The earliest precursors to ballets were lavish entertainments given in the courts of Renaissance Italy. The dancers based their performance on the social dances of the day. The Italian court ballets were further developed in France. The first ballet for which a complete score survived, was performed in Paris in 1581. In 1661 Louis XIV established the Acad‚mie Royale de Danse, a professional organization for dancing masters. The first female dancers to perform professionally in a theater production appeared in a ballet called Le Triomphe de l'Amour (The Triumph of Love). Eighteenth-century dancers were encumbered by masks, wigs or large headdresses, and heeled shoes. In the 1920s and 1930s, modern dance began to be developed in the United States and Germany. In the 1930s Massine invented the symphonic ballet, which aimed to express the musical content of symphonies by the German composers Ludwig Van Beethoven and Johannes Brahms. Balanchine also began to create plotless ballets in which the primary motivation was movement to music. Two great American ballet companies were founded in New York City in the 1940s, American Ballet Theatre and the New York City Ballet.
