carefully analysed all the steps of classical dance to find out exactly what they suggested to the eye - lightness, for example, or excitement, or brilliance. Using his ideas he created scenes in which characters and their relationships were conjured up through pure movement. One of Petipa’s greatest ballets, The Sleeping Beauty, is usually described as the perfect example of classicism in dance.

The Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev had a genius for bringing choreographers together with major composers and painters, and persuading them to make ballets that were complete works of art. One of the earliest examples was The Firebird, made in 1910 by Mikhail Fokine, Igor Stravinsky and Léon Bakst. Fokine thought the ballets of Petipa were overblown. He preferred to make one-act “dance-poems” with basic stories that allowed him to concentrate on mood and atmosphere. In works like this - choreographically simpler but visually and musically more exotic than anything seen before - Diaghilev and his company, Les Ballets Russes, dragged classical dance into the 20th century.

George Balanchine, who left Les Ballets Russes and became the father of American ballet, went even further than Fokine. He rejected conventional ideas of what dance should do, simplifying costumes and scenery and stripping away storylines, poetic themes and obvious displays of emotion. With Apollon Musagète (Apollo) in 1928 he made the world’s first “neo-classical” ballet, in which the movement is intended to match the themes and patterns in Stravinsky’s score. For Balanchine dance was music given a physical shape. There was no need for it to do anything more.

In 1936 the English choreographer Antony Tudor created Lilac Garden. It used classical dance to explore the thoughts and emotions of four lovers, and is often described as the first “psychological ballet”. Kenneth MacMillan took this approach even further. In ballets like Mayerling and The Invitation he explored human sexuality and violent emotions, as well as vast social and historical themes. Ballet began to deal with sophisticated topics that had once only been found in poems, novels or theatre.