On the surface, the ballerina appears in control. But in reality, she is controlled—by teachers, directors, and choreographers (most often men), and by societal expectations regarding her role as a representative of divinely patterned grace here on earth, as well as by ballet itself, an art with centuries of built-in rules and regulations. The brute backstage reality of the ballerina contrasts sharply with her image as a cultural icon of idealized femininity: the worm within the butterfly. The difference between the public image of the ballerina as embodying ethereal exotic glamor and romance and the crassly physical circumstances she endures has been there since the beginning and is intrinsic to an art form where difficult movements (indeed difficulties of any kind) must appear effortless, even natural.
But American-born ballerina Caroline Richardson, who danced with the Frankfurt Ballet under the direction of choreographer William Forsythe, says that nothing in life compares to dancing ballet. It’s “this sacred space,” a place literally set apart from the mundane, where deep inner change and freedom can be experienced. “Dance for me was the most intimate experience I had of spirit and truth. It had so much depth to it, no matter how lonely it was. It felt powerful to me. There was a great sacrifice of the self, but with the intention of being able, ultimately, to move out of the self towards truth and peace and sacredness, towards a refuge of the soul.”1
The former soloist with the National Ballet of Canada is today an award-winning choreographer for experimental film and video, new-fangled media light years away from the special effects used in the Romantic ballet spectacles performed by Marie Taglioni, one of the first ballerinas to represent ballet as an inspirational art form. And yet now, in the twenty-first century, Richardson likewise exalts the art of the ballerina as a liberation of the spirit: “It was a blazing sword of truth that I knew I could use to cut through the pettiness of the world outside, and let the people in, to feel the power also inside them.” To ballerinas like Richardson, achieving transcendence through dancing ballet is what justifies the hardships, a sentiment many dancers share.
Other ballerinas have described the hidden motivation to dance—what the audience often doesn’t see—as experiencing an unbearable lightness of being. Being on stage for many dancers also represents a rare opportunity to inspire pleasure in people, not just the evaluative judgment of the ballet studio. Some dancers point to the intense, yet liberating, physicality of dancing as the reason they do it. Recalled one ballerina who had retired from the stage, “There was a physical aspect to dancing which was wonderful because you burn yourself out, you sweat yourself to dance, and you feel like you are light, clean... burned to the essentials... very pacified, and very... content.”2
But there’s something else about ballet, and that is the ballerina herself as a figure of power. It’s why women love to do ballet and watch ballet, easily outstripping men as audience members. Despite the known pitfalls of eating disorders, low pay, injuries, and the specter of sexual exploitation, women and girls continue to flock to ballet in droves. The ballerina on stage and in the spotlight is an idealized extension of themselves. She is the ultimate feminine, a creature both beautiful and strong, the embodiment of grace and music and light. To one observer, “It was a virtuoso way of being a woman. It required discipline, expertise. No movement, no expression, no position of the limbs was without precise definition and timing. You sculpted with your body; to dance was to be simultaneously medium, instrument and artist. The dancer commanded respect and awe. The word ‘commanded’ was operative. She appeared to control situations and interactions as well as herself... Even a wimpish dance role like Giselle cannot help but display the female in the vigorous and active expression of her own desires.”3 It’s a Utopian vision of the ballerina that inspires not just ballet dancers but also ballet lovers in wanting to support an art form that, behind the scenes, can be brutally punishing. It’s not that those of us who cherish ballet want to turn a blind eye to its dark side. More, the intention is to show that the darkness, in the end, has not overwhelmed the brilliance of the art.
Ballerinas will probably always have to endure pain and suffering to attain ecstasy, transcendence, intoxication, flow (or whatever other term describes such peak experiences). They won’t likely ever go away. As with any other physically demanding performing art or sport, the motto “No pain, no gain” applies. Ballerinas are conditioned from a young age to accept self-sacrifice as an integral part of the art form. They learn to work through the pain, from childhood until the end of their days as dancers, numbing the pain with drugs and other means. After their performances, they reach for buckets of ice in which to soak their swollen, gnarled, and bleeding feet, seeking relief from the agonies of having danced in pointe shoes. The expectation is that they will tolerate their pain stoically, and in silence. If a ballerina dares speak up, she risks ostracism. One of ballet’s great sources of shame is how often ballerinas are mistreated and then expected to carry on, as if nothing bad has happened. It’s a pattern of negative behavior that is part and parcel of the unnaturalness of ballet. Bodies aren’t made to stand perfectly still on one leg to six bars of music, but ballerinas are taught how to perform such physically taxing feats without strain and without a whimper. Pain is denied—or at least its expression is. An art form founded on a stifling of discomfort has produced a culture where deprivation and degradation are allowed to flourish because they are seen to yield superhuman results.
But those performing such antigravitational illusions have had to compromise themselves as individuals. Ballerinas, in particular, have been expected to subsume their wants and needs to keep ballet flourishing. They give their all and then in the end, when the curtain falls on their last performance, they are pushed out into the cold, soon forgotten. The ballerina’s life, seen from afar, looks like a balancing act on the edge of a precipice, fraught with danger and the understanding that one false move and, splat, it’s finished. Such is the gritty behind-the-scenes world of the ballet. One scholar has called the ballet world a “fairly perverse social order,”4 whose perversities are often defended as beauty, even by the victims themselves. The end justifies the means, according to Suki Schorer, a former New York City Ballet dancer under George Balanchine and, later, a leading teacher at the School of American Ballet. She was once asked why a student jumped without putting down her heel—wouldn’t that cause tendinitis? “Yes,” Schorer smiled, “when people come into this company they get tendinitis—but it’s beautiful.”5
Yet some of that thinking has changed. Ballet shows evidence that it is catching up with the twenty-first century in becoming more sensitive to dancers as individuals with constitutionally protected rights. Ballerinas are having babies; they are even gaining weight to protect their bodies from repetitive injuries and prolong their careers. Science is bellying up to the barre to help dancers become more recognized as the elite athletes they are. There’s more job protection and, in some companies, better wages. But as the ballerina progresses, so does the art form. Choreography today is more athletic and acrobatic than it was even twenty years ago. This is putting the ballerina before a new set of risks: one step forward, two steps back.
Really, you wonder how she manages to rise above it all.
Ballet will always require the utmost dedication . However, the scandal and exploitation in which ballet history has so often been wrapped can be, and are, being shaken off. A more empowered generation of dancers and a more enlightened ballet-going public will no longer tolerate such unnecessary depredations. The ecstasy, whether experienced by the performing ballerina on stage, or vicariously, by an adoring audience on whose energy the dancers feed, will always be the reason and justification for keeping the flame of ballet going. And the ballerina will continue to be at the center of it all—the ideal, the driving force, the embodiment of beauty, grace, and hope.
The symbol of perfection.
Notes
Prologue
Je redanserai, Vidéo INA. www.ina.fr/art-et-culture/arts-du-spectacle/video/CPF04006930/je-redanserai.fr.html (accessed February 17, 2012).
Janine Charrat, Facebook, http://fr-fr.facebook.com/pages/Janine-Charrat/134001929998865, viewed February 17, 2012.
Chapter 1: The Feminization of Ballet
Rayner Heppenstall, “The Sexual Idiom,” from “Apology for Dancing,” in What Is Dance?, ed. Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 274.
Steven P. Wainwright and Bryan S. Turner, “ ‘Just Crumbling to Bits’? An Exploration of the Body, Ageing, Injury and Career in Classical Ballet Dancers,” Sociology 40 (2006): 241.
Quoted in Joann Kealinohomoku, “An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance,” in What Is Dance?, 544.
Evan Alderson, “Ballet as Ideology: ‘Giselle,’ Act II,” Dance Chronicle 10, no. 3 (1987): 292.
Susan Au, Ballet & Modern Dance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 18.
Julia Prest, “Dancing King: Louis XIV’s Roles in Molière’s Comédies-ballets, from Court to Town,” Seventeenth Century 16, no. 2 (2001): 285.
Jennifer Homans, Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet (New York: Random House, 2010), 13.
Mary Clarke and Clement Crisp, Ballerina: The Art of Women in Classical Ballet (London: BBC Books, 1987), 18.
Natalie Lecomte, “The Female Ballet Troupe of the Paris Opera from 1700 to 1725,” in Women’s Work, Making Dance in Europe before 1800, ed. Lynn Matluck Brooks (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 117.
Quoted in Edmund Fairfax, “The ‘Fair Sex’ and Its Style,” The Styles of Eighteenth Century Ballet (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003), 221.
Wendy Hilton, Dance and Music of Court and Theater (New York: Pendragon Press, 1981), 276 ff.
Homans, 15.
Phillip E. Hammond and Sandra N. Hammond, “The Internal Logic of Dance: A Weberian Perspective on the History of Ballet,” Journal of Social History 12, no. 4 (Summer 1979): 595.
Molière, The Middle Class Gentleman (English translation, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme), Act I, Scene I. Kindle edition.
Pierre Rameau, The Dancing Master, trans. Cyril W. Beaumont (New York: Dance Horizons Republications, 1970): 31.
Carlo Blasis, Code of Terpsichore (London: James Bulcock, 1828), 94–95.
Au, 23.
The invention of opéra-ballet is also attributed to French composer and musician André Campra, whose L’Europe galante of 1697 is considered one of the first known works in the genre.
Frederick H. Martens, “The Attitude of the Dancer Toward Music,” The Musical Quarterly 4, no. 3 (July 1918): 441.
Clarke and Crisp, 18.
Lecomte, 99.
Clarke and Crisp, 18.
Lecomte, 100.
Lecomte, 99.
Hammond and Hammond, 595.
Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen, “The Dance Medium,” in What is Dance? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 104–5.
Régine Astier, “Françoise Prévost: The Unauthorized Biography,” in Brooks, ed., Women’s Work, 142.
André Cardinal Destouches, as recorded in a letter to Antoine de Grimaldi, Prince of Monaco, quoted in Lecomte, 110.
Claude Conyers, “Courtesans in Dance History: Les Belles de la Belle Époque,” Dance Chronicle 26, no. 2 (2003): 220.
Lecomte, 106.
Astier, 142.
Astier, 143.
Astier, 158; footnote in reference to “Histoire de la demoiselle d’Azincourt, danseuse de l’Opéra écrite par elle-même, 1743,” in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
Quoted in Astier, 143.
Quoted in Astier, 142.
Astier, 142.
Lecomte, 107.
Astier, 107.
Lecomte, 106.
Lecomte, 107.
Robert Greskovic, Ballet 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving the Ballet (Montclair, NJ: Limelight Editions, 1998), 20.
Karen Eliot, Dancing Lives, Five Female Dancers from the Ballet d’Action to Merce Cunningham (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 9–11.
Quoted in Victoria Huckenpahler, “Confessions of an Opera Director: Chapters from the Mémoires of Dr. Louis Veron, Part II,” Dance Chronicle 7, no. 2 (1984).
Quoted in Astier, 131.
Lecomte, 103.
The courante is a sixteenth-century French court dance in compound time; the musette is a popular dance from the time of Louis XIV and Louis XV performed to the drone of a bagpipe.
Quoted in Astier, 125.
Astier, 141.
Manuscript 3137, also known as Mémoire pour l’Ambassadeur de Malte contre Mademoiselle Prévost, Factum, which was hidden for almost three hundred years in the Arsenal Library of Paris until its discovery earlier this century by the ballerina’s biographer, French dance scholar Régine Astier. Much of its contents are revealed in Astier, 123–159.
Roughly equivalent to about $25,000 in today’s money.
Astier, 133–34.
Astier, 133.
Astier, 128.
Astier, 128–29.
Astier, 129.
Lecomte, 107.
Lecomte, 125.
Quoted in Astier, 137–38.
Susan Au describes the entrée as structured like a ballet mascarade, with an opening récit or song, followed by dances. Au, 16.
Quoted in Cyril W. Beaumont, Three French Dancers of the Eighteenth Century (London: C.W. Beaumont, 1934), 12.
Ivor Guest, The Paris Opera Ballet (Alton, UK: Dance Books, 2006), 17.
Quoted in Fairfax, 223.
Lillian Moore, Artists of the Dance (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1932), 27.
Lincoln Kirstein, Four Centuries of Ballet: Fifty Masterworks, 99.
Régine Astier, “Marie-Anne Camargo,” in International Encyclopedia of Ballet, ed. Martha Bremser (London: St. James Press, 1993), 229–30.
Quoted in Fairfax, 229.
Quoted in Fairfax, 219.
Moore, 30–31.
Prudhommeau, 80.
Ibid.
Prudhommeau, 81.
Parmenia Migel, The Ballerinas (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 32–33; Prudhommeau, 80.
Quoted in Moore, 25.
Prudhommeau, 80.
Sarah McCleave, “Dancing at the English Opera: Marie Sallé’s Letter to the Duchess of Richmond,” Dance Research 17, no. 1 (Summer 1999): 32.
Quoted in David Charlton and Sarah Hibberd, “ ‘My Father Was a Poor Parisian Musician’: A Memoir (1756) Concerning Rameau, Handel’s Library and Sallé,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 128, no. 2 (2003): 177.
Charlton and Hibberd, 31.
Quoted in Moore, 29.
Migel, 19.
Sarah McCleave, “Marie Sallé, a Wise Professional Woman of Influence,” in Brooks, ed., Women’s Work, 163.
McCleave, “Marie Sallé,” 164.
McCleave, “Marie Sallé,” 170.
Quoted in McCleave, “Marie Sallé,” 168.
Migel, 25.
Quoted in McCleave, “Marie Sallé,” 166.
Sallé appeared at Versailles in late 1745, in March 1746, and February–March 1747, dancing in Rameau’s Les fêtes de l’Hymen et de l’Amour, among other ballets. She also danced at the palace at Fontainebleau in 1752–53. See Charlton and Hibberd, 161–199.
Charlton and Hibberd, 177.
Quoted in McCleave, “Marie Sallé,” 168.
Prudhommeau, 81.
Marie-Françoise Christout and Lucienne J. Serrano, “The Paris Opera Ballet,” Dance Chronicle 2, no. 2 (1978):
135.
La Guimard (Paris, 1893; reprinted Geneva, 1973).
Migel, 75.
Moore, 51.
Migel, 73.
Moore, 52.
Ivor Guest, “Luminaries of the Opera Ballet in 1770,” in The Ballet of the Enlightenment: The Establishment of the Ballet d’Action in France, 1770–1793 (London: Dance Books, 1996), 36.
Moore, 52.
Maureen Needham Costonis, “Marie-Madeleleine Guimard,” in International Dictionary of Ballet, 624–27.
Migel, 74.
Quoted in Guest, “Luminaries” 38.
Migel, 75–77.
Moore, 54.
Her daughter died young, aged just sixteen, and her loss was Guimard’s only moment of tragedy.
Guest, “Luminaries,” 36.
Guest, “Luminaries,” 36.
Migel, 78.
Quoted in Moore, 53.
Moore, 53.
Quoted in Migel, 83.
Karl Toepfer, “Orgy Salon: Aristocracy and Pornographic Theatre in Pre-Revolutionary Paris.” Performing Arts Journal 12, 2/3 (1990): 115.
Quoted in Toepfer, 115.
Toepfer, 116.
Quoted in Migel, 72.
Migel, 116.
Migel, 80.
Guimard wrote an affectionately gossipy letter to her banker friend in 1789 when she was briefly in London, in which she recounts in comic detail how she has to fight to get the money owed her by management of London’s opera house, which had just burned down, sending her 350-guinea contract up in smoke. See Ivor Guest, “Letters from London: Guimard’s Farewell to the Stage,” Dance Chronicle, 18, 2 (1995): 207–15.
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