The echo of Gustave Ricaux’ voice reaches us from an age in which he was the principal player, and one where the dancer was not seen as a sum of bodily parts to be arranged as seductively as possible. His teaching, incarnated in the great artists he trained, brought beauty into the world through study of the laws that lend the action of classical dancing its implacable adequacy to the task.

Although extremely retiring as a personality, it would not be stretching a point to compare Ricaux to Enrico Cecchetti, for he achieved a strategic purpose: to restore male dancing to the splendour of which the Romantics had robbed it, and by banishing all futile gesture, rescue the vocabulary in all its facets, from what had become a morass of clichés.

K. L. Kanter