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Dancing While Male: Theatrical Sovereignty in the French Romantic Ballet
Murray, Colin
Murray, Colin
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Thesis/Dissertation
Date
2023
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Dance
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http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/8417
Abstract
In this dissertation, I explore why the male dancer became an object of derision in the French romantic ballet and evaluate the implications of this rejection. I ask what it meant for critics to claim that the male dancer had no right to dance on the stage, over which the newly exalted ballerina was imagined to reign, by accounting for the legal history with which dance remained imbricated. This research addresses a gap in historical gender scholarship of the nineteenth-century ballet, which has overlooked the importance of the male dancer and masculinity, and it brings dance studies into dialogue with law. In these analyses, source materials consulted include official records of the Parlement of Paris, representations of the king and of the other performers under consideration in visual art, dance treatises, jurisprudence, dance criticism, and contemporaneous memoires and literary works.
Observing that the male dancer was often understood as a vestige of the monarch of the ancien régime and was therefore seen as a trespasser of the romantic stage, I first examine the performing king as a juridical figure. This is done by way of an analysis of theatricality as a force of law in the king’s representation of himself in the context of the early-eighteenth century lit de justice under Louis XV. The dissertation then examines cases of exceptional masculinity on the French stage on the cusp on the romantic era, initially by exploring androgynous performers in cognate performing arts, opera and pantomime, in the figures of Giovanni Velluti, a castrato, and Jean-Gaspard Deburau, a fairground mime, in the 1820s through 1840s. Repercussions of changes with respect to the theatrical articulation of juridical authority in the male figure identified in the lit de justice are drawn on to account for the affective but contrary public receptions of these two performers. The vilified male dancer is then examined in light of these findings as an intruder of the stage owing to the monarchical sovereignty which he could not help but evoke, yet which was ostensibly denied in the romantic aesthetic. Finally, Jules Perrot is considered as an exceptional performer who, amidst such condemnation, successfully rearticulated the juridical authority of the ancien régime king in his dancing at the Opéra. I argue that Perrot became a theatrical sovereign by means of his femininity and technical mastery, indicating the subsistence of monarchical sovereignty in the balletic form and the enduring imbrication of dance and law.
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