Ballet Trivia
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100 free Ballet trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 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 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In the Renaissance courts of which country did ballet begin before spreading to France?
Italy
Italy's Renaissance courts staged it at lavish noble weddings, danced by the courtiers themselves in court dress, long before tutus or pointe shoes existed.
Q 02Which queen of France is credited with importing court ballet from her homeland?
Catherine de' Medici
Catherine de' Medici's court staged the Ballet Comique de la Reine under her auspices in 1581; often called the first court ballet, it began a long French tradition.
Q 03Which French king founded the Académie Royale de Danse in 1661?
Louis XIV
Louis XIV founded the dance academy in March 1661, the very month he took personal control of France after his chief minister died; he had danced in court ballets himself as a teenager.
Q 04How many basic positions of the feet does classical ballet recognise?
Five
Five positions, each with the legs turned out from the hips, were codified in the late 1600s by dancing master Pierre Beauchamp, and ballet steps still start and finish in one of them.
Q 05Which composer wrote the music for Swan Lake?
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky did not live to see Swan Lake triumph: the first production was not a success, he died in 1893, and only the 1895 St Petersburg staging made it a classic.
Q 06In Swan Lake, what is the name of the princess turned into a swan by a sorcerer's curse?
Odette
Odette and Odile, the sorcerer's daughter who tricks the prince into betraying her, are usually danced by the same ballerina in one of ballet's great dual roles.
Q 07How many consecutive fouetté turns does the Black Swan famously perform in Act 3 of Swan Lake?
32
32 fouettés were Pierina Legnani's showpiece: she astonished St Petersburg with them in Cinderella in 1893, and the feat was then written into Swan Lake.
Q 08The Nutcracker is set on which night?
Christmas Eve
Christmas Eve at a family party opens the story. Its composer thought little of the score, writing that the ballet was 'infinitely worse' than his Sleeping Beauty.
Q 09Which instrument gives the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy its delicate, tinkling sound?
Celesta
Celesta: the composer came across the newly invented instrument in 1891 and at once asked his publisher to order one for the ballet.
Q 10Whose short story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King is the ultimate source of the ballet?
E. T. A. Hoffmann
E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1816 tale is darker than the ballet, which follows Alexandre Dumas's lighter retelling; along the way the heroine Marie became Clara.
Q 11Which West Coast company gave the first complete American performance of The Nutcracker, in 1944?
San Francisco Ballet
San Francisco Ballet's Willam Christensen staged it, then moved to Utah and founded Ballet West, which has kept his version in its repertoire.
Q 12Which Disney film set The Nutcracker's music to dancing fairies, fish and flowers?
Fantasia
Fantasia reached cinemas in 1940, when the complete ballet had never been staged in the United States: its first full American production came four years later.
Q 13In Giselle, the Wilis are the vengeful ghosts of whom?
Maidens jilted by their lovers
Q 21Which impresario founded the Ballets Russes, the company that ran from 1909 to 1929?
Sergei Diaghilev
Sergei Diaghilev recruited stars from Russia's imperial theatres, yet despite its name the company never once performed in Russia.
Q 22Whose score for The Rite of Spring caused a sensation at its 1913 premiere?
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky's score outlived its first staging: the original choreography vanished after a handful of performances, until the Joffrey Ballet rebuilt it in 1987.
Q 23Which dancer choreographed the 1913 Rite of Spring and 1912's L'après-midi d'un faune for the Ballets Russes?
Vaslav Nijinsky
Maidens jilted by their lovers, the Wilis dance men to death, but Giselle shields Albrecht until the hour their power fades.
Q 14Who composed the music for Giselle, first performed in 1841?
Adolphe Adam
Adolphe Adam, who also wrote the carol O Holy Night, worked at speed: Giselle reached the stage about two months after he began the score.
Q 15In The Sleeping Beauty, which fairy is the villain who curses Princess Aurora?
Carabosse
Carabosse curses baby Aurora over a snub: she was left off the christening guest list. A man, Enrico Cecchetti, first danced the role in 1890.
Q 16Which composer's 1935 Romeo and Juliet ballet was originally written with a happy ending for the lovers?
Sergei Prokofiev
Sergei Prokofiev first let the lovers live, then restored Shakespeare's ending; Soviet theatres shelved the ballet anyway, and it premiered abroad, in Brno, in 1938.
Q 17Coppélia, the 1870 comic ballet with music by Léo Delibes, centres on what?
A life-size dancing doll
A life-size dancing doll so lifelike that village boy Franz falls for it, until his sweetheart Swanilda cures him by dressing up as the doll herself.
Q 18Which French Impressionist is best known for his paintings and sculptures of ballet dancers?
Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas showed only one sculpture in his lifetime, the wax Little Dancer of 1881, which he dressed in a real cloth tutu and real hair.
Q 19Which part of her costume is 18th-century ballet star Marie Camargo credited with shortening?
The skirt
The skirt: Camargo is credited with raising her hem to calf length so audiences could see her fast footwork, and with swapping heeled shoes for slippers.
Q 20What is the stiffened front section of a pointe shoe that encases the toes called?
The box
The box ends in the small flat platform a dancer stands on, yet in a traditional shoe it is built up from layers of fabric and paper stiffened with glue.
Vaslav Nijinsky, famed for leaps that seemed to hang in the air, left the stage while still in his twenties after a breakdown that was diagnosed as schizophrenia.
Q 24Which fashion designer costumed the 1924 beach ballet Le Train Bleu?
Coco Chanel
Coco Chanel dressed the Ballets Russes cast in sportswear: the ballet shows swimmers and tennis players at play on the fashionable French Riviera.
Q 25The Dying Swan, the solo that made a Russian ballerina famous, is danced to music by whom?
Camille Saint-Saëns
Camille Saint-Saëns wrote it as The Swan, the one movement of his jokey Carnival of the Animals that he allowed to be published in his lifetime.
Q 26A meringue-based dessert popular in Australia and New Zealand is named after which ballerina?
Anna Pavlova
Anna Pavlova toured Australia and New Zealand in the 1920s, and the two countries have argued ever since over which of them first made the dessert in her honour.
Q 27Rudolf Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union in 1961 at an airport in which city?
Paris
Paris's Le Bourget airport was the scene: told to fly home to Moscow instead of on to London, he slipped his Soviet minders and asked the French for asylum.
Q 28Where was Rudolf Nureyev born during his mother's long journey?
On a Trans-Siberian train
On a Trans-Siberian train near Lake Baikal: his mother was travelling to Vladivostok, where his father, a Red Army political commissar, was posted.
Q 29What French term names a complete spin of the body on one foot, a staple of ballet?
Pirouette
Pirouette: to keep from getting dizzy, dancers 'spot', fixing their eyes on one point and whipping the head round last.
Q 30Which British ballerina, Nureyev's partner, was named prima ballerina assoluta of the Royal Ballet?
Margot Fonteyn
Margot Fonteyn was 42 to his 23 when they first danced Giselle together in 1962, and the ovation that night launched their celebrated partnership.