In an ironic reversal, artists who once had turned their talent to the Revolution now found themselves defending their old (royal) privileges and positions against Napoleon’s more progressive-minded administration. Thus the two official ballet masters of the theater, Pierre Gardel and Louis Milon, wrote a long letter to Napoleon complaining that upstart young dancers were setting ballets of their own and indignantly demanding that this challenge to their authority be stopped immediately (“would it not be ridiculous and dangerous for a soldier, having learned some exercises, to ask to command an army?”). The prefect of the palace, who seems to have taken over the case, refused their request, insisting that the opera—like society—must be “open to talent.”29
It was not that the practices of ballet changed overnight; the administrative and artistic battles were ongoing and the results often contradictory. But the ideas animating Napoleon’s rule did push ballet in a new direction. The aristocratic principles that had organized the art for so long were being deeply undermined, and it was in these postrevolutionary decades that the first outlines of ballet as a modern discipline emerged. It is no accident that to this day ballet remains (for better and worse) imbued with the principles Napoleon legislated across his realm: professional rigor and a meritocratic ethic joined to military-style discipline.
The most dramatic consequence of the French Revolution for dance, however, had to do with the image of the male dancer. In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, the male dancer in the noble style all but disappeared, and men went from being paragons of their art to pariahs chased from the stage. To take the full measure of what happened, we should recall that ballets—and bodies—were typically divided into three distinct genres: the serious or noble, the demi-character, and the comic. These were the architectural pillars of dance, and audiences and performers alike assumed that all dancers—and all dances—had an inherent character, defined and classified by physical attributes and style. Ballet was an expression of a belief in hierarchy and in the truth of social distinction. The noble style was thus proof of an old social fact: kings and noblemen were, by grace of God, more elevated than the rest, and they danced in ways that proved it.
The challenge to the noble style began, as we have seen, with Auguste Vestris’s rebellious virtuosity in the 1780s. At the time his unruly behavior had seemed more the enthusiasm of youth than a portent of decline, but in the years following the Revolution this explanation no longer sufficed, and what had begun as a playful attack turned into a rout. Old Noverre was among the first to register alarm. In a new edition of his Lettres published in 1803 and again in 1807, he accused Vestris of corrupting the noble style with his furious turns and outrageous jumps, and lamented that this talented artist seemed hell-bent on creating a “new genre” in which steps that once had been separated into distinct stylistic arenas were all mixed and matched and confused.30
He was right. In the years following the Revolution talented young male dancers rushed to imitate Vestris’s bold turns and jumps. In 1803, Bonet de Treiches, then director of the Opera, wrote a detailed report on the problems facing ballet in which he worried that dancers were increasingly neglecting the noble style in favor of the more middling demi-character genre. And why? They were, he said, shamelessly playing to the “multitude,” which was hungry for spectacular tricks and tours de force and had little interest in the niceties of “precision, flexibility, and grace.” The problem was not only the parterre. As one disapproving observer noted, the Revolution had changed everything. It was no longer enough to please: “marvels and extremes substitute for nature; they alone are admired.” And indeed, Vestris’s dancing was exaggerated even to the point of contortion and appealed in part precisely because he violated a central premise of aristocratic composure: he deliberately showed the physical work and strain of virtuosic dancing.31
Even the most promising dancers in the high noble style seemed to be turning against their art. Louis Henri, for example, had been trained by Gardel and the noted teacher Jean-François Coulon in the early years of the century; his future seemed bright and his confidence unremitting. In 1806 he compared his genre to that of history painting in art, noting that since it was “first,” he deserved superior billing. Critics rushed to proclaim him the savior of the embattled noble style: here was a man whose physical power and easy, elegant posture—“grace united with force”—stood in sharp contrast to the “monkey-like” movements of his contemporaries. Even the disillusioned Noverre hoped that Henri would be able to “revive” the “dead” noble genre. But Henri had other plans and did not last at the Opera: he went to work for the more populist Porte-Saint-Martin Theater. When Napoleon closed that theater, Henri left for Milan. He returned to Paris briefly from 1816 to 1818, but again took up employ on the boulevards.32
There were others to take his place, but they too succumbed to the inevitable. The dancer known as Albert, who made his debut in 1808, was (according to a colleague) “a complete gentleman” onstage and appealed directly to that select portion of the audience increasingly marginalized as connoisseurs. Yet to the despair of purists, he too could not resist embroidering his dances with multiple turns and high leaps. It is easy to understand why, for roles in the noble style were now few and far between, and ballet masters were under pressure to reward box office favorites. In 1822 Gardel created Alfred le Grand and Albert performed the part of the hero, but this was the last ballet for a very long time that featured a male dancer in a serious and prominent role.33
That same year Gardel submitted an uncharacteristically confused manuscript for a new ballet (which never made it to the stage) entitled Le Bal Masqué. In his scenario, dancers disguised as performers from the age of Louis XIV—including Dupré and Sallé—appeared at a ball and tottered ridiculously around the stage, tripping over their heavy and awkward ancien régime shoes and costumes: that era was over. But Gardel’s ambivalence about its passing came through in a later episode in the ballet. He envisioned a wild, erotic dance performed by a “negro” implausibly disguised as a sweet young girl. This dance—“the most lascivious dance of the negros”—featured the jumps, turns, and pirouettes typical of the new virtuosity. At the end, the “negro” revealed himself, and the real young girl restored her reputation by performing a tasteful dance in her own naturally restrained style. For Gardel, unselfconsciously echoing the racial prejudices of his time, the new technique was something exotic and out of social bounds.34
Three years later, Gardel created dances in honor of the new king, Charles X, for the opera Pharamond (1825). Here was an opportunity, if ever there was one, for dances in the noble style. But Gardel’s ballet featured the virtuoso Antoine Paul in the lead male role of a young warrior, and the noble-style dances were given instead to a woman, Madame Montessu. In an ironic turn, Gardel staged a scene in which Montessu tries in vain to teach Paul to temper his movements and make them more graceful and restrained. His natural virility, however, is irrepressible, and when Montessu in turn tries to imitate his movements, she collapses with exhaustion as he leaps across the stage, triumphant.
Paul was younger than Vestris and absorbed his influence while pushing athletic virtuosity to even greater extremes. His body was thick and muscular, with heavy thighs and calves that easily propelled him into the air; known as paérien, he could hover as if he were flying. His movements were raw and bold, and he threw himself into circles of spinning pirouettes, jumps, and complicated leg beats with such reckless abandon that he seemed, as one irritated critic put it, “unable to escape” his own momentum. The contrast with the stately and weighted movements of the old noble genre hardly could have been sharper, and many observers dismissed Paul’s leaps and “eternal and unbearable pirouettes” as a rude affront to high culture, fretting that the “dislocated” positions favored by the “new school” would mean the “total ruin of true dance.”35
Gardel and Milon, who themselves had done much to erode the noble genre, rushed to its defense. The old
and increasingly outmoded classification of dance into three distinct genres had become a rallying point for those loyal to the principle of hierarchy in art, as in society, and in a series of formal letters and reports submitted to the Opera direction well into the 1820s, Gardel and Milon pressed for the ongoing value of the genres in ballet, indigantly insisting that without them chaos and decline would ensue. Their arguments got a sympathetic hearing from the authorities, but although the genres remained intact for administrative purposes for some years, they were little more than a wooden bureaucratic tool. Gardel himself noted that young dancers trained in the serious genre seemed constitutionally incapable of the restraint and composure that had traditionally characterized the style. The new youth willfully distorted positions for effect and possessed a kind of nervous and “convulsive” energy that marred even the simplest of gestures.36
As the genres collapsed, so did dance notation. Raoul Feuillet’s system, developed under the reign of Louis XIV, had served well enough for nearly a hundred years, but by the late eighteenth century, when Vestris and others were beginning to push ballet in new directions, steps were becoming—as Noverre himself had noted—more “complicated, they have doubled and tripled; they have mixed together so that it is very difficult to write them down, and even harder to decipher any such notation.” Another dancing master explained: “For some years now, we have been seeing a bastard choregraphy” (by which he meant the writing). Indeed, manuscripts of dances from the period look like bastard Feuillet scores, crowded with stick figures and makeshift sketches scrawled in the margins. The strict social codes and spatial patterns of the noble style, which had structured ballet for so long, were breaking down. By century’s end, the scrawls in the margins had taken over, and Feuillet’s system fell out of use.37
This was not only inconvenient, it was disturbing. In the aftermath of the Revolution the Opera’s director, Bonet de Treiches, wrote a pointed memo insisting that a new dance notation must be invented immediately. Without notation, he said, ballet would never sustain its position as a high art. He proposed that a group of experts meet and create a fresh system of writing down dances based on the (he claimed) twenty-four elementary steps. This clipped instruction did not yield results, but it did signal the urgency felt by ballet masters and dancers alike, and in coming years many tried and failed to invent a way of recording the new intricacies of their art. Despréaux made an attempt around 1815, but the result (never published) was a collection of overly complicated diagrams and iterations indicative of the unsettled state of dance. Later, August Bournonville and Arthur Saint-Léon also tried, but they too failed (Saint-Léon published his system in 1852 but it was rarely used) and in their scribbles and extensive notes and rewrites we can see that they faced an almost impossible situation. Vestris had unleashed a chain reaction, and steps were changing and evolving almost by the day.38
A page from Jean-Étienne Despréaux’s manuscript from around 1815, attempting to analyze and codify ballet positions. Note the 180-degree turnout of the feet, so different from the more relaxed stance of earlier dancers. (3.2)
Yet although ballet masters failed to come up with a way of notating steps, thus leaving us with little record of their dances, we do know something about how dancers were training their bodies. Vestris’s pupil August Bournonville wrote detailed letters to his father and took copious longhand notes describing what he called “the Vestris method” of dance, and in 1849 he created a dance in his own ballet Conservatoriet called “The Dancing School,” modeled on Vestris’s classes (unusually, this dance has been preserved and is still performed today). Of equal value, the ballet master Michel Saint-Léon (Arthur’s father), who worked at the Paris Opera from 1803 to 1817 and again from 1819 to 1822, and who later taught in Stuttgart, kept working notebooks in which he neatly set forth classes and dances in longhand cursive (with little stick figures in the margins to clarify), often including musical accompaniment—a dance entitled Entrée composée par M. Albert, for example, was set to the popular tune “God Save the King.”39
Bournonville’s notes and dances, combined with Saint-Léon’s steps and other fragments and sketches made by ballet masters at the time, allow us to reconstruct whole classes and combinations of steps from the past, in some cases complete with musical accompaniment. We can dance these old steps now—try them on our own bodies—in order to see how they work and how it feels to perform them. Taken together, these sources provide a clear window onto the principles and practices of the emerging new school.40
The danse noble had emphasized moderation and ease of comportment, but Vestris’s new school pried the feet open to an exaggerated 180-degree turnout. Feet were fully pointed (a development made possible by the new Grecian-style shoes, soft and flat with ribbons tied around the ankle), and male dancers now pushed off from their toes and worked to spring high into the air with fully extended legs and feet. Torsos and arms were twisted and arranged in a wide variety of novel positions, which arrayed the body in fresh new dimensions. To help dancers achieve these novel effects, Vestris devised lessons that broke down the old dances (traditionally practiced as a whole) into single steps—building blocks—performed in order of ascending physical difficulty. Repetition was key, and dancers began with adagio movements and then progressed to pirouettes and small and large jumps. Steps were performed alone and then assembled into increasingly arduous combinations. Fouettés, for example, were performed to the front, then to the back, then with an added pose in attitude, then reversed and with turns, doubled, and tripled. Bournonville recorded dozens of steps in every category—there were, to take just one example, thirty-seven pirouette exercises carefully ranked according to difficulty.
Lessons typically lasted a grueling three hours and the steps and combinations developed in these years required enormous stamina: they were dense and intensely sustained, with few transitions and almost no opportunity for the dancer to rest or catch his breath. Students were routinely required to stand on one leg, flamingo-like, for several minutes, with nothing to hold on to, while the free leg described complicated patterns in the air. Many exercises, moreover, were performed on half-pointe, with the dancer standing high on the ball of one foot—a trying test of balance for any performer. Spinning and multiple pirouettes were a central feature of any class. Difficult and awkward-feeling to perform, they rarely ended safely on two feet (Vestris forbade any “provincial insecure shuffling of the feet”), and the dancer was instead required to stop precariously on one leg, halting his centrifugal force internally through sheer physical control as the other leg extended gracefully to the front or side, or as the body reversed back on itself, like a car turning against its own spin. Jumps were no less challenging, with fast beats (legs crossing six or eight times in midair) and multiple turns performed high off the ground that would amaze even the most jaded audiences today.41
Students had long since practiced by balancing themselves on the hands of a teacher, the back of a chair, or a rope hung from the ceiling; there were also, in some dance studios, wooden barres fixed horizontally to the wall for the dancers to hold on to (as is customary today). But in the 1820s the barre was also turned to more torturous purposes, as dancers took to strapping their feet and legs to it in order to stretch their limbs and force their insteps. Like the controversial machines used to force the hips and feet into perfect turnout, the barre was often associated with an overextended and violent placement. (One ballet master cheerfully advised that young children be given sweets and set in the painful turnout machine until the desired position was achieved.) Bournonville used these “infernal” devices himself when he was studying in Paris with Vestris, although he later claimed they deformed and disfigured the body and warned his own students against chaining themselves “like machines” to the barre rather than strengthening their bodies through hard work and muscular control.42
This early nineteenth-century satirical print of dancers practicing shows the “machines” male dancers were increa
singly willing to use to stretch their tendons and turn out their legs. The agonizing physical extremes of their training would have shocked an earlier generation. (3.3)
Most dancers, however, did begin their training sessions with a half hour of exercises at the barre, which would then be repeated in the center of the room without holding on—and often on half-pointe. These barre exercises were no less demanding for being supported, and Albert and others began their day with a regimen that would make today’s dancers pale: 48 pliés followed by 128 grand battements, 96 petits battements glissé, 128 ronds de jambes sur terre and 128 en l’air, and ending finally with 128 petits battements sur le cou-de-pied. One inevitable consequence of this extreme training was a sharp rise in injuries. Noverre had complained about the increasing strain of ballet as early as the 1760s, but Bournonville’s descriptions of the agonies of staying in shape or recovering from physical breakdown only illustrate the extremes to which male dancers in particular were now willing to go.
Yet although Vestris’s methods represented a sharp departure from the more tempered teaching of the past, it is important to emphasize that he did not simply sever all ties to the old order. Indeed, what made his method possible and practical was that it absorbed the steps and movement qualities of all three genres and combined them into a single technique and style. The noble style did not so much disappear as become a facet of something larger—it was the adagio component of Vestris’s method—whereas the old demi-character was represented by quick steps and intricate jumps, and the comic style by even more athletic capers. By integrating the genres and suggesting that a single dancer could embody them all, Vestris vastly expanded the dimensions of ballet. More than that, the new all-in-one dancer did away with the idea of distinction of ranks and estates in ballet. He had no prescribed social character—he was a blank slate, and his body was infinitely malleable and plastic. It could become whatever he made it.
Apollo’s Angels Page 17