pular entertainments of the day, such as the kind of pantomime being performed at La Comedie Francaise. So, for the first time, dancers were faced with the challenge of performing comedy. Though dancers hadn't been using pantomime for comic effect before, they had been performing it for years. In fact, pantomime is as much a part of ballet as dancing.
             But in the second half of the 19th century, the art of ballet seriously decayed in all countries across the world except for Russia and Denmark. Indeed, people forgot that it had ever been a great art, regarding it only as light entertainment. Male dancing almost disappeared and ballerinas were regarded as rather glamorous prostitutes and courtesans. In 1870, however, there was a remarkable (though very brief) recovery in Paris, brought about by the efforts of a group of gifted and intelligent people with minds of their own. This is how and when Coppelia was first created.
             The talented choreographer Arthur Saint-Leon was a close friend of Charles-Louis-Etienne Nuitter the originator of Coppelia. Arthur Saint –Leon was fascinated by the project of choreographing Coppelia and agreed to help shape it. Saint – Leon was renowned in France as a very talented choreographer and dancer although his successes in Paris were not matched in Russia. His new works were poorly received and he went so far as to challenge one critic to a duel. He thereafter put considerable energy into the completion of Coppélia, which was commissioned by the Paris Opéra in 1868. Before the ballet was finally presented, on May 25, 1870, years had gone by because of Saint-Léon's travels between Russia and Paris; but it can be argued that the protracted time allowed for the strengthening potentially weak spots in the work. Coppélia was an immediate success.
             Saint-Léon, however, had been suffering ill health since 1866, and he went to Weisbaden seeking a cure. He returned to Paris and died there, of a heart...