Tutu? Check. Pretty girl? Check. Tchaikovsky? BIG CHECK.note
Think tutus, pretty girls, and Tchaikovsky.
An index of ballets and works focused on ballet. To qualify, the work must either be a ballet or a ballet adaptation of an existing work, or have a primary focus on ballet and/or ballet dancers.
For more information on the art itself, see the Useful Notes page.
See also: Theatre, Operanote , and Ballet Episode. Related tropes like Dainty Little Ballet Dancers, Straight to the Pointe, and Tutu Fancy all have varying levels of Truth in Television. Creepy Ballet is when ballet is Played for Horror or Drama.
Notable ballets:
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
- Anna Karenina
- La Bayadere
- Carmen
- Checkmate
- Cinderella
- Coppélia
- Don Quixote
- Fall River Legend
- La Fille Mal Gardée
- The Firebird
- Giselle
- Like Water for Chocolate
- Manon
- A Midsummer Night's Dream
- The Nutcracker
- Raymonda
- The Rite of Spring
- Romeo and Juliet
- Shurale
- The Sleeping Beauty
- The Steadfast Tin Soldier
- Swan Lake
- La Sylphide
- The Winter's Tale
Works with major involvement of ballet:
- Les Ballets Trockadero De Monte Carlo, a comedy ballet troupe which is comprised of professional ballet dancers (many of whom had danced with companies before joining) which spoofs the art... in drag. Notable for having men performing female roles en pointe — and doing so quite well — and for being very, very funny.
- Angelina Ballerina: A book series about a ballet-loving mouse (later adapted into two animated shows, Angelina Ballerina and Angelina Ballerina: The Next Steps).
- Isabelle Palmer, the 2014 Girl of the Year for American Girl, heavily focuses on ballet and attends a special dance school along with her older sister Jade. Many of her outfits were ballet themed.
- The Bad News Ballet series by Pen Name Jahnna N. Malcolm focuses on five girls who are beginner ballet dancers—each of which has a different reason for not wanting to be in their lessons initially at all.
- Ballerina: (aka: Leap!) an animated movie about a French girl who runs away from her orphanage (with the help of her best friend) to fulfil her dream of joining a prestigious Parisian ballet school and win the part of Klara in the Paris debut of The Nutcracker.
- Ballet Shoes: A book about three adopted girls living in 1930's England. Together they are being trained in dance, with varying degrees of success. The youngest sister Posey is the daughter of a ballerina, who gave her up to focus on her career. She's the one of the sisters that have the most success.
- Base Instruments
, part three of the Mrs. Hawking play series, involves the murder of a ballerina with the Mariinsky Ballet in 1883, and a fellow dancer who is seeking justice for her. The main character, the steampunk superhero Victoria Hawking, also has a background in ballet.
- Billy Elliot: A young boy rebels against the prejudices of his working class friends and family to pursue his love of ballet. Set during the mining strikes of Thatcher's Britain.
- Black Swan: The intense stress of life in a ballet company drives one dancer to paranoia and madness.
- Brain Donors: The plot revolves around shyster Roland Flakfizer's management of the Oglethorpe Ballet Company and its star-crossed leads. As a remake of A Night at the Opera, Rule of Funny is the key motivation here.
- Bunheads: A ballet dancer-turned-showgirl clashes with her mother-in-law, a dance mistress who runs a ballet school in her home.
- Center Stage (2000): Teen dancers at a competitive ballet school train for places in a well-known company.
- The Cherry Project: About a figure skater training in ballet.
- Company (Ibuki Yuki): A novel about a salaryman who is transferred to Shikishima Ballet Company as a producer. The novel was also adapted into a musical by Takarazuka Revue.
- Dance Academy: A teen drama series set at the fictional National Academy of Dancenote in Sydney, Australia.
- Dance Class: Ballet is usually the main focus of the comic, though it does explore other dance styles as well such as street dancing, African folk dance, Tectonic dancing to name a few.
- Dance Dance Danseur is about a male high schooler who rediscovers his passion for ballet after giving it up to pursue another activity because ballet isn't considered manly and the challenges he faces in order to be freed from the shackles of masculinity.
- Fantasia: Three of the segments are based on famous ballet scores - The Nutcracker Suite, featuring dancing fairies, flowers and, most famously, mushrooms; The Rite of Spring, which depicts the evolution of life on Earth in a realistic fashion, with no dancing whatsoever; and Dance of the Hours, starring a dancing troupe consisting of ostriches, hippos, elephants and crocodiles.
- Find Me In Paris is a teen time travel show set at the Paris Opera Ballet School.
- Flesh and Bone: A young dancer escapes an abusive home-life to join a prestigious ballet company in New York.
- Flowers in the Attic and its sequels, particularly Petals On the Wind: Narrator Cathy trains in ballet from a very young age, eventually joining a ballet troupe and marrying the male lead. She and her husband are both well known in the art, and their son grows up to become a famous ballet dancer in his own right.
- Girl (2018): A Belgian-Dutch film about a transgender girl attending a ballet school.
- La Magnifique Grande Scène: A shounen manga by Cuvie that follows a young girl who, after being enamored by her neighbor's performance, begins to find joy and beauty in ballet as she strives to become a professional dancer. Notable for its grounded, realistic take on the path to becoming a pro.
- McQueen: The mannequins and twins provide ballet during every change, in some fantasy sequences, and in as many scenes as Dahlia. Dahlia even joins in at one point.
- Mrs. Hawking: The titular lead is a Victorian-era detective and superhero whose physical skills were in part developed by early training in ballet. Dance also represents something of a “road not taken” to the otherwise fairly monomaniacal hero.
- Pas de deux: Short film of two ballet dancers, with optical printing and other special effects and enhancements to alter the image.
- In the musical version of The Phantom of the Opera, Christine is a member of the Paris Opera's corps de ballet (though the bulk of the pointework is done by Meg Giry and the rest of the corps, as Christines are cast primarily for their voices).
- Princess Tutu: Combines ballet with a Magical Girl and a Fairy Tale Free-for-All story.
- The Red Shoes (1948): Romance and ambition collide, tragedy ensues. Based loosely on the Hans Christian Andersen tale of the same name.
- Romance novelist Nora Roberts wrote a trilogy of romance novellas centred around ballet dancers:
- Reflections is about Lindsay, a former prima ballerina with a major company who, after her retirement and opening her own ballet school, finds herself teaching a talented young dancer, Ruth, and falling in love with Ruth's uncle and guardian, Seth.
- Dance of Dreams follows Ruth from Reflections, who, now grown up and a principal dancer with the same company her now-stepmother Lindsay had danced with, has to reckon with her long-buried feelings for her demanding dance partner and choreographer, Nikolai.
- Considering Kate centers on the titular Kate, a former principal dancer with the same company as Lindsay, Ruth, and Nikolai, who has retired and is opening her own school; she finds herself falling in love with single father Brody, the contractor remodeling the unfinished building for her new school.
- Subaru: A manga with ballet as its main performed type of dance and story following the titular character's drive to become a professional ballet dancer.
- The six book Sugar Plum Ballerinas series focuses specifically on young black ballerinas at the Nutcracker School of Ballet in Harlem.
- Swan: A Shōjo about a young ballet student striving To Be a Master.
- Sweet Valley Twins has, among its other plots, a running plot of Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield taking ballet lessons regularly.
- Tiny Pretty Things: A television series about a fictional Chicago ballet school.
- The Turning Point (1977): Aging ballerina and her retired friend rehash old professional rivalry. Mikhail Baryshnikov's film debut. Received eleven Academy Award nominations, all of which it lost.
- Reserved for the Cat: Based on the story Puss in Boots. The main character is a French ballerina, who on the advice of her telepathic cat, masquerades as a famous Russian ballerina who is the sole surivor of a shipwreck and signs on to be the star of a music hall in Blackpool, England.
- White Nights: This 1985 film is about a great Russian male ballet dancer who defects from USSR and is recaptured by Soviets. Fortunately it stars a great ballet dancer, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and features great dancing.
