Scene da Les Sylphides
The term Ballet Blanc is used to indicate that section of the ballet, characteristic of Romanticism, dominated by fantastic and ethereal characters represented in the costume of white tarlatana or tulle: the famous tutu.
This is the so-called "white act" that appears on the scenes in the first half of the nineteenth century. Most of the nineteenth-century repertoire ballets contain at least one "white act", starting with Filippo Taglioni's La Sylphide (1832). The wretched woods and unreal creatures, or silphids wrapped in whitewashed whites, dominate throughout the second act; light footsteps, extraordinary aplombs, soft arms and the study of ports de bras - very important in romantic style - are decorative and expressive tools used as a means of making the characters of these ballets diaphanous and immaterial creatures. Giselle by Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot (1841) is another famous ballet with "white act", in this case dominated by Willi. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Swan Lake of Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov (1895), the famous ballet by Pátr Il'ič Čajkovskij, contains two "white acts" (the second and fourth ones) a strange lake where the girls turned into swans from the cruel Mage Rothbart.
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