The Cambridge Companion to Ballet (Cambridge Companions to Music) by Marion Kant

Author:Marion Kant [Kant, Marion]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2007-06-07T03:00:00+00:00

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LUCIA RUPRECHT

The romantic ballet and its critics: dance goes public

The extraordinarily successful phenomenon of the romantic ballet represents a period of renewal of theatre dance but also a symbiosis between the performed and the written, between dancer and critic. Romantic ballet is an aesthetic movement both embodied and discursive. Ballet in the 1830s and 1840s cannot be considered without taking into account its written testimonies, which described a new and sensational physical technique, suggestive stage technology and an elaborate dramatic style. A cult of the romantic ballerina grew up that soon reached the higher spheres of myth-making. While there had always been admiration for stellar dancers, the ‘star system’ came into its own in the nineteenth century. The new writing on dance followed an era of aesthetic redefinition and fits perfectly into Habermas’s theory of the emergence of Öffentlichkeit or the “public sphere”. The commercialisation of opera performance brought in its wake a demand for consumer information and led to a flood of journalistic and fictional writings that grounded ballet firmly in the rapidly developing field of publicity.1 Audiences expanded and diversified. They extended to those who did not have to be present at a performance at all, to the “liseuses de feuilleton” and to those who enjoyed being able to observe the dancers through the eyes of a critic who might even allow glimpses into the secret spaces behind the stage, the green rooms of Europe’s theatres to which only the lucky few were admitted.

If we think of criticism as a medium that makes art and aesthetic concepts public property, nineteenth-century ballet criticism distinguishes itself at first sight by its overtly voyeuristic attitude: it made the female performers public property, raising their attractiveness by an elaborate “hierarchy of proximity” as Marian Smith called it. It created an image of the opera house as a place where gaining access to dancers’ bodies – whether visual or otherwise – was not just a privilege of the rich and influential. Through the voices of male critics, the ballerina gained a prominent place in the feuilleton, but as object not subject.

Since voyeurism among dance critics will hardly surprise readers, it may be more useful to look at a cross-section of a range of views of well-known and also lesser-known critics. Their writings display the specific characteristics of nineteenth-century dance journalism, situated between aesthetic theory, advertisement and purple prose.

The Paris Opéra ballet was at the heart of a movement that spread out via Milan, London, Copenhagen, Vienna and Berlin. French criticism set the tone by the sheer quantity, as well as the quality of the reviews. These reviews report on various aspects of the performances, and reveal the aesthetic taste or even political opinions of the individual critic. They discuss the economic strategies of the enterprise which the Paris Opéra had become in the 1830s. Louis Véron, its director from 1831 to 1835, certainly understood the importance of publicity. He elevated Marie Taglioni to the rank of principal dancer. He started a tradition that

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