Ten dancers who carried ballet out of the imperial theaters and into the modern world, from Pavlova’s dying swan to Guillem’s impossible line.

Ballet entered the 20th century as a court entertainment guarded by a handful of imperial theaters and left it as a global art form. Nearly everything we now take for granted happened in between: the first world tours, the shock of modernism at the Ballets Russes, the rise of great national companies in Britain, America, and Cuba, and the Cold War defections that turned dancers into front-page news. Technique transformed too. Extensions rose, men reclaimed the spotlight after decades as porters for ballerinas, and choreographers from Fokine to Forsythe kept redrawing what a classically trained body could say.

The ten dancers here were chosen for influence rather than fame alone, though most had both. Each one changed how ballet was danced, taught, or watched, and together they span the century’s geography: St. Petersburg and Moscow, London and Paris, Havana and Harlem. A couple may be discoveries even for regular balletgoers, which is exactly the point. They appear in no particular order, because ranking them would miss how differently each remade the same art.

1. Anna Pavlova

1881-1931

Before Pavlova, ballet belonged to a few opera houses; after her, it belonged to the world. The St. Petersburg ballerina left the imperial stage to form her own touring company and became the first dancer to carry ballet across the globe, performing everywhere from India and South America to small-town America and Australia. Michel Fokine created The Dying Swan for her in 1905, a two-minute solo to Saint-Saëns that became the most famous dance of the century. Her reported last words in 1931 were a request to have her swan costume made ready. Start with the surviving 1925 film footage of her Dying Swan, still haunting a hundred years on.

2. Vaslav Nijinsky

The god of the dance

The star of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes made male dancing matter again, floating through Le Spectre de la rose with a leap audiences swore defied gravity. As a choreographer he was even more radical: his L’Après-midi d’un faune of 1912 scandalized Paris, and his The Rite of Spring provoked a near riot at its 1913 premiere. Mental illness ended his career by 1919, when he was still in his twenties, and no verified film of him dancing survives, which only deepened the legend. Start with a staged reconstruction of L’Après-midi d’un faune, then read his devastating diary.

3. Galina Ulanova

1928-1960

The supreme dramatic ballerina of the Soviet era proved that acting could be technique. Ulanova created Juliet in Lavrovsky’s Romeo and Juliet to Prokofiev’s score at the Kirov in 1940, then moved to the Bolshoi, where she reigned as prima ballerina. When the Bolshoi finally visited London in 1956, her Juliet, danced at the age of 46, reduced hardened critics to superlatives and reshaped Western ideas of what Russian ballet could be. Start with the 1954 Bolshoi film of Romeo and Juliet, where her run to Friar Laurence remains one of the most quoted moments in dance.

4. Margot Fonteyn

Prima ballerina assoluta

English ballet grew up around Fonteyn. She joined the young Vic-Wells company as a teenager and became the defining muse of choreographer Frederick Ashton, who built Ondine and much else on her musical, unforced classicism. Then came the second act no one predicted: at 42 she began dancing with the newly defected Rudolf Nureyev, and their 1962 Giselle ignited the most celebrated partnership in ballet history. The Royal Ballet named her prima ballerina assoluta, an honor almost never granted in the West. Start with the 1966 film of MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet, with Nureyev at her side.

5. Alicia Alonso

Cuba’s prima ballerina assoluta

Alonso danced most of her career nearly blind. Detached retinas struck at 19, and while bedridden after surgery she learned Giselle in her head, tracing the steps with her fingers. In 1943 she stepped in for an injured Alicia Markova at Ballet Theatre in New York and became a star overnight, with partners trained to stand exactly where she expected them and stage lights set as her private compass. In 1948 she went home to Havana and founded the company that became the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, building a Cuban school that still exports dazzling dancers worldwide. Start with her filmed Giselle, the role she owned for four decades.

6. Maya Plisetskaya

1943-1990

The Bolshoi’s other great ballerina was everything Ulanova was not: flamboyant, defiant, and blazingly modern. Her rippling arms in The Dying Swan became a signature the whole world imitated, and she spent decades pushing against Soviet officialdom, which she outlasted. In 1967 she starred in Carmen Suite, choreographed by the Cuban Alberto Alonso to music arranged by her husband Rodion Shchedrin, a ballet so sensual the authorities tried to suppress it. At 50 she was still premiering new work, including Béjart’s Boléro. Start with the filmed Carmen Suite, pure charisma in 45 minutes.

7. Rudolf Nureyev

1958-1992

When the Kirov’s young star broke from his Soviet handlers at Le Bourget airport in June 1961, dance acquired its first global celebrity of the jet age. Nureyev did more than anyone to restore the male dancer to equal billing, rechoreographing the classics to give men real dancing rather than polite support work. His partnership with Fonteyn filled opera houses for years, and as director of the Paris Opera Ballet in the 1980s he promoted a new generation, including a teenager named Sylvie Guillem. Start with the 1963 filmed Le Corsaire pas de deux with Fonteyn, ninety seconds of pure electricity.

8. Arthur Mitchell

1956-1969

Mitchell joined New York City Ballet in 1956 as its only Black dancer and rose to principal, a first at a major American company, at a time when some television stations refused to broadcast him partnering white ballerinas. Balanchine answered by building the central pas de deux of Agon on Mitchell and Diana Adams in 1957, a duet that quietly rewrote what American ballet could show. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Mitchell co-founded Dance Theatre of Harlem with Karel Shook in 1969 to prove that classical ballet belonged to everyone. Start with surviving footage of the Agon pas de deux, still startling in its intimacy.

9. Mikhail Baryshnikov

1967-present

Riga-born and Kirov-trained, Baryshnikov was perhaps the most technically complete male dancer the century produced, and his defection in Toronto in June 1974 gave the West its second Russian revolution in a generation. Unusually, he used his freedom to get stranger, dancing Balanchine at New York City Ballet, premiering Twyla Tharp’s playful Push Comes to Shove, and later founding the White Oak Dance Project with Mark Morris to champion modern work. He also ran American Ballet Theatre through the 1980s and earned an Oscar nomination for The Turning Point. Start with Push Comes to Shove, where a bowler hat meets perfect classical form.

10. Sylvie Guillem

1984-2015

A former gymnast, Guillem was named étoile of the Paris Opera Ballet by Nureyev in 1984 at just 19, the youngest ever so honored there. Her hyperextended six o’clock line changed the physical expectations of an entire generation of ballerinas, and her refusals earned her the nickname Mademoiselle Non when she moved to London’s Royal Ballet in 1989 on her own terms. She spent her final decades in contemporary work with Akram Khan and Russell Maliphant, retiring on December 31, 2015, in Tokyo with Béjart’s Boléro. Start with Forsythe’s In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated, created on her generation of Paris dancers in 1987.

Final thoughts

What these ten share is not a style but a refusal of limits. Pavlova refused geography, Nijinsky refused convention, Alonso refused blindness, Mitchell refused prejudice, and the defectors refused borders altogether. Between them they took an art form owned by two imperial theaters in 1900 and left it, a century later, thriving on six continents, with men and women as equals on the bill and classical technique in conversation with everything from Prokofiev to Forsythe.

Any list this short leaves giants at the door. Erik Bruhn, the Danish master whose immaculate purity of style set the standard every male dancer measured himself against, missed the cut by a hair, as did Natalia Makarova, whose 1970 defection and unforgettable Giselle bridged the Kirov and the West. Consider them numbers eleven and twelve, then keep exploring: the stages, composers, and cities that shaped these dancers run all through CreARTivity’s coverage of the performing arts and of Europe’s great artistic capitals.