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Copyright of Journal of Modern Russian History & Historiography is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The author offers insights on the link between George Balanchine's 1935 ballet "Serenade" and Mikhail Fokine's 1915 ballet "Eros." Topics discussed include the use of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's 1880 composition "Serenade for Strings" in both works, the contributions of Fokine for the Mariinsky Theatre in Russia prior to "Eros," and the possible knowledge of Balanchine about "Eros" during his training at the Imperial Theater School in Russia.

Throughout the eighteenth century, scandalous literature perpetuated a strongly male-gendered image of dance spectatorship through its preoccupation with the moral and sexual status of female ballet dancers. The frequency with which authors of scandal sheets, novels, satire and political criticism alluded to liaisons involving elite men and dancers was, in part, a reflection of the period's broader fascination with the status of women on the stage. However, this active preoccupation with the sexuality of dancers was also allied to an interrogation of aristocratic and moral codes in Britain and France, and was used to instantiate a performative ideal of elite masculinity. This article focuses on the recurring figure of the opera girl, whose pursuit by aristocratic libertines aroused the contempt, curiosity and envy of readers. Incorporating a critique of extant dance criticism, the article explores the interpretative dilemmas that the opera girl's sensational sexuality has traditionally posed for dance scholarship on account of the tendency for the opera girl's attributes to be mapped onto representations of real-life dancers. Sampling sources as diverse as fashionable periodicals, works of history, sentimental novels and prostitute narratives, this article introduces the singular typology and rhetorical functions of the opera girl that distinguish her as a literary type. In the process, a more nuanced reading of opera girls is offered, one that stresses how opera girls refract the debates and anxieties of the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1965, the French choreographer Roland Petit set himself the task of making a ballet out of Victor Hugo's voluminous novel Notre-Dame de Paris. The result departed radically from earlier attempts to transpose the work into movement by choreographers who included Jules Perrot and Marius Petipa. Although the love plot (which revolves around a dancer), the wide range of emotions depicted, the stark contrasts, and alternation between crowd scenes and more intimate scenes favour its transposition into a ballet, the novel also presents numerous difficulties, such as the importance of politics, philosophy and architecture. Quasimodo, Frollo and the cathedral seem rather unsuitable protagonists for a ballet. This paper argues that Petit's adaptation of Notre-Dame de Paris engaged with the literary source on a much deeper level than its predecessors. Petit's innovative ballet does not merely illustrate the novel: it reveals underlying elements in the source and sheds new light on it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Susan Sontag includes Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake (1875–6) in a list that illustrates “random examples” from “the canon of Camp.” Though the ballet has become an integral part of the classical repertory for professional companies from Moscow to New York to Sydney as well as the inspiration for numerous figure skaters (most notoriously in Johnny Weir's outré and rhinestone-bedecked interpretation in 2006), it has, as suggested by Sontag, been creative afflatus for gay underground performers for more than a century. But what are the origins of the swan gone queer? As this article demonstrates, I suggest that one way to trace both the swan's queer genealogy and its continuity lies in the dramatic history and lived performance of the ill-fated Ludwig II (hereafter “Ludwig”) of Bavaria (1845–86)—the Swan King (Fig. 1). Tchaikovsky, after all, had been inspired by the dramatic story of the effete young king (and perhaps titillated by a shared closeted gay desire), who would become a prototype for the ballet's tragic hero, Prince Siegfried. In fact, dance scholar Peter Stoneley suggests that “Swan Lake confirms the virtual impossibility, in Tchaikovsky's [and Ludwig's] era, of accommodating homosexuality within wider society.” Ludwig's desire was expressed through a lens of his same-sex fantasies and their inspired artistic interpretations, most notably taking form in the construction of his neo-Romanesque, fairy-tale castle Neue Burg Hohenschwangau (more commonly known as Neuschwanstein or New Swan on the Rock Castle, though it was not renamed until after Ludwig's death). Ludwig's queer positionality also arises from the theatrical way that he performed a highly aesthetic (though hardly effective) approach to monarchy with his swan-bedecked castle and its environs as a sort of metastage set. In this context, the swan may be read as an example of what Donna Haraway calls “a companion species,” or a personal animal symbol (real or mythical) that represents a variety of feelings that are otherwise difficult to express in the hegemonic context of a given time and place (like homosexuality in Roman Catholic Bavaria in the nineteenth century). Ludwig chose the swan (drawn from family heraldry but primarily envisioned in his own life through storybook-driven fantasy) as a means of alternative expression to that normally available to a man in his position and with his responsibilities, and also as a way to enact his forbidden desires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The French sarabande is typically characterized as one of the most serious and noble baroque dances in the instrumental suite. New research synthesizing eyewitness accounts, literary sources, and musical analysis reveals the sarabande's rich history as a theatrical dance regularly performed by female dancers in French court ballets. The groups of girls and solo young women who danced it between 1651 and 1669 invite us to reshape our narrative of the sarabande in France. Both literary references and the theatrical context reveal how the sarabande resonated with layers of culturally inscribed meanings at a time when danced and non-danced sarabandes coexisted side by side. The same individuals moved easily between dancing, watching danced sarabandes in ballets, and playing sarabandes on the keyboard or lute. Spectators and listeners likewise encountered and interpreted sarabandes in multiple settings; knowledge gained through dancing or accompanying dancing did not simply disappear from one performance context to the next. While such embodied knowledge is no longer common cultural currency, examining the historically embodied presence of the sarabande and its ties to female dancers permits a better understanding of its cultural resonances and its appeal in the seventeenth century and opens up a wider range of interpretations of this multi-faceted, multivalent dance type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“From Making Culture to Making Cultural History” is an account of how the author came to write about Canada's cultural history. She reflects on how practising ballet and music, being exposed to European cultural activity for more than two years, and studying European and Russian history came to provide the foundation for writing about and lecturing on Canada's culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Originating in the Italian and French courts, ballet is an age-old art that fuses aesthetics and athleticism (Wulff, 2008). Despite changing times, ballet masters and mistresses tenaciously hold on to a sense of deep traditionalism. However, some scholars suggest that unwavering devotion to the art may conceal troubled embodied relations and oppressive practices (Gvion, 2008). In this study, we drew on the phenomenological research tradition in an effort to further examine the power relations that play out on the body in the world of Canadian professional ballet (Papaefstathiou, Rhind, & Brakenridge, 2013). Twenty past professional female ballet dancers from across Canada participated in this study. Our dedicated dancers were relentless. They sacrificed body and mind in the pursuit of excellence in a broader cultural context that expected nothing less. The dancers normalized harmful emotional experiences, inappropriate sexual transgressions, and chronic injury (Gvion, 2008). They also described experiences of neglect—and feeling replaceable—after the onset of injury. We have attempted to theorize our findings within the context of embodiment literature and the work of gender theorists. Emboldened by our dancers’ voices, we have shed light—and broken secrets—regarding some of the harmful practices that still characterize professional ballet in Canada. We hope that our work might further continue efforts to democratize power imbalances in professional ballet and ultimately enhance holistic dancer development and health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the politics of dance collaborations between Cubans and Mexicans from 1959 to 1983. During this period, Mexican modern dancers worked in Cuba, and Cuban ballet dancers in Mexico. Over years of close, visceral encounters, Mexican and Cuban dancers built cultural institutions and international relationships filled with emotional ups and downs. Focusing on the sentiments that guided dancing revolutionaries, this article examines the everyday process of international relations as creative diplomats from Cuba and Mexico coordinated movements in classes, rehearsals, and performances. This article contends that in contrast to the friendly but distant bilateral relations forged by elite politicians in a tense Cold War context, dancers made the Cuban-Mexican relationship an intimate, creative partnership among revolutionary citizens. This demonstrates how the personal and interpersonal, in dialogue with geopolitics and ideology, shaped the cultural Cold War in Latin America and how it changed over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Court ballet after the Fronde has been understood as a technique for subjugating nobles, literally and metaphorically keeping them dancing in the monarch's orbit. This essay reconsiders ballet's role in fabricating aristocratic identities under Louis XIV through a reading of the performances of two celebrated English dancers (the Dukes of York and Buckingham) in theBallet royal de la nuit(1653). These performers' status as outsiders and as court celebrities with well-known personalities highlights the dancers’ influence over the roles they incarnated on the ballet stage. The body types and especially the self-fashioned social personas of performers were the raw material to which court artists added costume, choreography, and poetic text to create ballet characters. Dancers therefore acted as implicit collaborators in creating their onstage personas. Drawing upon Performance Studies' re-interrogation of the dynamics of subjection and agency in embodied practices, the analysis of the English dancers' unique case allows us to speculate about the degree of autonomy afforded to all noble performers and, more broadly, to consider how ballet expresses the mutual interdependence of sovereigns and nobles in court society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With a few notable exceptions, the literature in ballet history generally discusses Enrico Cecchetti solely as a ballet teacher, ignoring his contributions as a performer, and even as a ballet master, to ballet history. During his affiliation with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes from 1911 until 1928, Cecchetti played a significant role, as a performer and a teacher, in the development of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes along three trajectories: as a virtuosic dancer who raised the standard for male dancing, as an exceptional mime artist who inspired choreographers and dancers alike, and as a ballet master who created a solidcorps de balletfrom a group of dancers with diverse training and backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The evolution of classical ballet from its accepted origins as one method of displaying status and aristocratic power in Renaissance Italy to its Romantic form, featuring professional ballerinas in white costumes dancingen pointe, took place largely during the long eighteenth century. This article discusses this transformation from the dual perspectives of choreography and costume by using the premise that these two vital elements in the presentation of ballet were co-dependent, each prompting the other to develop and evolve. Concentrating on Paris and London, it examines the relationship between court dress, fashion and theatre costume, and how this affected both the choreography and the style of dance throughout the long eighteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cuadernos de Historia Moderna is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article offers an analysis of the contribution of dance to the success of French opera in the eighteenth century. It explores its development as it responded to the needs of music and song; its capacity to blend with evolving opera forms fitting in and commenting upon the décor itself; and draws out the inventiveness of successive generations of performers and choreographers who ensured that the works of Lully, Campra and Rameau continued to respond to changing public taste. From this analysis, dance emerges as the barometer by which we can measure the superiority of French over Italian opera, as it paved the way for the creation of ballet d'action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Up to the end of the nineteenth century, the history of ballet and the history of opera were closely entwined in a war for supremacy, with opera often in the dominant role; this was particularly the case during the second half of the nineteenth century, when ballet was widely perceived as being in decline. Some historical background is necessary to provide a brief outline of the long process that led to this outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the ballet dancer's pointe shoe as a technology of artistic production and bodily discipline. Drawing on oral histories, memoirs, dance journals, advertisements, and other archival materials, it demonstrates that the shoe utilized by dancers at George Balanchine's New York City Ballet was not the quintessentially Romantic entity it is so often presumed to be. Instead, it emerged from uniquely twentieth-century systems of labor and production, and it was used to alter dancers' bodies and professional lives in particularly modern ways. The article explores not only the substance of these changes but also the ways in which Balanchine's artistic oeuvre was inextricably intertwined with the material technologies he employed and, more broadly, how the history of technology and the history of dance can productively inform one another. Fundamentally, this article recasts Balanchine, seeing him not as a disconnected artist but as an eager participant in the twentieth-century national romance with American technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of the term chiaroscuro by choreographers and commentators on the ballet d'action was part of a deliberate strategy, in the context of controversy surrounding this innovative art. De Piles's emphasis on the use of colour rather than the geometry of line is analogous to Noverre and Angiolini's emphasis on body language in mime dance rather than formal step vocabulary. The rationale for using such terminology was to show that the ballet d'action was a hybrid genre and to redefine the nature of contemporary drama, just as the coloristes had sought to redefine the nature of painting a few decades earlier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that a group of young African Americans in the 1940s and 1950s used ballet as a means of crossing racial and class barriers of an art form in which few blacks had until then participated. Founded in 1946 by white choreographer Joseph Rickard (1918--1994), the First Negro Classic Ballet was one of the first African American ballet companies in the country's history and the first black ballet company known to last over a decade. With the goal of multiethnic cooperation in the arts, the company created a series of original "dance-dramas," several with musical scores by resident composer Claudius Wilson, to perform for white and black audiences in venues throughout Southern and Northern California during the postwar era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kaguyahime is one of Kylián's rare narrative ballets. This paper deals with the way in which Kylián reduces the narrative content of the literary tale on which the ballet is based to an abstract form, to adapt the ballet to his narrative–abstract style of choreography. The focus of the discussion is on his method of space composition: first, his practice of arranging and moving dancers around the stage; second, his design of the space, which takes into account the areas beyond the stage. The paper analyses each scene of Kaguyahime and seeks to show that the space is structured on the basis of perpendicular lines across the width and depth of the stage. The contrasting heavenly and earthly worlds which constitute the axes of the original story correspond to the axes of space – this being a device of Kylián's to formulate the narrative by using the space. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

“My Bicycle Girl” was a ballet for cyclists choreographed by Catherine Littlefield and performed as part of theAmerican Jubileespectacle at the New York World's Fair of 1940. In the context of the Fair, on the eve of World War II, the ballet was an experimental manifestation of the contradictory desires for novelty and nostalgia in mass culture and performing arts. The ballet illuminates the historical relationships between dance, technology, and militarism in mid-century American modernism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research in Moscow, New York, Paris, and Stockholm uncovers the compositional and early performance histories of Debussy's ballet pantomime for children, The Toy Box. Surprisingly, the first large-scale production took place in Moscow, not Paris, and Henri Forterre--in advance of André Caplet--completed the orchestration after Debussy's death. Theater directors and choreographers variously interpret Debussy's distinctive approach to creating music for children as having been influenced by the designs of his scenarist, André Hellé. Although newly uncovered source materials might permit a reconstruction of The Toy Box, to do so would be to violate the spirit of the ballet, which embraces the imagined over the real and, paradoxically, the permanence of the ephemeral. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines French choreographer Roland Petit's ballet adaptation of À la recherche du temps perdu as an example of the little-researched interartistic relations between literature and dance. Drawing on translation theory and recent dance scholarship, it argues that Petit's ‘lecture dancée’, Proust ou les intermittences du cœur, offers a bold critical reading of the source text that challenges conservative public perceptions of Proust through its foregrounding of the darker side of human passions in the text and its focus on homosexuality as a major theme. By lifting the novel out of its traditional medium, the ballet brings to the fore aspects of the work that criticism tends to overlook: Proust's interest in the body in motion, the gestural and choreographic qualities of his writing, the marked theatricality of some of the text's most prominent scenes. Not bound by the strictures of faithfulness, Petit signs a performance that extracts Proustian ‘essences’ in the interstices between text and performance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Visualizing his interaction with music's history in Expositions and Developments, Stravinsky enigmatically describes his early neoclassical work Pulcinella as a "look in the mirror." This spatial account of Pulcinella's stylistic imitation reflects the crucial visual contribution of Stravinsky's collaborators Pablo Picasso and Léonide Massine. The ballet's humorous and playful collaboration among the arts insists on a thoroughly performative neoclassicism; Pulcinella takes neoclassicism's conceptual negotiation with time and grounds it in the immediate physical spaces of its music, choreography, and set design. Whereas neoclassicism is often theorized as an overt antagonism between present and past, Pulcinella's visual aesthetic recasts its historicism as a lighthearted dialogue among the various arts. Written in the same decade as Stravinsky's ballet, Mikhail Bakhtin's Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity draws a compelling image of the visual symbiosis between author and work. This appealingly cooperative model, I argue, offers a new philosophical aesthetic for Pulcinella's interdisciplinary historicism. I take Bakhtin's concept of authorship as the basis for an appreciation of Pulcinella's project to reinstate history as an equal, positive collaborator in its neoclassical interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores Italian images of America during the Risorgimento and the time of Italy's unification. At the centre of this investigation are two remarkably painful theatrical representations of life in the New World: Verdi's 1859 opera Un ballo in maschera, set in seventeenth-century Boston; and Rota's 1852 ballet Bianchi e neri, based on Harriet Beecher Stowe's epic novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. Often performed together during the same evening, both works presented Italians with an extremely disturbing image of America, a negation of Italy's own cultural values. The article reads these theatrical representations of America within a wider context of Italian debates on the United States. Italians did not always look at life in America as a political, social or constitutional model; and if in the eyes of many Italians the United States became an epitome of modernity later in the nineteenth century, they did not necessarily identify with the particular model of modernity America stood for. The article argues that historians have tended to overlook some of the complexities of Italy's image of America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay discusses the use of female soloists in the court performances of ballets in the early seventeenth century, focusing particularly on the entertainments created for, and sometimes performed by, Marie de Medici, queen consort to Henri IV of France. It focuses particularly on the unnamed ballet de la reine created for Carnival 1605. Topics considered include royal patronage of music and the arts, the use of vocals in ballets, and 1604-1605 court visit of Italian composer Giulio Caccini with his family.

An essay is presented on the revitalization of ballet in France in the early twentieth century. The author starts the essay by presenting a historical overview of the attitudes toward ballet dancers and the image of ballet in France. The new reputation of women professionals in ballet and the change in the cultural perception of ballet in the early twentieth century as well as the impact of Russian ballet professionals on the French ballet stage are discussed.

The article discusses the depictions of relations between North America and South America in the ballet "Horsepower" (Caballos de vapor), or "H.P.," by Mexican composer Carlos Chávez, and describes the reception of the ballet by critics such as artist Frida Kahlo, wife of the ballet's costume designer Diego Rivera. Choreographer Catherine Littlefield, the ballet's music, and director Leopold Stokowski are also mentioned.

The first half of the twentieth century saw vast changes in American ballet, most of which were reflected at the Metropolitan Opera. The major transformation in the history of the Met Opera Ballet came in 1909 with the opening of its own school, which closed its doors only in 1968. The teaching was primarily in the Italian style and it created dancers of merit who performed at the Met and beyond. The Met Opera Ballet produced occasional stand-alone evenings of ballet, although most of its work was within the context of operas. Rosina Galli, trained at Milan's La Scala, served as both teacher and ballerina at the Met, supported by other fine artists, such as Giuseppe Bonfiglio and Pauline Verhoeven. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses ballet choreography, and argues that more attention to the classical ballet tradition would yield better dances than continued modern experimentation. The author's dislike for contemporary European choreography, pedagogical ballet, and revivals is discussed, and the assertion that more standards for choreography are needed is offered.

Wives’ coquetry abounds in the musical comedy of Falla and the poetry and theatre of Lorca, with such flirtatiousness always displaying female fantasy. In this comparative study between literature and music, it requires little imagination in the lewd ballad, ‘El molinero de Arcos’, for the deceived wife to conceive the double adultery as comedy. Comic theatricality dominates Alarcón's novella El sombrero de tres picos, avoiding its source's lewdness and satirizing authoritarianism. In Alarcón, Frasquita's grace and musicality inspire Falla's pantomime El Corregidor y la Molinera and its revised version, the ballet El sombrero de tres picos. Both compositions translate into music Alarcón's love triangle between the manly miller, the supple but heavy-set Frasquita, and the craven Corregidor in her play within the play. Lorca too closely imitates this internal play device in his unfinished opera libretto Lola, la comedianta, bearing Falla's self-imitating musical suggestions. However, Lorca's ‘La casada infiel’ relies on more mature borrowings from ‘El molinero de Arcos’ and Falla's ballet. Finally, Falla's puppet opera El retablo de maese Pedro inspires Lorca's La zapatera prodigiosa, climaxing in its own play within a play. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although exotic figures were a staple of the ballet de cour under Louis XIV, critics of the genre have tended to dismiss these masquerades as rehearsals of ignorant stereotypes about foreign peoples and places. This essay argues instead that the ballets' seemingly grotesque citations of preconceptions about other countries were often informed by a subtle understanding of the discursive force of national tropes. Through an examination of the sophisticated use of national stereotypes in Benserade, Lully, and Molière's Ballet des Muses (1666-67), particularly in the Spanish masquerade, Molière's Sicilian comedy and the Moorish dance, I aim to show that this work explicitly figures national character as a formal commonplace rather than a meaningful category. By enacting well-known stereotypes in ways that divorce them from any notion of original identity, the ballet's performers made space for a critique of more essentialist interpretations of nationality, including those used to underpin French claims to superiority. Thus reframing 'nationality' as performable, the work implies that mastery of the performing arts displaces any particular 'national' trait as the basis for a claim to European or global dominance. As a corollary, this essay also seeks to correct the common misconception that the understanding of 'identities' as performable and performative is uniquely a product of our own postmodern age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an examination into the history of ballet in the United States in the first half of the 19th century. The careers of the first American ballerinas Augusta Maywood and Mary Ann Lee are profiled, noting their popularity as well as their mixed critical reception. The period's engagement with social questions regarding the appropriateness of ballet as an art form at all, particularly in regards to the role of women dancing on stage, is described. Also mentioned are the careers and reception of European ballerinas in the U.S., such as Celeste Keppler and Eugenia Lecomte.

The article presents an examination into the history of French opera and ballet throughout the 19th-century. Details are given profiling the development of the relationship shared between the two performance arts during the Restoration period as well as the Second Empire, highlighting changes in legal policy and common production management trends. Particular attention is given to the gradual distinction and separation of the Grand Opéra and Petit Opéra genres with their differing treatment of dance.

Following the traces of Circe in opera history: the sorceress can be found at the very beginning, as main character of a court spectacle, the Balet Comique de la Royne or Balet de Circé (1581), from Balthazar de Beaujoueulx; in baroque times in many titles, such as La Circe de Cristoforo Ivanovich, music by Antonio Ziani (1665); at the start of the development of the Spanish zarzuela in the Comedia con m·sica from Calderón and Hidalgo El mayor encanto, amor, (1635) and at the times of the flourishment of that musical genre in Circe from Ruperto Chapí on a libretto by Ramos Carrión (1902). We present a study of the scripts within their historical frame. The Balet Comique introduces the subject of the birth of ballet as theatre spectacle, and Calderón and Chapí that of the history of zarzuela in Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Theodore Bale on global ballet, one by Kim Kyunghee and Kim Hyunjung on Lim Sung-nam's ballet "Prince Hodong," and one by Jill Nunes Jensen on Alonzo King's use of cross-cultural awareness in the dances choreographed for his LINES ballet.

This essay explores the source material for Andrée Howard's 1947 narrative work for Ballet Rambert, The Sailor's Return. Howard based her libretto for the ballet on David Garnett's 1925 novel of the same name, closely following his story of a West African princess who marries an English sailor and encounters racial prejudice in England. I examine the textual and choreographic contexts for the ballet, relating its visual rhetoric and movement vocabularies to a variety of sources from nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and dance. In investigating the novel, we find that Garnett drew on Richard Burton's 1864 anthropological account of Dahomey (now Benin) in West Africa, especially his striking descriptions of Amazonian dance. I locate these transmissions between text and dance in the context of modernist discussions of primitivism, showing that while aspects of Howard's ballet conform to enduring primitivist traditions, its focus on the female protagonist's individuality and ethnic origins reflects the anthropological thrust of the textual sources and offers a striking critique of racism in a realist mode. Howard's choreographic style can also be located in the context of contemporary experiments in black performance dance. Her sensitive handling of sources shows her important contribution to narrative ballet and the distinctiveness of her presentation of female experience in the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bibliothèque-musée of the Opéra de Paris holds numerous documents on the Swedish Ballet, which came from the division of the fonds of the Archives internationales de la danse. This collection had been split between Stockholm and Paris in 1952 by Rolf de Mare, who had founded this institution in Paris in 1931. This article discusses the documents produced for or caused by the ballets that remained in Paris in a more or less accidental way, without constituting a fond in the strictest sense. The author presents the historical context of this collection division, draws up a typology of these documents, and proposes some paths of study of these sources (holding, among other things, photographs of the ballets) that remain little exploited. A list of these sources as well as an inventory of the photographs are given in the appendices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the modernist ballet "Corroboree" and the neo-corroborees of contemporary bush doof culture, as examples of embodied performance by non-indigenous dancers directly inspired by conception of Aboriginal cultures. The authors believe that both these dance forms are the products of uneasy cultural encounters involving settler appropriation of Aboriginal cultural forms. Specifically, the 1954 ballet "Corroboree" was a product of a time when public performance and consumption of Aboriginal culture was white-dominated.

With the establishment of Louis-Philippe's Bourgeois Monarchy in1830, Romantic artists developed a sense of themselves as a class, often outsiders to the main fabric of bourgeois society, and their writings reflected this awareness of the artist as an outsider in society. In reaction to the overt capital accumulation, the crass materialism, the self-interest, and the spiritual philistinism of the times, the Romantics sought a counterculture of oblivion, a self-induced artistic euphoria, a dropping out of reality. Reenter the fantastic. It was in this milieu, where the debris of the past met the disenchantment of the present, that the conte fantastique had a renaissance. The debris of the past was the anarchy and horrors unleashed by years of revolution, the Terror, and Napoleonic wars. The literary critic Amy J. Ransom has characterized the Romantic Generation of 1830 as both scarred by historical traumas and unable to reclaim what might have been their pre-Revolutionary birthright. In her view, the Romantic mal du siècle was a longing for a past that could never be recaptured. Meanwhile, the monster of Gothic literature (and its feminine equivalent in the fantastic) embodied the malevolent specter of revolutionary anarchy. 1 A whimsical fragment entitled “Cauchemar d'un Mangeur” (Nightmare of an Eater) published in Le Gastronome on May 22, 1831, and attributed variously to Gérard de Nerval and Théophile Gautier, said that “One no longer believes in stories of revenants, and one is indeed wrong. Epochs of crisis and revolution are ordinarily the ones in which these gentlemen choose to recast in doubt the simplest ideas of rationalism and philosophic skepticism.”* There was a profound connection between the unthinkable, but only too real, and the fantastic. In 1830 Charles Nodier had articulated a similar link in his theory of the fantastic in literature. 2 But as early as 1819, implicitly aligning Romanticism and the frenetic genre, he had implicated political upheaval: The imagination is so enamored of story that it prefers an illusion that terrifies to an agreeable but natural verity. This last resort of the human heart, fatigued by ordinary sentiments, is what one calls the Romantic genre, strange poetry, but very well suited to the moral state of society, to the needs of blasé generations that desire sensations at any price and do not think them too expensive even at the price of the happiness of future generations. ... [The ideal] of the Romantic poets is in our miseries. This is not a defect of art; it is a necessary effect of the progress of our social perfection. One knows where we are in politics, and in poetry, we are in nightmare and vampires. † Tastes made blasé by the violence and political conflagrations of the time marked the literary climate in which young writers needed to survive. Economic considerations, like the growing market-driven system of literary production and the proliferation of newspapers and journals, gave further impetus to the frenetic genre. As shown in Parts One and Two of this study, few writers were immune to the violence, atrocities, and upside-down world of the genre—not Nodier, Jules Janin, or Honoré de Balzac, not the lesser-known authors or the bohemian artists of the Petit Cénacle .* Victor Hugo had provided philosophical cachet with his theory of the grotesque (although he would later admonish the young school to “reform,” not “deform” literary style). 3 Indeed, in the Romantic's book, the grotesque was to the ugly as the sublime was to the beautiful: both inspired awe, and the two counterpoised could create a sensation of almost unbearable tension. 4 In spite of its clichés and commonplaces, great writers used the frenetic impulse to achieve their own sensibilities and to match their own purposes. Such was the case with Théophile Gautier, who, in an early tale, “Onuphrius,” took the frenetic parody of the divine and trumped it with a parody of the frenetic. † “Onuphrius” first appeared in La France Littéraire in August 1832, then in Le Cabinet de Lecture in October of the same year, and finally in the first edition of Gautier's Les Jeunes-France, Romans Goguenards ( Jeunes-France , Fictions and Mockeries) in 1833. 5 Shifting its venue of publication and undergoing revisions in the process, the work signals Gautier's double consciousness as an author who aspired to a place inside the literary establishment and as a member of the frenetic circle of comrades (the Petit Cénacle ), hence an outsider by definition. This tension reveals itself in the opposing predilections of the story: on one hand, an acute sense of Romantic fervor and poetic exile, on the other, a witty tone that encompasses pastiche and self-satire. From Nodier, Gautier imported nightmare, somnambulism, malady, and madness (see Part One). From Balzac he drew a physiological type—the self-consuming artist whose fantastic vision surmounted the ordinary world. From Jules Janin, he borrowed the conceit of the grave robbed, the corpse unburied and dissected in a laboratory (see Part Two). But Gautier's dark introspections were often mitigated by witty self-insight. Indeed, scholars have perceived the painter-poet Onuphrius as a burlesque self-portrait of the author. 6 In one episode of the story, Onuphrius dreams that, immobilized and deprived of any way of signaling his existence, he is sealed in a coffin and buried, even while his feelings and sensations continue unabated. He passes the time composing verse—“La Vie dans la Mort” (Life in Death), a poem that Gautier would publish in Le Cabinet de Lecture a few weeks after “Onuphrius” appeared in that journal, and that later became the first part of La Comédie de la Mort , published in 1838. 7 In this poem the poet's super-susceptible imagination leads him to imagine a dialogue between a maggot and a dead woman: the maggot comes to consummate the “solemn mystery” of nuptial rites with the deceased one—the bride, who resists with a “fierce modesty.”* In French, the word for maggot, ver , is a homonym with the word for verse, vers . Maggots devouring the dead woman's body pose a metaphor for melancholic images devouring the poet's mind as he suffers a symbiotic act of graveyard creation. The recursive link between the poem and the novella heightens the sense of autobiography, as if the poem were meant as a key to the identity of the protagonist in a roman à clef . But “Onuphrius” goes beyond self-portrait to social commentary as Gautier satirizes the obsessed Romantic as a type: “I don't need to tell you, Onuphrius was a Jeune-France and a Romantic madman.” † The central character's studied out-of-vogue wardrobe, designed to evoke earlier centuries, and his scorn for anything bourgeois recall the artists of the Petit Cénacle as Gautier would describe them much later in his Histoire du Romantisme . ‡ Indeed, the very title Jeunes-France evokes this younger contingent of authors and artists (Fig. 1).* One is tempted to read into Onuphrius an uncanny resemblance to Gérard de Nerval, Gautier's friend from childhood: “Our writings were sisters, as our hearts were brothers.”* Nerval's fantastic inner world, his profound reveries (Gautier compares him to a somnambulist standing on the edge of a roof, whom one would not wish to startle), even his unpredictable zigzags and sudden suspensions in space evoke the artist-dreamer disoriented in the real world of Gautier's novella. And Onuphrius' madness and death seem strangely prescient of Nerval's struggles with insanity and his eventual suicide. † FIGURE 1 An engraving after Gavarni satirizing the artist as a type, which appeared in Le Diable à Paris: Paris et les Parisiens (J. Hetzel, 1845–46). Gautier's character, Onuphrius, was a literary precursor of such caricatures. “The devil in Paris" was like a fly on the wall, a voyeur of private life, who offered consumers a bird's-eye view of Paris and Parisians. By courtesy of the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania. As if he were of a double mind, the embodiment of contradictory tendencies, Gautier champions the Romantic mental set, chimerical and excrescent, even while commenting upon it with witty, ironic detachment. The subtitle of the tale, “The Fantastic Vexations of an Admirer of Hoffmann,” ‡ seems to refer ambiguously to the chagrins of its author as well as its protagonist. Steeped in mystical, cabalistic, demonic literature, Onuphrius is a prophet of the invisible and adverse: He made, in the middle of the real world buzzing around him, a world of ecstasy and vision that was given to few to enter. Of the most common and matter-of-fact detail, by his habit of searching for the supernatural aspect, he knew how to make something fantastic and unexpected spring out. § Diabolical jinx, Venetian mirrors, glimpses of Satan's talon—all signatures of a malfeasant deity unimagined by other characters—give the paradox of the fantastic: is this a minutely observed descent into madness or a chronicle of Satan's ever more daring assaults? What starts out as an obsession develops into “a state of nearly perpetual hallucination,” in which the artist cannot distinguish between dream and reality. Yet, Gautier's wit undermines the bizarre and gruesome images of the frenetic genre. When a double jumps out of the Venetian mirror and trepans Onuphrius' skull, he watches ideas and characters fly pell-mell from his head and promenade around his studio, “without troubling themselves the least, chatting, laughing, debating, as if they were in their homes.”* Earlier in the narrative, during the horrific dream sequence, I experienced a horrible fear because I understood they were going to dissect me; my soul, which until then had not abandoned my body, no longer hesitated to leave me: at the first cut of the scalpel it [ mon âme , feminine] altogether disengaged itself from its fetters. It would rather suffer all the inconvenience of an intelligence dispossessed of its means of physical manifestation than to share these dreadful tortures with my body [ mon corps , masculine]. ... Not wishing to witness the dismemberment of its dear envelope, my soul hastened to make its exit. † As the protagonist embodies (or disembodies) horrific violations of the human body, Gautier mocks the sadistic gratifications of the frenetic genre. The author's narration of the soul's ethereal lightness—at one point only the tips of the protagonist's toes touch the earth—makes one think of dancing sylphs, ‡ until the dreamer qualifies the bodily sensation as like that of an amputee's phantom limb. But it is this very liaison between gruesome physical torment and poetic ecstasy that is the theme of my study of the fantastic discourse in literature and dance. Nor is the alienated artist the only target of Gautier's satire. Bourgeois spectators, the least informed of whom are the most opinionated, are also the butt of the joke (Fig. 2). What is one to make of Satan's full-blown appearance as a dandy who transforms the poet's verse into insipid pablum before them? Moreover, the positivist denouement is deceptive; science is rendered relative as a fantastic discourse in its own right: For having too much observed his life through the microscope—because he nearly always took his fantastic in ordinary events—what happened to him was what happens to those people who perceive, with the aid of the microscope, worms in the soundest foods, serpents in the most limpid liquids. They no longer dare to eat; the most natural thing, magnified by his imagination, seemed to him monstrous.*FIGURE 2 A design by Gavarni satirizing the bourgeois, from Le Diable à Paris: Paris et les Parisiens . The caption translates, “Do not speak to him of artists.” The antipathy between the bourgeois and the artist was a recurrent theme during the Bourgeois Monarchy. By courtesy of the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania. Gautier cites a Doctor Esquirol, reproducing what is purportedly his statistical chart on the causes of madness.* The last category is “unknown cause” ( cause inconnue ), and that is where the storyteller places his protagonist, thus parodying the classification scheme in itself. 8 The theme of folie (madness) is so pervasive in the fantastic/frenetic discourse (from Alvaro to Inès, from Jeannie to the Public Prosecutor), that a medical reading of its causes and effects here as elsewhere would be literal and prosaic. Indeed, Gautier's ironic tone deliberately rebuts a logical explanation or mechanistic interpretation. As elsewhere in the fantastic literature, positivism is singled out for particular critique (see Parts One and Two). This is an important point to keep in mind vis-à-vis the ballet fantastique . Fantastic narratives are far too subjective to warrant positivist analysis. Whether one considers James' obsession in La Sylphide or Giselle's madness in Giselle , one must search for meanings in the specific discourses to which the ballets gesture and refer. † Here is where Felicia McCarren's analysis of Giselle's madness as a reflection of men's fears of syphilis and the symptoms it produces breaks down. 9 Contexts must be carefully chosen based upon relevance and proximity. Moreover, contexts do not exist independently of human conception; indeed, their meanings are formulated and mediated by meaningful structures or symbols. For the fantastic author from Nodier to Gautier, madness was a double-edged sword integrally interwoven with the imagination. When one considers Gautier's thorough investment in Romanticism in general, and the fantastic genre in particular, it becomes clear that to treat Giselle's dance of madness as symptom, rather than symbol full of nuances and tone colors, is to ignore one of the most pertinent of contexts—Gautier's narratives in which madness plays a thematic part. Gautier's synopsis of Giselle for the 1845 volume Les Beautés de l'Opéra offers a unique form of evidence, since it gave the librettist the opportunity to retell the story after having seen the ballet performed many times. He describes Giselle's madness in tender terms: “In women, reason is in the heart; wounded heart, affected head. Giselle becomes mad, not that she lets her hair hang and strikes her forehead in the manner of melodramatic heroines; it is a gentle madness, tender and charming like her.” When Berthe relates her premonition of the Wilis' fate to her daughter, Gautier reads Giselle's thoughts: “to dance after her death, that is certainly dreadful! Is it thus such a great pleasure to remain there between six boards and two slats, immobile, completely straight.” This was, after all, the author of La Comédie de la Mort writing. Giselle's only defect is that she yields herself utterly to the dance (Fig. 3). Like Onuphrius, who is a victim of his own imagination, Giselle is the artist whose suspension of reality undoes her in the end. In Gautier's words she is “mad about dance, she dreams of nothing but that, she dreams only of balls under the foliage, interminable waltzes and waltzers who never tire.”* To Gautier the loss of dance—a synecdoche for art—is the only thing to be regretted: FIGURE 3 Pierre Joseph Challamel depicts Carlotta Grisi as Giselle ascending saint- or martyrlike above the horizon (Act II, Giselle ). Giselle's index finger points to her temple even as she is liberated from earthly bonds by ethereal feet, suggesting links between madness, dance, death, and resurrection. From Album de l'Opéra: Principales scènes et décorations les plus remarquables des meilleurs ouvrages représentés sur la scène de l'Académie Royale de Musique (Paris: Challamel, 1845). By courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Giselle lived in a “fantastic land of pirouettes and jetés battus,” just as Gautier lived in a fantastic world of words. Undoubtedly for the poet, Carlotta Grisi partook of Giselle's character with her simple expression of emotion and “the pleasure that she experience[d] dancing.” As for the Wilis, they represented “all those who lived, all those who died for and by the dance.”* To understand Gautier's attraction to the fantastic, one must consider first the depth of his immersion. In the first volume of his two-volume edition of Gautier's fantastic work, Michel Crouzet includes ten short stories (some of them not so short): “La Cafetière” (The Coffee Pot, 1831), “Onuphrius” (1832), “Omphale” (1834), “La Morte Amoureuse” (The Dead Woman in Love, 1836), “La Pipe d'Opium” (The Opium Pipe, 1838), “Le Chevalier Double” (The Double Chevalier, 1840), “Le Pied de Momie” (The Mummy's Foot, 1840), “Deux Acteurs pour un Rôle” (Two Actors for One Role, 1841), “Le Club des Hachichins” (The Club of Hashish Eaters, 1846), and “Arria Marcella” (1852); volume two includes the novels Avatar (1856), Jettatura (1856), and Spirite (1865). Clearly, the fantastic genre was a source of inspiration for Gautier, one to which he returned throughout his literary life. Moreover, in spite of its ostensible parody of the fantastic artist, “Onuphrius” was too reflectively etched, too intimately drawn, to be considered merely a mockery of a type rather than a broader critique of the absurdities and miseries of the human condition. Like Nodier, Honoré de Balzac, Prosper Merimée, and others, Gautier found in the fantastic a genre conducive to the expression of the dark undercurrents of the past, poetic yearnings, and antiestablishment attitudes. But his fantastic sensibility was unique in that it moved into an entirely new medium—the dance. True, the ballet had already been pervaded by the fantastic, specifically in the Ballet of the Nuns and La Sylphide . But Gautier, whose broad immersion in the arts crossed categories of the visual arts, literature, theatre, and the dance, would become the greatest proponent of the fantastic in ballet. In his roles as ballet critic and ballet librettist, he apprehended the plastic, poetic potential of the medium of dance and its intrinsic beauty: l'art pour l'art , art for art's sake. Moreover, he understood the potential of the fantastic, ultimate encounter with the irrational, player of paradox at the expense of easy denouements, for establishing the primacy of the medium in ballet. Pierre-Jules-Théophile Gautier was born on August 30, 1811, in Tarbes, a cultural crossroads of the Pyrénées. In 1814 his family moved to Paris, where his father held a government post. At the Collège Charlemagne, where Théophile studied the humanities from 1822 to 1829, he met his lifelong friend Gérard de Nerval. His ambition to become a painter brought him to the studio in the rue Saint-Antoine of the artist Louis-Édouard Rioult, a student of David, and here he came into contact with a fervent circle of young Romantic fine artists. In 1829 Nerval introduced him to Victor Hugo and he discovered the master's book of poems Les Orientales , which strongly influenced his decision to become a man of letters instead. Gautier's first collection of poems was published in 1830, the same year that he was a flamboyant participant in the riot over Hernani . In 1832 he began to frequent the Petit Cénacle , whose young avant-garde writers and fine artists took Romanticism to its countercultural extreme, practicing the frenetic genre, subscribing to Art as a cult, and challenging dominant notions about realism, positivism, material progress, and social utility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on ballet production in England during the nineteenth century. Achievements and long-surviving productions of ballet; Creation of ballets for variety houses, music-halls and theaters; Publication of the Alhambra Ballet and Empire ballet by chronicler Ivor Guest.

Examines the precise historical moment in 20th century when British ballet was included in the canon of the classics. Ninette de Valois' responsibility for the renaissance of ballet in England; Creation of the Sadler's Wells canon of classics; Turning away from radical modernism in the 1920s; Dance historians' call for the public to rethink the image of ballet.