The Politics of Belle Epoque Ballet

In "The Politics of Belle Époque Ballet," I confront the complex enmeshment of music and dance both historically as well as historiographically. To that end, the dissertation is divided into two broad sections. The first chapter considers the understudied dancer Natasha Trouhanova, whose ubiquity on all sorts of Parisian stages is belied by the critical silence surrounding her life and performances. Her eclecticism has made Trouhanova into something of a historical curiosity, worthy of passing interest but by no means a pivotal character in the story of ballet, or even dance more broadly, in Paris. Her varied career complicates neat demarcations historians have tended to make between the activities of lightly clad performers in popular venues, fragile émigré ballerinas, and the hallowed generation of female modernists who overhauled contemporary choreographic practice. I examine an evening performance she gave in the spring of 1912, which included works by Dukas, d'Indy, and Ravel. Her simulated nudity in Istar and her lilting coquetterie in Adélaïde, ou le langage des fleurs expose competing notions of beauty and femininity that themselves were products of the nation's declining birthrate and the resultant pronatalist movement. Chapter Two discusses Daphnis et Chloé and L'Après-midi d'un faune. While an examination of Trouhanova's career yielded a surfeit of uncombed historical evidence, these ballets by Ravel and Debussy have received much more critical attention. That said, scholars have yet to think fully about the choreographed component of these works within the larger gestural life of belle époque Paris. I present links between Fokine and Nijinsky's movements for Daphnis and Faune respectively and interest in contemporary optical technologies like chronophotography to animate classical statuary. Such connections reveal a new culture of visuality, one that privileged Faune's minute flexing of the observed physique over Daphnis's fluid and fluent gestures of the contemplated body./nThe second half of the dissertation examines the attendant methodological complications of historiography on dance. My discussions of Trouhanova and Faune and Daphnis benefited from a comparative abundance of archival material, thereby allowing consideration not only of larger gestural context but also of specific choreography. Jeux, the topic of the third chapter, has had a respectable, though curious, material afterlife. That afterlife, however, has animated other problems, namely the continued bifurcation, indeed amputation, of gesture and music by admirers and critics alike. This chapter, and the one that follows, offer an opportunity to meditate on the potential yield and lingering limitations of studying so-called "lost" works. Chapter Three argues that Jeux's gradual evaporation--its transformation from material balletic production to immaterial abstracted score--serves as a parable of sorts. While I suggest that said evaporation was a function of the social divergence between supposedly healthy athleticism and enervating intellectualism, it is, I also argue, symptomatic of a larger problem with current historiographical practice, detectable in the Darmstadt reception of and reverence for Jeux and amplified in musicological writing to follow. The final chapter reflects on the most acute cases in the dissertation: La Boîte à joujoux and Dolly. Neither of these ballets have mobilized sustained critical interest. How then does one write about such works, which lack consistent documentation, and whose most stable artifact is the musical score itself? Through a reading of belle époque toy culture and Dalcrozean theory (among other contemporary sources), I suggest that, like the genre of ballet itself, French childhood faced a crossroads: an emphasis on physical excellence--whether in danced virtuosity or potentially militaristic training--upended concerns about emotiveness and individuation. I reach such a conclusion through a more speculative and searching approach to critical inquiry than has previously been used when thinking about ballet.

Advisor: Taruskin, Richard