Baryshnikov. and Despite His Evident Desire to Choreograph and the Fact
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Baryshnikov. And despite his evident desire to choreograph and the fact that by the age of twenty-three he already had completed two ballets, his works revealed little of the originality of Nijinsky's L'Apres-midi d'un Faune, Ailey's Blues Suite, or Robbins' Fancy Free. Biographers often exaggerate the accomplishments of WHERE ARE BALLET'S WOMEN CHOREOGRAPHERS? their subjects, but one wonders whether Solway would have advanced the same claims had Stierle died of kidney failure or in a car crash-or if he had been a woman. In a sense, the artistic questions raised by A Dance Against Time are beside the point, since the real subject of the book, as opposed to its setting, has little Women choreographers abound in modern dance; in ballet, by contrast, they to do with dance. This, presumably, is what appealed to Pocket Books in signing are a historical rarity. Even for the twentieth century, the names that immedi up the author in the first place: the proposed volume wasn't a dance book, but ately come to mind can be counted on the fingers of one hand-Bronislava a soap opera in which the star was an all-purpose victim-of his family, body, Nijinska, Agnes de Mille, Andree Howard, Ninette de Valois, Ruth Page. For the sexuality, AIDS, yo u name it. No greater contrast can be imagined between this nineteenth century, there are even fewer: Marie Taglioni, whose claim to the antidance biography and the volumes in the "Dancers of To-day" series. For title rests on one work, Le Papillon; and Katti Lanner, who choreographed the Adam and Charles Black, dance wasn't a pretext, but the raison d'etre of its spectacular ballets that figured on the programs at London's Empire Theatre, a books, which dealt unabashedly with the art and artistry of their various sub music hall. jects. And these books weren't the only dance items on the publisher's list, Many reasons have been advanced for this absence of women choreogra which also included Tamara Karsavina's Ballet Technique, Kay Ambrose's The phers in an idiom that for nearly two hundred years has been dominated by Ballet-Lover's Companion, and the Ballet Annual, edited by Arnold Haskell. In women as performers. One reason, it is said, is the codified movement vocabu other words, Black had a genuine commitment to dance and a sense of the pub lary of ballet-its "stiff and commonplace gymnastics," in Isadora Duncan's 1 lic its books were intended to serve. Alas, Pocket Books, with its eye on the du words -which supposedly limits the play of the imagination. Another expla bious mirage of big money, has neither. nation is what Susan Manning has called ballet's "sexual division of labor," which "defined choreography as a male task and performance as a female task."2 Still another is the representational system of nineteenth-century ballet, which presented women as objects of male desire rather than as subjects in their own right. In our day, explanations have focused on the day- to-day realities of ballet. Ballerina Karen Kain, for instance, has spoken of the unusually heavy burden that performing at the professional level imposes on women: with fewer claims on their time and energy, men can more easily try their hand at choreography.3 Others have noted the difference in structure between modern dance and bal let classes. Where modern dance classes often include an improvisational or choreographic component, ballet classes for the most part are exclusively de voted to technique. Finally, professional training for women in ballet begins extremely early, and, unlike the training for modern dancers, seldom includes academic learning or exposure to other artistic forms. Thus, women in ballet learn to experience their bodies through the medium of a single all-embracing technique and in isolation from the larger world of ideas. While all these explanations have some validity, they rest upon a number of dubious historical assumptions. The first is that the authorship of dances- This essay is based on a paper given at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, University of Michigan, on 21October1996. 215 214 PART II: Reconfiguring the Sexes including those of minor importance-has been generally acknowledged, when, did they labor? In what artistic contexts did they operate? Finally, and more in fact, in many eras this was seldom the case. The second is that dance-making broadly, what can we deduce about the institutional preconditions for female is an activity that has always been identified with the individual choreographer, achievement as choreographers in ballet? although the use of this term only became widespread in the twentieth century. The third is that choreography is preeminently an act of individual creation Although today her name is forgotten, in her time Madame Mariquita was rather than the expression of an institutional style, as was typical in the nine among the busiest and most respected choreographers of Paris. Critics spoke of teenth century. The fourth is that the choreographer is chiefly a maker of bal her "exquisite art"; one even dubbed her "the fairy of artistic choreography."4 lets, although in the past these formed only a fraction of most choreographers' She had "imagination, talent, [and] taste," wrote Cleo de Merode, and a "sensi total output. The fifth is that most ballet choreography was created for the tivity" that made dancers "adore" her.5 From 1898 to 1920, Mariquita was the opera house, as opposed to the popular stage or venues like circuses and plea ballet mistress of the Opera-Comique, where she produced nearly tl1irty ballets sure gardens that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries routinely pre and the dances in numerous operas. 6 Her tenure at the city's second opera sented ballet spectacles and entertainments. The sixth is that the historical house (where she succeeded Berthe Bernay, a former Opera dancer and teacher record, as this has come down to us, is an accurate reflection of reality. In terms at the Opera school) climaxed a long career on the popular stage. Born near of women, this is tantamount to saying that the only ones who choreographed Algiers in the 1830s, she made her Paris debut in 1845 at the renowned Theatre are those we know about. des Funambules, home of the mime Deburau. She danced at the Theatre des As I have said, all these assumptions are problematical. Based on a highly se Bouffes-Parisiens, Theatre de la Porte-Saint-Martin, and Theatre des Varietes; lective reading of the past, they ascribe to it the practices and prejudices of the choreographed early ballets for the "Skating de la rue Blanche," a roller derby present, while accepting on faith ballet's master narrative. This, in a nutshell, views turned popular theater; served as ballet mistress of the Theatre de la Gaite the development of ballet genealogically, as a royal succession of choreogra Lyrique and eventually the Folies-Bergere, which throughout the Belle Epoque phers of genius-Noverre, Perrot, Petipa, Fokine, Ashton, Balanchine. Because had a ballet troupe.7 Katti Larmer regarded her as a rival and closely monitored few ballets survive even the passage of a generation, such lineages are seductive, her doings from across the Channel. As Enrico Cecchetti observed, "Did Mdlle. even if the order they invoke bears little resemblance to the messiness and con Mariquita put on 'Autour de Paris' in the French capital, Katti Lanner was sure tradictions of history. Above all, by viewing the ballet past as a succession of to put on 'Round the Town' in London."8 individuals of genius, this approach consigns most of ballet history to the dust During her years at the Opera-Comique, Mariquita still kept a foot in the bin. Yet it is here, in the now invisible crannies of the popular, the forgotten, and popular tlieater. In 1900, for instance, she served as ballet mistress at the Palais the second-rate, in the everyday chronicle of the ballet past as opposed to the de la Danse at the Universal Exposition. In 1908, she "arranged" the dances for selective chronicle of its most privileged institutions that women made dances. La Belle au Bois Dormant (The Sleeping Beauty), a "feerie lyrique" in fourteen In these spaces, which even today remain largely undocumented, one finds the scenes with Sarah Bernhardt in the double travesty role of the Poet and the women choreographers of early twentieth-century French ballet. Prince. In 1912, she provided some of the choreography for the "galas" given by I did not set out to unearth their forgotten history: it came to me unbidden, soloist Natalia Trouhanova at the Folies-Bergere. In 1919, at the Theatre Vaude in newspapers, programs, books, and magazines-a history stumbled upon in ville, she staged the first production of Debussy's children's ballet La Boite a search of something else. But there they were-women with names like Ariane joujoux (The Toy Box), a work later produced by the Ballets Suedois. She even Hugon, Jane Hugard, Mademoiselle Stichel, Madame Mariquita, Louise Virard, found time to produce the odd trifle for high society. Narkiss, a "story-ballet Adelina Gedda, Jeanne Chasles, Rita Papurello-turn-of-the-century ghosts, with singing;' was mounted in 1913 for the Casino in Deauville. choreographers invisible to history although they had worked in the theater Madame Mariquita (she was never known otherwise) was the most prolific for years. of the era's women choreographers. When she died in 1922 close to the age of It is not my intention to offer a panorama of French women choreographers ninety, she could look back to a career spanning more than seven decades of of this period.