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The Travesty Dancer in Nineteenth-Century Ballet

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The Travesty Dancer in Nineteenth-Century Ballet View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Columbia University Academic Commons TheTravesty Dancer in Nineteenth-Century Ballet LynnGarafola More than any other era in the historyof ballet, the Unlike the theatersof the periphery,where govern- nineteenthcentury belongs to theballerina. She hauntsits mentcontrol of arts organization remained intact, those of lithographsand paintings,an etherealcreature touched the European core operated, or began to operate, as withthe charm of another age. Yet even when she turned private enterprises.1Entrepreneurs stood at the helm, into the fast, leggy ballerina of modern times, her with subscriberspaying all or a substantialshare of the ideologysurvived. If todaythe artof balletcelebrates the costs-even at theParis Opera whichcontinued to receive danseurnearly as oftenas thedanseuse, it has yetto rid its partialsubsidy from the governmentafter losing its royal aestheticof yesterday'scult of the eternalfeminine. Like licensein 1830. This changein the economicstructure of hernineteenth-century forbear, today's ballerina, an icon balletplaced the audience-particularlythe key groupof of teenyouth, athleticism, and anorexicvulnerability, in- monied subscribers-ina new and powerfulposition. It carnates a feminineideal defined overwhelminglyby led to a new kind of starsystem, one based on drawing men. power ratherthan rank,while eliminating,for purposes The nineteenthcentury did indeed createthe mystique ofeconomy, the pensions and otherbenefits traditionally of the ballerina.But it also gave birthto one of the more accruingto artistsin governmentemploy. The disap- curious phenomena of ballet history.Beginning with pearance of the male dancer coincidedwith the triumph romanticism,a twenty-yeargolden age stretchingfrom ofromanticism and marketplaceeconomics. theJuly Revolution to about 1850,the danseuseen travesti The ban on male talentwas not, strictlyspeaking, ab- usurpedthe positionof the male danseurin the corpsde solute.Even in the second halfof the centuryin England balletand as a partnerto theballerina. Stepping into roles and on theContinent, men continuedto appear in charac- previouslyfilled by men, women now impersonatedthe terroles such as Dr. Coppelius,the doddering,lovestruck sailor boys, hussars, and toreadors who made up Pygmalionof Coppelia,parts thatdemanded of dancers "masculine" contingentsof the corpsde ballet,even as skill as actors and mimes and could be performedby theydisplaced real men as romanticleads. Untilwell into thoselong past theirprime. Men on the balletstage were thetwentieth century, the female dancer who donnedthe fine,it seemed,so longas theyleft its youthful, beardless muftiof a cavalier was a commonplace of European heroesto the ladies and so longas theywere elderlyand, ballet. presumably,unattractive. In real life,donning men's clothingmeant assuming the Initially,then, the "travesty"problem defines itself as power and prerogativesthat went with male identity. one of roles,specifically, that of the romantichero, who Cross-dressingon the stage,however, had quite different incarnated,along with his ballerina counterpart,the implications.Coming into vogue at a timeof majorsocial, idealizedpoetic of nineteenthcentury ballet. In the new economic,and aestheticchanges, it reflectedthe shiftof era opened by theJuly Revolution, this aesthetic and the balletfrom a courtly,aristocratic art to an entertainment stylesof masculine dancing associated with its expression geared to the marketplaceand the tastes of a new became gradually"feminized." Scorned by audiences as bourgeoispublic. unmanly,they became the propertyof the danseuseen Thus the danseurdid notvanish in Copenhagen,where travesti,that curious androgynewho invoked both the August Bournonvilleguided the destinyof the Royal highpoetic and the bordellounderside of romanticand Theater for nearly five decades, or at the Maryinsky post-romanticballet. Theaterin St. Petersburg,where Marius Petipa ruledthe Althoughtravesty roles were not unknown before Imperial Ballet for a similar tenure. On these courtly 1789, they were rare, especially in the so-calledgenre stages the male remained, even if eclipsed by the noble,the mostelevated of the eighteenthcentury's three ballerina. balleticstyles.2 Indeed, its most distinguishedexponents Where he fought a losing battle was in those were men, dancerslike AugusteVestris, who broughta metropolitancenters that stood at theforefront of the new supremeelegance and beautyof personto the stageand aesthetic-Parisand London.At the prestigiouscradles of majestic perfectionto the adagios regarded as the ballet romanticismin these cities,the Paris Opera and touchstoneof theirart. No one embodied more than the King'sTheatre, he was edged graduallybut firmlyfrom danseurnoble the courtlyorigins of ballet,its aristocratic thelimelight by a transformationin the social relationsof manner, and the masculinityof a refined, leisured balletas thoroughgoingas the revolutiontaking place in society. itsart. Alreadyby 1820, the danseurnoble appealed to a very Dance ResearchJournal 17/2 & 18/1[1985-86) 35 "Ratsd'opera," Paris, 1854. "Rat" was theslang expression for the balletgirl. Note the rapturous expression on thefaces of the elderly in the boxand theman with the Note, A caricatureof the period that leaves little doubt of the growing con- gentlemen stage operaglasses. forthe male dancer. too, the youthof the dancersand theireyes, trained on theirad- tempt mirers. limitedpublic-connoisseurs and men of refinedtastes. protectedits daughters. (Taglioni, for instance, arrived in To theincreasing numbers from the middle classes who Parisin 1827with a brotherto partnerher and a father beganto frequent the Paris Opera in the later years of the who coachedher, choreographed for her, and actedas Restoration,his measured dignity and old-fashioned dress herpersonal manager.) The rest,however, belonged to betrayed,like the genre noble itself, the aristocratic man- theurban slums. "Most of thedancers," wrote Alberic nerand frippery ofthe Ancien Regime. Secondin 1844,"first saw thelight of day in a concierge's In thechanging social climate of the 1820s, then, a new lodge."4Bournonville summed up thelot of the majority kindof gendering was underway.The menabout town succinctly-humbleorigins, little education, and wretch- who formedthe backboneof the growingbourgeois ed salaries.5 publicsaw littleto admirein thestately refinements of Poverty, naturally, invites sexual exploitation, the danseurnoble. Their taste, instead,ran to the especiallyin a professionof flexiblemorals. (Liaisons energizedvirtuosity ofa danseurde demi-caract&re likeAn- sweetenalmost every ballerina biography.)6 In the 1830s, toinePaul whoseacrobatic leaps and multiplespins of- however,the backstageof the Paris Oplra becamea feredan analogueof their own active, helter-skelter lives. privilegedvenue of sexual assignation,officially coun- Thehigh poetic of ballet, the loftiness of feeling embodied tenancedand abetted. Eliminating older forms of "caste" by thedanseur noble, came to be seen as notmerely ob- separation,the theater's enterprisingmanagement solete,but also unmanly.With the triumphof roman- dangledbefore the elect of its paying public a commodity ticismand the new, ethereal style of Marie Taglioni in the of indisputablerarity and cachet-itsfemale corps of early1830s, poetry, expressiveness, and gracebecame dancers. theexclusive domain of the ballerina. At the same time, Imaginefor a momentthe inside of the old Paris Opera. advancesin technique,especially the refiningof pointe Descendingtier by tierfrom the gods, we moveup the work,gave her a secondvictory over the male: she now socialscale, until, finally, we standat thegolden horse- addedto her arsenal of tricks the virtuosity ofthe danseur shoe of wealth,privilege, and powerwhere, in boxes de demi-caractere.By 1840, a criticcould write, "If male three-deepon eitherside of the proscenium,sit the dancingno longercharms and attracts today, it is because pleasure-mindedsportsmen of the Jockey Club. hereis no Sylphide,no magic-wingedfairy capable of As theOpera's most influential abonnes, the occupants performingsuch a miracleand doingsomething that is ofthese loges infernales-all male, of course-enjoyed cer- endurablein a maledancer."3 tainprivileges: the run of the coulisses, for example, and In appropriatingthe aestheticidealism and virtuoso entryto theFoyer de la Danse,a largeroom lined with techniqueassociated with the older genres of male danc- barresand mirrorsjust behindthe stage.Before 1830, ing,the ballerina unmanned the danseur, reducing him to lackeysin royallivery had wardedprying eyes from this comiccharacter and occasional"lifter." But her gain had warm-upstudio. When the new regime turned the Opara anothereffect, more lasting even than the banishment of over to privatemanagement, the Foyerde la Danse themale fromthe dance stage.Beginning with roman- acquireda differentfunction.7 No longeroff limits to men ticismand continuing throughout the nineteenth century, ofwealth and fashion,before and afterperformances it femininityitself became the ideologyof ballet,indeed, becamean exclusivemaison close, with madams in the thevery definition of the art. Ideology, however, turned shap of mothersarranging terms. Nowhere was the outto be a falsefriend. Even as nineteenth-centuryballet claevoked time and again in lithographs and paintings, exaltedthe feminine, setting it on a pedestalto be wor- betweenthe idealized femininity ofballetic
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