Dance, Desire, and Anxiety in Early Twentieth-Century French Theater

Playing Identities

Charles R. Batson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754651307
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351946483
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The 1909 arrival of Serge de Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris marked the beginning of some two decades of collaboration among littérateurs, painters, musicians, and choreographers, many not native to France. Charles Batson's original and nuanced exploration of several of these collaborations integral to the formation of modernism and avant-gardist aesthetics reinscribes performances of the celebrated Russians and the lesser-known but equally innovative Ballets Suédois into their varied artistic traditions as well as the French historical context, teasing out connections and implications that are usually overlooked in less decidedly interdisciplinary studies. Batson not only uncovers the multiple meanings set in motion through the interplay of dancers, musicians, librettists, and spectators, but also reinterprets literary texts that inform these meanings, such as Valéry's 'L'Ame et la danse'. Identifying the performing body as a site where anxieties, drives, and desires of the French public were worked out, he shows how the messages carried by and ascribed to bodies in performance significantly influenced thought and informed the direction of much artistic expression in the twentieth century. His book will be a valuable resource for scholars working in the fields of literature, dance, music, and film, as well as French cultural studies.

1

Saint/s Sebastian

In May 1911, the controversial production of Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien in Paris’s Théâtre du Châtelet thrust a scene of extreme, sensual violence on its bourgeois public. Staging nightly the martyrdom of one of the Church’s most well-known saints, his body pierced by the arrows of his own band of archers, Le Martyre offered a spectacle of power, anxiety, and desire that my analyses will show to be a reenactment and a reaffirmation of drives marking French national and sexual identity. Imitating the theatrical model famously exploited by Serge de Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, whose arrival in the French capital only two years earlier had established Parisian dance theater as the site of extraordinarily fertile explorations among the arts, this meaning-rich production took form through the collaborative talents of Europe’s most sought-after artists. With libretto by Gabriele d’Annunzio, music by Claude Debussy, choreography by Michel Fokine, and set design and costumes by Léon Bakst, Le Martyre revealed cultural anxieties projected through the representing stage and onto the body and performance of the production’s star dancer–actor, Ida Rubinstein.

As it traces the multiple energies informing the 1911 performances, this chapter analyzes closely what it shows to be a fetishization of both the Roman martyr Saint Sebastian and the woman who performed (as) him. In its examination of the conflations of performer and performed, my analysis treats the specificities first of the Sebastiani heritage then of Rubinstein’s work to reveal how the saint and the dancer both gave form to projected fantasies of blended passivity, mastery, exposure and mystification. After these flashbacks onto how first Sebastian then Rubinstein had become vehicles for powerfully projected desire, I analyze D’Annunzio’s text in depth, exploring its internal thematics of revealed corporeality and blissful pain alongside the extra-textual meanings it occasioned in performance, in which Rubinstein was configured as Sebastian made flesh. I then examine Debussy’s contributions, showing these performances to enter then-current debates over nationalism and the values of French culture, problematized through the dancing, speaking, acting body of the Jewish Russian lesbian Rubinstein. As Rubinstein reaches out to grab her audience in the name of Sebastian, I show that she engages a logic of masochism already indexed in the Sebastian iconography and her own performance history, and the violence acted becomes a violence enacted on its willing, paying public. This chapter thus points to the masochistic scene’s multilayered significations embodied in Le Martyre’s performances of multiple blendings — of male icon and female performer, of body worship and chastised voice, of decadent disavowal and phallic display, and ultimately of spectator and spectacle.

Part One: Saint/s Sebastian

The sudden decapitation of France’s War Minister by an errant propeller at an airport outside of Paris had caused Le Martyre’s scheduled répétition générale to be closed to all but a few journalists, causing a stunned public to wait an extra day to witness a performance that brought its own scenes of violence and shock. On opening night, 22 May 1911, the rising curtain revealed a richly colored courtyard, with golds, blues, and reds covering the walls and evident porticos. Photographs from the performance show robe-clad men and veiled women milling about, their excited interest focused on twin brothers tied to adjacent sturdy columns adorned with Rococo-inflected detailing. Surrounded by archers and dressed in armor, a still figure leans against his bow, left knee slightly bent, left foot kicked slightly off center. He stands enthralled by the spectacle of the bound twins, who sing of their love for Christ as they embrace their martyrdom by the pagans in power. Only when his archers notice blood streaming from his hands does this figure break his silence. At the men’s’ cries for bandages for their leader, whom they call handsome and beloved in his suffering, he exclaims: “Archers, laissez couler mon sang” [“Archers, let my blood flow.”]¹ The Russian-accented voice of Ida Rubinstein rings throughout the theater, for she is this production’s blood-letting St. Sebastian. It is her voice, her presence, and her body that capture the audience and spark many of the fantasies attendant on this work.

It is precisely Ida Rubinstein’s body that inspired the very creation of the work, as Gabriele d’Annunzio found in Rubinstein the very embodiment of the martyred saint. Noting that D’Annunzio had long been intrigued by Sebastian imagery, Philippe Jullian points to the 1883 poem “Adonis” as an early manifestation of themes that would later drive D’Annunzio’s Le Martyre: “‘Thus died the Adolescent, in a great mystery of Pain and Beauty…’”² Marks left on his chest by the rough caresses of one of his mistresses made him conjure up, for the first time, in 1884, the specific image of Saint Sebastian.³ A later letter to another of his mistresses, Nathalie de Goloubeff, conflates the saint’s corporeally salvatory pain with his, even as he apostrophizes the somewhat androgynous De Goloubeff as the martyr: “‘My suffering is like a carnal magic, O St. Sebastian …’” (Jullian 225).

These diffuse Sebastiani notions took on crystallizing clarity when, in the spring of 1910, D’Annunzio attended the Ballets Russes production of Cléopâtre at the Opéra de Paris. The tall, angular, androgynous Ida Rubinstein, come to the French capital from her native Russia for only her second season, performed the title role and incited his enthusiastic remark, “Look, there are Saint Sebastian’s legs that for years I’ve been seeking in vain” (Montera 44). The morning after, those legs still haunted him. A letter dashed off to Robert de Montesquiou reads: “I’ve just seen Cleopatra; I can’t overcome my confusion. What to do?” (ibid.). A then-devoted admirer and close Mend, Montesquiou read in the question a sign of a conflicted attraction that could spark a superlative creation. He suggested that D’Annunzio “compose a work capable of showing off in exceptional fashion the unique gifts of such a performer while also giving your work the unique light that she could bring from the stars” (ibid.). Montesquiou’s florid response spoke to two loyalties: to the Italian he called a “man of genius” (Montera 8), first met at the home of Sarah Bernhardt in 1898, and to the Russian who had incited in him an “aesthetic ardor” in her first season as Cleopatra. Having declared himself “devoted”⁴ to the dancer whose every performance he had attended since her Parisian début in 1909, Montesquiou soon set about organizing a meeting between the two artists. The initial introduction was held in Rubinstein’s suite at the Hôtel Carlton. As Rubinstein noted after this first meeting, “[D’Annunzio’s] eyes, in which the regard seemed to lose itself before blazing forth, rested with pleasure on the bejeweled veils in which the magician Bakst took delight in swathing me.”⁵ D’Annunzio himself was soon quoted as saying, “Among the frivolous actresses of Paris, Ida creates the effect of a Russian icon among the trinkets of the Rue de la Paix” (Jullian 224). The legs had grabbed him; the veils sparked further pleasure. A hint of the divine, as in all icons, was present in her beauty.

Sebastian, Martyr

The scene was set for Rubinstein, legs and all, to inspire D’Annunzio’s vision of Saint Sebastian. “Tu es beau. — Tu es beau / comme Adonis” [“You are beautiful. — You are beautiful / Like Adonis”](Martyre 32):⁶ just as the one who would portray him, D’Annunzio’s textual Saint is of extreme beauty, modeled after descriptions both covert and overt dating from the martyrdom of the historical Sebastian in AD 287 or 288. The thirteenth-century publication of The Golden Legend, a rich collection of hagiographies compiled by Jacques de Voragine, a well-lettered bishop of Genoa, popularized the stories of the Church’s saints, including that of Sebastian, offering many details which had previously been known by only a scholarly few. Tale XXIII, entitled “SAINT SEBASTIAN, martyr,” adding for the reader the date “20 January” as the day on which this saint is celebrated, begins with the following description: “Sebastian … was filled with a very ardent Christian faith. But the pagan emperors Maximian and Diocletian held such an affection for him that they had named him leader of the first band, and had him engaged to their personal service.”⁷ Here we have the first hint at one of the driving forces of the Saint Sebastian tale as it has taken meaning since these first writings: a deep affection leads the male emperors to keep the (also male) Sebastian close to them. An intimate, same-sex union was formed, one to be broken by Sebastian’s open declaration of his Christianity. Witnessing the binding and flogging of twin brothers whose crime was having refused to “renounce faith in Christ” (De Voragine 92), Sebastian affirms to the gathered crowd that he is “Christ’s servant” (93), willing to come to the aid of his persecuted brothers. This public revelation of his Christian identity is not without consequence: a betrayed Diocletian, crying “Ingrate!” (95), condemns his former favorite to death by arrows shot by the hands of his own troupe.

Sebastian’s striding forth from the Christian closet means his death. It mattered little that he had earlier expressed his Christianity in numerous ways, in numerous places (“And he wore the military badge only to be able to aid and console persecuted Christians” [92]): as long as the secret was not verbally articulated, Sebastian’s place with Diocletian was assured. Saying nothing about his Christianity maintained his status: his silence, along with that of his fellow Christians, was as performative, as effectual, as any speech act.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick theorizes in her Epistemology of the Closet⁸ that the closet, the locus of the secret, in effect has see-through walls: the fact that the walls exist draws attention to them and to that which they were erected to hide. The secret is an open one, despite and because of the performative gestures that drive it to be hidden. In their actions against what they seek to drive outside public discourse, the agents of the governing regime reveal even further what they had sought to conceal. The arrows thrust into Sebastian’s body, determined to stifle overt expression of Christianity, bring even greater attention to his marked difference from the dominant powers.

The male–male union of the Sebastian tale has similarly been regulated, with the “secret” being similarly thrust behind glass walls. Carrying as its qualifying subtitle translated from the Latin in accordance with the most ancient manuscripts, De Voragine’s work sets claim to historical weight in support of the textual veracity of his version of the tale, one which occludes detail of the relationship between the archer and his emperor. How is it, then, that a review of Robert Wilson’s 1988 reworking of the Sebastian ballet for the Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris, could claim: “It is still true that the homosexual reading of Saint Sebastian is the one that is the best know n,”⁹ or that the then newly founded Centre Gai et Lesbien in Paris could proclaim a week-long festival of gay-themed activities as “La Folle Semaine de la Saint Sébastien [The Queeny Crazy Week of Saint Sebastian],” its dates, 14–22 January 1995, book-ending the Roman Catholic official Feast-day of Saint Sebastian, 20 January?

David Halperin has pointed to a trans-historical, often unarticulated, conflation of “pagan personal affection” with same-sex love, more specifically male–male love.¹⁰ De Voragine’s text thus proffers a same-sex eros as a ringingly silent marker of the description of the relationship between Diocletian and Sebastian. Modeling the texts of The Golden Legend or the similarly constructed tales of the Church’s official Acta Sanctora, later Saints’ Lives become infused with the erotic charge of the “pagan affection,” even as they may denotatively occlude it. One nineteenth-century Life, for example, glosses over the same-sex union as it focuses on Sebastian’s closeted Christianity: “Diocletian, having become master of the empire, came to Rome in 285, developed an affection for Sebastian, and gave him the duty of captain of the Praetorian guards ….: this Saint acted with such discretion that nobody yet suspected him to be Christian. He therefore continued to serve the Church of Jesus Christ ….”¹¹ The final section of this particular Life offers what might be called a preferred reading of the tale: “No profession, not even that of soldier, dispenses us from being Christian and from living like one.” The “affection” is nested in a collection of verbal clauses which serve only to lead to the main thrust of the story, one supported by its prescribed moral. If we follow Sedgwick, this hint to the male–male union as an unarticulated drive to the story further points to the walls of the closet and the openly hidden secret therein. James Saslow’s research may well affirm Sedgwick’s logic, in which the hidden is always already a part of the exposed: he has documented a same-sex eroticism attached to the Sebastian figure since at least the Italian Renaissance.¹²

From its first manifestations, the exposed Sebastian image has carried multisemic valences. In a densely lavish exhibition catalogue from 1984, Sylvie Forestier traces the Sebastian image from the early periods of Christianity to the late twentieth century.¹³ She notes that the founders of the Church, interested in evangelism, proselytized and converted the pagans by using the selfless, martyred Sebastian as a counterpoint to Diocletian, discursively recreated as the very image of a tyrannical, authoritarian, pagan power. The Middle Ages saw an increased focus on Sebastian’s body, inspired by Sebastian’s reappearance after his being shot by arrows. “And only a few days later, Saint Sebas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Principal Works
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Dancing France
• 1 Saint/s Sebastian
• 2 Dancing About Architecture
• 3 Performing the Other
• 4 Men in Tights
• 5 Relâche
• Works Cited
• Index