Tales of Two Cities by Jonathan Conlin

Author:Jonathan Conlin [Conlin, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619022638
Publisher: Counterpoint

FIG. 25: Unknown artist, Nini Pattes-en-l’air, la Sauterelle, Grille d’Egout and, in front of them, La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge, 1900.

For some reason, at the end of the 1880 season Sari decided to fire the staff and convert the Folies into a concert hall, only to change it back when the concert de grand musique failed to take off – at which point he was declared bankrupt. Only under the next lessees, M. and Mme Allemand, did the Folies introduce a full programme of music-hall variety. In October 1889 the Moulin Rouge was opened by Charles Zidler and Joseph Oller, on a site at the foot of the Butte Montmartre previously occupied by a bal, La Reine Blanche. This featured a large ballroom made of iron, with an orchestra at one end and a second stage outside in a small garden, itself dominated by a large elephant in which private performances of belly dancing were given by ‘la belle Fathma’.48

At the Folies Bergères and the Moulin Rouge, the London influence was obvious, encompassing the performers as well as the general ambience, as shown in work by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (who moved to Montmartre in 1886) and in written accounts by Symons and Huysmans.49 The former’s lithograph The Englishman at the Moulin Rouge (1892) [Fig. 21, p. 134] shows a moustachioed gent chatting up two ladies. Huysmans visited the Folies Bergères in 1879, describing his visit in his Parisian Sketches (1880). He admired the theatre for its boulevard air, found it both ugly and superb, in ‘exquisitely good and outrageously bad taste’, and relished the English humour of the Hanlon–Lees double act. Little Tich (Harry Relph) also clowned at the Folies Bergères. Indeed, he was such a hit that he was made an officier of the Academie Française in 1910.50 Meanwhile at the Moulin Rouge, ‘Les Ecossais’ (The Scotsmen) delighted female audiences by swinging overhead on trapezes while wearing kilts.51

At the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergères, the cancan was performed not on a stage, as Vaughan and Finette had danced it in London, but in the old Mabille way: on the dance floor, surrounded by circles of male and female spectators. It was now all about the dizzying, fizzing effects of skirts and petticoats, a multicoloured, hazy blur. Jane Avril developed a three-stage cancan, which she danced both solo and as part of the Troupe de Mademoiselle Eglantine. This began with ‘the mill’, in which the dancer lifted her skirt and raised one leg, hopping on the other leg and spinning the raised foot in a circle. After changing legs, the dancer lowered her skirt slightly and began a series of side-to-side movements redolent of the gambades originally performed by men in the days of the Grand Chaumière. The final phase consisted of high kicks and the adoption of well-known poses, such as the porte d’armes (with the leg held back against the shoulder, like a rifle), the gitarre (where one leg is held diagonally across the body, like a guitar) and the grand écart (the ‘splits’).

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