MOVE Issue 1

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES LOUISE ROBIN-CHALLAN Louise Robin-Challan studied the social lives of impoverished girls at the Paris Opéra. She wrote and published her research.

THÉOPHILE GAUTIER (August 31, 1811—October 23, 1872) Théophile Gautier was a poet, novelist, critic, and journalist whose influence was strongly felt in the period of changing sensibilities in French literature—from the early Romantic period to the aestheticism and naturalism of the end of the 19th century.

LYNN GARAFOLA Lynn Garafola is an American dance historian, linguist, critic, curator, lecturer, and educator. A prominent researcher and writer with broad interests in the field of dance history, she is acknowledged as the leading expert on the Ballets Russes de Serge Diaghilev (1909–1929), the most influential company in twentieth-century theatrical dance.

JANE DESMOND Jane Desmond is a Professor in Anthropology and Gender and Women's Studies, and Co-founder and current Director of the International Forum for U.S. Studies, a center for the Transnational Study of the United States. She also holds appointments in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, the Center for Global Studies, and in the College of Veterinary Medicine.

Her primary areas of interest focus of issues of embodiment, display, and social identity, as well as the transnational dimensions of U.S. Studies. Her areas of expertise include performance studies, critical theory, visual culture (including museum studies and tourism studies), the critical analysis of the U.S. in global perspectives, and, most recently, the political economy of human/animal relations. She has previously worked as a professional modern dancer and choreographer, and in film, video, and the academy.

DEBORAH JOWITT Deborah Jowitt is an American dance critic, author, and choreographer. Her career in dance began as a performer and choreographer. Jowitt has received several awards for her work, including a Bessie (New York Dance and Performance Award) for her work in dance criticism.

MARION KANT Marion Kant is a musicologist and dance historian (Ph.D., Humboldt University: Romantic Ballet: an Inquiry into Gender).

From the age of 14 she danced with the Komische Opéra under the choreographer Jean Weidt. There she also worked as a dramaturge. She has taught at the Regieinstitut Berlin, Hochschule fuer Musik/Theater Leipzig, the University of Surrey in Guildford, Cambridge University, King's College London, and now at the University of Pennsylvania. She has written

extensively on romantic ballet in the 19th century, education through dance in the 19th and 20th centuries, concepts of modern dance in the early 20th century and dance in exile. Her recent research project looks at dance ideologies from 1800 to 2000. In the past years, together with musicians Marshall Taylor (saxophone) and Sam Hsu (piano) she developed a concert series remembering "entartete Musik", music banned by the Nazis in 1930s Germany.

MAGAZINE PLAYLIST

? DANCE IS MY E C N A D I O D Y H "W EAM WHICH R C S E H T ’S IT .

E MEDICIN E THE TERRIBLE IL H W A R O F S E S EA ON TO ALL M M O C N IO T A R T FRUS O BECAUSE OF H W S G IN E B N A M HU COLOR, ARE RACE , CREED, OR IS THE FIST WITH E C N A D ’ .

E L IB IS V ‘IN E SICKENING WHICH I FIGHT TH REJUDICE ."

IGNORANCE OF P —PEARL PRIMUS

MOVE

FROM THE EDITOR MOVE is a three-part magazine series, a historical zine that tells a history of injustices and prejudice in dance while also uplifting and celebrating dancers of all backgrounds.

PART I of MOVE—explores dance in Europe from the 19th century to the 1930s, from the Paris Opéra to early modern dance.

The articles within this magazine are collected and edited to show the inequalities in dance and social injustices in dance history. This is by no means a comprehensive list of all the information that might have been include, but hopes to offer guidance and understanding to the dark side of dance history.

Dance like all other areas of our society has been riddled with injustices towards those of different race, gender, or sexual orientation. Many of the founding members of dance institutions, the people we look up to as the founders of specific styles can have backstories, not told within the dance studio. This magazine hopes to allow us to explore this topics and questions that we don't like to ask.

SOCIAL CONDITIONS P.8

Lucy J Chen Editor and Designer TW: ABUSE, NAZI

BRONISLAVA NIJINS KA P.50

RADHA P.64

5

8 SOCIAL CONDITIONS OF BALLET DANCERS IN THE 19TH CENTURY AT THE PARIS OPÉRA LOUISE ROBIN-CHALLAN

24 GAUTIER ON DANCE THÉOPHILE GAUTIER

32 HEROISM IN THE HAREM DEBORAH JOWITT

50 BRONISLAVA NIJINSKA: A LEGEND UNCOVERED LYNN GARAFOLA

64 DANCING OUT THE DIFFERENCE JANE DESMOND

86 DON'T MENTION THE NAZIS MARION KANT

MOVE

7

AUTHOR

Louise Robin-Challan

SOCIAL CONDITIONS OF BALLET DANCERS S I R A P E H T AT E H T N I A R OPÉ Y R U T N E C H 19T The 19th century, the period of the origin and subsequent development of the Romantic ballet in France, was a time of profound change.

After the Revolution, the First Empire, the come-back and then the departure of the Bourbons, the beginning of the industrial revolution causes many people to move to the suburbs, especially those of Paris. An ever-growing number of peasants, some of whom become factory workers, settle in the outskirts of town, in places like Montmartre, Belleville, les Batignolles, badly housed and badly paid, with only just enough money to survive. This deprived section of new Parisians will provide the greater part of the dancers of the corps de ballet of the Royal Academy of Music, more commonly known as the Opéra.

From the beginning of the 19th century, the professional (female) dancer was regarded upon as a mythical and symbolical figure: in the eyes of the aristocratic and, later, the bourgeois audience she maintained

1992

the secret of creating a kind of fairy-tale transcending reality. However, in everyday life she was, and had been for a century, the subject of a certain contempt on the part of all her contemporaries who accused her of leading a dissolute life tainted with all kinds of base acts, not the least of which was to ruin or plunge into misery the well bred offspring of noble families. How much of this was founded in truth?

On Monday the 28th of June 1841, at the Opéra in the Rue le Peletier in Paris, the curtain falls at the end of the first performance of "Giselle ou les Wilis": it's a great success. Choreographer Jean Coralli, dancer Jules Perrot, Théophile Gautier who signed the libretto assisted by the clever "arrangeur" of theatre works Vernoy de Saint-Georges, Cicéri the set designer and Adolphe Adam the composer had joined their talents to make this work a masterpiece, one of the greatest achievements of Romantic ballet. The outline, which would remain

MOVE

9

AUTHOR

Louise Robin-Challan unchanged for a long time to come, of a first act taking place in real life and a second, "white", in an entirely immaterial world was scrupulously respected. The first work of this kind had been given about ten years earlier: "La Sylphide", first performed in the same theatre on the 21st of March 1832 with Maria Taglioni dancing the main part.

"Giselle" was also a triumph for the principal dancers Carlotta Grisi and Lucien Petipa, as the cult of star dancers had reached such heights since "La Sylphide" that at the end of the show the stage (the théatre as it was called at the time, as opposed to the salle where the audience was seated) was scattered with flowers. This innovation was due to Henri Duponchel, stage director at the time of Maria Taglioni's first appearance in 1829: the stunned Paris audience had been contemplating with delight the point work executed by the famous ballerina. La Taglioni had been placed immediately on the same level as the other top dancers under the leadership of director Lubbert. But as soon as the new Government had come to power as a result of the Révolution de Juillet and entrusted the direction of the Opéra to director-entrepreneur Louis Véron, the latter gave Maria Taglioni the status of étoile, placing her above the excellent French ballerinas Pauline Montessu, Lise Noblet, Amalia Gallois and Mme Alexis Dupont. All the critics describe Miss Taglioni as the incarnation of Romantic ballet, an ethereal being hardly touching the ground, displaying the style "full of poetry and lightness, grace and suavity" that was so dear to the poet Théophile Gautier.

But a ballerina is made of flesh and bone. After the show, after ravishing the audience, she goes back to her dressing room and, from being a surreal creature capable of flying, she turns back into a girl, a young woman confronted with her personal problems, the concerns of everyday life which was so particularly hard for dancers of modest origin performing the minor part of the corps de ballet.

Work conditions, too, were not always easy: during the Revolution of 1789, for instance, the Opéra (under various names) continued to attract ballet and opera lovers. The dancers employed by this theatre—a State theatre—had to take part in the official festivities, sometimes under threat of being guillotined. The dancer Julie Aubray, coming straight out of the Opéra seraglio, had to play the part of the goddess of Reason in Notre-Dame cathedral, sparsely clad in the type of transparent tunic that was to become so fashionable a few years later during the Directoire.

During the Empire and the Restauration the leadership of Pierre Gardel proved highly effective and the dance school, housed in the outbuildings of the Royal Furniture Department, took on as pupils the daughters of ambitious middle class mothers who wanted to see them turning pirouettes at the Opéra. Standards of ballet teaching were high with reputable teachers like Antoine Coulon, Auguste Vestris, Louis Milon... After a few years of solid training the pupils easily became corps de ballet dancers. They were also taught pantomime expressing the dramatic action of the ballet, and the dancers of the more important parts learned a great number of new steps. The most acclaimed were Mme Clotilde, Miss Saulnier, Fanny Bias and Emilie Bigottini, as well as Geneviève Gosselin who tried to dance on point but whose fame was, alas, short-lived. All in all, Paris audiences preferred ballet to opera.

All this changed with the revolution of 1830. The new director, Dr. Véron, dedicated the Opéra to "the victorious bourgeoisie to whom it will be Versailles; they will throng to fill its seats in place of the Lords and the Court in exile". Of course, the prejudice according to which dancers are bound to lead dissolute lives kept bourgeois daughters from registering with the dance school, which was transferred in 1832 to new buildings at 4 Rue Richer, not far from the temporary Opéra (which was to last for more than 50 years!) built at Rue Grange-Batelière in 1821.

1992

MOVE

B u t a b a ll e r i n a i s m a d e o f f les h an

db one.

11

AUTHOR

Louise Robin-Challan

What was the social origin of these children of the dance? According to statistics drawn from personal records and containing 512 appointments registered at the National Archives, about one in seven pupils belonged to a family related in some way or other to the Opéra by profession (endogamy). The others were from a more modest, even humble background, reflected in the signature of the father or mother which is often replaced by a small cross, or less often by an awkward or illegible paraph: they belonged to the class of bushel and candle makers, publicans, clothes dealers, washerwomen, concierges, ragmen, people scrubbing floors and doing obscure jobs living from one day into the next, usually far away from the Chaussée d'Antin in miserable lodgings, dark attics or a porter's lodge.

The school accepted all children who presented themselves regardlessly, as long as they were aged between 7 and 10. Dr. Véron was personally in charge of the examinations which were taken every three months. He singled out the pupils most suited to study the art of dancing by their health, temperament, bodily proportions and build of ankle and foot.

This way he discontinued classes for the children who were "sickly, already looking like doddery old men, weakened instead of strengthened by the exercises." Most of the time these poor, badly fed and dressed children already had some exhausting manual job in order to survive. Sending them away inevitably meant plunging them into the terrible misery of the poorest of the city. Mothers could implore the director as much as they liked, he remained unaffected: "a sense of humanity made me uncompromising", he said.

"If you knew, Monsieur, how much courage, patience, resignation and devotion a girl needs; what horrible torture she must endure, how many silent tears she must swallow even to become a mediocre dancer, you would be at the same time moved and shocked", young Sydonie Toussaint reveals to Albéric Second.

And indeed: the classes, held three times a week at eight o'clock in the morning, began with real torture. The pupil's feet and legs were encased in a grooved box, to learn to keep the fourth position, and in the leg-turner, to achieve the en dehors position; then a long wooden plank curved at the level of the back was used to throw out the chest, deforming the fragile spine; these tortures were called se tourner. The poor pupil, who had already been through a long walk from home, most often without any breakfast, must then start working like a horse, learning assemblés, jetés, balancés, ronds de jambe, fouettés, cabrioles, pirouettes sur le cou-de-pied, saut de basque, pas-debourrée and, to finish, entrechats à 4, à 6, à 8...

1992 The physical effort was so great they were sweating all over their faces and bodies. At the end of class, their mothers (who were always sitting in) changed them completely. Apparently the girls soon acquired an unpleasant smell, since running water still did not exist in Paris.

By 1850 some development can be observed: the grooved boxes arc replaced by individual training. Another improvement occurs in 1860: the management begins to provide training and rehearsal dress, consisting of a short-sleeved top, a short and very full skirt of layered muslin or gauze and calico knickers to cover the thighs; and for the boys, a shirt without tie, a small white twill waistcoat and half-long trousers held by a leather belt.

This system brings up one question: who pays for the regular training indispensable for progress?

This system brings up one question: who pays for the regular training indispensable for progress? Here we have to mention the emergence of a practice affecting the advanced class taught by Monsieur Barrez. It became usual after director Louis Véron opened the dancer's foyer to balletomanes. Some of these Messieurs came to see the dance teacher who would suggest private lessons for the most gifted among the students. The "patron" would then pay a hundred francs a month in advance for these lessons, thus speculating in the future.

It's also in this group that pupils had a chance to get more than their daily ration: "that's where the 'rats' (young dancers) can be hired at twenty sous a show". Meanwhile, each performance night fathers, uncles and neighbours were waiting patiently in the dark alleyway alongside the Opéra, in rain or snow, for the evening to end so that they could take the exhausted dancers home. Except for the central areas of Paris, like the Chaussée d'Antin and the large boulevards where nightlife went on, the streets of the capital were poorly lit and unsafe. Living in one of the most miserable furnished attics of the Cité quarter, an area of ill repute, the young Maria Jacob, who had lost her mother early in life, had to wait after each performance for a neighbour, one of the stagehands, to take her home. Stage builders used to put up the set for the day after the next as soon as the evening's show was finished. This kept Maria waiting in the theatre until two o'clock at night: she was not the only one to get used to sleeping on a little bench in the stalls until then. This very deserving dancer, a model of courage and firmness, forced destiny: her perseverance

MOVE earned her the title of première danseuse and in 1848 she married her patron, the Count of Henneville, a member of the Committee of Royal Theatres.

By 1830 it had become more and more difficult to recruit new pupils for the school.

But there were women of doubtful morality who "devoted themselves to put an end to this shortage", we are told in the handwriting of the Opéra's dresser, kept at the Bibliothèque de l'Opéra. A certain Mrs de Rudder, for example, a failed tragedienne, and devoted believer at the Borme-Nouvelle church took in hand the education and support of the orphaned girls of the parish, taught them the more visible aspects of the Christian cult and a thing or two about catechism to put the vicar on the wrong track as to the destination of these children, and then sent them to the dance school at the Opéra. Not all of them became dancers, so she also ran a brothel in the house of a wine merchant, her accomplice, on the corner of the Rue de la Lune and the Rue Poissonnière. But police were tipped off and closed the establishment.

In 1846, a course at professional level is established by the director, Léon Pillet: parents find themselves signing an agreement by which they cannot refuse to let their child appear on stage, and a penalty of 4000 francs is due to the management in case a pupil leaves the school. For most parents it would be impossible even to produce that kind of money...

One might expect that the school would also provide general education, some knowledge of music, reading, writing, history and geography, or art history. But there was no question of such education. The pupils were quite ignorant. And yet many of them had a desire to study: they could be seen sitting in the wings between two stage rehearsals, laboriously reading aloud a few lines of some popular novel. Spelling is mostly phonetic, inspiring a columnist in search of mockery to quote: "Ge ceré a cattre eur ai demi o pacaje de l'aupérra Ni menké pas".

Around 1830, Prosper Mérimée received from a young corps de ballet dancer, Céline Cayot, a passionate declaration of love, showing complete ignorance of spelling rules and written on a piece of paper taken from a notebook: "Some of those sentences are so muddled and so ridiculous only someone living all her life in a porter's lodge could have come up with them!" he wrote to one of his friends. On the other hand, internationally renowned dancers like Fanny and Thérèse Elssler, Carlotta Grisi and Fanny Cerrito wrote French very correctly in spite of a few easily excused errors.

13

AUTHOR

Louise Robin-Challan

1992

MOVE

15

AUTHOR

Louise Robin-Challan

Maria Taglioni herself, who spoke and wrote four languages, humbly admits that she was hardly taught anything as a child. She tried to develop herself by reading a great deal and she openly made fun of what she called her "ignorance". The ballerinas who were most courageous in class are also those who strove most to acquire an education, not always just a basic one. Some of them, Pauline Duvemay, Olympe de SaintGeorges, and before them Elina Rolland, Florentine Dufour and Pauline Montessu have written nice letters in an interesting style. Only when the Conservatoire de Danse was created under Napoleon III did it become obligatory to attend school and gain some general knowledge until the age of 12. Regulations stated that only those pupils who had already had elementary education were exempted from this obligation.

Then the long-awaited day of the first appearance came: if a girl made a successful debut she would be appointed member of the corps de ballet and paid 500 francs for the first and 600 for the second year. It was not a big salary to live on in Paris in those days. Renting a tiny room or attic, or even just a cellar, cost 100 or 150 francs a year. Most dancers lived in furnished rooms that could be found anywhere in town. The next item was food: the basics were bread or sometimes even potatoes; there was also thin soup or stock, some dairy products, and very rarely meat. Cold veal seems to have been the favourite dish of the ballet dancers, but not until after the performance, since how is one to wear a wasp-waisted corset just after dinner? Some of the dancers do not always have enough to eat. When Dr. Véron once praised a mother on account of her daughter, she told him: "Still, we're badly-off; if you want her, you can have her, if only because of the food!"

In 1842, Cellarius, formerly a minor dancer at the Opéra himself, took the habit to invite girls he knew from the corps de ballet to his ballroom dance classes, for which he gave them a gratification of 2 francs an evening. The party would end up at the Café Anglais, where the young dancers seized the opportunity to fill themselves with as much as they could. They did not eat, they glutted themselves; they didn't drink, they gulped it down. Some of them stuffed what was left of the cream cheese into their sleeves and plundered candlesticks to fill their own candle-holders.

The colourful Mère Crosnier, who was concierge at the artists' entrance of the Opéra for more than forty years, often comforted poor girls breaking down with exhaustion and hunger: "I've seen some who pinched my cat's food, to swallow it as soon as I had my back turned!" she recalled. Without some of Mère Crosnier's bread many a famished sylphide would not have found the force to dance in the evening.

The young 'rats' are always on the lookout for food. In the dancer's foyer, they nibble away at the sweets given to them by fans of the 'sugar daddy' type. Let us listen to Théophile Gautier who tells us: "Approach a Rat and you will see her nibbling away, moving her little jaws like a squirrel enjoying an almond; you can't pass her by without hearing the imperceptibly soft cracking of pralines, nut bars or even simply bread crumbs, crushed by small sharp teeth making the same sound as a mouse behind a wall."

"Approach a Rat and you will see her nibbling away, moving her little jaws like a squirrel enjoying an almond; you can't pass her by without hearing the imperceptibly soft cracking of pralines, nut bars or even simply bread crumbs, crushed by small sharp teeth making the same sound as a mouse behind a wall."

1992 The young Sydonie Toussaint, already mentioned, was always carrying around under her gauze skirt "a half-sucked lemon, a packet of coffee, a paper cone with snuff, two bars of chocolate, a crust of Gruyère cheese, two crumbled brioches, currants, etc...", the remainder of presents given by the gentlemen she had met backstage or in the foyer.

Mocking ballet lovers sometimes took advantage of the rats' obsession with food by giving them demeaning presents. Etienne Arago, one of them, gives some examples: "Waiter, please bring Amanda in the dancer's foyer four ice creams which she is to swallow head down", or: "Thémise, you go to Bouix' after the performance, I've betted that you'll drink six glasses of champagne without falling off your points!" or: "Evelina, have this packet of cigars, but puff them on the boulevard all the way home to your old people's stove!" And the poor kids drank, smoked and swallowed to show their gratitude for the ice-cream sundaes.

And the poor kids drank, smoked and swallowed to show their gratitude for the ice-cream sundaes.

Some accepted invitations to ''business" dinners by potential patrons, rich balletomanes who often intimidated the girls with threats and obnoxious behaviour. Who accepts dinner accepts the rest, goes the saying. But you can not be admitted to a fashionable restaurant such as les Frères Provençaux without dressing decently.

On this point we are informed by Dr. Véron who describes in detail the poor clothes worn in rehearsal, formless hats in faded colours, old ribbons hanging from pieces of the set, clogs falling apart and deforming the dancer's delicate feet but indispensable for walking the long distance from home to the Opéra on hardly passable roads. Holes in their dresses and stains on their tartans prove that they are unable to dress properly for lack of money, time and clean lodgings. Running water still does not exist.

Sometimes a long distance must be covered just to get water from one of the fountains built or rebuilt in Paris in the century before, under Louis XV. Water carriers are expensive, and the dancer's hygiene often neglected.

Sydonie Toussaint, hoping to be one day a star ballerina, confides us that she will then install a zinc bath-tub in her kitchen. For the moment, as most of her friends, she probably puts off washing herself until the end of the month when she has a bath for fifteen sous. To be clean remains a luxury for her. In such miserable conditions, how is a dancer going to remain in blooming condition?

MOVE

To be clean r e m a i n

sa luxur

ai

n i n b l o oming condition?

ch o r h e r. I n s u

ce

yf

m is an e r a ble conditions , how is a d

According to the reports of five medical doctors in charge at the Opéra, few members of the corps de ballet reached the age of retirement.

A pension received after ten, fifteen, or even twenty years of dancing was deduced from the wages and proportional to income. This pension was abolished with the introduction of commercial management of the Royal Academy of Dancing which marked especially the period from 1831 to 1848.

Many undernourished, "chlorotic" ballerinas, who had to make each day an intense physical effort, contracted tuberculosis, the fearsome illness for which no cure had yet been found. According to the baron of Trémont, a quarter of those who had the talent to become a first or even a top dancer died in mid-youth from heart and lung diseases: "Like Roman gladiators, they pay with their lives for the pleasure they sought to give us".

No, life is not all roses for the dancers of the Opéra! And this litany of hardship would not be complete without mentioning the system of patronage of the dancer by a gentleman of a certain age, more or less influential but always seen as rich. This relationship was almost never freely chosen by the dancer. Ballerinas have often been accused of leading dissolute lives, but it must be admitted that, for them, that was both the only avenue to a successful artistic career and the only way out of a miserable life.

From the beginning of the century, the fantasies of the subscribers to the Opéra were always of the same kind. During the Empire, Mme de Rémusat said of the Opéra: "The only thing they go to "hear" are Miss Goudet's legs", but after 1815, the length of the tunics was brought down to the ankles by the prude director of the Opéra Sosthène de la Rochefoucault. They were shortened again by Dr. Véron in 1831, uncovering half of the calves; the situation escalated when Duponchel asked the painter Lami to design the Sylphide's costume and approved of a short skirt for la Taglioni and the entire corps de ballet. Also, for those who liked erotic daydreaming Dr. Véron had contracted Fanny Elssler for the ballet Le Diable Boiteux (The Limping Devil) in 1836, in which she danced a cachucha, a French version of the Spanish original. Her sensual grace, lascivious abandon, and plastic beauty were admired from behind the "telescopes in the stalls and boxes" as wrote Charles de Boigne.

In the auditorium, which was always brilliantly lit during the whole of the performance, the balletomanes were seated in the parterre, now called the orchestra stalls, which were for their exclusive use. The richest and most influential among them hired for periods of a year particular boxes close to the stage. The most famous one, box number 2, also called the "infernal box" and from which the dancers could best be observed, was occupied by the 'fashionables', also referred to as the 'yellow gloves', the founders of the Jockey Club. This was the group who asked the engineer Chevalier to manufacture binoculars that enlarged objects 32 times: "With these awful binoculars", said Albéric Second, "underwear becomes a joke. They reveal as much of even the best-harnessed legs as if the dancer had slipped out of her dress."

During the Restauration, connoisseurs like Lord Stuart de Rothesay, Duke Edmond de Fitz-James and his friend Puységur, the commander de Ferette, the Duke of Gramont and his inseparable companion the Viscount de la Rochefoucault had free choice of girls and sweethearts exposed to their avid glances in the Opéra. Often seen behind the stage, these gentlemen made their dreams come true by approaching the woman of their choice. But they first had to deal with the 'mother of the Opéra', the real one or a substitute. Everybody knew she was the inevitable companion of the ballerina. She played the game of protecting and chaperoning her daughter's virtue, but in fact it is she who taught her coquetry, the art of shining and pleasing in male company, considering it as an asset on which she could capitalize. She separated

m r go e ing to r

17

QUOTE

The Baron of Tremont

1992

"LIKE R GLADIATOR WITH THE FOR THE PLE SOUGHT TO

MOVE

ROMAN RS, THEY PAY EIR LIVES EASURE THEY O GIVE US"

19

AUTHOR

Louise Robin-Challan

her from her girl-friends, other friends in the orchestra, stagehands and firemen, reserving her for the most affluent gentleman with the best titles, to which she literally sells her off. For members of the corps de ballet, the Opéra is a stepping-stone from which the ballerina and her "loving mother" can reach the higher classes.

During the Monarchie de Juillet, backstage and foyer were visited by leisured young noblemen squandering what family capital was left (Boigne, La Valette, Montguyon...) as well as by too quickly enriched members of the bourgeoisie who had made a fortune in the grocery trade, in industry or the railways (the bankers Aguado, Riccardo, Etchegoyen, a friend of Balzac, the brothers Fould, the ironmaster Muel, Paul Daru...). The latter thought this was the way they could acquire a lordly tone and style.

The dresser's manuscript in the Bibliothèque de l'Opéra is hardly flattering about most of these gentlemen: "They are often greedy, showing how they hate spending money by decorating four or five rooms somewhere on a fourth floor with secondhand furniture. They get there in a rush to dine with their protégée off the simple fare they have ordered at a fixed price from the restaurateur." No kitchen help for their sweetheart, and what's more, they don't part with the monthly allowance unless they get a receipt or before they have checked the accounts!

Presents are rare; the gallant sometimes takes the lady to a cabaret where they drink champagne and smoke cigarettes... It was not fashionable any more to ruin oneself for a dancer; ballerinas were often looked down on and turned into a mere utility.

The time when ballet lovers, important figures from the financial world, English lords, courteous priests and great noblemen made sure the dancers could maintain a more than comfortable lifestyle and even ruined themselves for them where had it gone? First the ballerina was paid an education, then a house complete with servants and their livery, a coach and footmen, a private tutor to teach her to write and speak properly, and a lady to keep her company. She was an artist receiving all the necessary training. She became a grand lady. At that time relationships consisted in previously arranged visits and were based on large amounts of money and also a little love.

None of this can be found in the "petits ménages", as they were commonly called under Louis-Philippe. What was a petit ménage? Nestor Roqueplan defined it as an unlawful marriage of two souls who love each other. "Husband and wife" are always together; when she dances, he follows her every step, never losing sight of her, waiting for her at rehearsals, surrounding her with a myriad of attentions, arranging a carriage for her and her mother after the performance. The "wife" is a pretty little creature, but with no education, gracious but ignorant.

The "wife" is a pretty little creature, but with no education, gracious but ignorant.

The "husband" also acts as her agent, arranging dresses and stage costumes, dealing with journalists, clearing up some disagreement with the director of the Opéra. The petits ménages were short-lived: one month, six months perhaps... If it lasted more than a year one could already speak of a vieux ménage, a lasting relationship. However, some of these "marriages" proved quite stable, as in the case of Lise Noblet remaining faithful to General Claparède who never ceased to be fond of her until his death in 1842. Charles de Boigne, patron of Nathalie Fijan, also named Fitz-James, who ruined himself in 1836 by unfortunate speculations, was lovingly taken care of by his young girl-friend and stayed with her to hope together for happier days.

1992 So ballerinas never really married? Usually marriage occurred only later when, tired of adventures and successive protectors, disappointed with their love life, abandoned by patrons for younger and more naive dancers, they settled for the middle-class ideal of a lawful home giving them security and respectability. In some cases they began a partnership

Usually marriage occurred only later when, tired of adventures and successive protectors, disappointed with their love life, abandoned by patrons for younger and more naive dancers, they settled for the middle-class ideal of a lawful home giving them security and respectability. with a male dancer, based on money and talent, a contract by which they had exclusive use of some strong man whose muscular arms made him suitable as a dance partner.

Sometimes the terms of marriage were settled very early, as a result of a sudden passion, and opposing maternal authority: in 1839 a young Anglo-American ballet dancer who had made a promising debut, Augusta Maywood, was very successful in "Le Diable Boiteux". Balletomanes found her gentle and gracious; but she completely deceived their expectations by marrying an ugly and insignificant dancer with little talent, Charles, Mabille's younger brother. Her mother, Louisa Maywood, upset by this adventure, had a letter written to Dr. Duponchel in which she complains about the young man: "He's pressing me to accept that a 15-year-old child becomes his wife straightaway". Mabille had let her down, the wedding promise she signed was not sufficient. The mother thus loses all her hopes and her only source of income.

All this does not keep Augusta Maywood from becoming the first American ballet dancer to receive the title of prima ballerina in Europe.

Around 1850, ballet underwent changes: male dancers ended up doing practically nothing else than lifting their partners and the technique of Romantic ballet became set in conventional gesture, method dancing, academic thinking. The female dancers, who had been trained from their early youth, became in the words of Gaxotte "machines moulded against nature". It is true that they still created beauty, but their dance did not express emotions the way it had done before; some of their movements had more to do with pure acrobatics. This world of exhausting classes, perpetual tiredness, sweat and tears followed by renewed effort is transmitted to us by

MOVE

21

Louise Robin-Challan

After a strike of the corps de ballet "without precedent in the records of the Opéra" the brand new dancer's union obtained from the management a pay increase allowing dancers to finally lead a decent life and liberating them from the degrading system of "protection" of the poorest by the richest. filled with old gentlemen to whom the backstage foyer has long since ceased to hold any new and exciting surprises. Things only changed at the beginning of the 20th century.

ir

fi

rs

the

T

First, in 1912, the financial situation of the dancers improved. After a strike of the corps de ballet "without precedent in the records of the Opéra" the brand new dancer's union obtained from the management a pay increase allowing dancers to finally lead a decent life and liberating them from the degrading system of "protection" of the poorest by the richest.

Dancers can now build a career based on talent and work. Furthermore, because of the democratization and the evolution of dance and moral standards, they are no longer perceived as erotic objects. Even today, dance is still a difficult art, but now, the seeming fragility of the female dancer has to stand up only to the mixture or the alternation of the requirements of classical ballet and contemporary dance.

y e h

the lucid and cruelly observant genius of Edgar Degas. His famous dance figures, first of all aerial, childlike, transfigured by the lights, are also small "rats" with their worn-looking little faces, out of breath and exhausted after the monotonous rehearsals. Their mothers look even more destitute than at the beginning of the century and are ostensibly and systematically selling their daughters to once-important barons or upwardly mobile young men.

During the Second Empire, the dancer's foyer at the Opéra practically turned into an extension of the Jockey Club welcoming business men, writers, speculators on exchange business and politicians. While the life of the population at large became ever more inhuman, the rich middle-class and those occupying important government posts continued to be faithful to the ballet and to subject dancers to their amorous whims, like baron Haussmann with Francine Cellier, the Duke of Momy, Persigny, the Count of Walewsky, the Marquis of Caux, the Duke of Hamilton... They call the dancers by their first name, using tu, pinch them in the waist, have an overbearing manner standing in front of them and considering them through their pince-nez as if to assess a mare's worth. Thus Count Daru, the President of the Jockey Club, dominated the scene from the middle of the room "like a sultan in a seraglio". And to underline their contempt for the dancers, the regulars who feel just as much at ease as in a salon talk to each other about music and the arts. A caricature of the archetypal mother of the Opéra, taking advantage of her daughter's beauty, is given in the colourful and humorous contemporary novel "Les Petites Cardinal" by Ludovic Halévy, in which the eponymous dancers are forever escorted by their venerable mother, the buxom, majestic Madame Cardinal!

As for the dancers, who appear in an ever shorter tutu, they continue until the end of the century to lift their legs in front of a stalls

1992

e dancer s h t l l by ca

AUTHOR

a n t

, e m

th wa i st

, ha

v e a n ov e r b e a

rin g m

a n n ing e r sta nd

s i d e r i n g them through their pince-nez.. .

e

in

con

in

front f the m o

nd

u, p t inch g n i s the ,u m MOVE

a

23

AUTHOR

Théophile Gautier

TRANSLATOR

GAUTIER ON DANCE

Ivor Guest

1837

MOVE Théophile Gautier was a poet, novelist, critic, and journalist whose influence was strongly felt in the period of changing sensibilities in French literature—from the early Romantic period to the aestheticism and naturalism of the end of the 19th century.

Gautier on Dance is one of the primary sources of knowledge of the flowering of French Romantic ballet is the long series of descriptive reviews which Théophile Gautier wrote for the daily press. These cover a whole era of ballet, beginning with notices of those arch-rivals, Marie Taglioni and Fanny Elssler, representatives of the two aspects of romanticism in dance, in the 1830s, and closing with two of the early performances of Coppélia, separated by the trauma of the Franco-Prussian War, the Siege of Paris and the Commune. Gautier was much more than an observer earning his daily bread as a journalist. He was a poet, one of France's finest, and a poet blessed with a painter's eye and able to capture the magic of a moment in a telling phrase. He wrote, too, from a foundation of practical experience, writing many ballet scenarios, six of which (Giselle among them) reached the stage, and had a sensitive understanding of the dancer's life and art, gained through his life-long friendship with the ballerina Carlotta Grisi. His reviews have often been quoted, but not until now has a compilation covering the entire period of his activity been published, even in the original French. Taken as a whole, in this translation by the noted dance scholar Ivor Guest, they present a view of French ballet at its most brilliant period, seen through the eyes of surely the most qualified and entertaining guide one could wish for.

His writings on dance allow us to see a clearer picture and record of Romantic ballet but also allow us to see the ballet through the lens of an educated male audience. We can thus analyze the male gaze of the 19th century though such opinionated reviews as those by Gautier.

The Romantic ballet is defined primarily by an era in ballet in which the ideas of Romanticism in art and literature influenced the creation of ballets. The era occurred during the early to mid 19th century primarily at the Théâtre de l'Académie Royale de Musique of the Paris Opéra Ballet and Her Majesty's Theatre in London. It is typically considered to have begun with the 1827 début in Paris of the ballerina Marie Taglioni in the ballet La Sylphide, and to have reached its zenith with the premiere of the divertissement Pas de Quatre staged by the Ballet Master Jules Perrot in London in 1845. The Romantic ballet had no immediate end, but rather a slow decline. Arthur Saint-Léon's 1870 ballet Coppélia is considered to be the last work of the Romantic Ballet.

25

AUTHOR

Théophile Gautier

TRANSLATOR

Ivor Guest

THE SPANISH DANCERS Unless you are a fossilized dugong or manatee buried deep below the tertiary layer, you have undoubtedly seen the Spanish dancers—that charming couple, Camprubi and Dolores Serral. If you made the dreadful mistake of not booking a stall or a box at the Variétés when those two sparkling butterflies were brushing the tips of their wings in a burst of sequins on the dusty boards that had nearly given way beneath the heavy clogs of that great beast Odry, the Antonioüs of the cooks, you can only beat your breast with a rock like St Jerome as a sign of repentance, and hang yourself firmly on a strong nail with a noose around your neck to teach your head the weight of your feet, for you have missed one of the most ravishing and poetic performances in the world.

You know what a hideous sight an ordinary male dancer is—a great awkward creature with a long red neck swelling with muscles, a stereotyped grin that is as irremovable as a judge, expressionless eyes light the enamel eyes of mechanical dolls, the thick calves of a parish beadle, arms like carriage shafts, and the great angular movements with elbows and feet placed at right angles, the airs of Adonis and Apollo, and the ronds de jambe, pirouettes and other gestures of mechanical puppets.

Nothing could be more dreadful, and I really cannot resist throwing a shower of apples and hard boiled eggs instead of the rain of flowers customary at the Opéra. The dancing of Señor Camprubi is as pleasing a sight as that of a woman, yet he preserves a heroic and gentlemanly expression in his poses that has nothing in common with the foolish affection of French male dancers.

And ballet girls, what a sad lot they are! There is enough ugliness, misery and poverty of form to move you to pity. They are as thin as lizards that have been fasting for six months, and when you inspect them without your opera glasses, their bosoms, which are hardly perceptible amid the fragile swirling of their arms and legs, make them look like spiders disturbed in their webs and madly scuttling away. I do not know if you have taken it into your head to make a special study of a ballet girl's neck and chest. When lit from below, the clavicles form a ghastly transverse projection, attached to which like the strings on the bridge of a violin, are four or five tendons stretched to breaking point on which Paganini could easily have played a concerto. The larynx, given greater prominence by the lack of flesh, forms a protuberance resembling the lump in a turkey's neck that stands out like a nut that has been swallowed whole, and one looks in vain for the slightest rise int he flat plain of their charms that suggests the presence of what poets in their jargon call "the twin hillocks", "the two little snowy mountains" and other fine and vaguely anacreontic expressions. As for lower limbs, they are so absolutely disproportionate in their thickness that it seems as if the upper part of a consumptive girl's body has been sawn off and attached to the legs of a Grenadier guardsman.

Dolores has a plump bosom, rounded arms, slender legs and tiny feet, and in addition to being a very good dancer, is very pretty. If any

1837

woman is rigorously required to be beautiful, it must surely be a dancer.

Everyone has the right to be ugly with the exception of actors and actresses and dancers. A very talented actress can get away with being merely pleasingly attractive and graceful, but it is absolutely essential for a dancer to be very beautiful. Dance is a wholly sensual and material art that speaks neither to the intelligence nor to the hearty, but is directed only to the eyes. Stand on the tips of your toes, spin like a top for a quarter of an hour, raise the leg towards the ceiling—what will all that mean to me if I am shocked by the sight before me?

A woman who appears half-naked in a flimsy gauze skirt and tights to pose before your opera glasses in the glare of eighty footlights with no other purpose than to display her shoulder, bosom, arms and legs in a series of attitudes that show them off to best advantage, seems amazingly impudent if she is not as beautiful as Phaenna, Agaia or Paithea. I am not very interested in seeing an ugly figure morosely jigging about in the corner of some ballet. The Opéra should be a sort of gallery of living statues in which all types of beauty are combined. Dancers, through the perfection of their figures and the grace of their attitudes, should serve to maintain and develop the sense of beauty that is vanishing day by day.

They should be models, selected as carefully as possible, whose task is to appear before the public and instruct it in the ideas of elegance and good grace. To be a dancer is not enough to know how to perform the steps, jump high and manipulate a scarf. Agility is only a secondary quality.

Dolores and Comprubi have nothing in common with our own dancers. They have a passion, a vitality and an attack of which you can have no idea. They give the impression that they are dancing, not just anyhow so as to earn their fee, like other dancers, but for their dancing, nothing that appears copied or smacks of the classroom. Their dancing is an expression of temperament rather than a conforming to a set of principles; every gesture is a redolent of the fiery Southern blood. Such dancing as this with blonde hair would be a complete contradiction.

How is it that such hot-blooded and impetuous dancing, with its exaggerated movements and its free gestures, is in no way indecent, whereas the slightest écart of a French ballet girl is shockingly immodest? The answer is that the cachucha is a national dance of a primitive character and such barefaced simplicity that is has become chaste. It is so openly sensual, so boldly amorous, and its provocation coquetry and delirious exuberance are so full of the jobs of youth that it is easy to forgive the very Andalusian impetuosity of some of its mannerisms. It is a charming poem written in twistings of the hips, sidelong expressions, a foot advanced and then withdrawn, all joyfully accompanied by the chatter of castanets and having more to say on its own than many volumes of erotic verse.

There is one position that is ravishingly graceful. It is the moment when the dancer, half-kneeling, with back proudly arches, head thrown back, a large red rose unfolding in her beautiful half-loosened black hair,

MOVE

27

AUTHOR

Théophile Gautier

arms dreamily extended and only gently shaking the castanets, smiles over her shoulder at the lover who is approaching to steal a kiss. A more prettily designed group could not be imagined. It has nothing of the ridiculous and insipid grace of comic opera. The cavalier has in his movements a facility and an alert and proud nonchalance. He is as supple, precise, sinuous and lively as a young jaguar. The lady is young, light, free in her poses, forming her attitudes with admirable clarity, producing her sparkling smile only when the moment is opportune, barely raising the sequined folds of her basquine above the knee, and never indulging in those awful écarts of the leg that make a woman looks like an open compass.

It is strange that this delightful couple has not been engaged at the Opéra, for it would have been very easy to find employment for them.

Those national dances, so original in character, would have introduced a wonderful variety into the choreographic repertory, which by nature is so monotonous. In my opinion the Opéra should seek out the finest dancers in the would, anyone with a reputation in this field. Can one believe, for example, that a bayadère rôle would not assume a very lively attraction if performed by a genuine bayadère from Calcutta or Masulipatam? Why not have almehs in the theatre in the Rue Le Peletier?" Our new relations with the East should enable us to obtain a few without any great expense or difficulty.

M. Lubbert, who was once Director of the Opéra and, having visited the Gateways to the Levant, is a good judge of such matters, declares that nothing can compare with the perfection of their dancing girls.

However, do not jump to the conclusion that we are asking that Chinese rôles should be played exclusively by Chinese, for our acceptance of convention in art is too deeply ingrained to descend to such puerilities.

But certainly the choreographic art, being a mute and positive art, lends itself more than any other to an innovation such as this, which can only add spice to the deadly boring framework of ballet. The saltarello and the tarantella danced by Romans and Neapolitans, the cachucha, the jota aragonesa and the zapateado by Spaniards, and the scarf dances of almehs and bayadères would surely offer an attraction that is lacking when they are performed by ordinary dancers. But while waiting for the almehs, the Opéra should have retained the Spaniards and brought more of them from Madrid, where, it is said, there are even better dancers to be found.

La Charte de 1830, April 18th 1837.

TRANSLATOR

Ivor Guest

1837

RETURN OF R E L S S L E Y FANN E T E P M E T A IN L Mlle Fanny Elssler has just made her reappearance in the rôle of Alcine in La Tempete. The ballet of La Tempete is a ballet, and that is the only good thing to be said about it. It also has the distinction of spoiling one of the finest operatic subjects one could wish for. Why Oberon is robe found in this piece instead of Prospero is a complete mystery.

Oberon is inseparable from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and cannot appear without his wife, Titania. Alcina, that prestigious creation of Ariosto, seems completely our of place on the Island of Tempests alongside Caliban, and I very much doubt whether Fernando will make her forger the brilliant knight, Ruggiero. But we should not press our observations on the intrinsic merits of the scenario any further, for the literature of the legs is hardly a subject for contention. So let us quickly turn our attention to Fanny Elssler. A volley of applause broke our when her gauze veil parted, allowing us to see the seductive enchantress, and no one doubted that the virtuous Fernando would soon be unfaithful to the memory of Lea, Oberon’s protégée.

The dancing of Fanny Elssler is completely independent of academic principles. It has a character all its own which sets her apart from other ballerinas. Hers is nor the ethereal, virginal grace of Taglioni, it is something much more human which appeals more sharply to the senses.

Mlle Taglioni is a Christian dancer, if one can use such an expression about an art that is proscribed by Catholicism. She floats like a spirit in ;:i transparent mist of white muslin with which she loves to surround herself, and she resembles a contented soul scarcely bending the petals of celestial flowers with the tips of her rosy feet. Fanny Elssler is a completely pagan dancer. She recalls the muse Terpsichore with her tambourine and her tunic slit to reveal her thigh and caught up with

MOVE

clasps of gold. When she fearlessly arches her back, throwing her voluptuous arms behind her, she evokes a vision of those beautiful figures from Herculaneum or Pompeii standing out in white relief against a black background and accompanying their steps with sonorous, echoing crotala. Virgil’s verse, Crispum sub crotalo docta movere latus instinctively springs to mind. The Syrian slave girl he so loved to see dancing beneath the pale trellis of the little inn must have had much in common with Fanny Elssler.

Undoubtedly spirituality is something to be respected, but in the dance a few concessions can be made to reality. After all, dancing has no other purpose but to display beautiful bodies in graceful poses and develop lines that are pleasing to the eye. It is silent rhythm, music made visible. Dancing is ill suited for expressing metaphysical ideals; it expresses only the passions. Love, desire with all its coquetries, the aggressive male and the gently resisting woman—these are the subjects of all primitive dances.

Fanny Elssler has grasped this truth perfectly. She has dared more than any other dancer of the Opéra. She was the first to introduce the audacious Cachucha to these modest boards without sacrificing anything of its native flavour. She dances with her whole body, from the top of her head to the tips of her toes, and so she is in the true sense a beautiful ballerina, whereas the others are nothing but pairs of legs thrashing about beneath static torsos.

Le Presse, September 11th 1837.

29

bo le

ho

l ba l l e ri na ,

es, r to

au

be

th

tifu

a

n d i s o is s e h

n

he

with h

w r e

e tru e s e n s e

a

of

S h e danc es

d y,

fro

o the t i p dt s

m

h ea

th

p o f he o t r e

wh

s the o a e r e

FANNY ELSSLER 23 JUNE 1810–27 NOV 1884 Elssler was an Austrian ballerina of the Romantic Period. She was popular for playing exotic roles of people from other lands.

Elssler was not Spanish, but her performances of the Cachucha were filled with fire and sensual life. She sailed to New York and performed in 1840. Elssler is considered by Lillian Moore to have been "the most illustrious Sylphide ever to dance the role in America", with the final scene bringing many audience members to tears. Pictured to the left here is a drawing of Elssler dancing La Cachucha by Devéria, Achille, 1800-1857.

e

rs

a re

.

st

at

os

in

th

of l e gs t

a r h

ou t b en b a

ea

i pa g bu t

g

not h i n rs

sh

ot h

WHO IS FANNY ELSSLER?

ic t o r s

AUTHOR

Deborah Jowitt

HEROISM IN THE HAREM She was Persian perhaps, or Indian, or Moorish. Although she was almost certainly in thrall to some man—a denizen of a pasha's harem or a temple dancer subject to a high priest's whims—she fought heroically for her chastity and her right to choose a mate. When ruse or defiance failed, her own death became the ultimate weapon and bargaining point. Spirited, provocatively beautiful enough to put that chastity in jeopardy, she usually won in the end—not only the hand of her lover in marriage (or, if all else failed, union beyond the grave in a stunning apotheosis), but the hearts of all spectators. Whether kadine or bayadère, she wore beribboned doth slippers and danced on her toes. Her costume was a full-skirted dress with a nipped-in waist and a bodice that bared her bosom and shoulders; for whatever else she might be pretending to be, she was, above all, a ballerina of the nineteenth century, the sylph's more accessible cousin.

. . . for whatever else she might be pretending to be, she was, above all, a ballerina of the nineteenth century, the sylph's more accessible cousin.

The ballet landscapes she roamed were the domain of pageantry, opulence, mystery, barbaric customs, and ravishing women. With the advent of Romanticism, choreographers and ballet librettists­—like artists in other fields—turned to the East, much as they did to supernatural worlds. The Romantic temper bred images more seductive than those in the ballet dramas of the early nineteenth century and far removed from the decorative Orientalism of the eighteenth century: the

1988

nobility-in-turbans dances—as in Jean Philippe Rameau's Les Indes Galantes—or cavorting Siamese "grotesques" or the porcelain figures come to life in Jean Georges Noverre's Les Fêtes Chinoises.

Authenticity was never an issue. Although Westerners have been fascinated by the East for centuries, what one writer has referred to as "Europe's collective daydream of the Orient" has not always depended on a familiarity with Eastern customs or an understanding of Eastern philosophies. More often "The Orient" has designated a pleasure garden for the imagination—an Orient restructured to fire European longings and justify European conquest.

During the first part of the nineteenth century, the East on which these visions were based rarely included distant China and Japan; it was a nearer, more comprehensible Orient that clustered around the Mediterranean and flowed enticingly into the Caucasus, Persia, and India.

The Orient began just east of Venice: present-day Yugoslavia, Albania, and Greece were all part of an exotic Ottoman empire. Spain, with its strains of Moorish culture and its Gypsies, was as "Eastern" as Morocco and Algiers.

The public’s interest in the ancient cultures of Egypt and Syria was roused by the findings of archaeologists and other scholars who accompanied Napoleon's armies into those countries in 1798. Later, Greece's heroic struggles against the Turks stirred European hearts and engendered a rash of art and literature. By the middle of the nineteenth century, most of the major works of Asian literature had been translated into various European languages; among these were Kalidasa's play Shakuntala and The One Thousand and One Nights—the latter to be ransacked by composers, playwrights, choreographers, and vaudeville impresarios for years to come.

More often " The Orient" has designated a pleasure garden for the imagination—an Orient restructured to fire European longings and justify European conquest.

AUTHOR

Deborah Jowitt

"Never," wrote Victor Hugo in the preface to his 1829 volume of poetry, Les Orientales, "have so many intellects excavated the great abyss of Asia." In some, the riches of the East excited ambitions for empire—in others, tales of exotic splendor and curious customs spiced escapist dreams; for the nineteenth-century artists, excavating the Orient meant digging into their own psyches. Eastern mysticism held a possibility of spiritual regeneration to those soured on Christianity. To those put off by increasing industrialization, the East offered visions of unspoiled nature, of vital, sensual temperaments free of the constraints of Western civilization. In the wildness, the willfulness, the strangeness, the cruelty of what they saw or read about, they recognized the contours of their own interior landscapes and, in turn, projected onto it their inchoate longings. As Raymond Schwab has written, "The more superficial used the Orient primarily for

1988

The fictional East was a cultural marketplace, in which artists borrowed freely from each other.

Cultivated people of the day could easily become expert in its lore.

The fictional East was a cultural marketplace, in which artists borrowed freely from each other. Cultivated people of the day could easily become expert in its lore. Looking at the several paintings that Delacroix based on Byron's long poem of revenge The Giaour, they would have understood the import behind, say, a scene in which two enraged men in billowing robes rein their plunging horses close to each ocher the better to wield their daggers, This public would have known how closely Albert's ballet based on The Corsair followed Byron's scenario and how Joseph Mazilier's version diverged from it. Those who saw Carlo Blasis's pre-Romantic ballet Mokanna at La Scala or Jules Perrot's Lallah Rookh, or The Rose of Lahore, or heard Robert Schumann's Paradise and the Peri would undoubtedly have known that all three were drawn from episodes or tales in Thomas Moore's hugely popular Orientalist odyssey Lallah Rookh.

They judged these works more in relation to each other than to any real East. Some of those who saw the ballet La Péri (1843) at the Paris In the wildness, the willfulness, the strangeness, Opéra might even have noticed that one backthe cruelty of what they saw or read about, they drop—depicting the view of Cairo from the hero's harem—was modeled on a painting by Georges recognized the contours of their own interior Antoine Prosper Marilhat, but they wouldn't have landscapes and, in turn, projected onto it their questioned librettist Théophile Gautier's reasons inchoate longings. for locating this tale of a Persian fairy in Egypt.

As Thomas Moore's biographer Howard Mumford Jones said, speaking of Moore's Lallah Rookh, "What matter if to the general imagination India and Egypt, the Turks costumes, the more profound as fancy dress and the Parsees, the Bosphorus and the Vale of Cashmere were indistinfor the soul." Some, like Goethe or Hugo, were guishable parts of a vague, rich universe of dreams?" armchair voyagers, devouring the profusion of travel literature; others, like Flaubert, Byron, Delacroix, and de Nerval traveled in the East, adjusting the discrepancies between the real Orient and their private visions of it.

"For me," wrote de Nerval ruefully to his friend Théophile Gautier, "a lotus is only a kind of onion." Yet even while seeming to submit to the East, they possessed and transformed it as thoroughly as did the colonizers.

Delacroix filled sketchbooks with beautifully detailed drawings of Moroccan buildings and people, but a great anecdotal canvas like The Massacre at Chios is wholly imagined, invested with his own vision—both personal and political—of disorder, random violence, and loss of focus.

The public who filled the theaters and read the books and stared at the paintings were thrilled by this exotic East. Hugo's Les Orientales went through fourteen editions in a month. Byron's epic poem The Corsair, the author's publisher was pleased to inform him, sold ten thousand copies the first day it was printed, in 1814.

us

ap gr

io

Le sérail!... Cette nuit il tressaillait de joie.

Au son des gais tambours, sur des tapis de soie, Les sultanes dansaient som son lambris sacré; Et, tel qu'un roi couvert de ses joyaux de fête, Superbe, il se montrait aux en/ants du prophète,

De six mille tiles pari!

Livides, l'oeil éteint, de notirs cheveux chargées, Ces têtes couronnaient, sur les créneaux rangées, Les terrasses de rose et de jasmin en fleur!

Triste comme un ami, comme lui consolante, La lune, astre des morts, sur leur pâleur sanglante

Répandait sa douce pâleur.

ses.

Cho

do

re o

ic

e x t o u ticis o d m le o in d s ju r d e h

(In English) "The harem!... Tonight it quivered with joy.

To the sound of gay drums, on silken carpets, The sultanas danced beneath its inviolate roof; Like a king superbly decked with festal jewels, It displayed itself to the children of the prophet,

Adorned with six thousand heads!

Livid, eyes extinguished, heavy with blade hair, These heads, ranged along the battlements, crowned The terraces flowering with rose and jasmine!

Sad as a friend, as consoling as he, The moon, star of the dead, poured her pale sweetness.

Over their bleeding pallor.

35

AUTHOR

Deborah Jowitt

So begins the second part of Hugo's "Les Têtes de Sérail"—a poem lamenting a Greek defeat at the hands of the Turks. Luxury and remorseless cruelty, blood and flowers, life and death temporarily resolve in a rueful, yet voluptuous vision.

But such a vision could not be fully realized by nineteenth-century balletmakers. A certain prudery—both genuine and hypocriticalmilitated against it. "It is the fashion now co be virtuous and Christian; people have taken a turn for it," jeered Gautier in the preface co his sensational novel Mademoiselle de Maupin. In no theater would the public be likely to see such savage male grace as that depicted in Henri Regnault's painting of a black man, bloody sword in hand, standing over a decapitated body, or the voluptuous naked women being put to the sword in Delacroix's The Death of Sardanapalus. Painted or described, such visions were tolerated; alive and moving onstage, they would have been threatening to morality.

Painted or described, such visions were tolerated; alive and moving onstage, they would have been threatening to morality.

Too, the earlier public expected to see the dancer's virtuosity in ballon, in the sensitive use of pointe technique that Marie Taglioni had made the new standard. At the Opéra, they expected some of the order and logic that had dominated the neoclassic ballets of the first quarter of the century. Later, in the St. Petersburg of Marius Petipa's heyday, mandatory displays of supported pointework and divertissements in

1988 classical style made realism-in-fantasy even less possible. Choreographic Orientalism, then, lay primarily in the subject matter and decor, in certain beguiling possibilities for dances and tableaux, and in the roles assumed by the dancers.

Choreographers doled out exoticism in judicious doses. The backdrops were often modeled after paintings by minor Orientalists, but the music was thoroughly Western—tuneful and buoyant. While costumes for male dancers and some of the secondary women might be splendidly, if inauthentically, Oriental, the ballerina always wore her bouffant knee-length or calf-length tutu, garnished, perhaps, with fugitively "Eastern" trim. Carlotta Grisi's harem costume for La Péri (in which she played both the fairy of the title and Leila, the dead slave whose form the péri assumed) consisted of a full skirt and a pale blue bodice cut like an Indian dancer's choli to bare the midriff, but with the space between skirt and bodice filled in with flesh-colored net.

However, for all their charming pas and happily-ever-after plots, the ballets had the power to evoke for their audiences the darker, crueler, more sensual Orient of art and literature. In spite of Gautier's dismissal of ballet as a vehicle for serious themes ("It is not easy," he complained, "to write for legs."), the letter he wrote to Gerard de Nerval describing his ballet La Péri wafts in a vision worthy of Delacroix: In the interior of a harem with marble columns, mosaic pavements, fretted walls like lace, in the midst of perfume rising in clouds, jets of water falling like pearly dew, a handsome young man, rich as a prince of The Thousand and One Nights, nonchalantly dreams, his elbow deep in a lion's mane, his foot resting on the throat of one of those Abyssinians whose skins are always cold, even in the gust of the fiery desert wind: a kind of oriental Don Juan, his senses satiated, but not his desires.

MOVE

choreography—Bronislava Nijinska 1913 danced by the Mariinsky Theater Ballet—2013 37

Orientalism provided nineteenthcentury ballet with a body of themes and motifs. You find chem in both early Romantic works, like Filippo Taglioni's The Revolt in the Harem (1833), and ones made toward the end of the century, like Marius Petipa's forgotten Zoraiya, or The Moorish Woman in Spain (1881).

Playwrights, librettists, and vaudeville producers appropriated some of the same fantasies. For almost a century, the stages of opera houses and popular theaters— in America as well as Europe—teemed with enslaved heroines, treacherous rivals, disguises, fateful talismans, lovers offering to sacrifice their lives or their purity for each other, intrigues, threats of hideous punishment, opium dreams, spectacular scenic effects, and, of course, dances galore.

New plots had co be concocted and old ones reshaped in order co make the harem a domain of action—a thrilling place as well as a picturesque one. Gautier's scenario for Sacountala (staged in 1858 by Marius Petipa's brother Lucien) dispensed with the religious elements that imbued Kalidasa's play, made the heroine a temple dancer, condensed the action of years into a few days, and added a vengeful female rival co thwart further the heroine's claims to the love of King Dushmata—thus transforming, as Gautier's biographer Edwin Binney remarks disapprovingly, "... a long psychological study into an agreeable fairy tale." The version of Byron's The Corsair concocted for Joseph Mazilier's ballet in 1856 is the one char has persisted, through many reworkings, into the twentieth century. This may be because Mazilier

and his collaborator, Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges, had the sense to see that if the heroine, Medora, is the beloved wife of Conrad the pirate (as she was in Byron's poem and in Albert's 1837 ballet) and plays little part in the action except co die at home of natural causes, the ballet public is being denied some potential thrills, (At the same time, it is of necessity denied the complex moral dilemmas Byron provided for the hero, since these don't translate easily into ballet terms.) In Mazilier's scenario, Medora is a comely slave girl with a flair for dancing who takes Conrad's fancy in the marketplace just as she is being sold co the lustful Seyd Pasha, Now, along with daring raids, treachery, capture, and escape, the audience can revel in the lovers' plight: will Medora yield to the Pasha co save Conrad from execution for piracy? Can Conrad accept such a sacrifice? Will the ruse of the heroic concubine Gulnare succeed? (She may. He can't. It does. And after a stupendous shipwreck, the audience is gifted with a happy ending.)

If the roles of harem woman and temple dancer were favored, it was not only because of the aura of glamour and intimations of promiscuity that surrounded them, but because of the extra piquancy the characters' status as chattels gave to their bravery and resourcefulness, The heroines of this strain of ballets are usually dominated, or about to be dominated, by a man whose rule is malign. As the ballet audience knew—with a frisson of horrified delight—Oriental girls who disobeyed their masters were likely to be burned alive or sewn up in a sack and thrown into the sea.

For almost a century, the stages of opera houses and popular theaters—in America as well as Europe—teemed with enslaved heroines, treacherous rivals, disguises, fateful talismans, lovers offering to sacrifice their lives or their purity for each other, intrigues, threats of hideous punishment, opium dreams, spectacular scenic effects, and, of course, dances galore.

MOVE

39

AUTHOR

Deborah Jowitt

1988 The melodramatic complications in the heroine's pursuit of happiness dwarfed the hero's more manageable dilemma of love versus duty, or "my property versus your property"; he was a free man to start with—often a prince, a pirate, or a bandit, subject to few restraints beyond his own code of honor. And only in the Jean Coralli–Théophile Gautier La Peri (1843) and the Marius Petipa–S. N. Khudekov La Bayadère (1877) were the heroes the languid and perturbed dreamers we associate with the Romantic movement—men whom no reality can truly satisfy.

The courage and initiative that these Orientalist ballerinas display is remarkable, In the ballet Brahma, which Hippolyte Monplaisir created at La Scala in 1868 for Amalia Ferraris, there is a scene in which the heroine imperiously reveals herself as a priestess—shielding the sleeping Brahma from his enemies. In a critic's view of the great dramatic ballerina Virginia Zucchi as Padmana, "The fierce, expressive eyes chat shine like rubies in the dark, the sculptured pose of the body, the imperiously regal gesture transport the spectator into the azure regions of the ideal, into a fairyland among the passionate sultanas of the Thousand and One Nights." The dreamed-up Oriental woman, fired by passion, was apparently capable of a daring beyond that of the proper European lady, and certainly beyond that of the real sultana, whiling away the long hours of her indolent and restricted life.

The dreamed-up Oriental woman, fired by passion, was apparently capable of a daring beyond that of the proper European lady, and certainly beyond that of the real sultana, whiling away the long hours of her indolent and restricted life.

Consider, too, an ancestor of Brahma, Le Dieu et la Bayadère (known in England as The Maid of Cashmere). Concocted in Paris in 1830 by composer Daniel François Esprit Auber, the well-known playwright and librettist Eugene Scribe, and Filippo Taglioni, the work was designed co show off the seductive spirituality of Taglioni's daughter, Marie. The structure—an opera-ballet with a tenor for the hero—was hardly innovative, but the heroine, however victimized, did not behave like the acquiescent, sorrowing victims of early nineteenth-century ballets, and she played a more fiery role than the heroine of Goethe's ballad "Der Gott und die Bajadere," the source of the plot. The poem tells of the god Shiva, wandering the earth in disguise to

learn the ways of men. A temple dancer (and hence, in the Western view, a prostitute) offers him a true and unselfish love, and when he dies-or seems to-she casts herself on his funeral pyre. By this act, she is redeemed from her moral waywardness and ascends to heaven in the arms of the god. The operaballet was the first new work staged at the Paris Opéra after the July Revolution of 1830, and, while it cannot be considered overtly political, it does show a heroine determined to resist a tyrannical government official-in this case a judge who abuses his power.

Because the dancer, Zoloé, spurns the judge, mischievously pointing to a handsome stranger (now, for some reason, Brahma in disguise, rather than Shiva) as the kind of man she might fancy, the enraged judge sentences her to imprisonment. The Unknown heroically takes Zoloé punishment on himself, and she, not to be outdone, offers herself co the judge in exchange for his freedom. (A mortal hero would refuse to accept her sacrifice, but Brahma is testing the power of the heroine's love, and the bargain is struck.)

Soldiers enter and offer a reward for information leading to the capture of a certain "stranger," who faces execution. Anyone found sheltering him will be punished, but when Zoloé realizes that the one they seek is the mysterious man she has already saved once, she unhesitatingly spirits him away and hides him in her hut, where she vows her love to him. When soldiers arrive, she points him toward a secret cave and will not reveal his whereabouts.

Cyril Beaumont's description of the end of the ballet is not an eyewitness account, but it captures the mixture of mystery, terror, spectacle, and heroism that the final apotheosis must have conveyed: The captain orders her to be seized and burnt. Soldiers chop the door into pieces and build a pyre on which Zoloé is placed. The wood is fired and immediately thunder rolls and lightning flashes.

Zoloé is surrounded by leaping flames when the Unknown, now seen to be the God Brahma, shining like the sun, appears at her side and takes her in his arms. Together they rise toward the clouds where gleams the Indian paradise.

The clouds dose over them and the lovers pass from view.

This dramatic and heartrending spectacle muse have been a success: it was performed at the Paris Opéra on and off for thirty-six years, and August Bournonville created a version of it for the Royal Opera House in Copenhagen.

MOVE

41

QUOTE

Howard Mumford Jones

1988

WHAT MATTE GENERAL IMAG AND EGYPT, TH THE PARSEES, TH AND THE VALE WERE INDISTI PARTS OF A V UNIVERSE O

MOVE

ER IF TO THE GINATION INDIA HE TURKS AND HE BOSPHORUS OF CASHMERE INGUISHABLE VAGUE, RICH OF DREAMS? 43

AUTHOR

Deborah Jowitt

The ballet heroines, with their exotic and perfumed names—Zoloé, Zulma, Gulnare, Medora, Nikiya, Niriti, Nisia, Leila, Padmana, Sacountala—were nor only brave, they were endowed by their male creators with certain of

The paradox undoubtedly arose from the fact that, although women were second-class citizens, ballerinas rook precedence over male dancers in the esteem of public and critics.

the qualities usually reserved for Romantic heroes. The paradox undoubtedly arose from the fact that, although women were secondclass citizens, ballerinas rook precedence over male dancers in the esteem of public and critics. In acquiring time onstage, they acquired power as well. I don't mean to imply that these pretty, essentially simple heroines resembled the tormented and skeptical protagonist of Georges Sand's scandalous novel Lélia (1833), who dominated the men in her life and appropriated for herself all the characteristics of the Romantic hero. The

The ballet women did, however, fight for their liberty, assert the primacy of their desires, and refuse to be ruled by any restraints but their own will, even though, because they were women, their will was to submit themselves to the mate they chose, and "liberty" simply meant married happiness. ballet women did, however, fight for their liberty, assert the primacy of their desires, and refuse to be ruled by any restraints but their own will, even though, because they were women, their will was to submit themselves to the mate they chose, and "liberty" simply meant married happiness. The eponymous stolen-by-Gypsies-at-birth heroine of Mazilier's Paquita (1846) will not dance when the Gypsy chieftain, who virtually owns her, orders her to; she will do so when he understands that her dancing will please Lucien d'Hervilly and decides that she wishes to please him. Even in Filippo Taglioni's somewhat atypical The Revolt in the Harem, the heroine does not question the institution of the harem. She leads her fellow concubines in rebellion in order to protest the treachery chat Mahomet, the king of Granada, has employed in annexing her, and to assert her right to marry her betrothed. In the end, the liberated

1988 women (who've now learned how to shoot) agree to serve the king as troops—and presumably as paramours as well—if he'll treat chem with respect.

To the male balletomane of the nineteenth century, the Orientalist heroine's blend of boldness and submissiveness was no paradox, but a compliment to his gender: that a woman so potent would inevitably submit to a man's domination added to the man's own strength. Nor was her courage seen as comparable to the manly variety. Lord Byron, traveling through Spain early in the century, was pleased by the demure appearance of Augustina, the Maid of Zaragoza, who, during a battle of the Napoleonic Wars, had reputedly stepped over the dead and dying of an entire artillery unit in order to fire a cannon and rouse the citizens. His lines on her in Childe Harold could scarcely reflect more accurately the acceptable contemporary view of ballet's heroic harem women and bandit queens and lady pirates: Yet are Spain's maids no race of Amazons, But formed for all the witching arts of love; Though thus in arms they emulate her sons, And in the horrid phalanx dare to move, 'Tis but the tender fierceness of the dove, Pecking the hand that hovers o'er her mate.

The titillating blend of "masculine" strength and "feminine" voluptuousness found its most extreme expression in those ballets that required a woman co adopt male attire— Le Diable Amoureux, foe instance, in which the pretty demon Urielle did her tempting disguised as a page. A woman in travesty, her curves revealed by tight breeches, was a feast for the eyes of the jaded sensualist. D' Albert, the voluptuary hero of Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin, inflamed with desire for the disguised heroine, "Théodore," apostrophizes hermaphroditism: This son of Hermes and Aphrodite is, in fact, one of the sweetest creations of Pagan genius. Nothing in the world can be imagined more ravishing than these two bodies, harmoniously blended together... To an exclusive worshipper of form, can there be a more delightful uncertainty than that into which you are thrown by the sight of the back, the ambiguous loins, and the strong, delicate legs . . . ?

In order to give the influential subscribers in the boxes of the Opéra ample views of strong, delicate legs and not-so-ambiguous loins, management decreed that the Spanish

MOVE Gypsies who flourished their capes about their partners in Mazilier's Paquita be female corps members in disguise, as were the sailors in the same choreographer's Betty. By 1870 in St.-Léon's Coppélia, this emasculated and seductive vision reached its apogee (or nadir, depending on your point of view): a woman (Eugénie Fiocre) played the youthful hero, Franz.

... the female dancer herself embodied two paradoxes: she was both a hardworking professional and a potential mistress, a poetic image and a panting, perspiring body.

As noted in the previous chapter, the female dancer herself embodied two paradoxes: she was both a hardworking professional and a potential mistress, a poetic image and a panting, perspiring body. And just as ideas of strength and submissiveness married curiously in these ballets, so did the themes of female sensuality and female chastity. Even these lush, exotic fairy tales acknowledged chat the imagined division between flesh and spirit had become a large and troubling chasm.

With a naïveté that is as couching as it is amusing, the hero of Felicien Champsaur's 1888 novel L'Amant des danseuses describes his emotions on following his ballerina-mistress (modeled after Virginia Zucchi) down the stairs: ...I looked at her again from behind. Ah, her rump! I burned with the desire to spring at her, like a faun, co turn her round, co embrace her... It was a strange passion. Inwardly, I fought the brutal frenzy of a cloven-footed satyr for this splendid dancer, whom I respect as one of those rare beings in whose soul some unknown power has distilled the elixir of magnetism, and whom I venerate as I would a poem.

This kind of double-think pervades the ballets. In them, the heroine was, by implication, attainable, expected to gratify men's appetites; her "Oriental" nature alone held an erotic potential supposedly lacking in Western women. Yet the librettists—and, frequently, their heroes—persisted in viewing these heroines as virtuous maidens worthy of respect and as voluptuous chattels. Far from seeing anything odd about the harem girl who furiously defended her virtue unto death, the theatergoing public needed to have the Oriental-style sensuality controlled by familiar Christian moral codes.

45

AUTHOR

Deborah Jowitt

Since most of these ballets have not been preserved, one can only guess that the degree of eroticism that was tolerated on the ballet stages of the nineteenth century would be considered reticent by today's standards. In 1985 Utah's Ballet West reconstructed a "lost" Oriental ballet chat had been created in 1853 by Bournonville. The hero of Abdallah, a comedyballet with elements of Aladdin, or The Wonderful Lamp, is a humble shoemaker who, by means of a magic candelabrum, conjures up a dream harem complete with concubines, Yet—if the reconstruction is to be trusted these appear to be anything but lascivious women. "Lounging" on a tier of marble steps, their tutus spread neatly around them and their pointed toes crossed, they resemble a decorous Danish garden. Their only concessions to the harem behavior of literature, painting, and fancy are their lack of shyness, the promptness with which they perform pretty, buoyant dances for their new master, and the eagerness with which they kneel at his feet or kiss his hand, Admittedly, Bournonville, unlike many of his contemporaries, made no bones about prizing domesticity or seeing beauty in homey virtues, but the bulk of contemporary descriptions of ballerinas evokes charm and vivacity more often than sensuality. Here is Gautier, raving about his beloved Carlotta Grisi in Paquita: Never did foot so small support a more supple body, and never did castanets chatter more gaily at the tips of more agile fingers.

How lightly she bounds and quickly escapes the two gypsies who are her partners, poor devils who think to be able to pinch her waist or kiss her hand! She darts away like an adder, smiling maliciously over her shoulder, and the pursuit begins all over again!

Of course, the degree of provocativeness varied from dancer co dancer, Marie Taglioni brought out the spirituality of every character that she played—her eroticism confined to a dainty teasing. With Fanny Elssler, it was otherwise. Yet the allure that she bad for contemporary critics, the qualities that led Gautier to characterize her as a "pagan" dancer (as opposed to Taglioni, who was a "Christian" one) might be relative to the era. If recent reconstructions of her famous "Cachucha'' from Jean Coralli's 1836 Le Diable Boiteux are accurate, the solo affords the dancer opportunities for intricate tacqueterie—the stamping of a heel, the tapping of a toe, the turn-in-turn-out of a foot to make the laceedged skirt sway—for coquettish glances, supple port de bras, and a resiliently arching waist. It is a real Spanish dance and, as such, shows its Eastern influences. (Obviously the visit to the Paris Opéra in 1834 by four Spanish dancers of the Escuela Bolero had an influence on ballet choreography that the real ''bayadéres" who appeared in 1838 at the Thêatre des Varietés did not,) Today this "Cachucha" seems charming, flirtatious, mildly sensual; it certainly doesn't appear erode to the degree that it did to Gautier ("What fire! What voluptuousness! What ardour!") or to Charles de Boigne, who wrote ecstatically: Those contortions, those movements of the hips, those arms which seem to seek and embrace an absent lover, that mouth crying out for a kiss, that thrilling, quivering, twisting body...

Elssler's pink satin dress with its black lace trim, its décolleté, its rounded bust and small waist still exists; her performance is unrecoverable. Either she performed the dance as no one would perform it today, or—more probable—the sensibility of her audience was such that the merest hint of heat set men ablaze. Perhaps in contrast to the more dignified dances of the lace eighteenth and early nineteenth century, it was thrilling. Eastern customs bowed to Western ideals of behavior in these and other theatrical works; Eastern dance styles and postures seem scarcely to have made a stand, We can suppose the bathing scenes in

1988

MOVE The Revolt in the Harem and Le Corsaire to have been inspired by Ingres's calmly seductive turbaned nudes, yet cannot imagine that they actually invoked them. We imagine instead some provocative frolicking, half hidden by the rims of faux-marbre bathing pools, "dressing" accomplished behind veils held by slaves. Looking at the handfuls of lithographs that are the most tangible evidence of scenes from these ballets, we wonder, for instance, just what kind of a dance was performed in La Péri by four "almays," their arms around each other's waists, wearing the kind of coat-over-trousers outfit that American dress reformer Amelia Bloomer unwittingly lent her name to. Does Achille Devéria's drawing of Eugène Coralli and Adèle Dumilâtre dashing away together tell us about the choreography of La Gypsy, or only about its spirit?

Sometimes it was the props chat set the tone—the veil dances and shawl dances that engendered such beguiling tableaux. In Le Dieu et la Bayadère.' The pink scarves of the dancing girls floated and hovered in the air in the most ingenious combinations, at times streaming in undulating folds, now hanging loosely, and at one moment, stretched out fan-wise with their ends gathered beneath Taglioni's foot so that she

The pink scarves of the dancing girls floated and hovered in the air in the most ingenious combinations, at times streaming in undulating folds, now hanging loosely, and at one moment, stretched out fan-wise with their ends gathered beneath Taglioni's foot so that she appeared like Venus emerging from the waves in her shell." appeared like Venus emerging from the waves in her shell." In Perrot's Lallah Rookh, slave maidens formed elaborate tableaux around Fanny Cerrito, manipulating pink scarves (evidently pink was the popular hue) to suggest Hermes, The Shell, The Kiosks, The Cage, The Mirrors, The Harps, The Framed Picture, The Morning Breeze, The Stars, The Pine-Apples, The Car of The Rising Sun, The Butterflies, The Sun's Rays, and The Living Statue and lts Pedestal. This pas symbolique enumerated the heroine's virtues. We know of dances with pitchers in Sacauntala and La Bayadère. The sheikh's sons in Abdallah perform a striking dance with swords, re-creating through their slashing and stabbing gestures, their leaps, spins, and crouches, the furious battle which—thank God for their prowess!—has just been won. Perhaps there were other such dances, although few choreographers in that century prized male dancing as Bournonville did.

Some dances boggle the imagination. The concubines turned militant of The Revolt in the Harem are performing dashing drills with lances when a spy sends for the guards; immediately, by virtue of a magic bouquet, the lances turn into lyres and the women mask their fierceness with dulcet steps.

One can be sure, however, that the dancing was couched in the familiar ballet vocabulary of the day. In Petipa's heyday) as Fokine later noted despairingly, "character dances"' in ballers had a semblance of the national dances they referred to, but the principal dancers made all their utterances in the lingua franca of classicism, (The Spanish pas of mid-nineteenth-century France were no exception.) Attempts at "authentic" dances would have thwarted the public's expectations-particularly as far as their favorite ballerinas were concerned, and the ballerinas were careful to please. For Gautier's La Péri, based on his own story, "La Mille et Deuxième Nuit," the author had choreographer Jean Coralli concoct a "Pas de L'Abeille." Gautier had not yet visited Egypt, but had encountered the dance on bis voyages through travelers' tales.

Of course, Carlotta Grisi could not be expected to copy the harlots of Cairo, who, pretending that a bee had gotten into their clothing, contrived to strip themselves garment by garment, all the while dancing frantically.

Grisi had only to drop a few outer garments, but apparently the unruly drama of the solo didn't suit her, and she soon substituted a more popular number. Gautier drily remarked that the sight of a péri dancing a cachucha with castanets was something that "our imagination had not foreseen."

Just as cultural and societal differences between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries gradually altered the character of the unattainable female onstage, they altered-far more radically—the role and domain of the Orientalist heroine. The public in Paris and London that first thrilled to Diaghilev's Les Ballets Russes in 1909 was more comfortable with its libido than earlier generations of ballet fans had been, and could tolerate—indeed craved-images as sensual and cruel as any Delacroix or Byron could have devised.

Furthermore, they were willing to exchange the pleasure of seeing familiar ballet steps for darkly convincing fantasies. By the early years of the twentieth century, audiences in both Europe and America were beginning to concede that the spiritual aspects of the East were also fit subjects for dancing, and to admire the young American Ruth St. Denis, who brought these to their attention.

Voyagers in the earlier ballet Orient, like armchair travelers, gave up none of the comforts of home. Perhaps to many of them the proximity of the dancers was spice enough.

But the exotic settings and perilous plots gave the pretty, spirited dancing an edge and offered spectators a whiff of fragrance that seemed more intoxicating by far than that of their native daisies.

47

DANCE IS MUSIC MADE VISIBLE MARTHA GRAHAM

MOVE

E N I Z MAGA T S I L PLAY FROM LA SYLPHADIDE TO STR

AVINSKY'S BIRTH OF SPRING

49

A V A L S I N O R B

: A K S N I J I N Y C A G E L A D E R E V O C UN AUTHOR

Lynn Garafola

Although she choreographed over seventy ballets, for most of the twentieth century Bronislava Nijinska has had a bad press, when she has had a press at all. André Levinson, reviewing her 1923 masterpiece Les Noces, raged that this “Marxist” creation had “debased” the art of the dancer. Jean Cocteau, who wrote the libretti for Les Biches, Les Fâcheux, and Le Train Bleu, all choreographed by Nijinska the following year, sniped that Braque, the designer, was the “real choreographer” of Les Fâcheux: “All the real dancing... is done by the colours—beiges, yellows, browns and greys.” Serge Diaghilev, for whose Ballets Russes she created these works, thought highly of her talent, but regarded her sex as a mishap: “What a choreographer Bronia would have been if only she were a man!”

However unjust their remarks, Levinson, Cocteau and Diaghilev did at least acknowledge Nijinska’s existence. The same cannot be said of succeeding generations, which have sinned not by commission, but by omission. In the annals of twentieth-century dance, Nijinska for the most part has been forgotten. Invisibility has been the lot of women artists generally. But in Nijinska’s case, something more than the usual sexism has been afoot. Compounding the accident of sex was a second accident of birth. Arriving in the world two years after the brother who became this century’s most celebrated dancer, she was sister to a legend-a phrase that could have served as her epitaph. Vaslav Nijinsky first bounded across the Parisian stage in 1909 and in a handful of years captured the European imagination. Unlike his sister he created only four ballets. Until the Joffrey Ballet’s reconstruction of Le Sacre du Printemps last year, only one remained in repertory­—L’Après-midi d’un Faune.

The Nijinsky legend had no room for feminine helpmates, least of all a sister whose claim to choreographic greatness was by any yardstick equal to his own. In the silver screen version of his life, Nijinska appears nowhere. The myth of his uniqueness demanded her erasure. For this

1989

reason, Bronislava Nijinska: A Dancer’s Legacy, an exhibition curated by Nancy Van Norman Baer, sponsored by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and presented by the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York, assumes a symbolic importance that few shows of its kind can claim.

Not only is this the first exhibition devoted wholly to Nijinska, but it is the first to suggest the breadth of her career and the magnitude of her artistic achievement.

That career began in 1894, when as a child of three she made her debut in Nijni Novgorod, performing a “Chinese Dance” and “Sailor Dance” with her brother. It continued, as did his, at the Imperial Theatrical School, attached to St. Petersburg’s Maryinsky Theater, where she trained, and in Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, where she rose from the corps to the rank of principal dancer and choreographer. From 1925, when she left Diaghilev, to 1952, when she choreographed her last ballet, she served many companies—the Paris Opéra, Teatro ColÓn, Ida Rubinstein Ballet, Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Ballet Theatre, Chicago Ballet Repertory; Ballet International, Markova-Dolin Ballet­­­­­—in addition to forming three troupes of her own—Theatre Choréographique, Théâtre de la Danse Nijinska and the Polish Ballet. Together, these enterprises map the diaspora of Russian dance talent in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Artistically, they plot the diffusion and demise of international ballet modernism.

In this movement, Nijinska played a central role. Just how central has never been fully appreciated, and it is one of the show’s great virtues that for the first time her modernism stands revealed not as an isolated or derivative phenomenon, but as the primary thrust of her career. Until now, Nijinska’s reputation has rested on two ballets—Les Noces and Les Biches—both out of repertory in this country until a spate of revivals in the eighties, and on Early Memoirs, a posthumous volume of autobiography that unfortunately ends when she was only 23, in 1914, a year

o

her g ra p

ly

ho

been i f on

Br

ould h w a a i n

ve

re o

MOVE

e

w e re a ma

sh

“ What

c a

n!

”

51

AUTHOR

Lynn Garafola

Drawings by Natalia Goncherv of Nijinska's Les Noces.

1989

MOVE

53

AUTHOR

Lynn Garafola

1989 before she created her earliest dances. The exhibition adds substantially to this record, for thanks to Irina Nijinska, the choreographer’s daughter, the trunks carted by Bronislava across three continents and stowed in her last home in Pacific Palisades have been opened, revealing secrets kept for nearly seventy years.

In the notebooks, costumes, photographs and designs loaned to the Fine Arts Museums for this exhibition, the materials now exist to measure the character and development of Nijinska’s modernism.

Of critical importance were the years, hitherto undocumented, that she spent in Russia between 1914 and 1921. Separated from her brother, fired by the Revolution’s brave new art, Nijinska reimaged ballet in fully contemporary terms. She did this both

Separated from her brother, fired by the Revolution’s brave new art, Nijinska reimaged ballet in fully contemporary terms. theoretically and practically: in the treatise on choreography published in Kiev in 1920 (a related essay, never published, appears in the exhibition catalogue and in the winter 1986 issue of Ballet Review), and in the studio, named “Ecole de Mouvement,” that she opened in the Ukrainian capital the previous year. Both grew out of her conviction that movement was the essence and defining property of dance and that the technique of ballet, which she never abjured, needed to keep abreast of choreographic innovation and development. The solos and group works

Both grew out of her conviction that movement was the essence and defining property of dance and that the technique of ballet, which she never abjured, needed to keep abreast of choreographic innovation and development. presented by Nijinska and her students in 1919-1920 have not survived, but the diagrams and sketches from Nijinska’s choreographic notebooks of the period indicate that these were fully modernist conceptions.

They also support her later contention that in these dances she had made the passage to abstraction—one of the first choreographers to do so. Worked on graph paper, the diagrams are totally geometric, as if the space of the stage, represented by an enclosing square,

In Le s N o c e s , s h e

n the b al le rinas o nt

p ut s

poi

he v

e . . . t o i n t i m ate t

ge

st

ab

ain nce and p

ria

io le

ar o f t he m

encompassed only abstract forms. Often these are circular figures—quadrants, arcs, loops, spheres—that recall Balla’s futurist experiments from 19l2-19l3. At other times, they take a linear form: wedges, triangles and squares that come straight from the canvases of Malevich. Several of these forms reappear in the human massings of Les Noces, where the emergent constructivism of the period is fully palpable. They also occur on one of the two costumes Nijinska brought with her to the West in 1921, a Bakst creation originally designed for Nijinsky to which a short underskirt was added and to the underskirt an applique of geometric forms. Modernist influence is equally patent in three other exhibits that date to these years. One, a highly stylized costume sketch of a Japanese dancer, is in Nijinska’s own hand. The others, by Vadim Meller, are portraits of the choreographer in Fear and Mephisto Valse, two of her 1919 solos; in both, the geometric forms of the notebooks come alive in the cubo-futurist renderings of the figure.

Unrepresented in this section is the woman with whom Nijinska formed the closest and most productive association of her career.

Alexandra Exter was a painter close to the cubo-futurist vanguard and a designer for Alexander Tairov’s experimental Kamerny Theater when she and Nijinska met in Moscow in 1917. The following year Exter opened a studio in Kiev that may well have been the model for the Ecole de Mouvement.

The two women worked together closely; their students—including Meller—mingled. Exter was often present at the discussions that went on far into-the night at Nijinska’s school.

Although never actually constructed because of the extreme shortages of the period, all the costume designs for Nijinska’s works were commissioned from Exter’s studio.

That no visual material, except for the pair of Meller portraits, survives to document this first stage of the Nijinska-Exter collaboration is hardly surprising. The circumstances of Nijinska’s departure from Russia precluded her taking much baggage with her. She left hastily and illegally with her mother and two young children when news reached her of Nijinsky’s commitment to an insane asylum.

But that the collaboration of the two in the West should go entirely unnoticed in the dance and art historical literature seems inexplicable, except on the grounds of sexism.

For unlike so many of Diaghilev’s collaborations of the twenties—cocktails mixed by the ballet barman supreme—that of the two female visionaries was a true meeting of minds.

Early in 1925, Nijinska left the Ballets Russes.

Her decision was prompted by several things:

t h e g ro u n d like shar p, weig hted knive s.

MOVE

bed : The

t e fe

55

AUTHOR

Lynn Garafola

George Balanchine’s arrival on the scene; the acrimony of her relations with Cocteau, a power in Diaghilev’s inner circle; and her desire to create plotless ballets. That Exter had recently come West no doubt influenced Nijinska as well. In any event, the two pooled their talents on the chamber ensemble that made its debut in England the following summer as Theatre Choréographique. From this short-lived enterprise, which performed at such seaside resorts as Bexhill-on-Sea, Margate, Bournemouth and Selsey, and in Paris at isolated performances organized by the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, comes the striking body of material, exhibited for the first time, that attests to the fact and quality of their collaboration.

Baer’s catalogue lists six works brought to life by Theatre Choréographique—Holy Eludes, Night on Bald Mountain, Touring, Jazz, On the Road, and Le Guignol—all choreographed by Nijinska and designed by Exter. To facilitate touring and reduce costs, scenery was not used,although the bared stage, one suspects, was not uncongenial to these proponents of scenic functionalism. At least two of these ballets had their genesis in the Kiev years: Holy Etudes, to one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, and On the Road, a Japanese “pantomime” that may have grown out of the solo Fear. For both, Nijinska sketched the preliminary designs worked up by Exter in 1925. All six of these production are represented at the Cooper-Hewitt, with Exter’s costume design’s mounted alongside photographs of Nijinska and her dancers in costume, the whole complemented by the costumes themselves displayed on remarkably life-like mannequins.

Above all, the exhibits document a collaboration based on a shared aesthetic vision. The two were fascinated by angular unadorned lines and geometries of limb and torso, and they stylized the body down to the smallest detail. Both reveled in modernity, and even in ballets like Night on Bald Mountain, to Moussorgsky, and Holy Etudes, the dancers wore theatricalized versions of contemporary dress—elegant silk shifts in the former, pleated flapper dresses in the latter. Both, moreover, treated the group as a sculptural or architectural entity, a frieze of massed, designed images.

Both reveled in modernity, and even in ballets like Night on Bald Mountain, to Moussorgsky, and Holy Etudes, the dancers wore theatricalized versions of contemporary dress—elegant silk shifts in the former, pleated flapper dresses in the latter.

Some of the exhibit display a fine erotic wit. The female equestrians of Touring sport ambisexual drag—black tuxedo jackets and bustlebacked miniskirts, white starched shirtfronts, black see-through stockings, black silk top hats; in a naughty touch, they prettily brandish riding crops. Touring, however, is not the only work that plays with images of gender. Nijinska’s male partner in Jazz wears an elegant knee-skimming shift that Courrèges might have designed early in the 1960s, while in Night on Bald Mountain men and women are dressed identically in long body-concealing gowns.

Redefining gender boundaries was certainly a theme of twenties’ fashion, as it was of art in that decade. But in Nijinska’s work, its appearance transcends the moment: It seems to rush from a spring of discontent. Again and again, she exposes the gender conventions of ballet style and technique. In Les Noces, she puts the ballerinas on pointe not as an aerial metaphor, a symbol of femininity and its mystique, but to intimate the violence and pain of the marriage bed: The feet stab

1989

MOVE

choreography—Bronislava Nijinska 1923 danced by the Mariinsky Theater Ballet—2008 57

AUTHOR

Lynn Garafola

1989

choreography—Bronislava Nijinska 1913 danced by the Mariinsky Theater Ballet—2013 The most famous work of Nijinska and Nijinsky originally only accredited to Vaslav Nijinsky. The original performance on May 29, 1913 was so controversial that a literal riot began in the audience due to their shock of the performance.

MOVE the ground like sharp, weighted knives. In Les Riches, her corps struts like mannequins a parody of Petipa’s top-hopping variations and society’s narrow definitions of feminine behavior. In Les Biches, too, Nijinska overturns the romantic conventions of the pas de deux: her Garçonne (in French, literally, a feminized boy) and her Athlete go through the motions of a formal adagio—the extensions, promenades and supported turns identified with the presentation of blossoming love— without so much as exchanging a glance. Her unease with traditional representations of femininity appears in her redesigning of the Ballerina role in Petrouchka: Where Fokine in the original had mocked the display of shallow virtuosity, Nijinska redrew the role as a female grotesque.

Franco, the ColÓn’s in-house designer. With that, the collaboration between the two women ended. Yet the very survival of Exter’s designs and the costumes executed from them suggests that Nijinska felt differently about them than about almost any other men1orabilia recording her life in the theater. Forget-menots of happier days, they crossed continents and seas; now in Bronislava Nijinska: A Dancer’s Legacy, they make a collaboration of rare quality and attainment suddenly and magnificently visible.

In Les Riches, too, Nijinska overturns the romantic conventions of the pas de deux: her Garçonne and her Athlete go through the motions of a formal adagio. . . without so much as exchanging a glance.

Nijinska’s own performing career offers more than a few gender anomalies. In a century that has seen few women perform en travestie, Nijinska impersonated any number of male characters, most of her own creation.

The first time she did so appears to have been at Diaghilev’s urging, although the idea of Nijinska assuming her brother’s role in L’Aprés-midi d’un Faune, a role created on her own body, suggests something more: that at the start of her career as a choreographer, she may have had to possess Nijinsky physically to exorcise him creatively. The Cooper-Hewitt show and accompanying catalogue document other male roles in Nijinska’s repertory: Lysandre in Les Facheux (1924), Pedrollino in Les Comédiens Jaloux (1932), the title role in Hamlet (1934). And in the Dietrich-style tuxedos she affected in the mid-1930s, we see her cultivation of a masculine glamor image.

Given Nijinska’s fascination with gender, it would be idle to pretend that her collaborations with Exter had nothing to do with the fact that both were women, Amazons in a male world. That world, institutionalized by the economics of the theatrical marketplace, ultimately destroyed their experimentalist haven. In 1926-1927, at the Teatro ColÓn, Nijinska staged what amounted to a retrospective of her work to date. For those ballets created for Theatre Choréographique, Exter’s designs were used. She, however, did not receive credit; they were attributed to Rodolfo 59

ALEXANDRA EXTER

Costume design. 1924.

MOVE

The curtain of the Kamerny Theatre, Moscow. Both in color and black and white. 1916.

Costume design for Chorus and Bronislava Nijinska (respectively) in Night on Bald Mountain. 1925.

61

Poster design for Théâtre Choréographique for The Sports and Touring Ballet Revue. 1925.

Costume design for the Equestrian in The Sports and Touring Ballet Revue. 1925.

MOVE

Costume design for the Aviator in The Sports and Touring Ballet Revue. 1925.

Costume design for the Bronislava Nijinska as Modiste in The Sports and Touring Ballet Revue.

1925.

Costume designs for Male and Females in Holy Etudes. 1925.

63

AUTHOR

Jane Desmond

G N I C DAN E H T OUT E C N E R E F F DI

1991

MOVE

Analysis of the mechanisms through which meaning is generated is central to any reevaluation of dance history and its canon. I will be arguing in this article for the application of poststructuralist theory to the writing of dance history and also for the wider opening of feminist scholarship to considerations of live performance. Women’s studies, although it has generated a great deal of scholarly writing on the social construction of gender and the visual and verbal representation of women in literature, visual arts, and the mass media, has yet to engage fully with the specific richness of performance. Study of performance can include not only historical analysis of visual representations, their construction and reception, but also consideration of the special case of construction of meaning through display of the body—a body that is at once “real” and “representational” as it exists in performance. If “the feminine” itself can be conceived of as a socially constituted masquerade, as Mary Ann Doane and others have noted, then an analysis of performance has wide potential application for work in feminist studies.

DA N C E S C H O L A R S H IP DANCE SCHOLARSHIP Although dance scholarship has expanded dramatically in the last fifteen years or so, it remains far behind related fields of arts criticism both in the amount of work and in the level of analysis. Within the bounds of traditional history and criticism, several excellent scholars have emerged in the last two decades, but the discipline as a whole is still waging a battle for acceptance within the academy and remains relatively closed to current work in related fields such as literary theory.

There are many reasons for this: as the most ephemeral of all the arts, dance leaves the fewest traces (most dances have not been recorded in any way), making historical reconstruction and analysis exceedingly difficult. And, because it deals most directly with the mute (and most often female) body, dance remains suspect in institutions of higher learning.

Most dance writing is still concerned with technical and artistic judgment, historical reconstruction, reportage, and description, or even social history; but deeper analyses of the ideological functions of dances as works of art are still relatively rare. Only in the last few years have dance critics and historians begun to consider issues that have engaged literary critics and feminist scholars for much more than a decade.

Gender, while it may be noted, is rarely analyzed as a constitutive factor.

Furthermore, we are still in the early stages of developing theoretical tools suitable for our object of investigation: the human body, most often the female body, moving in performance. I want to show how theoretical tools drawn from other disciplines can be adapted to dance criticism, as well as how any investigation of gender in dance must be linked to concurrent analysis of other markers of cultural otherness,

such as race and class. I hope that in return the particular structure of dance as live performance will open new avenues of theoretical investigation, furthering development of current theories about perception, pleasure, and the mapping of meaning onto the gendered body.

EN IS . DDENIS RUTH ST. T H ST RU My object of analysis is an important 1906 piece, “Radha,” choreographed and performed by Ruth St. Denis. St. Denis is usually presented as one of the major figures in the history of American dance, and she is always cited, along with Loie Fuller and Isadora Duncan, as one of the three “mothers” of modern dance. Any reevaluation of the dance history canon must consider St. Denis’s work.

With her husband, Ted Shawn, she started the Denishawn school of dance, one of the first professional schools of “aesthetic” dancing, in 1915, and toured throughout the country in the early decades of this century. Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and Martha Graham, the leading choreographers of the next generation, all served an apprenticeship with Denishawn. St. Denis’s work was seen on the vaudeville circuit (often the first professional aesthetic dancing that many Americans encountered) and was performed in elite theaters as well. The bulk of her repertoire, which she continued to perform well into the 1960s, consisted of dances inspired by ethnic styles ranging from American Indian to Japanese. The scale of the works varied from solo pieces to large spectacles. Denishawn dancers even appeared in D. W. Griffith’s 1916 film, Intolerance. In the 1920s St. Denis’s company toured Asia, presenting its orientalia to enthusiastic crowds. Although St. Denis’s aesthetic was largely rejected as too decorative by Humphrey and Graham, and her works are not regularly performed today, her contribution to the rise of modern dance in America cannot be denied.

Most dance histories discuss St. Denis’s “showmanship” and refer to her dances as part of the turn-of-the-century American passion for exotica. But such observations do not take us deeply into the ideological structure and function of the work itself. While we can never imagine with certainty the meaning of an art work for a particular audience, we can venture an analysis of its structures of meaning. I will argue that by adapting contemporary insights drawn from literary criticism, film theory, and work on race and colonialism, we can come closer to understanding not only what “Radha” means, but how its range of meanings may be produced. I will argue that “Radha” presents a hyperbolization of categories of otherness, mapping markers of race, orientalism, and sexuality onto the white middle-class female body.

Thus, “Radha” can be said to function as a site of condensation and displacement of desire.

65

AUTHOR

Jane Desmond

1991

SP EC TA C LE The dance opens and closes with visions of the Hindu goddess Radha posed in spiritual contemplation, partially hidden by a screen.

The longest portion of the dance, however, consists of five variations celebrating the pleasures of the senses, and a whirling “delirium of the senses” episode that plunges the dancer into postorgasmic darkness. In both its theatrical structure and its visual arrangement on the stage, “Radha” is a spectacle displaying the female body.

It is spectacular first in the sense of not being narrative. Although there is a thin story line to the dance, and it fits the barest

requirements of narrative—stasis, disruption, stasis—the majority of stage time is devoted to the display of the body in a way that does not drive a narrative forward by providing new information or character development. Second, the spectacular aspects of the dance are enhanced by an emphasis on surface decoration. The stage is set with soft amber lighting, wisps of incense, and an ornate backdrop (or—in a later version—a stage set) representing a Jain temple. St. Denis’s costume, a short jacket and gauzy skirt, is accented with “jewels” and trimmed with shiny material. Flowers adorn her hair and jewelry her ankles and arms.

MOVE

67

AUTHOR

Jane Desmond Midriff and feet are bare. That a critic for Variety referred to the “semi-nudity of the woman” tells us how this costuming was perceived at the time.

The choreography itself reiterated the decorative aspect of the design. As Suzanne Shelton notes, St. Denis believed that “each gesture and pose should objectify an inner emotional state;’ and “Radha” was conceived as “an elaborate network of spatial and gestural symbols” connoting such feeling states as rapture, despair, or inspiration.

Authorial intent aside, “Radha”—having been blocked out with saltcellars on the kitchen table—was a series of simple circular or square spatial patterns composed of relatively simple movements.

“Radha” was conceived as “an elaborate network of spatial and gestural symbols” connoting such feeling states as rapture, despair, or inspiration.

These movements were the turns and flourishes of the skirt dancer’s repertoire mixed with a smattering of balletish steps and Delsartean limb movements. Never having studied Indian dance, St. Denis drew on the

1991 images of India available to her in books and punctuated her simple phrases with poses that recalled oriental icons and “popular images of the late Victorian era,” such as the femme fatale. Many of these poses were performed in

St. Denis drew on the images of India available to her in books and punctuated her simple phrases with poses that recalled oriental icons and “popular images of the late Victorian era,” such as the femme fatale. profile, enhancing the two-dimensional quality of the figure-ground relationship. Radha, brought out of her ornate enclosure like a precious jewel, becomes a moving ornament against an elaborately decorated backdrop until, after displaying her valuable beauty, she is enclosed again, still tantalizingly visible but unattainable, within the carved fretwork of her diadem. Every aspect of staging can be seen as contributing to this fetishistic display.

A closer look at the choreography will clarify the presentation.

D E SCDESCRIPTION AND CLOSE R IP T IO N A N D C L O SE A N A LY SI S ANALYSIS The curtain rises to reveal the goddess Radha sitting in the lotus position on a pedestal. (In later versions she is partially hidden from view behind an ornately carved screen, which will be opened by the head priest.) A procession of Brahman priests enters, carrying sacrificial offerings. (The priests were performed by Indian sailors and clerks rounded up for the purpose.) When the priests are seated in a semicircle, framing a space for Radha to enter, she comes to life. Watched by her priests, she enters the sacred space to begin the dance of the five senses. In a progression from the senses of far distance to the more intimate ones (taste and touch), Radha dances to music from Delibes’s orientalist opera, Lakme.

In the opening dance of sight, Radha holds a strand of pearls in each hand as she revolves in place. Then, in small steps phrased to the music, she moves from side to side in front of her watching priests, posing occasionally with one leg gently lifted to the front. Exchanging the pearls for bells, she begins the playful, rhythmic dance of hearing during which she surrounds her body with a cascade of sounds.

Throbbing music initiates the dance of smell as Radha manipulates a garland of marigolds in a series of simple waltzing steps and poses.

MOVE

69

AUTHOR

Jane Desmond

1991

choreography—Ruth St. Denis 1906 recorded at Jacob's Pillow Dance Interactive—July 1941

MOVE At the close of the section she arches back, trailing the blossoms along the front of her body, one hand crushing the flowers to her face. So far we have seen the dancer’s body in association with nature and signs of luxurious ornamentation.

Things heat up for the dance of taste, which follows. Drinking deeply from a simple clay bowl, she whirls with abandon, ending in the seductive vulnerability of a deep back bend before she falls to the ground. Kneeling, with her skirt spread around her, she starts the dance of touch by caressing one hand with the other. Languorous music accompanies her movements as she slides her hands voluptuously over her body, ending with fingertips to her lips.

Kneeling, with her skirt spread around her, she starts the dance of touch by caressing one hand with the other. Languorous music accompanies her movements as she slides her hands voluptuously over her body, ending with fingertips to her lips.

After the “foreplay” of the preceding episodes, the “delirium of the senses” section unfolds, the music quickening to a frenzied tempo. Spinning, possessed, Radha whirls with her skirts swishing wildly until she suddenly falls to the ground, and “writhes and trembles to a climax, then lies supine as darkness descends.” The lights come up on a chastened Radha, lifting her arms in supplication. After tracing the petals of a lotus blossom on the floor, she withdraws to her shrine. The final image shows her sitting on her pedestal, transformed by samadhi, self-realization.

C IN G T H E T IC DA NDANCING A E SAESTHETIC St. Denis’s aesthetic dancing arose during a time of complex social change in America.

At the turn of the twentieth century, changing gender roles joined with racial and ethnic differences and class antagonisms to create a volatile social mixture. To contextualize St. Denis’s work, I will consider two aspects of turn-of-the-century culture: changing social attitudes toward the body, and popularization of the “exotic” in cultural forms.

AM ER IC AN DE LS ARTE AMERICAN DELSARTE MOVEMENT MOVE ME NT In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, a growing emphasis on “physical culture” was allied with a number of reform and educational movements, such as women’s dress reform and physical education. Prominent among these physical training regimes was the American Delsarte movement, based on the teachings of French music and drama teacher Francois Delsarte (1811-71). Seeking to analyze and classify human expression, he developed a technical training system based on “an elaborate and mystical science of aesthetics deriving from his personal interpretation of the Christian Trinity.” In the Delsarte system, the codification of gesture was linked to “a spiritual labeling of every part of the body according to certain zones—Head, Heart, and Lower Limbs, which corresponded to Mind, Soul, Life.”

Although intended for the elocutionary training of professional speakers and actors in the 1870s, the expressive principles of Delsarte’s aesthetic theory were being practiced throughout the United States by the late 1880s, especially by women, in the drawing rooms of middle- and upper-class households.

American proponents of Delsartism stressed relaxation techniques, “energizing” exercises, rhythmic gymnastics, “natural” movement based on spiraling curves, statue-posing, and pantomime. Statue-posing and pantomime were deemed “the ultimate in refinement and gentility” and helped open a “wedge for the entrance of respectable women into the field of theatrical dance” at a time when the theater was regarded in the United States as morally suspect.

... the expressive principles of Delsarte’s aesthetic theory were being practiced throughout the United States by the late 1880s, especially by women, in the drawing rooms of middleand upper-class households.

Through Delsarte, movement was analyzed and linked to meaning and morality. “Natural” movement was thought to provide authenticity of expression. The body became a signifier of Truth. Writing in 1954 about the Delsarte system, Ted Shawn, St. Denis’s lifelong partner, states, “The spontaneous movements of the body cannot lie … all human beings move under the government of universal laws, and gesture is the universal language by which we can speak to each other with immediacy, clarity, and truth, and which no barrier of race, nationality, language, religion or political belief can diminish in communicative power.”

71

AUTHOR

Jane Desmond

1991

nce, St. D e n

Poster that inspired Radha.

ha t she was presenting t h

i s declare d t

p e r i e n c e o f u n it y w it h G od .

Through her da

e m ystic’s e x

MOVE

The changes in American society at the turn of the century coincided with massive colonial expansion in which Europe consolidated control of most of what is now known as the Third World. During this time, a popular and elite fascination with non-European cultures coincided with a rise in such “sciences” of codification as ethnography. The “exotic” was extremely fashionable in scholarly endeavors as well as “high” art and “low” art forms.

In some high art contexts, the exotic was cast as a utopian vision of the past glories of classical civilizations. The past seemed to offer an antidote to the chaotic urban conditions that threatened the middle and upper classes. At the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition, the monumental White City, built in neoclassical style, typified this urge in elite cultural production. Popular images of the exotic, however, were less utopian and were perceived by the cultural elite as merely gratifying the senses rather than providing spiritual uplift. For example, historian John Kasson describes the exposition’s Midway as “exuberant chaos,” and a “hurlyburly of exotic attractions: mosques and pagodas, Viennese streets and Turkish bazaars, South Sea Island huts, Irish and German castles, and Indian tepees.” A prime attraction was the Persian Palace of Eros where Little Egypt and her

cohorts danced the hootchy-kootchy. Described at the time as a “suggestively lascivious contorting of the abdominal muscles” that was “almost shockingly disgusting,” this attraction proved immensely popular.

Exotic popular amusements like the Midway and Luna Park on Coney Island, which attracted both middle—and working-class patrons, supplied an ornate aesthetic that Kasson has termed the “oriental orgasmic.”

The essentialist strains of Delsartism and orientalism mixed well. St. Denis’s achievement in “Radha” was to combine the oriental orgasmic with Delsartism’s transcendent spirituality into a spectacular form that could play successfully not only on the vaudeville circuit but also at the garden parties of the elite and in the art theaters of America and Europe.

D “R AD H A” AN“RADHA” D EN IS ST.DENIS RUTH AND T H ST. RU The multiple strains of orientalism, popular culture, and artistic spiritualism that are found in St. Denis’s work have their beginnings in her childhood. The daughter of a well-educated progressive mother, she was drilled in Delsarte exercises and exposed to Eastern spiritualism through theosophy and through the orientalist performance of leading American Delsarte exponent Genevieve Stebbins. As a young adult, St. Denis became a believer in Christian Science, and throughout her career she combined the spirituality of the Delsarte system with her own adaptations of Christian Science teachings, which emphasized that “spirit is the immortal truth; matter is mortal error.”

Some scholars have seen a feminist dimension in Christian Science, founded by Mary Baker Eddy, because it asserts the androgynous nature of God. In the social sphere, this concept means that in order to be complete persons, both men and women had to have “a harmonious balance of masculine and feminine traits.” But equally important to Christian Science were notions of morality that promoted “purity” and chastity. Inheriting the traditional Christian dualism between the spiritual and material realms, Christian Science did away with the hierarchy of that dualism

73

AUTHOR

Jane Desmond

St. Denis’s dancing was not always so uplifting. With the support of her mother, who accompanied her to New York, she got her start at the age of fifteen as a skirt dancer in a dime museum variety show.

Surrounded by specimens like triple-headed calves, she danced six shows a day, punctuating her routines with acrobatic roll-overs and her specialty, the slow-splits. On the bill with St. Denis one week in 1894 were an albino musician and Lillie the Trick Dog. This may not seem an auspicious start for a dancer who was later to be hailed as the solution to “the world’s enigma,” but it provided the basis for an artistic savvy that “aspired to the loftier echelons of fine art” while never losing the “genius of lowbrow.”

The myth surrounding St. Denis’s first moment of choreographic revelation combines mass consumer culture with the spiritual aspirations assigned to high art. In 1904, while on tour in a David Belasco production of DuBarry, St. Denis was struck by a drugstore poster advertising Egyptian Deities cigarettes: the bare-breasted goddess Isis sat surrounded by huge columns and flowering lotus. An inscription carved in stone above her head assured the buyer that “No Better Turkish Cigarette Can Be Made.” St. Denis later wrote, “My destiny as a dancer had sprung alive in that moment. I would become a rhythmic and impersonal instrument of spiritual revelation... I have never before known such an inward shock of rapture.”

In dance histories, this incident is usually repeated and valorized as a moment of artistic inspiration. What should be noted, however, is how it reveals the forces of commodification, appropriation of the exotic, rapturous denial of the physical in favor of the spiritual, and display of the female body as a site of revelation that were to mark St. Denis’s work throughout her career. All of these are exemplified in “Radha.”

The dance (“Egypta”) that the poster inspired was not completed until several years later, but the idea of an Eastern goddess was St. Denis writes, “My own body is the living Temple of transposed into an Indian setting for “Radha,” all Gods. The God of Truth is in my upright spine. The which catapulted St. Denis into the artistic God of Love is in the Heart’s rhythmic beating. The circles of the cultural elite. First publicly God of Wisdom lives in my conceiving mind... The God performed in 1906, “Radha” played in New York at Proctor’s vaudeville house on Twentyof Beauty is revealed in my harmonious body.’ third Street, with St. Denis appearing between acts by a pugilist and a group of trained monkeys. Soon, however, a New York socialite and oriental enthusiast, Mrs. Orland Rowland, took an interest in St. Through her dance, St. Denis declared that Denis’s work and arranged a private matinee for her society friends. she was presenting the mystic’s experience of unity with God. In preparation for each “Radha” became a hit. Newspaper notices assured her success with headlines such as “Yes, Society Did Gasp When Radha in Incense Laden performance of “Radha;’ St. Denis writes, she Air ‘Threw Off the Bondage of the Earthly Senses,’ “ and hundreds of would meditate for half an hour to “realize my contact with the one Mind,” so that by the eager spectators were turned away from subsequent performances. St. Denis was launched on the high art circuit and soon found an influential time she stepped onstage, she felt she “was supporter in Stanford White, but her work never lost its cross-class truly the priestess in the temple.’’

Just as in Christian Science the body was appeal. Lean times periodically sent her back to vaudeville to finance her work. subsumed into Spirit, St. Denis subsumed the sensual aspects of her dancing into a vaunted By thus contextualizing “Radha” in terms of the popularity of exotica at the turn of the century, the rise of “barefoot dancing,’’ and various mysticism framed both as religion and as art. strains of spiritualism, I have touched on issues of gender, orientalism, In doing so she, like her contemporary Isadora Duncan, was able to extend the bounds of and changing representations of women. Many dance historians stop propriety in the public display of the partially their analysis at this point. But I still want to consider in detail the clothed female body. At a time when bare feet ideologies of these various discourses and their mode of activation in the were cause for shock, St. Denis in her revealconstruction of “Radha.” ing costume earned reviews declaring, “Every lascivious thought flees shy into the farthest corner... [She has] freed our souls from the clutches of everyday life.’’

by denying the material world altogether, subsuming it into a monism of Spirit. As Susan Hill Lindley has argued, the feminism of Christian Science was “ambiguous,” and Eddy’s resolution of this dualism that traditionally denigrated both women and the material “was no real solution to the tension, for it denied rather than redeemed the ‘lost half.'"

But, the spiritualism of Christian Science combined with the Delsarte system, which allowed women a new freedom of expression through movement, may have provided St. Denis a way “around” the strictures associated with the body’s materiality and sensuality.

While building a career on her own physical display, she steadfastly asserted her identity as a mystic and her dancing as spiritual uplift.

In a poem titled “White Jade” describing an early dance of the same name, St. Denis writes, “My own body is the living Temple of all Gods.

The God of Truth is in my upright spine. The God of Love is in the Heart’s rhythmic beating.

The God of Wisdom lives in my conceiving mind... The God of Beauty is revealed in my harmonious body.’’ In this rhetorical fiat, the material body is not so much denied as transposed into the figuration of transcendental values.

1991

MOVE

“O R IE N TA L IS M” “ORIENTALISM” Edward Said defines “orientalism” as “a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’).” Through an act of “imaginative geography,” it both created and then served the maintenance of the two worlds. It articulates a “relationship of power, of domination, and of varying degrees of cultural hegemony.” “Orientalism” in Said’s usage refers not only to the changing political-historical relations between Europe and Asia but also to the discovery and study of various oriental cultures by Westerners and to a body of assumptions, images, and fantasies held by Westerners about the Orient. It is this latter category that is my concern here. Although Said traces historical changes in the specific constitution of these images and fantasies, he maintains that a pervasive “latent Orientalism,’’ circulating both inside and outside of scholarly disciplines, has remained remarkably consistent for several hundred years.

Above all, the Orient is conceived of as unchanging and eternal.

Occasionally these characteristics are valorized as “seminal” and “pro found;’ as in reference to “the wisdom of the East.” Yet, most of the attributes assigned to the Orient are opposite to those valorized in the West. The East is primitive, childlike, and backward; it is eccentric, irrational, chaotic, and mysterious; it is sensual, sexual, fecund, and despotic. Most important, the Orient is deemed incapable of speaking for itself. It is not Europe’s “interlocutor, but its silent Other.” The Western orientalist, as artist or scholar, “makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West.”

By the end of the nineteenth century, the East was clearly constructed as a site requiring explication, investigation, illustration, discipline, reconstruction, or redemption. The East’s otherness offended European standards of sexual propriety, threatened domestic seemliness, and “wore away Eastern discreteness and rationality of time, space, and personal identity. In the Orient, one was suddenly confronted with unimaginable antiquity, inhuman beauty, boundless distance.”

By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the “unchanging” nature of the East was seen as a source of regeneration for a Western world caught in an unsettling rise of industrialism and materialism.

Said has characterized this idea of regeneration as a secular postEnlightenment myth based on Christian imagery of death and rebirth through salvation. In “Radha,” St. Denis acts out a similar scenario of redemption within the imaginative geography of the Orient.

Following Said, we could thus look at “Radha;’ with its cresting tide of physical excitement overcome by spiritual purification, as illustrating the threatening chaotic sensuality of the East and its ultimate discipline and redemption through the triumph of spirituality or the law of ultimate truth. From this point of view, “Radha” projects a vision of the East as a site of imaginary pilgrimage both for sensual indulgence and physical awakening (the same notion later popularized in E. M. Forster’s Passage to India, e.g.) and for spiritual rejuvenation of an America in the throes of change.

But if “Radha” is “about” the East, it is even more about the West. As James Clifford has noted in his criticism of Said’s book, Said’s argument at times suffers too much from the dichotomy we/they he attempts to describe. In fact, Western discourse about “the East” reflects a continually changing historical process of self-definition by “the West.” We can see “Radha” as a portrayal of Western desires and ambivalences displaced onto an orientalized, gendered body. The association between the cultural otherness of the Orient and the construction of gender in the West is the key to this linkage.

Yet, most of theattributes assigned to the Orient are opposite to those valorized in the West. The East is primitive, childlike, and backward; it is eccentric, irrational, chaotic, and mysterious; it is sensual, sexual, fecund, and despotic. Most important, the Orient is deemed incapable of speaking for itself.

caption here

75

QUOTE

Jane Desmond

1991

THE TENSION THESE SE INCOMMEN ATTRIBUTES— WHORE, EASTE AND SEXUAL/CH ARTICULATED MATERIAL PRES FEMALE

MOVE

NS BETWEEN EEMINGLY NSURABLE —GODDESS/ ERN/WESTERN, HASTE—ARE ALL D ACROSS THE SENCE OF THE E BODY. 77

AUTHOR

Jane Desmond

ORIENTALISM E AND THE OTHT H O T H ER N ES S D AN SM LI TA EN O RI ERNESS OF GENDER AND ER AN D RA C E D EN G F O RACE As a site of unlimited desire and deep generative energies, the Orient is figured as female. Trinh T. Minh-ha describes the construction of the feminine in Western culture in practically the same language Said uses in depicting the Orient. “Woman,” she says, “can never be defined... She wallows in night, disorder, immanence, and is at the same time the ‘disturbing factor (between men)’ and the key to the beyond.”

Both “woman” and “the East” are constructed by Western patriarchy as “natural” categories of difference requiring explication, investigation, illustration, discipline, reconstruction, or redemption. Knowledge of both is eroticized as a stripping bare, an exposing of hidden meaning. The vocabulary itself reveals a scopic economy of difference in which the act of seeing is equated with mastery. As Said notes, a recurrent motif in nineteenth-century writing is the “vision of the Orient as spectacle, or tableau vivant.”That both the Orient and woman are cast as speechless renders selfnarrative and history impossible and creates the necessary conditions for visual spectacle as site or source of knowledge. These double specular economies of difference come together in St. Denis’s performance of “Radha.”

Here the mute colonized female body represents the sensuality of both the “female” and the Orient. Similarly, the higher spirituality attached to the “wisdom of the East” meets current notions of the women’s sphere as the province of moral guardianship. “Radha” is thus doubly sexualized and doubly chaste. The

“Radha” is thus doubly sexualized and doubly chaste.

tensions between these seemingly incommensurable attributes—goddess/whore, Eastern/ Western, and sexual/chaste—are all articulated across the material presence of the female body. The dance signals the underlying dialectical relation of opposites in any binary construction. It also points to the changing dimensions of women’s roles at the turn of the century and the reconstruction of female physicality as it was reflected in the health reform movement.

Freud’s description of woman’s sexuality as the dark continent reminds us of the intimate relationship among orientalism, gender, and a third register of otherness: race. In discussing this phrase, Sander Gilman asserts that Freud

1991 “ties the image of female sexuality to the image of the colonial black and to the perceived relationship between the female’s ascribed sexuality and the Other’s exoticism and pathology.” The reason Freud’s statement was legible to his contemporaries is that, like female sexuality and the imaginative geography of colonialism, the “dark races” were represented as objects to be illuminated, mapped, and controlled.

Early nineteenth-century race theory joined with social Darwinism in the latter half of the century to provide intellectual currency for white ideas about the biological basis of racial inequality. Like gender, the concept of race entailed notions of difference that were seen as irreducibly linked to the body and, therefore, as “natural.” Both women and nonwhites were thus consigned to the “lower” realm of nature. The same dynamic of dominance based on natural difference that was exemplified in white colonialism also undergirds patriarchy.

RE AD IN G “R AD HA ” READING “RADHA” In “Radha” I find a construction of meaning that depends on manipulating these codes of difference into an overlapping structure.

Race, gender, and cultural otherness double one another, with each register reinforcing the next to produce a hyperbole of “Otherness.”

Dancing, as a nonverbal display of the body—most often the female body—provides an especially rich mode of articulation for this process.

Race, gender, and cultural otherness double one another, with each register reinforcing the next to produce a hyperbole of “Otherness.” Dancing, as a nonverbal display of the body—most often the female body—provides an especially rich mode of articulation for this process.

As I have noted in the preceding discussion, orientalist thought has constructed the East as feminine. Racial thinking has similarly tied otherness to the body. Display of the “colored” Eastern female body then carries with it a surplus of signifiers of difference. The litany of difference can be summarized as sexual (i.e., desirable yet terrifying), mute, natural, essential, universal, unchanging, and visually knowable.

The female body is the nodal point that interpolates racial and cultural difference in “Radha.” Its investigation is also the main content of the dance and the vehicle for spectacle.

It shows a woman renouncing, of her own accord, the powerful pleasure of her own body for a chaste spiritual union with the transcendent.

EA N IN G FM MECHANISMS OF MEANING EC H AN IS M S O M The structure of this dance reveals the spectacle of a woman lost in a rising tide of self-pleasure, a goddess delirious with her own sexuality.

It shows a woman renouncing, of her own accord, the powerful pleasure of her own body for a chaste spiritual union with the transcendent. It shows the careful marking out and celebration of each aspect of a woman’s physicality, her five senses explored one by one moving in sequence,

MOVE

Ruth St. Denis begins the dance of touch.

so that the spectator is drawn into an ever more intimate relationship with her body. This spectacle is displayed in front of a semicircle of male viewers on stage and equally directed outward to the audience.

When it is described in this way, the scopophilic aspects of the piece become apparent.

Drawing on psychoanalytic film theories of spectatorship and voyeurism, I maintain that the woman’s body is fragmented and fetishized, not only visually but conceptually, into each of the five senses-the woman is the five senses, each displayed separately for investigation by the viewer. The woman, observed “unawares” by the audience in the darkened theater, is caught in a vortex of pleasure. She is further situated as object of the male gaze through the relayed looks of the priests on stage. Their presence also signals the religiosity of the act.

(Being priests, they provide no competition for a white heterosexual male viewer in the audience but do provide adequate gender identification.)

At first glance, it appears that any displeasure that may be aroused in a male viewer by the woman’s ability to sexually satisfy herself is soon banished by the reassurance that she rejects her own pleasure/power for spiritual fulfillment. The potential terror of female sexuality would thus be constrained by the patriarchal law of the Father in the form of religion, which would demonstrate the control that orientals, women, and all people of color were seen as requiring. However, the dance also unites the goddess/whore duality within the figure of one woman, thus allowing for several possible readings. One reading reassures the male viewer that even “asexual” women are really “women,” that is, defined by and reducible to their bodies. Other readings might hold that women themselves are repositories of both relationships to sexuality, indulgence, and control; or that woman’s pleasure in her own body is so seductive as to involve a constant struggle between expression and renunciation; or even that the pleasure of the senses is itself a transcendent spiritual experience. That is, the recuperative effect of the religious framing remains ambiguous, allowing for multiple responses.

Scopophilic pleasures of this sort are allowed in high art under certain conditions.

St. Denis’s contemporary, the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal, characterized this requirement when he stated that, although “Radha” “borders on voluptuousness,... it is chaste.” The mechanism that allows this audience/performer link can be described as what Michel Foucault calls the “confessional” mode.

79

AUTHOR

Jane Desmond

1991

Ruth St. Denis performs Radha. 1906.

MOVE

T H E P L E A SU R E S OF O F THE THE PLEASURES THE C O N F E SS IO N A LM CONCESSIONAL MODE ODE One way of looking at the dynamics of meaning in “Radha;’ with its religious discourse, is in the form of a Christian confessional. The confessional structure is a ritual expression, a truthful telling of forbidden behavior, especially­—as Foucault emphasizes in The History of Sexuality—sexual behavior. It requires a speaker and listener (performer and audience). The act of telling “exonerates, redeems, and purifies” the confessor, and promises him or her salvation. Its redemptive promise simultaneously allows, while disavowing, the illicit pleasures of prurient interest on the part of the audience.

Foucault indicates how the range of the confessional form expanded after the Reformation. By the end of the nineteenth century this range extended into a series of relationships, including those between psychiatrists and patients and delinquents and experts, and it also took several rhetorical forms such as autobiographical narratives and published letters I would add to this list the relationship between Radha and her audience as it functioned in performance. It was the supposed moral superiority of the viewing audience that was being played to and rein forced in Radha’s display and renunciation of the pleasures of her own body. Linda Nochlin has, in her discussion of orientalist painting, called this type of viewing experience a “tongue-clicking and lip-smacking response.”

The confessional mode interlocked with St. Denis’s own way of conceiving of her work.

St. Denis’s belief in the Delsartean meaningfulness of movement, and her conviction that her dancing demonstrated the unity of the individual spirit with god (formulated in Christian Science as androgynous, or beyond sexuality), framed her work in moral justification. The confessional mode, as a way of structuring a relationship between performer and spectator, framed sexuality as art and art as moral uplift. Given St. Denis’s position as a woman choreographer, then a rarity, I believe that her utilization of these discourses of morality enabled her to subvert the contemporary standards for “respectable” women’s display of their own sexuality. In doing so, however, she also reproduced traditional patriarchal designations of that sexuality.

The tensions between the sexuality of the work and its artistic and spiritual framing are reflected in the contemporary critical response.

Von Hofmannsthal captured the crux of the dance: “It is consecrated to the senses, but it is higher.” Similarly, a British critic called “Radha” athletic in its actuality and ascetic in its refinement. The reviewer for the Boston

Herald could not help noting that St. Denis’s “body is that of a woman divinely planned” but insisted that “there is no atmosphere of sex about her.”

Foucault’s work can take us farther in a consideration of sexuality and spectatorship.

Foucault points out the similarity between two modes of production of truth, the confessional and the scientific discourse. Both were utilized in the expanding nineteenth-century discourses of sexuality, and both implied a will to knowledge that reflected a socially inscribed power to investigate, to judge, and ultimately to reform or punish. In “Radha,” both of these discourses come together. The ethnographic urge to represent the other for the pleasure and uses of the representer combines with the display of sexuality sanctified by the confessional code. The result for the audience is a doubly inscribed “right to look,” further enhanced by racial ideologies.

In white Western discourse, both nonwhites and non-Westerners are coded as extremely or excessively sexual. The dark (St. Denis used dark body paint in the first versions) goddess from the erotic East, then, implies a surfeit of sexuality. Even when St. Denis switched to a body suit of her own flesh color in later versions, either for reasons of propriety or merely for convenience, she was still perceived as a Hindu goddess, and we know that at that time in North America, Hindus were perceived as black. In one of the first performances, when a Hindu first entered carrying a tray of incense, an audience member jeered in black dialect, “Who wants de Waitah?” The racial implication was so clear that the company did not tour south of the Mason-Dixon line because of the Jim Crow laws.

St. Denis was, of course, known by her audience to be white. Her portrayal of a woman of color had the effect of sexualizing her in the audience’s mind. This is similar to the device used in nineteenth-century odalisque paintings where the association of black women with whites served as a clue to the sexual knowledge or availability of the white women. Similarly, while St. Denis is Western, she is here linked to the sensuous, eternal feminine represented by the East.

These several dynamics function to enhance the audience’s right to look sexually at the respectable white middle-class woman on the stage. The racial and cultural displacement of “Radha” is precisely what enhances the success of the confessional mode in the context of art. It is this hyperbole of otherness and its reinforcing linkages between ideological notions of race, gender, and non-Westernness that, I suspect, was the key to this dance’s popularity.

81

AUTHOR

Jane Desmond

Ruth St. Denis: 'The Lady of the Dance'

Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shaw for National Geographic Magazine, April 1916.

1991

MOVE

IONS ONCLUS C CONCLUSIONS But if we leave the analysis at that, we fail to consider fully the dynamics of live performance. After all, the representation of Radha is not a story, where the priestess Radha might be imagined, or a painting, where she might be displayed and observed, but a live performance.

As I have already mentioned, the middle-class white woman’s body is central to the production of pleasure in the relationship of these three markers of otherness as discussed above. But it is also the factor that ultimately confounds binary constructions of meaning. In the ludic or dreamlike space of performance, the performer is both white and nonwhite, Western and Eastern, and female while usurping the male role of choreographer. (Remember that at that time, although most dancers were female, very few dances were choreographed by women.)

What issues of spectatorship and the production of meaning do these complications raise? At the very least, they unsettle the binarisms of the ideologies that undergird racism, sexism, and orientalism. The element of mastery, however, implied by the right to represent the “other,” remains.

At the very least, they unsettle the binarisms of the ideologies that undergird racism, sexism, and orientalism.

But if we look at the choreography, with its combination of skirtdancing turns, ballet steps, and “Indian” gestures, something else becomes apparent. The dance itself serves as a sign of the cultural process of “othering” through representation—an ongoing process of construction that is always self-reflexive with regard to the culture that produces it.

The representative codes of vaudeville skirt-dancing collide with iconic signs of Indianness, mixing with and overlaying one another as a sign of cultural interaction and continually renegotiated meaning.

Although there is no Brechtian self-reflexivity built into the theatrical structure of “Radha,” implicit in every performance is the spectator’s awareness of the construction of an illusion. Because of its existence as a temporal art—and a three-dimensional one that is dependent on the physical presence of the performer in the same space as the audience (i.e., not sculpture, not film, not literature)—live performance must produce a convincing linkage of similarity and difference. The performer is both himself or herself and the character who is portrayed. Performance presents this as a dialectical relationship, always in negotiation.

Drawing on psychoanalytic film theories of spectatorship, I could argue that St. Denis as a white Westerner provides an avenue of psychological identification for her white Western audience. Framed by the essentialist, transcendent spirituality of the piece, the audience is brought into ego identification with the white as nonwhite and the Western as Eastern. At the same time, the voyeuristic and fetishistic aspects of the dance (enhanced by its construction as spectacle) objectify it as separate from the observer. A “colored” white woman (since this is not caricature of the minstrel-show variety) also evokes an ambiguous response. While “mixing” sexualizes the white woman, it simultaneously indicates a potential mixing of the races, legally proscribed at the time. If ideologies are based on binary constructions of difference necessary to the maintenance of hegemony, performance thus indicates the ambiguity of such binary constructions and their true dialectical function in the production of meaning.

Certainly St. Denis’s rise to fame and her ability to present herself in respectable theaters as a woman alone on the stage is emblematic of the social changes in the women’s sphere at the turn of the century. Still,

her work remains conservative in its assertion of spirituality as the realm of woman and also in its presentation of woman’s body as sexualized.

One of St. Denis’s achievements was to unite these supposed opposites.

Some critics have begun to pose questions theorizing the body in performance. Questions of the power of representation become more complex when acted out on and through a material body. Is the female appropriation of sexual display in live performance, even within patriarchal norms, an act that in some way threatens the hegemony of patriarchy? That so much of the sexual pleasure in “Radha” is danced as self-pleasure (especially Radha’s self-caressing) on the one hand asserts a new self-empowerment for woman and on the other belongs to traditional structures of pornographic viewing.

That so much of the sexual pleasure in “Radha” is danced as self-pleasure (especially Radha’s selfcaressing) on the one hand asserts a new selfempowerment for woman and on the other belongs to traditional structures of pornographic viewing.

In any performance, the venue and the particularities of audience are essential to the generation of meaning. Certainly the meanings activated by the first performance, for spectators who had just watched boxing and were soon to see trained monkeys, were somewhat different from those generated by the same piece in a “respectable” theater, framed as “art.” Different still is the reception of “Radha” by our students today who dutifully sit through St. Denis films in dance history seminars.

What the investigation of a piece like “Radha” can provide is an example of the necessity of unraveling the multiple strains of ideological meaning that are present in any work of performance and that are variously activated in specific viewing situations. For instance, similar doublings of race, exotica, and sexuality are played out in Josephine Baker’s famous “banana dance.” As a black woman, however, her construction as “exotic” never played as successfully in North America as in Europe.

As we reconsider the canon of dance history and integrate it with gender studies, it is not enough to ask how St. Denis conceived of her work, or how it relates to the dance history that precedes and follows it.

Nor it is enough to ask how St. Denis’s work reflected the changing roles of women in her day, or to note stylistic similarities between dance and other types of artistic products in the same historical period. All of these investigations produce valuable information and should not be ignored. But as scholars we must also look more deeply at the mechanisms of meaning on which the performance hinges and investigate the role of live display of the female body in activating those mechanisms, as I have attempted to do in this article. Only by more fully comprehending the production of ideology in every sphere of social construction, including the female body in performance, can we begin to sever the invisible links that bind racism, sexism, and cultural imperialism so tightly together.

83

Jane Desmond

1991

. . .t h e

r fo

rm

m

pe er

is

th

e

AUTHOR

fem

ale whil e usu

g n i rp

m

ale

role of chor

p a r eog

r e h

MOVE

85

AUTHOR

Marion Kant

DON’T MENTION THE NAZIS Imagine you are sitting in an archive and you come across some documents—piles of dusty material, yellowed paper with rusty marks of paperclips, some sheets slightly torn and worn at the edges, all with that unmistakable musty smell of age—and you read that some of your admired heroes of modern dance were caught up in the unpleasant politics of the Nazi system.

You are puzzled; these papers do not fit the story you were told all along. You did not know that Rudolf von Laban or Mary Wigman had anything at all in common with one of the worst political regimes of European history. You did not know that they were fellow travelers of Nazi cultural politics. You did not know that they not only took advantage of the system but openly supported it.

You do not like what you see. What do you do next?

Tick the correct answer.  You change the subject and find something nicer to research.  You tear up the evidence so it disappears and nobody else finds it.  You discard the evidence as inconsequential and thus negligible.  You break down in tears and seek therapy.  You become angry with the archive for keeping damaging files.  You sit down and think.

2004

MOVE

87

AUTHOR

Marion Kant

Rudolf von Laban has been considered the ‘father’ of modern German dance, an artistic movement that provided the ideas and structures for a fundamentally new and historically different dance in Europe. Laban saw himself as both a reformer and a revolutionary. Because our notions of ‘modernity’ rely heavily on the concepts developed in the early twentieth century, we hesitate to query the motives or actions of the founding fathers and mothers of that beloved art. We prefer to interpret them in a positive way and like to see the departure from tradition and history as an essentially progressive movement.

What happens if we do question the lives and works of those who created the new dance? What happens when we examine history and do not like the results of our examination? These questions raise many problems about the way we direct our research and the assumptions we use to write that research up.

2004 The twentieth century was a violent age; Eric Hobsbawm called his history of the ‘short twentieth century’ the Age of Extremes (1994).

Europe, and Germany in particular, suffered under deep social and economic divisions that led to the establishment of the most extreme of political regimes in 1933: Nazism. How did artists such as dancers, choreographers, teachers; how did Rudolf von Laban or Mary Wigman cope with the vicissitudes of life in Germany? How did they react to a growing radicalization in Germany? How did they face Nazism? Are the politics of the 1930s reflected in their dances and choreographies?

Though the questions seem innocent enough, the answers have deeply divided the dance community. To come back to our multiple choice suggestions: there are people who would prefer to eliminate the questions—and the documentary material. Then there are people who do not like the questions but have answers ready, answers that aim at

MOVE protecting dancers and choreographers under all circumstances. The threatening questions are avoided by finding an acceptable story that makes further inquiries undesirable. Yet what is so threatening about those questions? Why has there been such hesitance to face them?

things and people develop over time, what changes they undergo and what relationships they enter, how societies are formed, how and why they sometimes disappear, etc., are questions a historian might ask.

In history, events or people of the past are taken, looked at and put into a context—a political, economic, social, cultural, psychological and/ or institutional context. This context is necessarily defined by using present knowledge. After all, we know what happened next; the people we study did not. Historical inquiry uses documents of the past— sources­—to construct or reconstruct or deconstruct (every one of these verbs already indicates a principal attitude towards history) the past reality of a three-dimensional historical situation.

The documentary sources are one important starting point of historical research. But they are not sufficient in themselves. Some kinds of models are needed to organize our sources. Otherwise they are just

THE USES OF HISTORY Historical inquiry offers a particular strategy to answer those questions. But history is not something simple. Volumes and volumes have been written to suggest and analyze what history is about and how to study it. Hence history can be written in many ways - chronologically or categorically/analytically, describing ‘micro history’ or tracing ‘macro developments’. Yet, however it is written, the concept of ‘time’ is one of the defining categories. What happens in a certain period of time, how

da

c o m m u n i t y. e c n

the

ep

ly

d

ivide

nn o c e n t e n

oug h ,

em

i

d

answ e th

de

e

a h ve s r

Th o u

e

s s n o i t he ques t gh

How did artists such as dancers, choreographers, teachers; how did Rudolf von Laban or Mary Wigman cope with the vicissitudes of life in Germany? How did they react to a growing radicalization in Germany? How did they face Nazism? Are the politics of the 1930s reflected in their dances and choreographies?

89

QUOTE

Marion Kant

2004

WHAT HAPP WE EXAMIN AND DO NO RESULTS EXAMIN

THE BARON O

MOVE

PENS WHEN NE HISTORY OT LIKE THE S OF OUR NATION?

OF TREMONT

91

AUTHOR

Marion Kant

disconnected bits and make no sense at all.

Here we enter tricky ground because the application of any and every model implies epistemological (that is, how knowledge is created) consequences. Models, informed by philosophies and theoretical ideas, are necessary not only to transform the three dimensions of historical reality into thoughts and words but also to offer a mould, which will give a comprehensible form to the thoughts.

Models say much about the background, the very general way of thinking of any historian.

These models also determine the direction of the examination, what will be emphasized, what left out because it does not suit the argument or fit into the mould. The choice of methods, the choice of models, will shape the process of thinking about an argument and will guide the research and the organization of the research material.

Just as it is necessary to choose a theoretical frame, it is also necessary to be conscious of this process and the choices made. The relationship between models, methods and historical research is complicated and requires experience, flexibility and intuition, a feeling for the period and the people. In principle, any theoretical framework could be used to organize historical documentation. But not all theories can help to understand the material and not all theories are suitable for every historical research project. There exists a correlation between theory/model and sources.

Both have to be evaluated and tested constantly for their mutual suitability. A model or a theory can, of course, be forced onto historical material. Yet the outcome would be a poor and one-sided image of the reality. ‘Theory’ fashions have not helped this complex process; for example postmodern theories, drawn from the sensibilities of the mid-to late twentieth century can often be anachronistic when imposed mechanically on earlier periods. As much as some theories have been overused, others are underused. Jurgen Habermas and his theory of ‘Öffentlichkeit’—the public sphere, or Noam Chomsky’s theories on language development and language skills have hardly made an appearance in dance studies, though they offer alternative ways of looking at the public role of dance as expressive art (Habermas) or of considering whether there are deep structures of meaning in bodily expression as there appear to be in language (Chomsky). Whatever theory or model is applied, however, it should disappear into the historical investigation and not dominate the resulting text or narrative. It should fuse with evidence in an elegant synthesis.

2004 Once the theoretical framework is chosen, the historian begins the research process (locating sources, visiting archives, reading primary sources, collecting other evidence, filing documents and other evidence); next comes the writing and publishing process, and then finally the process of discussing, presenting and defending the version of the past that has emerged. None of these stages are mechanical nor are they completely separate from each other. Thought goes into filing as much as into writing. Documents are never self-evident. They need to be decoded, deciphered, understood and reassembled within a context or milieu, which the historian creates.

Writing down arguments within a historical context, composing a ‘text’, is a very personal process and the above mentioned choice of methods is a subjective matter as well as an objective necessity.

They and the other dancers profited personally and artistically from the new structures. Their aesthetic propositions reflect the greater ideas of their time.

MOVE

GERMAN MODERN DANCE AS A HISTORICAL RESEARCH TOPIC Let us develop some arguments concerning German dance in the 1920s and 1930s, which can serve as guidelines or hypotheses. In the course of research the hypotheses will be modified and constantly assessed for their value, helpfulness and correctness. Specific questions, like those above, turn into hypotheses to trigger the research and act as constant reminders of important strands of ideas that need to be followed.

They serve as threads to construct traceable and cohesive narratives.

The first argument proposed as a working hypothesis is that Laban and Wigman were great artists and therefore they deserve a special kind of protection. As dance belongs to the higher sphere of art, it cannot be contaminated by tedious and disagreeable realities like politics. Dance has to be measured only against itself and its aesthetic advances. The artistic invention of dancers or choreographers is above critical inquiry and there is no need to question either the person or the work of art.

Laban’s and Wigman’s ideas and original innovations have initiated an entirely new way of creating and teaching dance. That is proof enough of their superior status. They deserve our admiration. Any questionable political alliances they might have entered can be discarded as insignificant for their work. Investigation should therefore illuminate their contribution in dance history by adding further detailed understanding of their artistic achievement.

Here is an argument that contradicts the one just stated: Laban and Wigman absorbed and contributed to a certain kind of German thought of the early twentieth century. Both can be considered to have belonged to a nationally orientated and conservative movement, which embraced racist as well as occult notions. This current of thought was part and parcel of what later became the Nazi state, the Third Reich. By the 1920s Laban had made and represented a particular kind of modernity.

His entire opus on dance embodied modern notions. Yet’ his modernity hated and fought many of the equally modern representations and aspects of western capitalist bourgeois society. Laban did not participate accidentally in the Nazi regime; his theory of dance and community disposed him to arrive at the same völkisch [untranslatable, but roughly ‘racist’] ideas as the Nazis. Similarly; Wigman’s dances reflected the need for a strictly hierarchical structure of society with a chosen leader; a society which also depended heavily on national identity. Laban, like other famous German dancers, might not have initiated the political process of nazification in Germany but he contributed to the making of a German society ready for the Nazis.

Laban and Wigman stood at the forefront of the radical new changes in dance aesthetics and dance management. They and the other dancers profited personally and artistically from the new structures. Their aesthetic propositions reflect the greater ideas of their time.

CHOICE OF HYPOTHESIS How did I arrive at this argument? There are always personal reasons in any choice of subject, certain topics which attract the researcher. In my case I was intrigued by the ‘missing period’ in the history of modern dance in Germany. I found that the years from 1933 to 1945 seemed to be absent from the written accounts of German dance. The years of the Third Reich were either left blank or compressed into prefabricated apologies. There were cryptic statements about the suffering of artists/ musicians/dancers and the suppression of their work. Yet the evidence was never supplied.

My research began by questioning the standard formulas about German art and dance in the Nazi period. I began by looking at all the arts in Germany from 1933 to 1945 and found that dance had been left

out. At most the histories stated that German dance, and its dancers, were ‘forbidden’ and had been silenced by the political regime.

Modern dance and modern dancers, it was asserted, had not been visibly connected to the political or cultural structures of Nazism.

The next step was to examine how some of the leading representatives had actually lived and worked during the period I had chosen. I found that the majority had not emigrated but had remained in Germany. This fact was interesting and, when compared to the fate of the other arts, of singular importance.

Since some of the most famous German modern dancers had chosen to remain in Nazi Germany, their relationship to the regime must have been different from that of the writers, painters, musicians or those dancers who were forced to leave. If they stayed and collaborated with the Nazis, that raised a new question about the aesthetic and moral values in their art. That, in turn, raised the question of the social involvement of the artists, the political context of the creation of art and the integrity of the artists under a brutal regime. It also involved the analysis of ideological and philosophical tendencies of the early twentieth century and their evolution during the 1910s and 1920s.

Laban came into my research naturally; he was one of the outstanding figures in dance history of the twentieth century, not only in Germany. If I was looking at the leading representatives of German dance I had to find out where and how the ‘father’ of modern dance, the inventor and master of the movement, was placed in this particular regime. I had to find out who he was and what made him act the way I thought he had.

I can summarize and say that my approach was to deconstruct the dominant and authoritative perception and to construct my version of this period in history.

In the beginning I applied a deductive method; I took a particular situation and applied the results of general historical research of this period. Historical inquiry helped me to analyze the situation of the arts and their histories during Nazism in Germany­—I could compare dance with the broader picture given.

Then I used an inductive method and conducted research that might generate a deeper understanding of what drove the German dance movement into Nazism.

As time was one important category in history I had to ask whether German dance had always been part of the Nazi system or what it had been before the Nazis came to power. I had to find out the differences or similarities and follow changes that occurred.

93

AUTHOR

Marion Kant

Above all I had to search for the ideological bases and theories of this movement. So, from a specific example, I arrived at a general notion and attempted to verify these arguments.

The documentation in the various archives substantiated my theoretical arguments. Every chronology I created seemed to prove the arguments useful and confirmed ever more that the questions I had asked and the theses I had constructed at the beginning of my research were fruitful. Thus, I assumed that they were ‘correct’ and would make it feasible for me to ‘write’ about a particular part of German history and the history of German dance.

On the one hand there are the ideas, the theoretical framework, the assumptions within a historical frame, but on the other hand this frame has to be filled with substance, with historical data, with ‘evidence’, with something that will make this period come to life.

As an example of Laban’s position in Germany I shall present a document from the files of the Bundesarchiv [the Federal German Archive] in Berlin from 1935. It was written by Rudolf von Laban, who at that time headed the Deutsche Tanzbiihne, the German Dance Theatre. Addressed to Herr von Keudell, a bureaucrat in the Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, the memorandum answered a query, which the top bureaucrats of several ministries, including the Ministry for the Interior, as well as the Police Force, had posed. On 11 February 1935 Laban offered a definition of what constituted German dance. The letter was signed by Laban with ‘Heil Hitler!’, the Nazi salute. The date of February 1935, the address to the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda with its Minister Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s devoted propagandist, and the closing formula give important general information.

They help identify the circumstances and give a greater picture of the time. We are now aware that we are looking at a letter written in Nazi Germany to a highly influential government agency. We also learn that the memorandum is a reference to a letter from the Ministry to Laban. Without knowing exactly what his status was at that time we could conclude that he must have been of some importance otherwise the Ministry would not have turned to him in a vital matter: the definition of something German.

Laban’s explanation offered three main arguments for the identification of German dances—geography, ‘racial essence’ and social usage. ‘German’ was defined by what had been danced in the ‘various German regions from olden times in traditional manner’, and had been incorporated into German customs.

2004 He perceived dance as part of a heritage in which foreign influences had been stripped off and thus made into German cultural assets.

German soil and land had embraced these alien inventions and turned them into something they had not been before. Laban created a mythical historical evolution in which these dances, like migratory tribes, had traveled to German areas over the centuries. Though such dances had once upon a time arrived on German soil as borrowed assets, they had

He perceived dance as part of a heritage in which foreign influences had been stripped off and thus made into German cultural assets.

passed so deeply into the ‘flesh and blood of the German population that one could safely call them German dances, art forms, which arose from German ways of life’. The ‘nature of movement’ and ‘movement forms’, which ‘originate in, and represent, the German spirit’, he concluded, would further inform definitions of ‘German’ dance. Laban accepted waltzes, or ‘turning dances’ and ‘running dances’ as ‘German’ dances.

In his second argument Laban went to the heart of the matter. He turned from external factors to internal matters, to the ‘way to move’ and the ‘form of movement’. For Laban, ‘racial criteria’ characterized dance movements, in particular ‘rhythm’ but also ‘body posture’ and the ‘way the extremities’ are used.

For Laban, ‘racial criteria’ characterised dance movements, in particular ‘rhythm’ but also ‘body posture’ and the ‘way the extremities’ are used.

The ‘racial criteria’ determined the ‘essence of German expression’ as much as they were a result of them. This ‘essence’ in the end distinguished ‘German’ dance from any other movement form.

In historical research one document cannot tell a whole story. The definition of ‘German’ in dance formed part of a wider debate on the nature of the new racial state. Sometimes the researcher knows that context before she gets to the archive; in an ideal world she should always command the general information before taking up the detailed evidence. In reality our

MOVE knowledge is always imperfect. Let us go on to see what we can read in the document by guessing at what must be happening.

It is clear from the text that Laban had trouble defining precisely what constituted the ‘German’ element in dance; his statements appear vague. Therefore he needed to identify ‘racial characteristics’, which he did by separating the ‘German’ from the ‘non-German’.

With these opposite categories Laban constructed a theory that recognized what ‘German’ was not. Here again the letter conceals important information. If we are not familiar with positions of German ideology and the turn towards racial philosophy we cannot recognize that Laban simply copied a method applied by one of Hitler’s demagogues, Alfred Rosenberg, in his book The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1982). One of Rosenberg’s constructions introduced opposing groups of ideas or terms. He defined ‘German’ as the opposite of ‘Alien’/‘Foreign’/ ‘un-German’—Jewish. Once the construct was in place, it was easy to build a hierarchy and justify whatever one wanted to be ‘German’.

‘German’ represented the positive, which had to be protected and rescued from the negative, which was threatening and had to be eliminated. Laban adopted exactly this method when he wrote that clarification would be achieved by ‘reflection on that which is not German in dance’.

It also reveals that he accepted Rosenberg’s polarization of good and evil—‘German’ and ‘un-German’.

The memorandum shows that Laban was familiar with and adopted Nazi terminology and racial theory. It also reveals that he accepted Rosenberg’s polarization of good and evil —‘German’ and ‘un-German’. He set an arbitrarily defined ‘German’ characteristic against an equally arbitrary ‘un-German’ feature.

Within this hierarchy of dances Laban—like Rosenberg—proved that ‘German’ dances were better, racially superior, of higher quality.

The next step, and this the Nazis had made clear in their party programmes right from the beginning, was the eradication of the ‘unGerman’, even ‘un-German’ dance - because it was inferior. Laban’s role was to underpin theoretically the Nazi desire to cleanse the dance scene in Germany.

95

AUTHOR

Marion Kant

Laban found a third distinction by examining the social usage of dances. He suggested that folk dance should no longer be separated from social dance because social dances had in fact become so popular that they already were a form of folk dance. The idea that folk dance would disappear and be replaced by a particular kind of social dance had been established in many of his writings, his teaching programmes and not least in the creation of the movement choir scheme. Again, the letter does not tell us about the 1920s and Laban’s achievements in reorganizing the German dance scene.

This is the ‘context’ that has to be developed in order to understand the memorandum of 1935.

Laban had hoped that his movement choirs would prove to be the future form of social dance, a united and unifying folk/community socializing through movement. In 1926 he promoted social dance as he saw it as a positive morale for the white

2004 race (Laban 1926). Shortly after that, in 1928 he sketched the basic body movement of the white race on which the new dance could build. As he wrote, ‘The picture, which we have of the most natural movement for the white race, is roughly the sideward movement’.

Laban designed his own new social dance as a merger of folk dance and art dance, which reflected the true rhythms of life of the ‘master’ race. The popular dances of the era, Charleston, Black Bottom, Swing, though, he rejected as ‘degeneration’.

The memorandum that Laban composed gave the Nazi administration an apparently scholarly justification for the prohibition of jazz and swing dance in both musical and dance entertainment. Written by the most influential dance theoretician and practitioner it added a particular kind of weight to the decision making process. Laban provided the state prohibition of swing and jazz as ‘Nigger- and Jew dance’ with a pseudo-scientific basis. His definition became a valuable means of orientation throughout the debate about prohibiting ‘un-German’ dance practices.

MOVE

There is no evidence in the document that Laban was under any pressure by the civil servants in the Ministry of Propaganda. The document shows that he collaborated keenly in the creation of a Nazi dance theory. If artists willingly created the intellectual foundations for Nazi cultural policy, they could be utilized by the administration, the police force or the SS to evaluate dances, to ban or encourage them or to employ them in propaganda.

To read the document with full comprehension, the historian would need a background in the previous period, the so-called Weimar Republic, 1919-33.Two broad cultural debates of those years shaped Laban’s notion of modernity and the invention of a new dance: one concerned the clash between ‘community’ (Gemeinschaft) and ‘society’ (Gesellschaft). The former was organic, face-to-face, based on village and small town; the latter artificial, mechanical, urban, nonnatural.

Laban passionately advocated the former. The other great debate concerned the concepts of culture and civilization. In order to analyze a letter or memorandum, written by Laban in 1935, the historian has to be familiar with these discourses. Inevitably, she will take sides. Whether she prefers to use the positions and arguments of German philosophers Martin Heidegger or Georg Gadamer, both tainted with Nazist ideas themselves, to justify Laban’s decision or, for instance, those of the Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin, who provides different tools to critique Laban’s beliefs, is up to her. The choice, though, will inform and guide her inquiry.

Now the next step is yours. You become the historian. Read the document printed in the Appendix in the light of what I have offered you as background.

Ask yourself the following questions:  Does the document ‘prove’ that Laban was a Nazi?  Does it suggest that he was forced to work with the Ministry?  Do you see evidence that he regarded art as above the politics of his time?  Should you revise your attitude to German modern dance because of this evidence?  Should you make no judgment until you have seen more evidence or constructed your own context for the Nazi period?

However you answer them, by asking them you become a real historian, for, after all, history is not the past but thinking about the past.

97

APPENDIX

(50.01/237) Deutsche Tanzbuhne To: Reich Ministry for Pop. Enl. and Prop.

Attention: Herr von Keudell 11 February 1935 Ref: in reply to your letter of 29.1.1935, herewith my interpretation of the concept "German Dance" Heil Hitler! (signed) Laban Deutsche Tanzbuhne The categorization of a dance form as "German dance" can be justified from many points of view. In the first place there are to be sure those dances, which from the remote past have been danced in various German regions in traditional forms, which we can certainly call German dances. Here there are certainly mutually borrowed elements from the dances of neighbouring peoples. A whole array of folk dance steps are cultivated in the same ways in Holland, England, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Switzerland and Northern Italy as well as in Germany (Polka, Mazurka, many counter dances). It cannot be established if one or the other of these peoples first developed the relevant dance steps and dance forms, but they have penetrated so deeply into the flesh and blood of the German people that they can confidently be termed German dances. The waltz is certainly a German dance. Indeed it can be called the typical form of dance movement of the German Volk.

This brings me to the second point of view, from which the concept "German Dance" is to be assessed. Here we deal with the type of movement and the form of movement, which corresponds to and arises from essential German features. Here it can only be briefly remarked that racial characteristics stamp themselves in the movements, especially in the rhythm, in the posture of the body and the use of the body parts.

Reflection on that which is not German in dance will most quickly lead to clarification. Certain Spanish or Hungarian or indeed certain definitely Slavic bodily movements and rhythms are so foreign to the essence of German expressive and cultural sensibilities that they could never be taken over and moulded into German forms of dance. This applies to exotic forms of movement of more distant races such as Negroes, Indians, Mongols etc.

To be sure, there are sometimes occasions when something native will be adapted from a foreign stimulus, which we can observe both in the Middle Ages and m modern times. For example, at the time of the Crusades both peasant and aristocratic forms of our own racial dances evolved from the Moriscos (Moor's dances) and more recently the so-called German tango grew out of Iberian dance rhythms and Anglo-German social dances from Negroid running and hopping dances. How far

such transformations, often third hand, of dance structures can be considered German dance types depends doubtless on they way they are performed and used.

There is here a third point of view. One can assess dances according to their social and societal use as either foreign or home grown. There are courtly dances, which are historically undoubtedly of foreign origin, such as the minuet.

Although they reflect a foreign choreographic origin, and in spite of the fact that they reflect entirely courtly customs, they have in certain transformations had an impact on peasant dancing. Thus today social dances have by their very wide use become themselves folk dances. It is even questionable today and for the foreseeable future, if the distinction between folk dance and social dance is really tenable and where the boundaries are to be drawn.

In conclusion it can be said that today waltzes and running dances from the area of so-called social dancing can be certainly accepted as German dances, in so far as they are performed in the German way and to music, which corresponds to the sensibilities of the German Volk. An interpretation of the concept "German Art Dance", that is, the various representational forms of dance, must be approached in much the same way from similar points of view.

(A note handwritten by the Minister Rat von Keudell is appended to this memo, as follows: ft is probably still premature to provide a .fixed definition. What can be said is that "today waltzes and running dances from the area of so-called social dancing can be certainly accepted as German dances, in so far as they are performed in the German way music, which corresponds to the sensibilities of the German Volk.")

MOVE

Rudolf von Laban at the Art of Movement Studio, Manchester, 1948, and his dance anotation system, Labanotation.

99

CE OTHER FAMOUS CONTRIBUTORS TO DAN

CATHERINE DE MEDICI 1515-1589 Catherine de Medici brought ballet from Italy to the courts of France after marrying Henry II (France) who died young, she acts as regent and has dance added to the courts

MOVE

LOIE FULLER JAN. 15, 1862—JAN. 1, 1928 Loie Fuller was American dancer who achieved international distinction for her innovations in theatrical lighting, as well as for her invention of the “Serpentine Dance,” a striking variation on the popular “skirt dances” of the day.

MARIE TAGLIONI 23 APRIL 1804—24 APRIL 1884 Italian ballet dancer whose fragile, delicate dancing typified the early 19th-century Romantic style. Not only did she have Paris at her feet but audiences in London, Milan, Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg hailed her as one of the greatest dancers ballet had ever produced.

101

FAMOUS CONTRIBUTORS TO DA NCE CONT.

ÉMILE JAQUES-DALCROZE 6 JULY 1865—1 JULY 1950 Émile Jaques-Dalcroze was a Swiss music teacher and composer who originated the eurythmics system of musical instruction.

In his youth Jaques-Dalcroze studied composition, and by 1892 he was professor of harmony at the Geneva Conservatory. Convinced that current methods of training professional musicians needed reform, he revised the teaching of harmony and developed his system of rhythmic education, in which bodily movements are used to represent musical rhythms.

MOVE

ISADORA DUNCAN 26 MAY 1877, OR 27 MAY 1878—SEPT. 14, 1927 Isadora Duncan was American dancer whose teaching and performances helped to free ballet from its conservative restrictions and presaged the development of modern expressive dance. She was among the first to raise interpretive dance to the status of creative art.

MARY WIGMAN 13 NOV. 1886—18 SEPT. 1973 Mary Wigman was a German dancer and choreographer, notable as the pioneer of expressionist dance, dance therapy, and movement training without pointe shoes. She is considered one of the most important figures in the history of modern dance. She became one of the most iconic figures of Weimar German culture and her work was hailed for bringing the deepest of existential experiences to the stage.

103

SPECIAL THANKS TO ASSISTANT PROFESSOR JOANNA DEE DAS AT WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST LOUIS AND HER CLASS: HISTORIES OF THEATRICAL DANCE FOR THE INSPIRATION AND COLLECTION OF ARTICLES INCLUDED WITHIN THE MAGAZINE. OTHER ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS GO TO MY PARENTS AND FRIENDS FOR PUTTING UP WITH ME WHENEVER I WOULD RAMBLE ON ABOUT THIS PROJECT.

PRINTING—KINKOS PAPER—GLOSSY 50 T TYPEFACES­— Acumin Variable Concept— Designed by Robert Slimbach at Adobe Originals Plantin MT Pro—Originally designed by Fritz Stelzer and Frank Hinman Pierpont IBM Plex Mono—Designed by Mike Abbink at IBM in collaboration with Bold Monday DESIGN—LUCY J CHEN

SOCIAL CONDITIONS OF BALLET DANCERS AT THE PARIS OPÉRA IN THE 19TH CENTURY Paintings by Edgar Degas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1830s.

GAUTIER ON DANCE—THE SPANISH DANCERS Illustration by Lucy Chen. 2021.

GAUTIER ON DANCE—FANNY ELSSLER Fanny Elssler dancing the cachucha. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library. 1836.

HEROISM IN THE HAREM Illustrations by Lucy Chen. 2021.

BRONISLAVA NIJINSKA: A LEGACY UNCOVERED Photograph of Bronislava Nijinska, graduation picture. Library of Congress. 1908.

Photography of Nijinski, in Afternoon of the Faun. Storia della Danza. 1912.

Illustrations by Natalia Goncharov. ArtStor. before 1923.

ALEXANDRA EXTER Illustrations and drawings by Alexandra Exter.

DANCING OUT THE DIFFERENCE Postcard Ruth St. Denis in Radha. Wikipedia Commons. 1906.

Ruth St. Denis. Wikipedia Commons.

Poster that Inspired Egypta and Radha. ArtStor.

Ruth St. Denis. ArtStor.

Postcard of Radha. New York Public Library. 1906.

Ruth St. Denis. Dance of Taste. Travalanche. 1906.

Radha /dancer: det.: the Dance of Taste. ArtStor.

Ruth St. Denis: "First Lady of the Dance". South Asian American Digital Archive. 1906.

Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn in an out-of-doors photo, in costume, for National Geographic Magazine, April 1916. New York Public Library. 1951 reprint.

DON'T MENTION THE NAZIS Photography by Ahmad Odeh

MOVE is a three-part magazine series, a historical zine that tells a history of injustices and prejudice in dance while also uplifting and celebrating dancers of all backgrounds.

PART I of MOVE—explores dance in Europe from the 19th century to the 1930s, from the Paris Opéra to early modern dance.