A Queer History of the Ballet

Peter Stoneley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781135872427
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

Designed for students, scholars and general readers with an interest in dance and queer history, A Queer History of the Ballet focuses on how, as makers and as audiences, queer men and women have helped to develop many of the texts, images, and legends of ballet.

Presenting a series of historical case studies, the book explores the ways in which, from the nineteenth century into the twentieth, ballet has been a means of conjuring homosexuality – of enabling some degree of expression and visibility for people who were otherwise declared illegal and obscene.

Studies include:

• the perverse sororities of the Romantic ballet
• the fairy in folklore, literature, and ballet
• Tchaikovsky and the making of Swan Lake
• Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and the emergence of queer modernity
• the formation of ballet in America
• the queer uses of the prima ballerina
• Genet's writings for and about ballet.

Also including a consideration of how ballet's queer tradition has been memorialized by such contemporary dance-makers as Neumeier, Bausch, Bourne, and Preljocaj, this is an essential book in the study of ballet and queer history.

1: COMPONENTS

Spaces, bodies, movement

Spaces

In To-Night the Ballet (1934), Adrian Stokes writes of the enjoyment that children and grownups take in arranging the figures in a toy theatre. He suggests that the toy theatre grants us a fantasy of power, whereby we determine events that, in real life, are usually beyond our control. Although we lack the same degree of control when we go to an actual theatre, Stokes suggests that there is still the same fantastical engagement. We see various ‘prototypes, symbols, fears, [and] aspirations . . . externalised and dramatised within the open box of the stage’.¹

Some decades after Stokes, Roland Barthes developed a similar argument in relation to the cinema. In Barthes's version, we enter a ‘twilight reverie’ even before we enter the cinema, as we move from one film poster to another. Then we bury ourselves in the ‘dim, anonymous, indifferent cube’ in which we see the film. For Barthes, we move from the static emblems of desire into a theatrical darkness that is ‘the very substance’ of fantasy, which has ‘the colour of a diffused eroticism’. In the cinema we are removed from the world and placed in a relaxed posture, but in close proximity to others. Both alone and surrounded, and seduced by the brilliance of the figures on the screen, we ‘slide down into [our] seats as if into a bed’, and enter into a hypnotic state that is to one side of our everyday loyalties and responsibilities. For Barthes, the ‘urban dark’ of the cinema is a place in which ‘the body's freedom is generated’.² The cinematic space induces a state of arousal that is both passive and aggressive. The gratification is that of passively looking, rather than of acting out, as we ‘slide down into [our] seats’. But the experience of theatre – and subsequently of cinema – is structured so as to provide the voyeuristic joy of subjecting others to ‘a controlling and curious gaze’.³ While the spectacle renders us passive, it may permit a livelier imaginative engagement precisely because it is not to be acted upon. The theatre or the cinema is a safe space in which to allow the mind some degree of erotic vagrancy, and it feels all the safer because this is not, primarily, an erotic event at all (to return to Barthes's terms, it is a ‘diffused eroticism’).

Barthes describes a model of spectatorship that was largely in place before the invention of cinema, and his ideas are especially evocative when explored in relation to the ballet theatre. This is because the classic design of the ballet theatre or opera house has an obviously permissive architecture. The layout is one that deliberately sets out to stimulate the voyeuristic impulse even before the performance has begun. It does this by having shapes beyond shapes, and enclosures within enclosures. To take what is perhaps the supreme example, the Palais Garnier in Paris, completed in 1875, has different styles concertinaed into each other: the Italianate, peristyled façade is surmounted by an Oriental dome, which is backed by a Greek gable. This love of excess, with different shapes and styles impacted on top of each other, is also apparent in the surface decorations. The walls are encrusted with friezes of bodies, wreathes, and musical motifs; horizontal lines are punctuated by dancing and gesturing muses and bacchantes. The Palais Garnier is, as Gérard Fontaine has suggested, an example of the ‘façade as stage-set’.⁴ At the summit of the building stands a handsome, naked Apollo, whose face has been sculpted to resemble that of Napoleon I. A nymph sits on either side of him. One looks up adoringly to his face, while the other stares at his groin. Even as we approach the theatre, then, there is a promiscuity of styles and images, and an unambiguous invitation to look and to be aware of pleasure.

The theatre's exterior initiates narratives of desire, in that it presents the onlooker with mythical figures acting out their characteristic pleasures, and this sense of creating a narrative is developed by the building's interior. In the case of the Palais Garnier, the audience enters through a grand entrance hall, which leads up to a much grander staircase, which takes us on in turn to the avant foyer and to the grand foyer. The building encourages us to expect a progressive intensification of visual pleasure. It achieves this by a shift in materials, from the marble of the staircase, to the mosaics of the avant foyer, to the gilding and crystal of the grand foyer. Also, with various subordinate rotundas, galleries, porticoes, and balconies, the architecture gives different views onto itself and onto the audience. Garnier fulfilled in spectacular style that part of his brief that stipulated that he provide ‘plaisirs ambulatoires’. We are encouraged to look at and to be aware of each other, and we must make our own exits and entrances as we make our way around the theatre. At many a turn there are huge mirrors that give us a view of our own performance. Then, with our visual appetites aroused, we might wonder what splendours will be revealed in the theatre's most intimate recess, the auditorium or salle de spectacle. Although classic opera houses tend to be quite large and can seat several thousand people, the auditoria are cleverly laid out to create an almost suffocating, private atmosphere. In the Palais Garnier, each layer of encircling seats is divided up into a row of small boxes or loges. With the seats and walls of the loges lined in crimson plush, the salle de spectacle consists of a pornotopian series of vaginal enclosures. Each enclosure is itself a kind of stage, but each also allows its inhabitants to look, finally and imperiously, into the lighted box of the actual stage, and at the actual bodies displayed there. In this way, the theatre's design creates a space that is both public and private, and in which the endpoint of desire is the performer.

The performer might be said to occupy a privileged position, in that he or she is the active persona who dominates the scene. But this sense is counterbalanced by the fact that he or she is an object of scrutiny, compelled to fulfil the expectations of the viewer (there is the sense, as Stokes would have it, that these people are our ‘toys’). There are, then, both sinister and attractive aspects to the way in which the classic theatre encodes the spectacle with connotations of secrecy and privacy. In designing a theatre that seems to accentuate these connotations, Garnier was working within the traditions of theatre architecture, and of ballet as spectacle. The Paris Opéra was notorious in the nineteenth century for seeking to elicit and satisfy the ‘erotic daydreaming’ of a largely male clientele. Historians have noted that the ballet of this period was increasingly offered as a ‘voyeuristic free-for-all’, and that the layout of the theatres provided spaces in which performers and patrons could make each other's acquaintance. The architecture is permissive in that it elicits a curious and desiring gaze, but this aspect is also literally ‘built in’ at theatres such as the Palais Garnier, with various warm-up and retiring rooms. These were spaces in which the privileged subscriber and his guests could mix ‘behind the scenes’ with the dancers. Barthes's cinema offers a distant and imaginary interaction between performer and spectator; the ballet theatre enabled a more actual, corporeal exchange, as the dancers became involved in prostitution légère.⁵

While the relationship between audience and performer has long since changed, the connotations of the Palais Garnier's architecture are not lost on present-day dancers. Among the recent stars of the Opéra Nationale de Paris, Nicolas Le Riche notes: ‘At the Garnier, you feel “watched.” I sometimes have the impression of having “voyeurs” in front of me, and I don't want to play the exhibitionist’. On the other hand, some dancers enjoy the intimacy with the audience, in that it can give them a stronger sense of their own power. Kader Belarbi observes: ‘When you're at the Garnier, you have a mutual exchange with the public. I get the feeling that I'm entering into the arena’.⁶

While it is possible to establish the theatre as a space that initiates and structures desire, one could not make a case that it is an especially queer space (and throughout this book we will usually be dealing with shared ideas and territories). The theatre may serve to encourage otherwise illicit desires. Let's return at this point to Barthes's spectator within the ‘dim, anonymous, indifferent cube’. The darkness is indifferent and anonymous in the sense that it disregards how each of us identifies with the spectacle before our eyes. As viewers, we may desire the female performer or the male, or we may experience a shifting or imprecise identification. The theatre is a place of ‘free association’, in that we can watch and desire as we wish. This may not define the pleasure that most of us take in attending the theatre. But the public-private nature of the space, with its conditioning of desire, its various enclosures and cover of darkness, and its very idea of acting out roles, has led to a sustained historic association between the theatre and illicit desire. Theatres have, at various times, served as trysting places for unwed couples, as relatively safe places for queer social interaction, and as locales of prostitution. The theatre, then, was a space for the diffusion of the erotic in two senses. First, in witnessing the performance, the members of the audience could variously sublimate, visualise, and reconstruct their desires in relation to the scene on the stage. Second, the theatre occasioned the dispersal and intermingling of groups and behaviours. It enabled new contacts across otherwise tightly controlled social boundaries. In neither of these senses is the theatre a necessarily queer space. But, as we will see in later chapters, deviancy could flourish opportunistically under the shelter of this unusual régime.⁷

Bodies

What of the spectacle itself, and what specifically of the ballet spectacle? At various points since the early nineteenth century, ballet has been a scandal about the body. It has been a prime occasion to see attractive young women in short or more or less see-through garments. It has also given offence from time to time because it presents a relatively undressed male body. It offers young men as objects of contemplation, surrendered to the viewer's gaze. I want to return to the ‘offensiveness’ of the male body, but first the ballet body – male or female – is a particular kind of body, with its own special ‘look’. It is a ‘customised’ body, and this has had a bearing on its queer potential. How and why did the dancer's look evolve as it did, and what queer implications has it had for dance-makers and their audiences?

Our starting-point is that the dancer's body is made over to its specialised role. Ballet is ‘deforming’, in that it produces an altered musculature. To some extent it requires its practitioners to give up on having a normal body, and the pain involved in this transformation is a part of ballet's mythology. The dancer carries out a series of barre exercises, repeated day after day over many years. These are done with the hips, legs, and feet projecting out in more or less extreme versions of a ‘six o'clock’ position. As a result, over time, the body develops a characteristic ‘turned-out’ appearance. Although this ‘splayed’ or ‘penguin’ look is often taken as a sign of ballet's ridiculously fanciful nature, it has rational, historical antecedents. Ballet is usually understood to date from the sixteenth-century court masque, in which aristocrats would perform a series of movements to music as part of a larger symbolic drama. These stately manoeuvres, with rich costumes and scenery, were designed to display the monarch's power. With the feet slightly turned out, the courtiers could manage the various sideways and crosswise movements with smoothness and grace. Turn-out, and a more general openness of posture, had other moral and social significances within the aristocracy. It indicated righteousness, style, and power (a slumped, self-concealing posture, on the other hand, was taken to signify deviousness and ignorance). The noble, dancerly body was also a manly body. The balance of turn-out, and having a fine control of the contour of one's upper body, were essential components of fencing. It was understood that dancing taught one to ‘handle matters with seemliness and without disorder’, while also helping one to ‘ride horseback and carry arms’. In sum, it ‘render[ed] one more skilled at serving one's Prince in battle, and pleasing him in divertissements’.⁸

As the court masque evolved, its movements became more complicated, and gradually it became an event the nobles watched rather than took part in. Acrobats and tumblers were brought in from the streets to carry out the ever-more-complex dances, and turn-out was gradually exaggerated from a 45-degree to a 90-degree angle. In taking over the ballet, the lower-class street performers aped the style and gestures of their ‘betters’, except that the acrobat's imitation was understood to be better than the aristocrat's original.⁹

The significance of the balletic look changed over time, especially in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was a complex evolution, but to pick out a few key moments, we might consider France and the rise of the new classes in the course of the eighteenth century. Alongside the more widespread emergence of the middle class, there was the rise of an intellectual class that was independent of – and even opposed to – the practices and values of the court. This new faction – the thinkers of the Enlightenment – urged more scientific, rationalist modes, and they sought to demystify the authority of the monarch and the church. The writers and thinkers of the Enlightenment emphasised the laws of nature, and they urged that society should be more in keeping with such natural laws. This involved a critique of the studiously elegant persona of the aristocrat. As Sarah Cohen puts it in her analysis of dance and the ancien régime, ‘A widespread Enlightenment effort to separate artifice from the body's natural “truth” prompted a rejection of many of the arts associated with aristocratic corporeality, including Watteau's paintings and the danse noble’.¹⁰

In the Enlightenment era, manliness was increasingly defined in terms of strength and functionality. Gracefulness came to be seen more as a womanly attribute, and ballet survived the Enlightenment in part because it could orient itself more emphatically around the female dancer. This tendency was confirmed in the early nineteenth century, as the aristocratic audience was displaced by the bourgeoisie. To the newly confident Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment middle classes, the refinement of aristocratic posture – in the case of men – was seen as frivolous and effeminate. The male ballet dancer became unacceptable. There was a sense that the male body could not and should not be graceful; that it was too grossly material for aesthetic display. As poet and critic Théophile Gautier wrote in 1838: ‘Nothing is more distasteful than a man who shows his red neck, his big muscular arms, his legs with the calves of a parish beadle, and all his strong massive frame shaken by leaps and pirouettes’. Similarly, the critic Jules Janin wrote of a male dancer in 1840: ‘That this fellow should dance as a woman does – impossible!’ It was offensive to Janin that a ‘bewhiskered individual who is a pillar of the community’ should ‘come before us in a tunic of sky-blue satin, his head covered with a hat with a waving plume amorously caressing his cheek’.¹¹

In a bourgeois culture, the mock-aristocratic male dancer was disturbingly feminine, and he was irrelevant. Who, after all, was supposed to enjoy the display of the male body, and on what grounds? Janin declared of the ‘pretty dancing girl’ that he knew ‘what this lovely creature wishes us’, whereas he could not see the point of watching a man ‘as ugly as you or I’.¹² What kind of a pleasure can one man take in another's body, and, especially, in this body? Turn-out seems to make a display of the genitals, while the muscular roundness and ‘pulled-up’ look of the male dancer's buttocks might seem to have made its own invitation. The supposition becomes ever stronger that the presence of the male dancer could only appeal to abnormal men, and to immodest women. The bourgeois man did not wish to be confronted so obviously by another man. The male dancer seemed to intervene between the male spectator and the object of his desire. There was a sense of competitive resentment. The newly wealthy subscribers expected unimpeded access to the female dancers, and the male dancers were an even greater nuisance because they tended to be the husbands, brothers, and fathers of the female dancers.¹³

The changes in the social composition and preconceptions of the audience produced great changes in the spectacle itself. In the processional form of the courtly masque, ballet tended to be performed by single-sex groups. As the ballet professionalised, boys were often cast in women's roles, though towards the end of the seventeenth century women too began to be cast. But the restrictive costumes worn by women meant that the man performed the more skilful and varied movements. He remained the central and most admired performer. It was only in the nineteenth century, with the extensive use of pointe-work in Romantic ballets, and with the advent of the bourgeois audience, that women displaced men. Increasingly, ballet centred on a world of sylphs and ingénues. The great stars of Romantic ballet were all women: Marie Taglioni (1804–1884), Fanny Elssler (1810–1884), Fanny Cerrito (1817–1909), and Lucile Grahn (1819–1907). And, in a complete reversal of the early court ballets, women now took men's parts.¹⁴

These shifts in the perception of the dancing body might lead us toward the way in which queer theory intersects with – or has exploited – the debates that it inherited from feminism to do with ‘nature versus nurture’, or ‘biology versus social construction’. It has become a founding idea of queer theory that gender is not an innate, biological destiny, but a social construct or cultural performance. Judith Butler invites us to see masculine and feminine values not as natural and undeviating qualities that depend on one's sex, but as roles that we assimilate as we grow up. She argues that ‘gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylised repetition of acts’.¹⁵ Even the most normative of gendered identities is a carefully and continuously rehearsed performance, though the performer may not recognise it as such. Normative identities acquire a power that allows them to be understood as natural and inevitable, rather than as ‘tenuously constituted in time’. But even the most readily accepted or powerful of id...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• A QUEER HISTORY OF THE BALLET
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: COMPONENTS
• 2: NUNS AND FAIRIES
• 3: SWANS
• 4: QUEER MODERNITY
• 5: NEW YORK AND THE ‘CLOSED SHOP’
• 6: THE PRIMA AND HER FANS
• 7: DANCE OF THE SAILORS
• CONCLUSION: TRACES
• NOTES
• REFERENCES