Jean-Baptiste Landé

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Jean-Baptiste Landé (18th century) was a French dancer. He is the founder of the Russian Ballet.

Landé was employed at the Polish royal court when he was engaged by king Frederick I of Sweden in 1721. He was appointed dancing master of the Swedish court, and in 1723 he became the director of the French Opera-Theatre in Bollhuset in Stockholm, which he named L'Académie royale de musique et de danse. In 1726, he was a guest ballet master at the first theatre in Denmark, the Lille Grönnegade theatre (1722-1728), where performed with his wife. He left Sweden in 1728, after a conflict with Charles Langlois (actor), who intruded on his theatre privilige by arranging his own plays at Bollhuset. He went to Denmark, where the theatre was closed in 1728, and tried to start his own theatre, but theatre became banned in Denmark in 1730-1746.

In Russia, he was made dance master at the military academy. After a ballet performance for Empress Anna in 1735, the Russian Ballet School was established in 1738 with Landé as it's ballet master. He educated the first dancers in Russia, which where taken from the staff at the royal palace: Timofei Bublikov, Nikolai Choglokov, Afanasy Toporkov, Ivan Shatilov, Nikolai Tolubeyev, Sergei Chalyshkin, Andrei Samarin and Andrei Nesterov, and among the females Yelizaveta, Avdotia Timofeyeva and Axiniaya Sergeyeva.