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60 free Ballet trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
51 free Ballet trivia questions with answers. Ballet has a 500-year history, its own French vocabulary and a roster of legends from Marie Taglioni to Misty Copeland, and this quiz covers all of it. You will meet Tchaikovsky's three great ballets, the Wilis of Giselle, the Sun King who founded the first dance academy, the Ballets Russes and the near-riot at The Rite of Spring, and the defections of Nureyev and Baryshnikov that made Cold War headlines. The early questions suit anyone who has been to a Nutcracker; the later ones are for people who know their pas de deux from their port de bras and who first landed 32 fouettés. There are questions on pointe shoes and tutus, on companies from the Bolshoi to American Ballet Theatre, and on ballet in film, from The Red Shoes to Billy Elliot and Black Swan. Every answer has been checked against a published source and carries a link, so you can settle any backstage argument on the spot. Good for dance students, company trivia nights, or anyone who has ever tried a plié at the kitchen counter.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Ballet originated in the courts of which country's Renaissance before spreading to France?
Italy
The word itself comes from the Italian balletto, a diminutive of ballo, 'dance'; it entered English from French around 1630.
Q 02Which queen is credited with bringing court ballet from Italy to France?
Catherine de' Medici
The dancers in these early court ballets were mostly noble amateurs weighed down by ornate costumes.
Q 03Which French king founded the Académie Royale de Danse in 1661?
Louis XIV
He was an enthusiastic dancer himself; his ballet master Pierre Beauchamp is credited with codifying the five positions of the feet.
Q 04How many basic positions of the feet does classical ballet recognise?
Five
Lully and his ballet-master Beauchamp get the credit for fixing them at the Paris Opera in the 1670s.
Q 05Which composer wrote the music for Swan Lake?
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
He wrote it in 1875-76; the 1877 Bolshoi premiere flopped and it took the 1895 Petipa-Ivanov revival to make it a classic.
Q 06In Swan Lake, what is the name of the princess turned into a swan by a sorcerer's curse?
Odette
The same ballerina now usually dances both her and the sorcerer's daughter Odile, though the original 1877 production may have used two dancers.
Q 07How many consecutive fouetté turns does the Black Swan famously perform in Act 3 of Swan Lake?
32
Italian ballerina Pierina Legnani first pulled off the feat in public in 1893, in a ballet called Cinderella, before it was written into Swan Lake.
Q 08The Nutcracker is set on which night?
Christmas Eve
American companies now earn roughly 40 percent of their annual ticket revenue from it, though it flopped next to its own suite in 1892.
Q 09Which bell-like keyboard instrument gives the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy its distinctive sound?
Celesta
Tchaikovsky had already tried the instrument out in his little-known 1891 symphonic ballad The Voyevoda.
Q 10Whose short story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King is the ultimate source of the ballet?
E. T. A. Hoffmann
The ballet actually adapts Alexandre Dumas's 1844 retelling; in the original story the heroine is Marie and Clara is her doll's name.
Q 11Which American company gave the first complete US performance of The Nutcracker, on 24 December 1944?
San Francisco Ballet
Willam Christensen staged it; his brother's company Ballet West in Salt Lake City has performed the original version every year since 1963.
Q 12In what year did New York City Ballet first perform Balanchine's The Nutcracker?
1954
Maria Tallchief's Sugar Plum Fairy was singled out for turning the piece from an obscurity into the industry's most reliable box-office draw.
Q 13In Giselle, the Wilis are the vengeful ghosts of whom?
Maidens jilted by their lovers
Q 21Which impresario founded the Ballets Russes, the Paris-based company that ran from 1909 to 1929?
Sergei Diaghilev
Despite the name, the company never once performed in Russia; he died in Venice in 1929 leaving it deep in debt.
Q 22Whose score for The Rite of Spring caused a sensation at its 1913 Paris premiere?
Igor Stravinsky
Nijinsky's original choreography saw only eight performances and was thought lost until the Joffrey Ballet reconstructed it in the 1980s.
Q 23Which dancer choreographed the 1913 Rite of Spring and 1912's L'après-midi d'un faune for the Ballets Russes?
Vaslav Nijinsky
They dance men to death by exhaustion; Giselle's love for Albrecht saves him and frees her from joining them.
Q 14Who composed the music for Giselle, first performed in Paris in 1841?
Adolphe Adam
He is also the composer of the Christmas carol 'O Holy Night'; Carlotta Grisi created the title role.
Q 15In The Sleeping Beauty, which fairy is the villain who curses Princess Aurora?
Carabosse
Good and evil each get a leitmotif that runs through the whole score, and the villain is often danced as a virtuoso role by a man.
Q 16Which composer's Romeo and Juliet ballet originally had a happy ending that Soviet officials objected to?
Sergei Prokofiev
Composed in 1935, it was not staged in the Soviet Union until 1940, partly because of the Pravda campaign against 'degenerate modernists'.
Q 17Coppélia, the 1870 comic ballet with music by Léo Delibes, centres on what?
A life-size dancing doll
Village boy Franz falls for Dr Coppélius's creation, and his sweetheart Swanilda saves him by impersonating it.
Q 18Which Italian-born ballerina is credited as the first to truly dance en pointe, in La Sylphide in 1832?
Marie Taglioni
Her shoes were little more than darned satin slippers; the gauzy white skirt she wore became the Romantic tutu.
Q 19Which 1730s French dancer was the first to perform in a heel-less shoe, freeing her to jump?
Marie Camargo
Heels disappeared from ballet shoes entirely after the French Revolution.
Q 20What is the stiffened front section of a pointe shoe that encases the toes called?
The box
One famous prima ballerina, who had very arched feet, hardened hers with leather and then had photographs retouched so nobody could tell.
He was also Diaghilev's lover for a time; his career ended early with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
Q 24Which fashion designer created costumes for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes?
Coco Chanel
Picasso and Matisse designed for the company too, and its avant-garde look fed directly into Art Deco.
Q 25The Dying Swan, the solo that made a Russian ballerina famous, is danced to music by whom?
Camille Saint-Saëns
Michel Fokine choreographed it in 1905 to Le cygne from The Carnival of the Animals; the dancer later fed pet swans on the lake at her London home.
Q 26A meringue-based dessert popular in Australia and New Zealand is named after which ballerina?
Anna Pavlova
She was the first ballerina to tour the world with her own company, reaching South America, India, Mexico and Australia.
Q 27Rudolf Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union in 1961 at an airport in which city?
Paris
He was told at Le Bourget that he must fly back to Moscow instead of on to London with the Kirov; it was the first Cold War defection by a Soviet artist.
Q 28Nureyev was born in an unusual place. Where?
On a Trans-Siberian train
His mother was travelling to Vladivostok, where his father, a Red Army political commissar, was stationed.
Q 29Which company did Nureyev direct from 1983 to 1989?
Paris Opera Ballet
He died in 1993 at 54 from AIDS complications; his diagnosis was not made public until after his death.
Q 30Which British ballerina, Nureyev's partner, was named prima ballerina assoluta of the Royal Ballet?
Margot Fonteyn
She was considering retirement when Nureyev defected in 1961; the partnership that followed premiered Ashton's Marguerite and Armand.