Isadora Duncan

Chapter 7
Modernizing Dance


In 1892, the year the first cakewalk con­test was held in a New York ballroom, a woman named Loie Fuller created a sensation at the Folies-Bergere in Paris, dancing what she called her "serpentine dance." The thirty-year-old Fuller, a native of Illinois, had been performing in burlesque and vaudeville since child­hood. Her serpentine dance owed its inspiration to a prop; a few years earlier she had received from an admirer a voluminous skirt of transparent white silk. Playing around with the sensuously pleasing fabric in front of a mirror, Fuller had a vision: With dramatic lighting, she could create fantastic, eva­nescent, suggestive shapes onstage by agitating swaths of silk from underneath with a pair of hand-held wands.
Fuller was a born impresario with a gift for technical stagecraft. Whirling around on a glass platform, lit by as many as fourteen electric spotlights whose colors kept changing and blend­ing, she kept yards and yards of fabric billowing around her in three-dimensional evocations of flowers, butterflies, and flames. Her music tended toward the dramatic, like Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries." To her audiences, she was a living manifestation of Art Nouveau, the decorative style that was just com­ing into vogue in Paris.
None of Fuller's many imitators came close to matching her technical wizardry or her theatrical sense. Her fans included poets (Mallarme and Yeats), painters (Toulouse-Lautrec and Whistler), and scientists (Pierre and Marie Curie). In her hypnotic hold on her audience, in her ability to epitomize the taste of an entire generation, she was a successor to the Taglionis and Elsslers of the earlier nineteenth centu­ry. But unlike those ballerinas, whose careers had been formed within a long­-established artistic tradition, Fuller was a self-made artist who ran her own show, literally as well as figuratively. She was not only the star dancer, she was the dance maker and the business-savvy entrepreneur. As such, she served as
precursor to a whole generation of dancers-mostly young women from America-whose fresh ideas and atti­tudes would prove to be as revolutionary a force in the theater as the incursion of African-American dance forms had already become in the ballroom.
The revolution we call "modern dance" was not just about how to move; it was also about how art should be made and by whom. In the West, as we have seen, dance as a serious theater art bad always been a group endeavor, requiring the contributions of hundreds of individuals (from dancers and musi­cians to carpenters and stagehands) and substantial outlays of money. There was virtually no way to practice the art of dance, either as a dancer or a choreographer, outside the large ballet companies. Like most large enterprises, especially those that rely on the support of the wealthy and powerful, ballet companies tended to resist change. Ballet was unique in one way; although its dominant institutions (like those of the other arts and indeed European society in general) were in the hands
of men, the stars of the ballet stage were women. In no other nineteenth-century enterprise, artistic or otherwise, did women play so significant a role as they did in classical ballet. Behind the scenes, it is true, men remained in charge. Even the most acclaimed balleri­nas danced, quite literally, to the tunes of men. With rare exceptions, men composed the music and the librettos, devised and staged the dances, collected and disbursed the money, and, as ballet masters and critics, set the standards and shaped the images that the dancers embodied onstage and off. A ballerina might express her personality in her dancing-the ethereal Taglioni, the pagan Elssler-but that personality was filtered through vessels crafted by men. Nevertheless, dance was one area of public endeavor in nineteenth-century Europe where women's talents were not only prized but idolized. The ballerinas whom audiences cheered were well re­
warded; they had both money and fame. They had no reason to separate them­selves from institutions and traditions that had nurtured them, to strike out on their own by creating dances of a purely personal inspiration under condi­tions of their choosing. When agitation for this kind of freedom began, it came not from within the ballet establish­ment, but from women who set up shop, on their own, as self-proclaimed artists; their goal was unfettered self-expression through body movement. The freedom they won for themselves has invigorated theatrical dance in the West, including ballet, ever since.
The women who created modern dance were asserting for themselves something that poets and painters in the West had come to take for granted by the end of the nineteenth century: the right to follow personal inspiration without catering to the tastes of some private or institutional patron. This prerogative was inherent in the cultural phenomenon known as Romanticism.
The French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was often obsessive in his quest to capture the essence of a popular performer's style and personality, and he was enchanted by Lose Fuller. In 1893, he painted Loie Fuller in the Dance of the Veils, a work that reveals more about the kinetic vitality of her dance than do contemporary photographs and engravings.
Although Romanticism meant different things at different times to different people, common to all its manifestations was an emphasis on the individual as opposed to society, on feelings and intuition as opposed to rationality and calculation, on an almost mystical faith in the ability of an inspired artist to perceive universal truths and to commu­nicate those truths to others. While genuinely inspired individuals formed a kind of natural elite, Romanticism had
a built-in bias against the status quo; the artist needed no official sanction for his or her genius, and could expect incom­prehension and resistance from the institutions that society had set up to monitor "good taste" in the arts. William Wordsworth, who challenged accepted taste in English poetry at the beginning of the nineteenth century, urged would-be poets to look within for their justification: "You feel strongly, trust those feelings, and your poem will take its shape and proportions as a tree does from the vital principle that actu­ates it." Change the word "poem" to "dance," and you have the recipe that Isadora Duncan followed in her seminal career as a pioneer of modern dance.


D
uncan was born in San Francisco on May 26, 1877. The city had a verve that set it apart even in a Califor­nia that was still largely frontier. The Gold Rush of '49 had left a permanent heritage of wealth, cultural aspirations, and a sense of adventure that some found intemperate: Rudyard Kipling, after a visit to California, noted, "San Francisco is a mad city, inhabited for
the most part by perfectly insane people, Isadora Duncan, not yet barefoot at twenty-one, dancing in a gown she fashioned from her mother's
lace curtains, 1898.
whose women are of remarkable beauty." Duncan's mother was a strong-willed woman who divorced her husband for his philandering and financial irrespon­sibility; she supported her four children by taking in boarders, sewing, and giv­ing piano lessons. As a lapsed Catholic who read atheistic tracts to her children, she believed in self-improvement through self-education, and elevated art to the status of religion; a print of Botticelli's Primavera became a veritable icon in the family. By fifteen Isadora was teaching ballroom dancing to Californians in need of social polish; she and her sib­lings also toured the state in a variety show of their own devising. Her reading ranged from Walt Whitman to Charles Darwin. Money was always a problem, and in 1895 Duncan left San Francisco to seek her fortune on the "open road" that Whitman had written about.
Duncan ended up in a New York theatrical company that toured America and England doing everything from musicals to Shakespeare. But the more she saw of the theatrical dance of the time the less she liked it. She probably saw some ballet and may have taken a few ballet lessons as well, and she liked that even less. "I am an enemy of the Ballet, which I consider a false and pre­posterous art, in fact outside the pale of all art," she wrote. Ballet was beyond the pale because it was unnatural; it required a "deformed skeleton" and
"sterile movements" whose "purpose is
to create the delusion that the law of gravitation does not exist for them." To uncover what she called "the real source of dance," she went to three places: to nature, to the art of classical Greece, and inside herself.
In Greek sculpture and vase paintings depicting figures in motion-a plump little cupid treading the ground, a gam­boling satyr, a winged Hermes "with the ball of his foot resting on the wind" -she found a conformity to "natural forces" that would become the touch­stone of her efforts to create what she called "the dance of the future." The Greeks only confirmed her intuition that people responded naturally to every experience with spontaneous movements of the body. Observing her own body for hours at a time in a mirror, she con­cluded that "the central spring of all movement" was the solar plexus, not "the center of the back at the base of the spine" as the ballet masters taught. She wasted no time informing the world of her discoveries. "I have discovered the dance. I have discovered the art which
has been lost for two thousand years," she told a theatrical producer. She was not yet twenty years old.
Duncan's claims were no more extravagant than those made by the defiant poets and painters of the nine­teenth century, the Wordsworths and the Shelleys and the Baudelaires, the Van Goghs and the Monets, who had sought to reshape artistic experience (and therefore human experience itself) in their own image. But for a young woman-a woman with no credentials, no institutional backing, and no mon­ey-to challenge the artistic estab­lishment was unheard-of. Her options were limited. There was no stage, either on Broadway or in an opera house, where she could put her theories to the test. So she turned to the only arena available to her: the salons of society women who enlivened their leisure time by supporting Art with a capital A.
A favorite pastime in these salons was the recitation of poetry accompanied by gestures based on a system that linked specific physical movements to specific mental and emotional states. The system had been devised by Francois Delsarte (1811-1871), a French pedagogue with a passion for classical Greece, who was given to statements like, "Art is the tele­scope of the supernatural world." An American disciple, Genevieve Stebbins, codified his teachings into a regimen of what might be called aesthetic calis­thenics, in which literary texts could be interpreted, line by line and even word by word, through an encoded pan­tomime not unlike the hand-language of Indian classical dance. The grand ambi­tion of this form of Delsartism was sati­rized in the lyrics of a 1910 hit tune that proclaimed: "Every little movement has a meaning all its own/ Every thought and feeling by some posture may be shown."
Duncan's gestural vocabulary showed the influence of Delsartism, but even more important to her development was Duncan dancers in an undated publicity photograph for a concertat the Metropolitan Opera House in New York performing Duncan's dance based on Sandro Botticelli's painting Primavera (c.1482). A print of this work hung in Isadora Duncan's house when she was a child and seems to have made a strong impression on her. The resemblance between the postures and costumes of the Three Graces in the painting (opposite below) and the Duncan dancers is obvious.
the fact that Delsarte's summons to free the body from all unnecessary con­straints had already been heard in the salons of New York and Newport. So her wealthy patrons were in a receptive frame of mind when Duncan put on a Greek-style tunic made from her moth­er's old lace curtains and, to the lilt of Strauss waltzes, danced her interpreta­tions of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Botticelli's Primavera. Her costume, antique in its associations, was also deliciously modern. Feminists and hygienists had been campaigning for years against the painfully and even dangerously constricting clothes that fashion decreed for respectable women in the second half of the nineteenth century. From the age of three or four, girls were bound into tightly laced corsets that prevented them from lifting their arms above the head. What with corset, drawers, petticoats, dress-skirt, over-skirt, and dress-waist, the typical turn-of-the-century woman wore as many as sixteen layers of garments fold­ ed, buttoned, and belted tightly around her midriff. To such women, the loosely clad Duncan, striking poses from quattrocento paintings and Greek sculp­ture, must have seemed an incarnation not just of Art and Beauty but of Freedom itself. Her dancing did not come across as erotic; "pure and sexless" is how someone later described it. She saw herself as a "Pagan Puritan, or a Puritanical Pagan."
With the money she raised at salon recitals, Duncan gathered her family and in 1899 sailed to Europe on a "cat­tle boat" to get in touch with the roots of her art. In London she stood "in adoration" before the British Museum's Elgin marbles and danced for the city's artistic and literary elite; among her sponsors were Henry James, the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and the classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison. On the advice of music critic J. Fuller Maitland, another sponsor, she "elevated" her choice of music from the waltzes of Strauss to the compositions of Gluck, Chopin, and Mendelssohn. For a sub­scription concert in an avant-garde art gallery she left off her dancing slip­pers and, apparently for the first time, performed barefoot for an audience. While a few expressed shock at this
gesture of emancipation from the con­ventions of European art dance, dancing barefoot became her trademark-and the defining characteristic of all "mod­ern dance" in the first half of the twentieth century.
From London, the Duncan family moved on to Paris, where Duncan was enthralled by the Greek collection at the Louvre and by the performances of Loie Fuller in a theater that had been built to her specifications on the grounds of the 1900 Exposition Universelle. When Fuller in turn saw Duncan dance, she invited the young American to join her on a tour through Germany. In the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Duncan found a view of Greek art that attributed its greatness to a dynamic balance between mea­sured Apollonian beauty and irrational Dionysian frenzy; she adopted Nietz­sche's Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music as her bible.
Wherever she went, Duncan was taken seriously not only as a dancer but as a creative artist of a revolutionary kind. On a pilgrimage to Greece she paid her respects to the origins of her
The American photographer Edward Steichen made a well-known series of images of Duncan on the Acropolis in Athens, including this one at the Parthenon. Steichen's photographs affirmed the association, so important to Duncan, of her art with the culture of classical Greece.
art by dancing ecstatically through the ruins of Athens. In the winter of 1904-5 she was in St. Petersburg, where politi­cal reformers, revolutionaries, and supporters of the tsar clashed almost daily in the streets. Her recitals, danced to a selection of Chopin preludes and polonaises, galvanized the forces of artistic reform in the Russian capital. In one of her characteristic pieces, she ran across the stage like the Winged Victory of Samothrace come to life, with her upper body and head bent backward and her arms extended behind her; some people in the audience swore they could hear the wind blowing through her hair. At the apartment of ballerina Anna Pavlova, Duncan met many of the rising stars of the Imperial Ballet, including the twenty-five-year­old Mikhail Fokine, a promising
choreographer who would be the first to put barefoot ballerinas on the classical stage; she also argued about dance with a brilliant critic and promoter of the arts named Serge Diaghilev who, four years later, would astonish the ballet world with an innovative company of Russian dancers brought to Paris under the ban­ner of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.
Although she certainly worked out many of her movement sequences ahead of time, Duncan liked to give the impression that she was improvising onstage. None of her dances were notated during her lifetime; with the excep­tion of a few grainy frames of dubious provenance, no film documentation exists and the still photography of her time could capture only stagy poses, not the fluidity of pantomimic movement she was famous for. She did leave behind students and disciples who handed down her dances in what we are assured is something approximating their origi­nal form. Even more evocative are the many drawings of Duncan by artists who thrilled to her embodiment of all that was fresh and daring in the imagi­nation of the new century. "When she appeared," recalled one art student in Paris, "we all had the feeling that God -that is to say Certainty, Simplicity, Grandeur, and Harmony-that God was present [in] the magic of her move­ments."
Rodin declared: "It can be said of Isadora that she has attained sculpture and emotion effortlessly." Art historian Elie Faure confessed: "Yes, we wept when we saw her.... From deep within us when she danced there arose a flood that swept away from the corners of
our soul all the filth which had been piled up there by those who for twenty centuries had bequeathed to us their cri­tique, their ethics, their judgments...."
Duncan usually danced barefoot on a soft carpet, lit by colored spotlights, against a neutral background of long draperies, wearing a light silk tunic gathered only at the breasts and hips so that her powerful legs were unencum­bered. Her movements, based on the natural rhythms of walking, skipping, jumping, and running, were matched to the dynamics of the music she had chosen: familiar concert pieces by Bach, Chopin, Schubert, Beethoven, even Wagner. To dance to such music was daring in itself; before her, the works of the major classical composers were con­sidered too "serious" to be used as mere accompaniment for any kind of dance, even ballet.
New York critic Carl Van Vechten described her interpretation of Tchaikovsky's Marche Slave as follows: "[Her dance] symbolizes her conception of the Russian moujik rising from slav­ery to freedom. With her hands bound behind her hack, groping, stumbling, head bowed, knees bent, she struggles forward, clad only in a short red garment that barely covers her thighs. With furtive glances of extreme despair she peers above and ahead. When the strains of God Save the Czar are first heard in the orchestra she falls to her knees and you see the peasant shudder­ing under the blows of the knout.... Finally comes the moment of release and here Isadora makes one of her great effects. She does not spread her arms apart with a wide gesture. She brings them forward slowly and we observe with horror that they have practically forgotten how to move at all. They are crushed, these hands, crushed and bleeding after their long serfdom; they are not hands at all but claws, broken, twisted piteous claws!"
Before Duncan came onstage to dance the "Liebestod" from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde before a full house at New York's Metropolitan Opera in 1911, conductor Walter Damrosch warned the audience: "As there are probably a great many people here to whom the idea of giving pantomimic expression to the `Liebestod' would be horrifying, I am putting it last on the program so that those who do not wish to see it may leave." No one left, and her performance was greeted with sus­tained applause.
Despite her rhetoric about midwifing a new music and dance "that would express America," Duncan had no ear for ragtime or for any African-American rhythms that appealed to what she called "the appetites." She expressed a strong distaste for "the tottering, ape­like convulsions" of the Charleston. "Jazz rhythm ... rhythm from the waist down" was alien to her, the expression, as she saw it, not of her Whitmanesque America but of "the South African savage."
Like the Romantic poets who had troubled the proprieties of the previous century, Duncan made her own rules in life as well as art. Disdaining mar­riage as a form of slavery, she had two children by two different lovers; her young daughter and son were drowned in a freak automobile accident in 1913. When she decided to marry Sergey Yesenin, a Russian poet seven­
teen years her junior, she was reviled in America as a Bolshevik sympathizer; after several stormy years of marriage, he returned alone to Russia, where he committed suicide in 1925. By this time her dances had taken on a somber, autumnal tone; grief and suffering, not the joys of springtime or the glories of the Russian Revolution, increasingly became her themes. The girls' schools she founded in several countries to train a new generation of free-spirited, bare­foot dancers failed one by one; her financial situation became precarious; she began to eat and drink to excess. In 1927, while she was riding in an open car near her home on the French Riviera, a long scarf she was wearing caught in a rear wheel and snapped her neck, killing her.
With all her misfortunes and disap­pointments, Isadora Duncan's achieve­ment was epic. She defined herself and her art, controlled her own career, and forced the world to accept her on her own terms. In the history of Western culture, no woman since Sappho has been so identified with a major artistic genre. Although she left behind no institution to carry on her work, she served as a catalyst for a whole new art form-the dance known as modern. The task of securing the advances she made and of training the next genera­tion of modern dancers fell to her contemporary, Ruth St. Denis.

Isadora Duncan (Homework)

Name:________________________________________

Modern Dance History Homework Assignment 10/29/07

Due: Next class

What can you tell me about these two women: Loie Fuller and Isadora Duncan? Anything biographical, their aesthetics, or innovations etc.

-Use any or all of these resources:
-Recall from what you have learned in Orientation 1 & 2
-Use the reading given
-Go Online to find information

Loie Fuller

Isadora Duncan

Isadora Duncan (Assignment 1)

Assignment 1

Based on the diversity of styles of the modern dance pieces presented in last year’s SpringFest Dance Concert, how would you define or describe Modern Dance?

Classical Ballet II

Age of Petipa (Classical Ballet)


Classical Petipa ballets.

Marius Petipa is credited with choreographing about sixty ballets, a number of which became the mainstay of the classical ballet repertory, down to this day. The word classical refers here, as it did in the case of Giselle, to works of the highest quality. However, unlike Giselle, these works were also classical, rather than Romantic, in spirit and style. Classical works are created according to formal rules, in contrast to the inventive freedom in Romantic works. An emphasis on technical virtuosity, rather than on emotional depth, is another characteristic of classical style.
Petipa's ballets were conceived in the grand manner. The typical Romantic ballet image was a wispy sylph, floating above a moonlit forest, pursued feverishly through the shadows by a love-sick youth. In contrast, the typical classical ballet image was a procession of elaborately dressed, jewelled noblemen, surrounding a reigning monarch, along with fanciful characters assembled for their entertainment, in a ballroom whose sparkling chandeliers were as bright as the sun. Classical Petipa ballets harkened back to dazzling, colorful Renaissance spectacle and to the impressive ceremonious Baroque grandeur that surrounded Louis XIV. It is no accident that Petipa's productions glittered in St. Petersburg, the home of the Russian tsar's imperial court, just as ballet under the direction of Lully and Beauchamp had graced the court of Louis XIV, the Sun King. There was a great resemblance between the French Baroque and Russian tsarist courts in the power of their absolute rulers as well as the life enjoyed by their privileged aristocracies who gave frequent sumptuous parties and attended ballet and opera evenings in expensive, jewelled clothing.
It is not surprising that ballets made under such conditions expressed devotion to the supreme monarch. When King Louis was on the throne, all was right with the world. So it was under the tsar. Tribute to royalty was paid in Petipa's ballets when he featured royal characters as heroes and heroines. Their action was often set in palaces and followed orderly procedures, like court ceremonies. We saw earlier that at the court of Louis XIV, impressive spectacles were more likely to contain complicated, carefully engineered scenic effects than much interesting dancing. At the tsar's court there were also elaborate stage settings, but this time there was more attention paid to the actual dancing, which was very skillful. The object was the same at both royal courts: to produce dazzling visual entertainment for the upper classes. Therefore the resulting spirit was the same and the many differences between Petipa's productions and those during the reign of Louis XIV arose from two hundred years of developments in the performance of ballets.
By Petipa's time, dance technique had reached a high point, demanding years of devoted study for its mastery. By necessity, the ballet world was thoroughly professional, no longer the plaything of amateurs. True, a tsar might fancy a particular dancer, as did the young Nicholas before he became tsar in 1894, when he fell in love with ballerina Mathilde Kschessinka. But this action took place backstage and not in performance! Similarly, the Russian nobility might wish to show themselves at the ballet, but they had to confine their exhibitionism to the boxes in the audience, and not display themselves from the stage the way Louis XIV and his courtiers had done. Sexual roles had also reversed themselves. In the time of Louis XIV, not only were the males the central figures strutting in noble attire, ladies seldom appeared at all. Women's and girls' parts were taken by males in female costumes. Then gradually, women took their place on the stage, side by side with men until the romantic era, when females rose above the males to dominate the scene. Petipa's ballets continued in this line. His choreography always featured the ballerina, and left the male either to carry her around, or at least to stand slightly behind her, showing off her poses.
Along with the strides made in virtuoso technique and the emphasis on the female, many traditions had grown up in the ballet-music world with the passage of time, and were drawn upon by each new generation of producers. In short, the art of choreography had matured considerably since Louis's day. Petipa worked out a formula derived from elements already familiar to the ballet public. However, in a few works these elements were combined in such a skillful manner that they continue to be effective today, at least when they are refinished according to modern fashion. As always, we must keep in mind that when we see a production of The Sleeping Beauty or Swan Lake, we are not really watching a genuine nineteenth-century ballet, staged by a twentieth-century company. We are seeing a twentieth-century version of a nineteenth-century ballet. This is not necessarily because the original work has been forgotten. Detailed records were kept of the important Russian productions by ballet master Nicholas Sergeyev, and after the revolution he restaged these in Paris and London, where they have been handed down from dancer to dancer.
However, styles change. Even when a work from an earlier period has a fine reputation as a classic, and a ballet director decides to show it to the modern public, he usually doesn't want it to look old-fashioned. He wants the audience of his day, and the critics, to enjoy it as a ballet, rather than as a museum relic. Therefore he gives it an up-to-date appearance. Then too, the dancers themselves have a different look from previous generations and their own ways of dancing ballets. By the way, this happens in any performing art: drama, music, or dance. It doesn't happen with painting, sculpture, or novels because they don't require anyone to give them life. A Rembrandt painting remains as it was in the 1600s; a statue by Rodin doesn't change; when you read a novel by Charles Dickens, it is the way he wrote it. However, when you hear a Bach concerto, it is not played exactly as it was in Bach's time. There are bigger alterations in drama. The words in a present-day production of Hamlet are Shakespeare's, but the actors and director interpret the play according to modern ideas of psychology and behavior. As for dance, since the very medium of this art form is human action—or behavior—ballets are presented quite differently as time goes
by.
Again, we are faced with seeming contradictions. How can we speak about great classic works that live beyond their time, and also say that ballets change all the time? Perhaps an example will clarify the situation. Let's look at Petipa's ballet The Sleeping Beauty, and we will see how the overall spirit, the music, the theme, and the plot outline remain the same, while interpretations and details vary in successive productions. Just as the nondancing writer Gautier and the director of the Paris Opera Louis Veron had a lot to do with launching the Romantic ballet, so another nondancer whose name began with V, Vsevolojsky, had an important role in the Petipa era.

Here are the main ingredients for Petipa’s formula for choreography:

1. This marks a return to the French court ballet, where such entertainments continued for many hours. It was a complete evening's entertainment which was based on a dramatic plot and alternated mime episodes with dancing. This formula is regarded as ballet in the grand classical style.

2. Spectacle. Elaborate stage designs usually including a dazzling palace hall and large casts in colorful elaborate costumes that together fill the stage.
3. Virtuosity. Talented dancers trained to a high level of skill execute brilliant, tricky steps and poses.

4. Choreographic variety. Each act contains mimed action and ballet pieces for soloists, couples, small groups, and large ensembles. There are also character dance bits that include folk and national steps which are arranged in geometric groupings. All kinds of comedy parts are included, such as impersonations of animals, clowns, sailors, and bossy old people, all presented with bold, obvious gestures. There are one or more stately processions.

5. Grand pas de deux. Often at the conclusion, but sometimes earlier, the leading ballerina is joined by an important male dancer in an elegant duet with a fixed form. This bit begins with a supported adagio, in which the female does difficult pirouettes and complicated poses with her partner's support. Here the male's function is to show off the ballerina by displaying her high in the air and helping her to balance in ways that she could not achieve alone. Next, the male exhibits his own high jumps, leaps, and fancy turns. Then the ballerina does a solo in which her movements are small and dainty, but precise and brilliant. Finally, the two together do their flashy specialties in technique, ending with the ballerina diving into her partner's arms in a daring position.

6. Finale. The ballet closes with the whole cast onstage, the important characters in the front, all in lively motion that ends with everyone posed, framing the stars of the performance.

7. Classic style. Body shapes are clear and elegant. Groups are designed in straight lines, circles, squares, and triangles, usually in perfectly symmetrical arrangements. Soloists are always placed in the middle or above the ensemble. The total expressive manner is noble and orderly. Formal beauty is the keynote.

In all, the Frenchman Petipa spent fifty-six years in Russia, where he created forty-six original ballets and made new productions of seventeen ballets by other choreographers, not to mention thirty-five dances that he put together for operas. Petipa's best known works after the Tchaikovsky trio The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, and The Nutcracker are La Bayadere, Don Quixote, Bluebeard, Cinderella, Raymonda, (whose music composer was Glazunov) Harlequinade, and Le Corsair. You may have seen some of these in versions by the Russian Kirov Ballet, Balanchine's New York City Ballet,
or a number of other companies. However, The Sleeping Beauty remains the queen of the Petipa repertory.
While these works differed from one another, certain elements are considered characteristic of Petipa; for example, the pantomime that was like sign language rather than expressive acting. Swan Queen Odette fears that Prince Siegfried will shoot her, so she says "You" (points to him with her right hand) "me" (places fingertips to her breasts) "shoot" (mimes aiming an arrow in a crossbow) "not?" (negative gesture). Then there are the arrangements of classical dance sections. These are simple, symmetrical formations with emphasis on technical display, and a clear development, usually A-B-A (fast-slow-fast or slow-fast-slow).
Two other ballets, TJie Nutcracker and Swan Lake, together with Tlie Sleeping Beauty are all very much alive today. Mark the Age of Petipa as a great one. Yet in that annoying way of the past to refuse to fit neatly into the student's notebook, Petipa cannot be given full credit for either of these two ballets. Although he didn't want to, he must share the honors of Swan Lake with Lev Ivanov, and leave them almost completely to Ivanov for The Nutcracker.

Classical Period I

Marius Petipa

But by the late 19th century ballet in Russia was a stagnant form where the virtuoso demonstration of classical technique had become an end in itself while the narrative was enlivened only by character dances. It was Frenchman, Marius Petipa (1818-1910), who decisively refashioned this failing art form, structuring the haphazard tradition he had inherited, making a virtue of what would later be seen as its weakness - the deliberate lack of dramatic unity. It was the lack of quality symphonic music that had hitherto prevented a complete unification with the increasing complexities of ballet movement. It was Petipa who introduced the strict proportions between mime and dance, and established the ensembles of the corps de ballet and the precise rules for the order of dancing in a pas de deux.
Marius Petipa was still a leading dancer with the St. Petersburg ballet in 1862 when he created his first multi-act ballet for the tsar's imperial theatre, The Pharoh's Daughter, an incredible fantasy that included such Egyptian happenings as mummies awakening and poisonous snakes, much like an Indiana Jones movie. This ballet led to other ballets and eventually to what the world considers Classical Ballet.
In 1869 Petipa took over the position of Ballet Master in Chief to the Imperial Tsar. In his role of leadership Petipa created many multi- and single-act ballets for presentation on the imperial stages of Russia. In 1869 he went to Moscow and created Don Quixote for the ballet of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. Then in 1877 he created La Bayadère for the Bolshoi Theatre in St. Petersburg, (There was a Bolshoi in both Moscow and in St. Petersburg - the word Bolshoi meaning "big").
In earlier years Petipa had choreographed the dances of les wilis in the second act of Giselle while acting as an assistant to Perrot and this form of female corps dancing representing shadows or spirits became known as ballet blanc and is common to Giselle, La Bayadère, and many other ballets.
Also in 1877 a ballet so popular its name and image represents classical ballet premiered in Moscow. Swan Lake, set to Tchaikovsky's first ballet score was the first of the "Big Three" of Russian Ballet. Originally set by Austrian Wenzel Reisinger, (1827-1892), Swan Lake has been reworked by many people including Joseph Hansen, (1842-1907), and then again by Petipa in 1895.
During the 1880s Petipa restaged in Russia two ballets that had been very successful in Paris. The first was Giselle which he had been involved in the first time, and the second was Saint-Léon's Coppelia, (originally presented in 1870). Interestingly enough, it was the music to Coppelia which inspired Tchaikovsky to write music for the ballet. With Petipa as the chief ballet master, many more Russian born and trained ballerinas danced on the imperial stages at this time than did at the beginning of Russian ballet. Now the Russians are known the world over as ballet dancers of extreme quality.
In 1890 the Italian ballerina Carlotta Brianza, (1867-1930), was chosen by Petipa to dance the title role in a new ballet called Spyashchaya Krasavitsa in Russian, La belle au Bois Dormant by the Francophile Russian Court, and The Sleeping Beauty in English. With music by Tchaikovsky composed "to spec" for Petipa, this ballet is the second of the Russian "Big Three" and is one of the great classical ballet masterpieces.
Then, continuing on their roll of success, in 1892 Petipa, Tchaikovsky, designer Ivan Vsevolozhsky, and assistant ballet master Lev Ivanov, (1834-1901), created The Nutcracker. This third of the Russian "Big Three" was based on a sweetened French retelling of the story by E.T.A. Hoffman. The Nutcracker has enjoyed huge popularity in hundreds of different versions as a "Christmas ballet."
In 1895 Petipa restaged Swan Lake including major choreographic additions. One of these was as the thirty two fouetté turns in the coda of the pas de deux from the ballroom scene. In 1898 Petipa choreographed his last ballet with any staying power. Raymonda is a three-act ballet with music by Alexander Glazunov. Similar in style to the three Tchaikovsky ballets Raymonda is very difficult to follow because it showcases an impressive variety of dancing more than it portrays its plot line.

ROMANTIC BALLET II

ROMANTIC BALLET


THE TAGLIONI INFLUENCE

Romanticism

A sigh of nostalgia for the Romantic ballerina has been echoed thousands of times, particularly after performances of Giselle, which has become one of the all-time favorites of the ballet repertory. If Giselle still has such great appeal 150 years after its premiere, then there must be something in Romanticism that speaks in a language more universal than that of the Parisian French of the 1840s. In fact Romanticism is the word historians use to describe much of European culture in the 19th century. Similar attitudes and ideas were expressed in poetry, novels, paintings, symphonic music, as well as ballet during that period. What united all these creations was their emphases on the emotions. Imagination, flying free, was carried aloft by the supercharged feelings of existed artists.

Emotion in Ballet You may well ask: Isn't all art always concerned with imagination and feelings? And the answer would have to be yes. Any dance (or painting, poem, or play for that matter) expresses feelings, and they need not be happy ones. For example, both Romeo and Juliet and La Mal Gardee are about the same thing. Two young people love each other, against the wishes of the girl's elders, who have plans for her to marry someone else. Romeo and Juliet in its many versions express dread, dismay, and needless, youthful death. The pantomimic movements in this ballet are seriously dramatic, the story has a tragic ending, and the music and many of the dance patterns are heavy with foreboding. On the other hand, in La Fille Mal Gardee, the pantomime is light and playful, even slapstick. The story ends happily. The music and the dance patterns are light, bouncy, and folksy, arranged in symmetrical designs. Therefore this ballet always expresses feelings of carefree harmony and foolishness. We do not go to see either of these ballets—or any others—for information and intellectual stimulation, but rather for emotional experience.
The difference that marked the Romantic Age was not the discovery of emotion, but the central place assigned to it, both in the theme itself and also in its treatment. The Romantic artist was less interested in telling a story than in delving deeply into feelings, his own and those of the characters he described. And for the most part, these feelings were not the ones that accompany the daily routine of living, but those that arise in solitude, at night, or while daydreaming. The Romantic artist was introspective, and therefore often gloomy. Or else he dreamed about far-off places, fairy-tale settings for exotic adventures. Romanticism was fantasy that stemmed from a sense of dissatisfaction with the here and now; a longing for distance in either time or space; a wish to escape from present reality. Its themes were poetic love that could never be real, foreign exotic scenes, and spiritual creatures that resembled people, but couldn't be grasped by ordinary men. Historically, the Romantic movement reached its peak in the years following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. Because of this timing, it has been explained by many historians as a disillusioned reaction against the excesses of war and politics; a desire to get away from the grim truth. However, even when reality is not so horrible, perhaps only fixed into boring routine, the idea of an imaginative escape is appealing.
It would be hard to find a more dreamy, sentimental image than that of the fairylike Romantic ballerina, floating as an unattainable figure of pure love, above mere mortal men. The steamy, hothouse climate of Paris in the 1820s turned the city into a breeding ground for exotic ballets, of which Giselle and La Sylphide later emerged as the shining examples. But Giselle still has top billing in the ballet repertory. And it is therefore Giselle who calls down through the ages from the spirit world, and awakens poetic longing in many hearts, especially in Act II when she dances after her death with her beloved prince.

Ballet and Opera. In 1800, the center of the ballet world was still Paris, although for a while during the Reign of Terror, London took over. There was also ballet activity as far north as Sweden, as far east as Russia, and as far west as the United States. The main setting for important new productions was the Paris Opera. This meant that ballets were often designed as amusing diversions in full-length opera productions. Even when ballet evenings were given separately, the choreographers, composers, scene designers, and performers were hired by the opera director. Opera, like ballet, had its roots in elaborate Italian Renaissance spectacles. At first, both forms were related to theatrical drama, taking their plots from ancient Greece and Rome,. To carry along the action, the opera substituted singing for dialogue, while the ballet substituted mime for speech. A lso included were passages of just song, or just dance. Both depended for their appeal, to a large extent, on cleverly engineered scenery. And both were closely intertwined with the historical development of music.
Ever since their birth, ballet and opera have grown along parallel lines, first at the courts and then in the more widely attended public theaters. Today they share the honor of being the most expensive art forms to produce. At any rate, they have been reared together intimately, often sharing one opera theater and one management, supported by subsidies of royal courts, civil governments, or wealthy establishment patrons. When they are together like this, the ballet is the subordinate unit. After all, dancing is often found as part of an opera, but who ever heard of opera being only part of a ballet?

Ballet of the Nuns

This ballet appeared in the third act of the opera Robert le Diable in 1831, and at its premiere it scored immediately with the public. Now you have to suffer through a long list of credits, because many of the names connected with this work have relevance for the whole of our Romantic golden age. Of course, some are notable only because they are linked with this pace-set-ting opera. The music was composed by Giacomo.Meyerfaeer. The libretto (scenario) was written by Eugene Scribe. The scenery was designed by Pierre Ciceri and Henri Duponchel. The choreography was arranged by Filippo Taglioni. The leading dance roles were performed by Marie Taglioni as the abbess and Adolphe Nourrit as Robert. And the opera manager was Louis Veron..
We now consider the contribution of each of these people. Histories of music refer to Meyerbeer (German born) as the most successful practitioner of the form known as French grand spectacle opera. Naturally this form included ballet interludes. The music for the Ballet of the Nuns was described as diabolical and highly effective. Libretto, which means the word script to be sung, as well as the scenario, was by a playwright. Eugene Scribe was not only the most popular and prolific playwright of his day,
turning out almost five hundred plays, he also merits a mention in our field as a scenarist.
We generally think of a scenarist as one who outlines the plot, characters, and situations of a movie. The word is also used for one who does this service for a ballet. Before Scribe, during the 1800s, the choreographer had usually been his own scenarist. He would settle for following the outlines of a drama already written: as Noverre did with the Greek play Jason and Medea; or Dauberval, who choreographed La Fille Mal Gardee after a comic opera libretto of 1758. Scribe changed this approach in 1827, when he provided a scenario for La Somnambule (The Sleepwalker). Four years before the premiere of Robert le Diable (Robert the Devil), La Somnambule was successful precisely because of Scribe's contribution. His subject of a sleepwalker allowed for suspenseful moments in movement as the sleeping heroine unknowingly made her way along a roof, in danger of falling to her death. This proved a welcome change from the ancient legendary heroes that had occupied the ballet scene for over two hundred years. Further, it foreshadowed the aerial themes and the psychological mysteries that were to seep into so many Romantic ballets.
Now, with Robert le Diable, the opera-ballet made another leap from Mount Olympus into the airy, eerie vapors of wispy phantoms. Greek and Roman gods and mortals were dismissed from center stage, which was now crowded instead with figures of the German poetic imagination, both on the floor and hovering above it. You see, Romanticism started out as a literary movement—actually with German novels, poems, and plays. So when writers turned their attention to ballet, as Scribe and then the playwright Saint-Georges and the poet Gautier did (these last two were later to provide the scenario for Giselle), the immediate effect was a complete shift in subject matter.
Writers brought with them the ideas and themes that were popular in their own fields. Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, about a young man who wallowed in hopeless misery through a foredoomed love affair, had appeared in 1774 and had quickly become a runaway best-seller. Byron's poem about a prisoner of Chilton has this message, "I learned to love despair," a line that sums up Goethe's novel of self-pity, and many other popular works of the day. Another favorite literary character was the supernatural being—whether ghost or sylph—-who was enough like a person to attract human passion, but who tended to fade away when touched by a love-sick mortal.
This last idea was to be featured in La Sylphide and Giselle, but some of the elements were present in Robert le Diable. Scribe's plot for the opera has Robert, a wicked knight, craving the love of Princess Isabelle. He can win her love with the aid of a magic stone, which he must seek from a statue of Saint Rosalie in the graveyard of a ruined cloister. The Ballet of the Nuns takes place at night, in the cemetery, where Robert is surrounded by spirits of dead nuns, who are damned because they broke their religious vows. They dance in wicked abandon, led by their abbess Helena, who tries to lure Robert to disaster. Finally, however, he reaches the statue, grabs the magic charm, and with its help makes his way safely through the group of nuns who weakly sink back to their waiting demons.
The tremendous impact made by this ballet scene came partly from the striking originality of the subject matter. Nuns in themselves were a departure from the usual. But wicked nuns! They were a real attention getter. The evil insinuations of the music also strengthened the drama. But a large share of the credit must go to Duponchel, who designed the scene, and Ciceri who painted it. We see a lot of ballets in the twentieth century that are performed on a bare stage, and so we sometimes forget what a prominent role ballet gave to stage settings in earlier years. For the Ballet of the Nuns, Henri Duponchel conceived the idea which Pierre Ciceri carried out, which was to create a mysterious night atmosphere, quite different from the ordinary bright or stormy landscape generally seen.
As visual artists, Duponchel and Ciceri would probably have been aware of the moonlit images in paintings by German Romantics like Casper David Friedrich. At any rate, they took advantage of the advanced lighting equipment that had recently been installed at the opera house by the new opera director Louis Veron to create a memorable poetic scene. Moonlight was exactly right for the Romantic themes of supernatural spirits, love-sick melancholy, and mystical charms. Ciceri caught this same atmosphere again later in La Sylphide, and it was to be taken up repeatedly by other ballet designers, as the moonlit landscape became a symbol for Romanticism.
What about those artists without whom there wouldn't be any ballet at all: the dancers and the choreographer? Wasn't there anything outstanding about the dancing in Robert le Diable? Yes, there certainly was. Marie Taglioni (1804 to 1884) triumphed in the part of the abbess Helena, which her father Filippo Taglioni had choreographed, and for which he had coached her.

Taglioni's Style

For many historians, Marie Taglioni's dance personality is synonymous with the whole concept of Romantic ballet. She had made her Paris Opera debut in 1827, four years before the premiere of Robert de Diable. But her appearance in the Ballet of the Nuns, with its dance of dead maidens, made a strong identification between Marie Taglioni and supernatural fantasy, an idea that was confirmed in La Sylphide, which we’ll look at in a minute. In these two productions, Taglioni’s personal style matched perfectly with that of the works themselves, and the combination suited the spirit of the times.
What Taglioni did was to revolutionize the approach to ballet dancing. She changed it in two ways: first of all, through her attitude toward technique; and secondly, through her performing manner. Taglioni's mastery of technical difficulties was outstanding, but she added to that an illusion of effortless grace that was in marked contrast to what had been usual before her appearance, when a performer swaggered before the audience as though saying, "Look how good I am in these almost impossibly hard steps!" Further, in performing style, Taglioni allowed the dance role to be the focus of attention, rather than burying the content of the choreography under her own feminine charms and flirting tricks. The fashion before Taglioni was called the danse noble, the classical style with its mannered poses, stiffness, and stereotyped smiles. In 1840, a critic compared the state of ballet performance before and after Taglioni's arrival on the scene:

Before her appearance, the sceptre of the dance was entrusted to the hands, or rather the legs, of Messieurs Paul and Albert. Theirs was a dance of the springboard and the public square, and the daughters of Terpsichore [old style) were founded in their image
No elegance, no taste; frightful pirouettes, horrible efforts of muscle and calf, legs ungracefully stretched, stiff and raised to the level of the eyes or the chin the whole evening long; tours de force, the grand ecart, the perilous leap. All the male dancers were brought up in this school and built on this model.
The female dancers dislocated themselves by imitating these muscular and semaphoric exercises. .
Then Marie Taglioni appeared and started a revolution against the rule of the pirouette, but a revolution that was gently accomplished, through the irresistible power of grace, perfection and beauty in the art.
Marie Taglioni loosened the legs, softened the muscles, gradually changed by her example the tasteless routine and unstylish attitudes, taught the art of seductive poses and correct and harmonious lines, and founded the double kingdom of grace and strength, the most beautiful and most pleasing and rarest of kingdoms.

We have this and other detailed descriptions of all these matters, because no fewer than thirty-four newspapers and periodicals were printed in Paris with columns about ballet and opera. Many letters and memoirs from the period have also been preserved. The quotations in this chapter are found in Ivor Guest's The Romantic Ballet in Paris.
Marie Taglioni is also remembered for her gliding in point. Although Taglioni did not invent this use of the foot-rising up to, and moving on the very tips of the toes-she did popularize it by the light, floating quality she gave these steps. Thus Taglioni won her fame through the combination of great skill and attitude of ease. Along with this, she refused to emphasize her feats of technique; and maintained an air of aloof dignity that was a departure from standard ballerina conduct. For much of this we must thank her father Filippo Taglioni, who was her demanding private tutor. Not only did he put his daughter through a daily torturous physical routine, as severe as any ballet schooling has ever been, but he insisted on modest decorum in performance.
Ballet masters at the Paris Opera were known for preaching quite another line. Opera director Veron wrote in his memoirs, that along with plies and pirouettes, teachers gave instructions to promote:
elegance, seduction; they insisted on provocative smiles, poses and attitudes that were almost immodest and shameless. One was often heard telling his pupils, "My dears, be charming, coquettish; display the most alluring freedom in every move you make; you must inspire love both during and after your 'pas' and make the audience and orchestra desirous of sleeping with you!"

Veron went on to point out that Filippo Taglioni's instructions were exactly the opposite. Taglioni demanded graceful ease of movement, lightness and especially ballon; but he did not allow his daughter a single gesture or pose which might be lacking in decency or modesty. He told her: "Women and young girls must be able to watch your dance without blushing; your performance should be marked by restraint, delicacy and good taste." Accordingly, one woman in the audience wrote after Marie Taglioni's opera debut, "Here is a new style of dancing, graceful beyond all comparison. . ."And she was particularly charmed by the "decent dignity" with which Taglioni acknowledged the clapping and cheering that burst out at the end: "This was very unlike the leering smiles with which, in general, a danseuse thinks it necessary to advance to the front of the proscenium, showing all her teeth, as she slowly curtsies to the audience."
Filippo Taglioni carefully guarded his daughter's unique style, and when she was elevated to the position of first soloist at the opera, one of the conditions in the contract was that her father would arrange her pieces, and also be engaged as ballet master. Opera director Louis Veron's generosity with both Taglionis was justified by the success of the Ballet of the Nuns in Robert le Diable, in November 1831. But when this was followed by the reception given to La Sylphide in March 1832, Veron not only won a place for himself in dance history, but he made money for the opera—and himself. When he retired in 1835, it was with a personal profit of about one million francs. Adolphe Nourrit, who danced the title role in Robert le Diable, is not important in our history for that reason, but because he was the scenarist for La Sylphide

La Sylphide

With La Sylphide, the Romantic ballet reached full flower. In the theater, it was a moment of complete triumph for a theme whose time had come, for the inspired designers of movement patterns, stage settings, and costumes, and above all, for a dancer who seemed born to embody a poetic image of Romanticism.
First, a note of caution. Don't confuse La Sylphide (singular) with Les Sylphides (plural). Les Sylphides, a scene of winged fairies dancing in a moonlit forest around a dreamy youth, was choreographed many years later by Fokine, who wanted to revive the spirit of Romanticism, when once again ballet had deteriorated into a free-for-all for acrobats and showoffs. You may have seen Les Sylphides which is given by many companies. You may even have danced in some of its Chopin-accompanied patterns in class. The chances are, however, that you have not seen La Sylphide, although there are some versions of it around, notably in the repertory of the Royal Danish Ballet and the American Ballet Theater. But if you were part of the ballet public in the 1830s, you undoubtedly would have seen La Sylphide—and more than once.
La Sylphide, 1832, tells the story of a winged sylph who falls in love with a mortal Scotsman, James. She comes to him with a kiss, on the night before he is to marry Effie, a fully human girl. Because of this beautiful vision, James cannot bring himself to go ahead with the wedding. Running out on Effie, he follows the sylph into a forest. Although she keeps fading out of sight, he catches up with her at dawn. When he finally reaches out to capture her, her wings fall off and she drops to her death. Grief-stricken, James is left alone, standing in the shadow of the trees as a wedding procession is seen passing in the distance. Effie has married another peasant lad, who loved her all along.
To understand the instant and continuing appeal of the theme, you must not think of the story literally. A man who abandons a flesh and blood, luscious bride, to chase after a dimly seen winged spirit, sounds like a dimwit. The fascination becomes acceptable if you look at the sylph as a symbol, which is the way she was viewed by the French public in 1832. A symbol of what? In a general way, the creature of flight stood for the spiritual half of man's nature. Victor Hugo, a French playwright who was a major spokesman for Romanticism, wrote in a preface to a play in 1824:
Christianity told man "you have a double nature. You are composed of two beings, the one perishable, the other immortal; the one flesh, the other spirit." One is chained by appetites, needs and passions. The other is carried on the wings of ecstasy and vision. The former always falls towards the earth, its mother; the latter constantly shoots towards heaven, its father.
The sylph therefore became a dance symbol of the poetic fantasy which lifts people away from everyday physical reality.
The sylph represents a young man's dream, his ideal vision, whether of beauty, art, love, or politics. This can be carried over to the disillusionment after the French Revolution. How magnificent the concepts of liberty, equality, and brotherhood! Compare the dream to the bloody terror that became the reality. Specifically, the sylph is the vision of a perfect love. In real life, such a dream is never fulfilled. Hence, when grasped, the wings fall off and the vision fades away. You can consider more realistically the future of the happy couple Lisette and Colin in La Fille Mai Gardee. It is easy to imagine them both growing a little stout and quarreling about money. To the Romantic poet, such a future was totally unacceptable. Being forced to settle for prosaic affection and the ordinary ups and downs of a relationship would be an intolerable compromise with a man's search for love. If he couldn't have his perfect, spiritual, eternal love, he would choose lonely misery or even death.
The scenarist for La Sylphide, Adolphe Nourrit, was known in his day not as a poet but as a tenor in the opera. He took the male lead in Ballet of the Nuns. However, his literary interests were demonstrated several times after he did the plot for La Sylphide, with his name appearing on a number of ballet scenarios. For this most famous work, he had several literary models for inspiration, particularly the story Trilby, which was also set in Scotland. But instead of a peasant lad longing for a female sylph, Trilby tells of a young fisherman's wife who was lured by the advances of an unearthly male creature. Thrown into a deep, psychological conflict by her desires, divided between normal happiness with her husband and her dreamy longings for mystical experience as represented by the elfin Trilby, the heroine dies. Despite the reversal of sex roles, the resemblance between Trilby and La Sylphide is quite clear. It would seem that scenarist Nourrit also felt too deeply, within himself, some kind of conflict between reality and dream, because seven years after La Sylphide came out, he committed suicide by jumping from a hotel room in Naples.
La Sylphide symbolized for one viewer nothing less than political freedom. This interpretation was included in a ballet review in the newspaper Le Constitutionel: "For a sylphide, as for a people, liberty is life. Deprived of wings, she ceases to exist." This was a disappointed reference to the French Revolution of 1830, as much as it was an explanation of the ballet. A modern viewer will not associate the wings of a ballerina's costume with political revolution. However, whether he recognizes the reason or not, if he enjoys and gets a lift from a Romantic ballet, it is because he shares with the viewers of 1830 a response to a winged vision of some beautiful ideal, a sense of escaping from the gravity of earthly problems. Today, this theme proves its universal appeal time and again for audiences as far apart as Tashkent, Russia and Havana, Cuba.
Interestingly enough, the director of the opera, Veron, was given his job after the revolution in the summer of 1830. Changes in public opinion and in the new government's financial policy brought about the separation of the opera from the royal court, where both it and the ballet had been from their beginnings. This separation meant that a director would be chosen to run the opera as a private business for profit. As noted above, Dr. Louis Veron, the first director under the new system, so well understood the business side of entertainment that he made a lot of money. (Those who followed him did not.) It is instructive to read Veron's formula for success, which he later set down in his memoirs:

Dramas and comedies of manners do not come within the choreographer's scope; in a ballet the public demands above all a varied and striking score, new and unusual costumes, a great variety, contrasting sets, surprises, transformation scenes, and a simple plot which is easy to follow and in which the dance develops naturally out of the situations.
To all that must be added the charm of a young and beautiful dancer who dances better and differently than those who have preceded her. If one is aiming neither at the intelligence nor at the heart, one must appeal to the senses and most particularly to the eyes.

Veron's opinion of ballet as an art form whose main appeal was to the eyes was echoed by Gautier, a famous poet and dance critic who is best remembered in the dance world for inspiring the creation of Giselle. In a ballet review in 1837, Gautier wrote:

Without a doubt, spiritualism is a respectable thing. But in making a dance, one
does well to make concessions to materialism. The dance after all, has no other
aim but to exhibit beautiful forms in graceful poses, and to develop lines pleasing
to the eye...
The dance is less suited to presenting metaphysical ideas. It only expresses feelings: love and desire with all their coquettries. The man is aggressive, and the woman modestly defends herself—the theme of all primitive dance.

Gautier loved ballet, but he limited its sphere to sex appeal and pleasing the eye, as did the opera director Veron. Needless to say, we can find a contradiction between Gautier's statement of 1837 that denies spiritualism in ballet, and his responsibility in 1841 for the theme of Giselle, which ranks with La Sylphide as a symbol of Romantic spirituality. It seems that both Veron and Gautier underrated ballet. It is true that many people go only for eye-filling spectacle or to be amused by a pretty girl (or boy). But there is often more to be found in a dance work, even if it is not easy to pin down exactly what it is.
A dance work presents ideal figures, in the person of dancers, carefully shaped by years of special preparation. It presents images, created onstage by the combined effect of these figures, their movement patterns enhanced by costume and scenery, ideas and music. These images can be compared to the statements made in poetry. They produce associations in the viewer's mind that awaken feelings and ideas. For example, a long, lifting leap can suggest flight, freedom, or ecstasy. When it is exquisitely performed, along with stirring music, it can bring the viewer an experience that is richer and more complex than simply visual pleasure. Even if the experience cannot be summed up in words, we know it occurs, because we have felt it. In this way, the excitement of the Paris audiences in 1832 at La Sylphide, and in the 1840s at Giselle, can be understood, as can that of audiences at hundreds of performances of Romantic ballets like these, down to the present. Therefore the statements of Veron and Gautier, along with those of certain twentieth-century producers, can be discounted. Very often, we find that people who themselves make important contributions to the dance art in practice; fall down quite clumsily when it comes to theoretical explanations.
At any rate, one reason for the tremendous reception given to La Sylphide came from a theme that was suited perfectly to the temper of the times. Of course, along with the theme, or idea, there was also the way it was carried out in dance, music, in stage setting, and costume. The music, composed by Schneitzhoeffer (the French ballet world had a terrible time pronouncing this name!) does not seem to have been one of the ballet's strong points. In fact, the Danish version that survives today is accompanied by a different score. There was a mixed reception for Schneitzhoeffer's original score, with some critics praising it and others complaining that it was weak. No matter. The visual atmosphere made up for whatever was lacking in sound. The setting by Ciceri, particularly the forest touched by dawn in the second act, when James pursues the sylph, was considered a masterpiece.
As for the costume, tradition credits this ballet with the introduction of the full, bell-shaped tutu that extends down to mid-calf, which is associated with all Romantic ballet. In fact, these ballets, with their endless yards of white gauze drifting about the legs of ballerinas, are also called (ballets blancs, "white ballets," because of the popularity of this costume. Never mind that similar skirts were not that unusual in performances before La Sylphide, and that they only reached their full size quite a bit later. A number of ballet traditions rest on inaccurate information. Just as Marie Taglioni is mistakenly thought to have invented toe-dancing, she is also remembered incorrectly as appearing in La Sylphide in the first bell-shaped tutu. The persistence of these false traditions really means that Taglioni's strong impression in La Sylphide led to her being credited with inventing all the new developments that characterize the Romantic ballet. Because beyond the theme, the scenery, or anything else, it was Taglioni's dancing that made La Sylphide such a sensation. From her debut in 1827, to her interpretation of the abbess Helena in Robert le Diable, Taglioni had already, won fame for her highly skilled, unassuming dancing, particularly her gliding en pointe and her ethereal manner.
As noted earlier, it is impossible to separate her own part in this from her father Filippo Taglioni's. It was he who trained his daughter, and Filippo was satisfied with nothing less than technical perfection. He was the one responsible for emphasizing dance in her performance, rather than sex appeal or personality. And finally, it was Filippo Taglioni who arranged the choreography for Marie, in which she shone so brightly. Unfortunately we have very little information about the choreography in La Sylphide. The surviving Danish version by Auguste Bournonville uses only the libretto—the scenario of the original. And we have seen that it uses another musical score. Not surprisingly, Bournonville created his own steps and patterns, rather than taking Filippo Taglioni's.
A brief comment from one spectator mentions an original effect in Taglioni's choreography in which the sylphs advanced from "the back of the stage, in groups of four, to form a delightful group in the very front" That is not much help in imagining the way the ballet proceeded! However, the audience does not usually observe the choreography very well, but tends to see the dancer who is physically before them.
Choreography often stands or falls on the performer's personality and ability. Marie Taglioni may have learned her art from Filippo, and was executing his steps. But Marie was onstage, not Filippo, and in the public mind she was La Sylphide, because the subject was perfectly suited to the Paris taste of 1832 and to Marie Taglioni's temperament. The ballerina once said of herself, "I have spiritual hands and feet." It is also true that she was not comfortable in the part of the abbess Helena, which included a seduction scene in the moonlit graveyard. Although she was highly praised in the Ballet of the Nuns, Marie asked to be replaced after three performances.
In La Sylphide she found the role of a lifetime. It was absolutely right as the setting for her ethereal, poetic style. While her father had helped form this style, he in turn was inspired by the magical quality of her dancing, and his choreography for this masterwork reflected it. The afterimage that Marie Taglioni left here was that of "a shadow condensed into a mist." One review raved:

There is a sequence of furtive, aerial steps, something ravishing beyond all description....The irresolute flight of a butterfly, those round tufts which the mild wind of April plucks like down from the cups of flowers and balances in the air, these are the only points of comparison with the timid graces, the mocking abandon, and the artful modesty of the Sylphide. Really Taglioni is no mortal. God could not have imagined the cherubim better.

Earlier, when Marie Taglioni first became the darling of the public, the word taglioniser was used to describe a light, floating dance technique. After the premiere of La Sylphide, the word itself—sylphide—was heard everywhere to describe dresses, hairstyles, and moods. The ballet became such a fad that two periodicals with ballet and theater news came out, one called Sylph and another called Sylphide.

Relative Importance of Male and Female Dancers. If such titles were conferred in the arts as they are in beauty contests, Marie Taglioni would have been unanimously acclaimed Miss Sylphide and even Miss Romantic Ballet. Don't bother to look for Mr. Romantic Ballet. The ballerina Taglioni summarized the Romantic ballet style. Her eminence in La Sylphide was the origin of the one-sided feminine emphasis in ballet. This art form swings from one extreme to the other in its sexist attitudes. A hundred years earlier, when Louis XIV took the stage as the Sun God, you can bet that this glittering male peacock was the center of all attention and the focus of the action. In fact, it was considered improper for women even to appear onstage. Men, dressed in skirts, took women's roles. Then the situation reversed itself. George Balanchine has often been quoted as saying, "ballet is a woman." This idea can be traced directly to La Sylphide and to ballerina Marie Taglioni as the visual symbol of the mysterious, elusive, feminine ideal. The male dancer was demoted from a masterly, dashing figure, spinning around on strong muscular legs, to a servant who waited around at the ballerina's feet. His job was to lift her and extend the image of her weightlessness by carrying her through space as though suspended.
In his book on the theory and practice of dancing, Carlo Blasis had stressed multiple pirouettes in his training manual. The male dancers of the 1820s had brought multiple pirouettes to the height of virtuosity. (Emphasis on jumps for men was a later, Russian contribution.) Perhaps because the male dancers made too much of a good thing, they helped bring about their own downfall. They overdid pirouettes, dragging them in whenever possible in order to dazzle the spectators. These monotonous repetitions may well have been partly responsible for the decline in male importance through the 1800s. Certainly during the golden age of Romantic ballet, there was only one popular male dancer, Jules Perrot (1810 to 1892), while there were many favorite ballerinas in addition to Taglioni, as we shall see.
There is no doubt that by 1840 the ballet world was clearly a matriarchy, as mirrored in this typical reaction of one newspaper writer:

You know we are hardly a supporter of what are called the "grand danseurs" [the
male ballet stars]. The "grand danseur" appears to us so sad and heavy! He is so
unhappy and so self-satisfied! He responds to nothing, he represents nothing, he is
nothing.
Speak to us of a pretty dancing girl who displays the grace of her features and the elegance of her figure, who reveals so fleetingly all the treasures of her beauty. Thank God I understand that perfectly. I know what this lovely creature wishes us, and I would willingly follow her wherever she wishes in the sweet land of love.
But a man, frightful man, as ugly as you and I, a wretched fellow who leaps about without knowing why, a creature specially made to carry a musket and a sword and to wear a uniform. That this fellow should dance as a woman does—impossible!
Today, thanks to this revolution which we have effected, woman is the queen of ballet. She breathes and dances there at her ease. She is no longer forced to cut off half her silk petticoat to dress her partner with it. Today the dancing man is no longer tolerated except as a useful accessory. He is the shading of the picture, the green box trees surrounding the garden flowers, the necessary foil.

All this came about after La Sylphide. A foreshadowing hint of this development can be read into the birth of Nourrit's scenario. As noted before, his inspiration is credited to the novel Trilby, which concerned a peasant woman and a male elfin creature. If Nourrit changed the male to a female fairy, it was partly to give Taglioni a suitable role. But the deeper reason was that the French public of 1830 was in a mood to elevate the ballerina above her male partner. While Nijinsky, Nureyev, and others have restored prestige to the male dancer, in many circles the art of ballet is still often considered effeminate. This prejudice can be traced to the Romantic ballet, and to La Sylphide—Marie Taglioni.


Questions for Review:

1. Discuss Romanticism as the spirit of an age, and in ballet.



2. What has been the relationship between opera and ballet since the Renaissance in Europe?
3. What are the elements that made La Sylphide the Romantic ballet?



4. Discuss the relative position of the sexes in ballet before and after Marie Taglioni's starring position at the Paris Opera.

ENTRECHATS AND REVOLUTIONS

ENTRECHATS AND REVOLUTIONS

PROFESSIONAL BALLET 1714 T0 1789

The Royal Academy of Dance

Our next scene takes place in Paris, in 1725. Picture a special ballet class for small group of advanced and professional pupils. The teacher is Francois Prevost (ca.1680 to 1741) the outstanding female dancer of her day. Jean Balon (1676 to 1739) was her partner. His name is easy to remember because his dancing was outstanding for its quality of ease, and the word we use for lightness in elevation is ballon.
Among Prevost's pupils were two talented young females whom Prevost addressed by their family names, Mademoiselle Camargo and Mademoiselle Salle, in order not to cause confusion, since both were named Marie. The rest of the advanced students didn't like the two Maries because they were obviously the teacher's pets. When the time came to practice jumping exercises, Camargo used to show off, continuing to jump easily, long after everybody else had to stop, completely out of bream. As for Salle, she would often interrupt an exercise with questions that the other students found very silly, like: "What if we tried to bend this way when we do the pirouette?" "Wouldn't that look like a leaf spinning in the wind?" In the previous chapter we noted the appearance of Mademoiselle de Lafontaine, the first female dancer of status. Next in line came Francoise Prevost who made her debut at the opera in 1699.
For thirty years. Prevoste was the foremost prima ballerina of her day, widely admired for lightness and expressive elegance. With the appearance of Camargo and Salle the place of the female dancer was secure. In fact, with them began the rivalry between ballerinas, which we will
hear of time and again in dance history. Camargo an Salle eventually divided the Paris dance public into two opposing camps, and you can be sure that each was very conscious of her standing as reflected by salary, the type of roles assigned bouquets (flowers) received, and all the other trappings of fame. Although ballerinas were popular, we still have to wait more than a hundred years for women to dominate men in professional ballet. In fact, the outstanding dancer of the early eighteenth century was a man, Louis Dupre.

Louis Dupre (ca. 1697 to 1774) was referred to as le grand, both because of his height (almost six feet) and because of his artistic greatness. Lillian Moore tells us (in Dance Magazine, June 1960) that Dupre made his debut in1714, and was soon acclaimed for his graceful elegance. He became the favorite partner of Marie Salle. Dupre was the premier danseur noble of his day. He was by inclination and temperament a classical, rather then dramatic dancer. In fact, Jean-Georges Noverre, one of his pupils, criticized Dupre for always dancing abstract chaconnes in which he excelled, instead of varying his style to suit the theme of a particular ballet. At the same time, Moore quotes this admiring description that Noverre wrote of his teacher.

The elegance of his figure and the length of his limbs were wonderfully suited to the execution of developpes effaces and the intricate steps of the dance…
This rare harmony in every movement earned for the celebrated Dupre the glorious title of Dieu de la Danse (God of the Dance.)

Dancing as a Career. The mark of professionalism from the time Camargo, Salle, and Dupre was that dancers from then on would be totally dedicated to their careers. They were not noble dilettantes, amusing themselves on occasion, but people middle and lower classes who put a tremendous amount of effort and time into their art-their work. Dancing lessons, rehearsals, and fours became the focus of their daily existence. They competed with one another for the public’s approval, and sought roles in productions not to show off among their friends, but to earn money and establish positions for themselves in a society which was rapidly changing.
During the eighteenth century, European culture made a somersault from a court-centered pyramid to a more stimulating, fluid, middle-class leadership a mixture of money and talent to prevail. Widespread changes were in evidence. In government, the Frenche and American Revolution were about to burst upon the world. In economics, mass production and industrialization were on the way. In education, literacy was increasing and freer intellectual attitudes prevailed. The dancer moved gracefully into this open environment; taking the role of producer and salesman of entertainment; trying to please a broad public and get as many people as possible to buy his merchandise. No wonder, then, that he strove for popularity, a word which took on new meaning with the appearance of cheap, daily newspapers. Through newspaper, theatrical gossip and critics' opinions were distributed to anyone who cared to read them. Journalists had no small part in promoting both the careers and the theatrical rivalries of Camargo and Salle.

The two Maries had a lot in common, in addition to their first names. They were both ambitious and artistically daring. They both made performing debuts at very early ages: Gamargo at nine: Salle at ten. Yet they were to present their public with a choice of ballet idols that differed sharply in style. In the eighteenth century, as in the present, a ballerina's charm included an image of her private life superimposed on her stage personality. Of course men, as now, the public sometimes had a distorted picture of a dancer's biography.

Marie Anne de Cupis de Camargo (1710 to 1770). Camargo had an exotic "foreign" background. She was born in Brussels to a Spanish mother and an Italian music-master father. Before making her debut at the Paris Opera when she was sixteen, she appeared successfully in Rouen and Brussels, beginning at the age of nine. Later, Camargo followed the fashion of Parisian society by being linked with a succession of high-born wealthy lovers. Noverre, whom we shall soon meet as a prominent ballet master, wrote of her: "Mademoiselle Camargo, so gay on the stage, was by nature melancholy and serious." Many performers presented this kind of mystery. There was no mystery, however, about her appeal to audiences. She was outstanding in speed and drive: in short, a brilliant technician.

If the general level of skill was considerably lower than it is today, you must remember that an audience can judge only in the framework of the times. Camargo was probably the first dancer to execute the entrechat quatre, which was fantasic for the 1700s. She was particularly famous for shortening the voluminous eighteenth-century skirt. This change in costume extended the range and virtuosity of women's movements beyond anything yet seen. To exhibit women's ankles so shamelessly was a bold move. In addition to shocking current standards of female modesty, her action also flew in the face of Rule XIII of the opera: "Artists are obliged to sing and dance in the clothing assigned to them." However, the academy administrators must have quickly appreciated the advantages of freeing the legs in this manner (even though we would consider it a very limited freedom indeed!). Anyway, Camargo was careful to wear special underwear under these shorter skirts to protect her modesty.

Not only did Camargo thrill her public with technical virtuosity and daring costume, she also had a fine musical sense. As Noverre wrote of her: “Mademoiselle Camargo enjoyed that precious gift of appreciating naturally and easily the movements of the most difficult melodies. This gift, plus an exact precision, accorded to her dancing a spirit of vivacity and gaiety which is never found in those dancers who have less sensitivity to music." Please note carefully Noverre’s comment under importance of music. Musicality is the prime quality that raises the dance technician out of the class of the athlete and places him squarely among the artists. Musical sensitivity makes the dancer beautiful, as well as skillful.

Marie Salle (1707 to 1756). Salle brought a different side of dance to the public. This second Marie was born into show business. Her father was an acrobat in her uncle’s successful touring company of actors, comedians, tumblers, and clowns. The troupe came to Paris every spring and summer to entertain at numerous fairs, and while they were in the neighborhood, Marie's family arranged for her to study with Prevost and Balon. Obviously, she had a special aptitude for dancing, and her performing family, always on the lookout for new talent, must have spotted it when she was very young. In fact, Marie Salle" made a big hit on a London Stage when she was only nine years old. Together with her brother, she appeared for two months as a harlequin in a dancing act that followed a melodrama (The Unhappy Favorite). Their engagement was so successful that it was extended to over one hundred performances in all.

One evening when Prevost, her teacher, was ill, she allowed Salle, a girl of fourteen, to dance in her place at the prestigious opera house. The reason for Salle's substitution lasting for only one night, however, was that the audience had responded to the young ballerina very enthusiastically, and Prevost, who was over forty, did not care for this at all. .Middle-aged people in every profession are resentful when faced with the threat of fresh young talent. This is an ever-recurring problem, particularly in our field. Since the instrument of the dance art is the body, a dancer, like an athlete, achieves his greatest technical skill quite early in life, usually somewhere in his twenties. Reaching the heights of interpretation, musically and dramatically, can take longer. But it is a rare dancer who can maintain his superiority well into his forties, or even continue to please the public. And the forties are the very years in which the dancer achieves an important position in a ballet or a theater company. This makes constant struggles inevitable between the mature performer and the newcomer who is pushing for his turn in the spotlight. This is an unpleasant, but inescapable fact of dance life. After her short one-night stand at the opera, Salle continued to tour with her uncle's troupe and to appear in London with her brother. When she finally landed an appointment at the Paris Opera, she was twenty. Then she had leading roles in all important opera productions. As well, she had her share of roles in ballets at court. There Salle was much admired and she made friends with important people like Voltaire. In her personal life, she was not particularly happy. Along with her constantly growing dance fame came increasingly more discomfiting gossip and backstage intrigue. The regular Parisian opera goers enjoyed scandals as much as ballets. They were disappointed that Salle didn't openly take lovers the way Camargo did. In her teenage years, she was neurotically preoccupied with her brother, and after his marriage and shockingly early death, she showed a preference for women over men. If the scandal-loving public enjoyed discussing details of ballerinas' love affairs, you can imagine what they made of an unconventional private life. The more private Salle tried to be, the more she wet the appetites of the gossips. Journalists catered to this appetite, inserting many nasty innuendos in their newspaper columns. They did this for the same reason that they enjoyed inflating the rivalry between Salle and Camargo. Scandals stimulated newspaper circulation and boosted the journalists' egos.

Artistically, Salle also had her problems with the opera administration. Many of the rigid, artificial aspects of court ballet had made their way into the opera, and remained there even after it became professional. Star dancers appeared in an opera, doing dance entrees tailored to fit their own abilities. As a result, these entrees often had little to do with the action of the work in which they were performing. These stars also used their favorite piece of music, not caring whether or not it harmonized with the style of the opera, or was written by the same composer. Such spirited prima donnas also refused to consider the logical or dramatic requirements of a role when they chose their costumes. They might be representing Greeks, or Indians, or peasants. Yet they dressed solely for prestige, in elaborate costumes, insisting on the tallest hairstyles, {he fullest skirts, and the most glittering jewelry possible.

These costumes caused quarrels between Salle and the opera's director, because her approach to dance was indeed a revolutionary one. Like Camargo, she also was interested in changing and simplifying dance costumes, but for a completely different reason. Camargo shortened her skirt so that she could execute more difficult, splashy jumps. Salle, on the other hand, was interested in dance not as a form for exhibiting technical skill, but as one for expressing feelings and portraying situations. Because of the attitude of the Paris Opera management, Salle had to return to London to put her theories into practice.

Pygmalion

In London, Salle triumphed in Pygmalion, her best-known work, in 1734. Through this ballet, she realized several ambitions: creating choreography; performing as a dramatic dancer, capable of every nuance of expression; and designing dance costumes that suited the dance idea and at the same time allowed freedom of movement-the very opposite of the tinsel and clutter of French operatic ballet dress. Salle dared to wear a simple muslin dress, draped in the style of classic Greek sculpture; slippers without heels; and her hair without any ornament, falling loosely around her shoulders. Starting as a statue, she came to life before the eyes of the audience. An observer from the newspaper Mercure de France described it this way:

The statue, little by little, becomes conscious, showing wonder at her changed existence. Amazed and entranced, Pygmalion takes her hand, leading her down from the pedestal. Step by step she feels her way, gradually assuming the most graceful poses a sculptor could possibly desire, with steps ranging from the simplest to the most complex.

George Bernard Shaw took this ancient myth and changed it around quite a bit to bring it up to date—that is, to 1912, when he wrote the play Pygmalion. The original tale is of the sculptor, Pygmalion, who creates a statue of such an appealing woman that he falls in love with it, or her, Galatea by name. Galatea then comes to life. Shaw moved the ancient tale into modern England. He made the sculptor Pygmalion into Henry Higgins, a language expert; and the statue into a lovely English lady whom Higgins creates from the “raw clay” of Eliza, a rough lower-class girl who sells flowers. In turn, this play was made into My Fair Lady in the 1950s, with dialogue, songs, and dancing. Then, from the musical comedy, they made the popular movie. Thus My Fair Lady traces its lineage to comic opera and ballet, which relate to court entertainments and the comedie-ballet form perfected by Lully and Moliere. This family of artworks and art forms is like a large tree, with many intertwined branches.

Meanwhile, back in the eighteenth century, the London audience responded with enthusiastic excitement to Pygmalion. This was the high print of Marie Sally's career, when she was twenty-seven. After that, she performed intermittently with varying success born in London and Paris, until 1752. She died in 1756 but her appearance in ballets like Pygmalion left an unforgettable image with the public of the dancer as an instrument for creating emotional images. Noverre wrote of Salle:

We have not forgotten Mademoiselle Salle's artless expression. Her graces are always in our thoughts. Even though many other dancers have since copied her style, they have not succeeded in overshadowing the nobility, the harmonious simplicity, the tenderness, the fullness—yet the always modest movements-of that pleasant ballerina.

For a while there were many other dancers during that period who took their share of the spotlight, no one compared with the two Maries. Camargo brought technical virtuosity to a high point, and Salle did the same for expressive emotion. These remain the two great facets of the dance art: formalized movements performed with skill and musical sensitivity on the one hand; and gestures mat are made expressively to communicate feeling, on the other. This second facet was the overriding interest of Jean-George Noverre, a name that has been mentioned in passing several times. Now we owe our full and respectful attention to the most famous person of eighteenth-century dance.

Jean-Georges Noverre

Noverre (1727 to 1810) was born the year of Salle's debut at the Paris Opera. Because of him, 1760 stands out as a memorable date in dance history. By then, ballet had progressed to the point where it boasted long list of able, professional performers. It had spread through Europe with companies in residence in many cities. This came about with the increasing spread of theater buildings and opera companies beyond Italy, England, and France to Sweden, Austria, Portugal, and so on. Along with an impressive number of fine performers, ballet had also developed a host of problems and shortcomings. After all, if we date the first ballet as 1581 the Ballet Comique de La Reine- then by 1760 we are talking about something almost two hundred years old, even if its professional life was much younger. No wonder there were problems!

Anyway, 1760 saw the publication of Noverre's Letters on Dancing and Ballets, a series of essays whose main purpose was to attack the same ridiculous approach to choreography and costuming that had caused bad feelings between Salle and the directors of the opera. We have the book available to us today in a translation by Cyril Beaumont (issued by Dance Horizons). In this excellent work of criticism, Noverre laid down at length and in clear detail his own-and to some extent Salle's—philosophy of dance. It was one that emphasized this art form as a means of communication: of speech without words. In fact, Noverre held that in expressing emotion, dance was often superior to words. He wrote:

There are undoubtedly, a great many things which pantomime can only indicate. But in regard to the passions, there is a degree of expression to which words cannot attain-or rather there are passions for which no words exist. Then, dancing allied with action, triumphs.
A step, a gesture, a movement, and an attitude express what no words can say. The more violent the sentiments it is required to depict, the less able is one to find words to express them. Exclamations, which are the apex to which the language of passions can reach, become insufficient and have to be replaced by gesture.


In order that dance may best reflect nature, Noverre advised the ballet master to observe constantly how the people around him, every day, in every walk of life, move both in their occupations and in their dealings with one another. These and many other thoughts were well appreciated, both during Noverre's lifetime and since then. Fame came to his writings in part because he was such a fine performer himself. Also, several of his pupils rose to high places in and out of dance: Marie Antoinette, the ill- fated queen of France during the revolution, the great dancer Vestris, and the choreographer Dauberval. But most important of all to building his fine reputation was the fact that he himself proved his theories over and over again with renewed, successful entertainments which he created in his position as ballet master at the court of Stuttgart.

Jason and Medea 1763. This was the best- known work that Noverre produced. Again from Greek mythology, the terrible story went like this. Jason, in order to get back his throne from a wicked uncle who grabbed it unlawfully, needs to find the golden fleece (gold was contained in the magic wool that covered a ram). This treasure is guarded by a dragon, and Jason seeks the help of Medea the sorceress to slay it. In gratitude, Jason stays with Medea for ten years, and she bears him two children. But finally, Jason falls in love with a more appealing young nymph and he runs off with her. Medea goes mad with jealousy. First, she sends a gift of a poisoned mantle to Jason's young beloved, and when the nymph puts it on, it burns her to death. Still not satisfied, Medea kills the two children of Jason's that she bore, and in some versions she serves their hearts to him at a banquet.

With his treatment of this legend, Noverre had a tremendous success. In fact, the work was revived repeatedly with or without his permission, especially by Vestris, who starred in the premiere and broke precedent by appearing without a mask, according to Noverre's direction. In this way he could use facial expression as well as gesture to carry out his heroic role. Incidentally, copying choreography without authorization is a practice that continues. There is no real protection against it because; the ballet master can change things around so that his version isn’t identical with the original. Better copyright laws have helped, but probably won't entirely eliminate the problem.

Jason and Medea were not universally loved. There were some who objected to a horror story as the scenario for a ballet as one critic later explained. “I do not wish to see Jason's children strangled, while dancing—perishing on the beat 'neath rhythmic blows by their mother dancer..." In fact, in Saint-Hubert's advice on How to Compose a Successful Ballet, mentioned in our discussion of the seventeenth-century ballet art, he had warned against doing Homer's Iliad in ballet form because the burning of Troy would scare the ladies." How much worse would they be affected by seeing a mother murder her children? And indeed, it was reported from Stuttgart that at one point during Jason and Medea some in the audience fainted, while others fled the hall.

A basic argument over what should be suitably dealt with in dancing still goes on. Martha Graham choreographed Cave of the Heart in 1946, telling this same story. Scorn and ridicule, as well as the most ecstatic praise, have been heaped on Graham for such grim creations. In recent years, there have been performances of The-Miraculous Mandarin, with its complicated plot about multiple murders. It can be gruesome when the same character is killed and rises only to be killed again, which happens here several times. This work has been through many choreographic versions. In the eighteenth century, few ballets were about such gory events as the ones in Jason and Medea. Much more usual themes were adventure stories, many with exotic glimpses of far-off places like Turkey, China, and ancient Greece. Then in 1789, a few months before the French Revolution smashed the Old Regime, La Fille Mai Gardee appeared in a French provincial theater. This ballet was a story of peasant life, and marked a departure from the heroic themes that had dominated up to that time.

Jean Dauberval

Dauberval (1742 to 1806) choreographed La Fille Mal Gardee(1789) to apply ,Noverre's theories to comedy. Up to then, the master himself had emphasized tragic and lyric emotions, as had those who followed in his footsteps. While it may seem that here was a democratic interest in "the people," particularly considering the nearness of the revolution, today we can see that works like this were almost as exotic and artificial as an eighteenth-century balletic portrait of the Crusades, La Fille Mal Gardee was rose-colored image of "happy peasant villagers”. After all, villages were not far away in actual distance from the theater and the courts; but they were far enough from the life experiences of the middle and upper classes to be wrapped in a romantic glamour. Marie Antoinette, before she lost her head to the revolutionary guillotine, used to enjoy playing peasant maid with some of her ladies-in-waiting at a picturesque, miniature dairy farm, set up specially for her amusement. Whatever one thinks of the nature of these "games," the very fact that stage room was even given to a complete work set in a peasant village did indicate some change in the consciousness of the eighteenth-century ballet world about the way people in general spend their lives.

La Fille Mal Gardee has another distinction for a dance history. It is considered the oldest ballet—not first, still the Ballet Comique de la Reine, which had been produced over two hundred years earlier-but the oldest that is still current in the repertory of several companies in England, the United States, Denmark, and elsewhere. Please keep in mind that these versions are not authentic revivals. Duberval's choreography and the first musical accompanying score have long since disappeared from both memory and other records. What remains is the village setting, the rough outlines of a comic plot, the idea of combining naturalistic pantomime with dance interludes, the mixture of folk dance and academic ballet steps which today we call character, and the use of music based on French folk tunes.

The plot of La Fille Mal Gardee, now as then, concerns a wealthy widow who owns a farm and seeks a suitable marriage for her daughter Lisette. Arranged marriages were as accepted in eighteenth century village life as they were earlier in the Italy of Romeo and Juliet, and at the French court of Catherine de Medici. Money, not noble birth, is the prize sought here. The widow Simone does find a rich man who owns a vineyard and is eager to find bride for his son Alain, a good-natured dope. These practical adults agree on a marriage between Lisette and Alain. Of course, Lisette, being a high-spirited beautiful girl, already has a sweetheart of her own choosing: the honest, handsome, but poor Colin.

The attractive couple shares the friendship of all the merry young villagers, and they cooperate to help Lisette and Colin give the old matchmakers the runaround. Since this is a lighthearted comedy, the couple manages to tease old Simone into blessing their union, and the foolish boy and his father take themselves grudgingly off the scene.

Along the way, the action includes byplay with a butter churn and an umbrella, which silly Alain swings around while everybody gets wet in a sudden rainstorm. Dance interludes include a harvest festival in which the young people weave in and out of streamers, and wave kerchiefs, sheaves, and strike tambourines while doing polka and other folk steps in balletic precision. A love duet in straight classical adagio technique, is provided for Lisette and Colin. As much comedy pantomime as possible is milked from the foolish, clumsy Alain, his pushy father, the bossy buxom widow, and the fun-loving villagers. As the curtain lowers on La Fille Mal Gardee, we bring to a close the first stage of our ballet history.


Questions for Review

1. Which balletic style do you prefer, that of Marie Camargo or that of Marie Salle? Why?


2. Discuss Noverre's philosophy of dance.


3. Do you believe that murder is a fit subject for dance?



4. Describe the choreographic elements of La Fille Mal Gardee.