Ballerina

by Deirdre Kelly

  Those at court had to keep up with, if not match, the physical prowess of the king if they were to enjoy a position of prestige, and this involved hours upon hours of study and practice. In this way, Louis, quite literally, kept the elite on their toes. Even the smallest misstep could prove fatal. Coordination was prized as much as exhibiting rhythm and poise and elegant posture—“straight spine, lifted chest, relaxed shoulders, long neck, erect head, hands and arms held without tension. It was the gesture of the aristocrat, as expressed on the dance floor. It was upper class demeanor converted into movement to music.”13 People who could not, or did not, dance well were ridiculed and made social pariahs. In Molière’s comic play Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670), the principal character, Monsieur Jourdain, is scorned for failing to grasp the aristocratic ethos at the heart of his society, a blunder represented by his inability to master the minuet. “All the misfortunes of mankind, all the dreadful disasters that fill the history books, the blunders of politicians and the faults of omission of great commanders, all this comes from not knowing how to dance,” the Dancing Master tells him. “Without the dance, a man can do nothing.”14

  Comporting one’s self with elegance was also important for women, especially women of low birth who had nothing to lose but much to gain by using their wits, talent, and imitative powers to distinguish themselves through a mastery of their own bodies. Dancing manuals, which proliferated in those days, provided a road map for navigating the complex system of social hierarchies whose path led straight to the king. Jean-Philippe Rameau had been dancing master to the queen of Spain, and he penned two books on dance in which he stressed elegance in comportment as the means by which a woman could make her mark: “A lady, however graceful her deportment, will be judged,” Rameau instructed. “For example, if she holds her head erect and her body upright, without affectation or boldness, it will be said: ‘There goes a fine lady.’ ”15

  This notion of the female dancer as necessarily daintier and more refined than her male counterpart has persisted and helps explain why ballerinas in our own time are presented as paragons of purity and virtue. The expectation is that a ballerina remains poised and dignified, no matter what the circumstances. In 1820, the Italian dancer, choreographer, and dance theoretician Carlo Blasis published his classic treatise on dancing, The Code of Terpsichore (1823), the first published analysis of ballet technique, and in it he stressed the importance of grand manners and courtly behavior among ballerinas: “Men must dance in a manner very different from women; the temps de vigueur, and bold majestic execution of the former, would have a disagreeable effect in the latter, who must shine and delight by lithesome [sic] and graceful motions, by neat and pretty terre-à-terre steps, and by a decent voluptuousness and abandon in all their attitudes.”16

  The convention would eventually change early in the eighteenth century, with the rise of professional ballerinas whose virtuosic feats were at first deemed shocking, precisely because performed by women. But Louis never appeared squeamish in the face of a lively, dancing woman. In fact, he was eager to encourage displays of virtuosity among women, often selecting females as partners in ballets he danced at a court. Among them was Mademoiselle Vertpré, who danced with him in Le Ballet de la Nuit.17 This early ballerina, about whom little is known, also performed opposite the king in Le Ballet de l’Impatience in 1661, the same year Louis established the Académie Royale de Danse, the first institution dedicated to standardizing ballet. Later, more women continued to gain prominence in ballet when in 1669 the king established a theater with a school dedicated to training professionals of both genders for the stage.

  One of the king’s dancing masters, Jean-Baptiste Lully, managed that school. A native of Italy, Lully had also danced with the king in Le Ballet de Nuit, and was one of his favorites. Besides being an accomplished dancer, Lully was a gifted composer and musician, a member of the vaunted Vingt-quatre Violons du Roi, the king’s personal violin ensemble. As well, he composed and staged ballets, mostly light fare suitable as court entertainments. A ruthlessly ambitious man, Lully aspired to create works on a larger scale. For this he needed his own venue. In 1672, through Machiavellian connivance, Lully commandeered his way to the directorship of the Académie Royale de Musique, later known as the Paris Opéra, purchasing from Pierre Perrin the letters patent originally granted him by the king in 1669 to run the public theater. Lully quickly cleaned house, replacing the old guard with men of impressive talent of his own choosing, among them choreographer Pierre Beauchamps, poet Philippe Quinault, costume designer Jean-Louis Berain, and playwrights Pierre Corneille and Molière, to create a new theatrical genre combining music, verse, dance, song and scenic design within an integrated whole.18 Among the new productions were works created specifically for women, among the first of their kind. Typically, opéra-ballet, as these spectacles were called, replicated entertainments at court, making the Paris Opéra seem a mere extension of that royal realm, especially considering that until this time only members of the nobility were allowed to perform them.

  But Lully generally found the nobility to be inferior as performers, particularly with regards to the ballet. Known for having defined a French style of music, Lully had quickened the pace of compositions created for dance, making it fly where previously it had decorously glided, only to discover that many of the aristocrats assigned to perform his ballets had difficulty keeping up. His solution was to look outside the nobility for people of talent to better dance his work. “He was obliged to choose novices, unspoiled by the traditions of their art, and laboriously train them to carry out his intentions,” music historian Frederick H. Martens writes. “The dancers of his time... could see nothing but their own dance per se, all else, proportion, character, the relation of the dance to the expressive content of the music, was a matter of indifference to them.”19 Significantly, women were, for the first time, counted among the so-called novices whom Lully started to train for his own glorification. It is at this point in ballet history, and largely as a result of Lully’s frustration with the prevailing system, that the first professional ballerinas begin to be noticed. Among them was Mademoiselle La Fontaine (1655–1738), the so-called “Queen of the Dance,”20 who in 1681 appeared in a revival of Lully’s opera-ballet Le Triomphe de l’Amour at the Académie Royale de Musique, the first recorded instance of professional ballerinas on the proscenium stage. La Fontaine performed alongside three other professional women dancers: mesdemoiselles Carré, Pesant, and Leclerc.21 Other accounts of the ballet list mesdemoiselles Roland, Le Peintre, and Fernon,22 suggesting there may have been other contemporaneous performances of Le Triomphe de l’Amour in 1681 but always with La Fontaine at the center.

  Women like La Fontaine were happy to help Lully take on the role of ballet reformer. The theater offered them a chance to assert themselves in ways not typically allowed in society at large and on the basis of skill and looks. The latter was something they were born with. The former was something capable of being expanded upon through study and discipline. Many women dancers seized the opportunity to dance professionally, acquiring social prestige and, in some cases, vast stores of wealth even though their origins were humble. Their social mobility came courtesy of an art form that operated as both a political and personal tool for advancement, attracting and swaying power with its elegance and poise. The founding of a professional dancing school ensured that talent would eventually trump birthright as the means for social mobility for certain women in pre-Revolutionary France. Between the years 1700 and 1725, almost ninety professional female dancers were known to dance on the Paris Opéra stage.23 The Opéra dance company, “which had so far been exclusively composed of men, was at long last opening up to professional dancers. Their growing presence became rapidly and increasingly felt and the first female celebrities of the prestigious troupe were soon to hold their own under the leadership of ballet master Guillaume-Louis Pécour.”24

  Lully had ensured that the nobility
no longer danced as it once used to, but members of this privileged social class continued to form the majority of the ballet audience. In fact, the aristocracy never stopped exerting its privilege over the public theater, especially backstage, where the notion of “theater” constituted an entirely different moral universe than was depicted onstage.

  Even so, the ballerina’s rise to prominence came about almost by default. Having decamped for Versailles in 1682, Louis had hung up his dancing shoes for good and was no longer performing ballet; courtiers had to follow his lead, and soon ballet began to shed some of its importance as a court practice. Eventually this rarefied art of kings would open its doors to anyone with enough physical attributes, talent, and ambition to enable them to pursue it as a career, women included. The emphasis had shifted from ballets that showed group processions and geometric floor patterns to ballets that showcased the increasing virtuosity of the performers,25 a development that grew out of the creation of the first proscenium arch stage in France, in 1641, at the Palais Cardinal—later known as the Palais-Royal—located next to the Louvre. Before this, ballets had been performed on the ballroom floor in large rectangular halls, with the audience seated on the periphery and the action facing squarely in one direction, toward the king.

  When dances were raised to a platform at the end of the hall, a precursor to the proscenium stage, technical mastery of steps became more important than a mere presentation of harmony and order. Dancers were now facing toward an audience, their legs turned outwards from the hips for maximum frontal exposure.

  This change marked a significant juncture in the history of the ballerina, as from this point onward she moved from decorative object to object of desire. In the geometrically patterned ballets at court, where ballerinas typically were arranged in procession, demonstrating allegorically suggestive floor patterns, the physical attributes of their bodies were de-emphasized.26 But with the advent of the proscenium stage and an increased focus on individual technique in theatrical performance, ballerinas’ bodies were more on display. What the dancing female body could do fired the audience’s imagination as to what else it might do, behind closed doors. Ballerinas, as soon as they became professionals, no longer symbolized Platonic concepts of heavenly order and other philosophical ideas borrowed from antiquity. In the eighteenth century, bolstered by advances in stagecraft, they represented sex, the vital here and now of the flesh: erotic playthings exciting emotions, not just ideas, in the spectator.

  Almost from the beginning, professional ballerinas were sexualized, and many came to lead double lives as courtesans. The ballerina-as-concubine was an open secret in French society, the status of the kept women being so widely accepted at the Opéra that a registry of female dancers’ names was listed alongside that of their protectors.27 The king’s theater, for all its grandeur and gravitas, became known as “that house of ill-fame,” as a disgusted French composer referred to it in the day.28 The brothel of France.

  These so-called protectors were male patrons of wealth and influence who paid for a dancer’s keep and expenses and often shrewdly represented her interests within the theater. In exchange, she became her protector’s mistress but not his property. There was a distinction. Thanks to their training in dancing and etiquette and well-honed skills of mimicry, ballerinas who knew how to act like aristocrats, although they themselves were not, attracted the attention of the upper classes, who sought them out for sexual liaisons. This is how many ballerina-courtesans rose to the top of their profession, as well as to the pinnacle of society, enriching themselves along the way. The talent ballerinas exhibited on stage often mirrored the dexterity they displayed behind the scenes in juggling several prominent lovers at once. Such women were not passive victims of patriarchy, as some might want to think, but active participants in the shaping of their own destinies, often with great pluck, aplomb, and humor. Ballerina-courtesans were among the first independent women; they did not live in brothels or bend themselves to conform to another’s will. They danced to their own tune, so to speak, and so, for the most part, were not to be pitied but admired.

  They sold themselves to men of influence, hoping to advance themselves both socially and professionally; yet to label such ballerinas prostitutes would distort the point of their existence. Ballerina-courtesans were, in a sense, a cut above. Certainly, in the eighteenth century, such dancers exuded a whiff of risqué glamor. They were celebrities, women prized for their beauty, charm, and physical talents, who became mistresses of kings or men of nobility or wealth. Their motivation, observes one dance scholar, wasn’t love or affection; it was business: “Almost always, a courtesan is a beautiful poor woman who forms sexual alliances with wealthy men in order to improve her station in life, to increase her fortune, and to advance her social or professional career. Money, jewels, property, and other items of great value are always involved in the transaction. The courtesan is an amatory professional.”29

  Some ballerina-courtesans of the eighteenth century came from the corps de ballet, drawn from among the ranks of the poor, who bartered sex for the basics of life. But others were among the top-ranking ballerinas of their day, the world’s first ballet superstars, for whom sex was as important a tool for social advancement as a well-honed technique radiating aristocratic manners.

  Ballerina-courtesans were the unexpected consequence of the founding of a professional school intended to achieve perfection in the art of ballet, as directed by the king. When Lully, with the king’s backing, started developing the professional dance and music academies within the Paris Opéra, he looked for people not of rank but of talent whom he could train to increase the prestige of French theater art. Thus Lully was able to give rise to the first professional ballerinas, who surpassed the limited capabilities of the aristocratic amateur by mastering ballets of increasing technical complexity and rigor. Discipline in the form of daily labor was required for these dancers to advance along with the art. To ensure that he had complete control over ballerinas at a time when women were still considered property, the chattels of their fathers or husbands, Lully freed them by law from all familial obligations. Dancers, as well as singers employed by the Paris Opéra (sometimes the roles were doubled), enjoyed an unprecedented degree of freedom afforded them by Lully’s emphasis on creating artists devoted almost exclusively to their art forms. Ballerinas under his watch were servants of the king and were emancipated from parental and spousal control.30 These cosseted filles d’Opéra were also protected from police harassment, deportation, and imprisonment. In matters of justice they were under royal protection.31 This made them not only freer than most women in society at large but also able to seek and find patrons among the powerful and wealthy.

  A private manuscript describing conditions backstage at the Opéra at the turn of the eighteenth century offers an idea of what obstacles professional women in the theater had to surmount: “Their fate depends on the one man who reigns as an absolute monarch over the Opéra [the Director], one who decides on whims their wages, whether low or high, and who stands above control or supervision. They are devoted to him like slaves in their constant fear of losing their position ... They have no certification [brevet] and no contract and can be dismissed without compensation for the slightest reason.”32

  But the courtesan lifestyle was not without its risks: for instance, eighteenth-century Paris Opéra ballerina Mademoiselle d’Azincourt died in 1743 of venereal disease when she was just twenty-three.33 And yet for the majority of these women, who came from nothing, there was so much more to gain: not only food, shelter, and clothing but also carriages, servants, jewels, furs, and augmented pensions on which to survive into advanced age. For such dancers, positioning themselves close to men of means was a maneuver to emulate in attaining success. Ballerinas had a number of incentives for moonlighting as courtesans: female dancers were generally paid less than their male counterparts, and yet they were responsible for living up to the high standards set
by the Opéra’s public image. An anonymous memoirist observed that “some women receive 400 livres, some 300 livres, and a very few at the top 1,000 livres, but what are these [sums] in comparison to what they must spend in decent cloths, linen, ribbons, accessories, shawls, trinkets, banquets, games, receptions, illnesses, medication, and rents in one of the most expensive districts of Paris.”34 But besides enabling them to afford the prestige associated with their onstage profession, ballerinas were also motivated to moonlight as courtesans as a result of the Opéra’s murky recruitment practices. The Opéra Statutes approved by Louis XIV in 1713 specified that “actors, actresses, dancers and members of the Orchestra must have demonstrated their performing skill and received public approbation before being eligible for admission to the Opéra.”35 In real-life terms, such a policy often called for a lot of backroom negotiations in the form of favors and influence. For ballerinas, “it was tacitly understood that a distinguished sponsor should open the stage door for [them].”36

  Some ballerinas abstained from the courtesan life, preferring to reside with their parents at home—for example, a Paris Opéra ballerina named Anne Haran.37 But such dancers proved the exception to the rule. It was generally thought that no self-respecting ballerina went with fewer than three lovers at a time—one for prestige, one for money, one for love.38 Some, like Émilie Dupré, a dancer from the French countryside, brazenly exceeded that figure. Mademoiselle Émilie, as the ballerina was known, had a great many protectors, all powerful men in French society who claimed her as their mistress—sometimes at the same time. They included the Duc Louis II de Melun, the regent Philippe d’Orléans, the Duc de Mazarin, and a Monsieur Fimarcon, a colonel who got into a dispute over the ballerina with the Comte de la Roche-Aymon, a musketeer, which ended in a duel.39