As authors who contributed to an edited volume, we were startled to learn that editors added a subtitle that broadly declared French balletic supremacy.Footnote 1 This text, entitled The Opera Ballet: Three Centuries of Supremacy Beginning with Louis XIV [Le Ballet de l'Opéra: Trois siècles de suprématie depuis Louis XIV] (Auclair and Ghristi Reference Auclair and Ghristi2013), presents the notion of “supremacy” as a seductive value, and it is disturbing, to say the least. It is first and foremost a false assertion. The editors cannot seriously suppose that the Paris Opera Ballet, during the course of three centuries, occupied a position of dominance; and such a notion requires, in any case, detailed discussion establishing the criteria that are considered to define and delimit said domination.Footnote 2 Such a title participates in a type of competition better identified with nation states, capitals, or European theaters after the seventeenth century.Footnote 3 To suggest that the Paris Opera Ballet has always existed as a place of cultural “supremacy” is first of all to ignore the question of métissage, and to overlook how the institution adopted exogenous knowledge and savoir-faire; it is a rejection of dance history that occurred elsewhere, entirely separate or sometimes in opposition to the productions of this single cultural institution. Most disturbing of all is the highlighting of the notion of “supremacy,” or a superiority and power over others. By valuing the notion of domination, the editors encourage readers to envision dance and the broader world in terms of inferiority and superiority (between classes, genders, nations, and cultures). The Paris Opera Ballet may have acted in the service of such an ideology in the past, and may do so again in the future; however, the role of a scholarly publication should be to analyze discourses of propaganda, not to reproduce them.
Herein lies the problem. Such a subtitle and the ideology it implies are symptomatic of a larger issue: the responsibility of the historian. If this subtitle seemed expedient to an editorial team, it is perhaps because dance historians have too often left the door open to simplistic representations, sometimes citing directly from source material that ought to have been studied as historical discourse, rather than taken at face value. In this way, we have regularly seen works of dance history that confirm the notion of a “French superiority” as it might have been declared by Louis XIV and his entourageFootnote 4; or histories that float a nostalgia for the “purity” of an art that has suffered from cultural degeneration [dégénérescence] over time; or quite simply, historians of dance who think “dance” can be reduced to a limited set of practices belonging to an elite social class.Footnote 5
The list of these clichés is extensive. They are partly transmitted by works we can categorize as relatively outdated,Footnote 6 but since these works have rarely benefitted from revision, they remain (despite their outmoded values) authoritative.Footnote 7 Even if numerous researchers today regularly deplore these myopic and elitist values, one quickly realizes that no one has yet published a text destined for the general public that reflects how meanings historically have been attributed to Western dance and its history. This is particularly pertinent when it comes to a consideration of dance under the Ancien Régime.Footnote 8 We propose to rectify this situation through inciting historians to vigilance and inviting a wide-ranging reflection on the ways in which we write and use dance history.
Cultural Exchange Versus “Supremacy”
“Supremacy” requires imagining a cultural model that can be imposed upon another (another dance space, dancer, or country), such that the transfer of information and the reception of a practice is exercised in a single, non-reciprocal way. We may note that dance historians have left the door open to this conception of how dances and modes of dancing circulate. In this vein, a recent conference was organized at Versailles under the title “French Dance and Its Radiating Force [Rayonnement].”Footnote 9 Such a title, of course, does not presuppose the same ideological values as “supremacy”; however the title adopts an image of dance from a historical vantage point without problematizing the interpretation. The image evoked by the notion of rayonnement is easily recognizable as the Sun King whose political influence spread across all of Europe: it invites one to think that art spreads naturally from one place or culture to another, and we are asked to imagine the individuals who receive this rayonnement as passive receptors of its influence.
To think that an art or a culture radiating itself abroad, enlightening others thanks to its “supremacy,” is precisely what many cultural historians and researchers in other disciplines of the social sciences have worked against for the past thirty years. The notion of “cultural exchange” proposed by Michael Werner and Michel Espagne (Reference Espagne and Werner1987) initiated a discussion among French scholars who have since moved away from the notion of “assimilation” (marked by the idea of a progressive incorporation of values from one “emitting” culture by those belonging to a second “receptive” culture) and toward a refashioned notion of a reciprocal marking of cultures who come into contact,Footnote 10 or more precisely, a “relationality between two autonomous and asymmetrical [cultural] systems” (Werner and Espagne Reference Espagne and Werner1988, 5). A culture incorporating exogenous elements does so only in terms of a selective procedure, transforming what it absorbs while simultaneously transforming itself through the incorporation of novel cultural practices. In this interpretation, each of the implicated cultures is reconfigured in the process. Such a notion of exchange, in which reciprocal impressions are left upon both cultures, suggests that the “reception” (of an art, of a practice, of an idea) is never passive, but rather generates “a space and a relationship of [shared] use, and thus a re-creation” (Ory Reference Ory and Michaud2000, 26).
In this context, to speak of “supremacy” is to neglect that an art form circulating across cultures does not impose itself in a homogenous or intentional way. The idea is not to deny the strategies of power or coercion that may be involved: in this case it is clear that French dance has, during certain periods, often served as a model, eliciting admiration and even envy in some dancers from other European countries; the French state has encouraged this admiration and has sought to develop it. However, confronted with this so-called “French model” (in the domain of dance as in other domains), one must question, as Robert Mandrou remarked in Reference Mandrou1977, “the significance accorded to phenomena which merit more than complacent enumeration” (186). We thus discover that the supposed indicators of “French supremacy” need very much to be problematized, and should ideally remain limited to political and ideological discourses. In this case, phenomena that had been presented as a rayonnement from a center out toward a periphery, an “exportation” to territories considered quasi-colonized, were actually importations organized voluntarily by the historical actors of the “receiving” cultures who, in concert with these imported phenomena, implemented their own projects and strategies (those that a strictly ethnocentric viewpoint did not allow us to see).Footnote 11 We discover once again that in this procedure, art forms in circulation become the objects of appropriations and creative reconfigurations in which the “originary culture” holds little sway. Finally, admiration of an artistic culture is rarely unequivocal: “French” dance, at the very same time as it was lauded and imitated in other countries, also solicited mockery, satire, even contestations, at times driving others to create new forms of dance in reaction to these “models.”Footnote 12
Being attentive to the circulation of cultural practices also leads one to recognize that various “foreign” contributions have also left their mark on “French dance.”Footnote 13 One easily forgets to point out how dance artists from Italy, England, Spain, Germany, and Russia, as well as numerous non-European countries, in their circulation throughout Europe, have also contributed to French dance.Footnote 14 Historians of dance, by citing without any critical attempt to contextualize or problematize texts from the nineteenth century whose aim was to denigrate foreign performance genres, reinforce the notion that the romantic ballet was the only artistic form of dance, and all other genres were simply “minor forms of expression” or “diversions.”Footnote 15 Such discourses are generally founded on a notion of “national character,” and are thus particularly reductive, sometimes introducing notions of a cultural Other who is suspect, or even dangerous.Footnote 16
Historical scholarship about French dance that continues to be authoritative for a broad readership, including the dance milieu in France, has too often overlooked the significance of cultural exchange, collaboration, métissage,Footnote 17 and appropriation. To admit these overlooked dimensions is to refuse a history of dubious supremacy in an attempt to understand the complexity of these cultural dialogues, collective creations, and reciprocal transformations. Why not write the history of shared imaginaries as well as power struggles in dance, of rivalries as well as shared utopias, and attempt to shed light on these rich and complex histories that are equally fascinating as an attempt to establish a history of hegemony?
On the Use of Words in History
The dance historical discourses mentioned above are born out of a conception of the relation between different cultures that, as we have just seen, amply merit revision. They also bear witness to the use of a specific vocabulary: in the discipline of dance history, recurrent semantic fields serve to distribute values and ways of thinking that urgently require investigation.
As an example of the type of intellectual work needed, let us take a look at an analysis of the historical references used in the 2008 speeches of Nicolas Sarkozy (then-president of the French republic) (Cock et al. Reference Cock, Madeline, Offenstadt and Wahnich2008). The inflation of historical terminology, the systematic recourse to famous historical figures known by the entire national community, ultimately inspired a reaction from the Committee of Vigilance on the Public Use of History.Footnote 18 This legitimate reaction of the community of historians sought to address a general public in order to demonstrate the effects of Sarkozy's consistent attempts to manipulate public opinion (repeated references to Napoleon I, for example, were shown to be a way of associating France with the notion of grandeur, of empire, at a moment when the French people were discovering the first effects of the subprime economic crisis). Beyond the historical misinterpretations that Comment Sarkozy écrit l'histoire de France pointed out, the work was above all a way to demonstrate how the very enunciation of certain terms permitted the president to generate sentiments of national pride, communitarianism, patriotism, etc. Following on the ideas of Lucien Febvre (Reference Febvre1920, 4), this work reminds us that “a history that serves is a servile history.” The important thing is to reflect on the meaning of words, the use of history, and its implications for the politics of public space (Offenstadt Reference Offenstadt2009).
With regard to dance historiography, such an investigation brings to the fore the preponderance of terms such as “reign,” “supremacy,” or “triumph”: sometimes wittingly employed in order to deconstruct the mechanisms of an imposed power, such terms often serve as no more than facile narrative tools (or even “theatricalizations”) that allow an author to impose an inexact, simplistic mode of thinking onto social realities.Footnote 19 The rhetoric of “apogee” and of “decadence”Footnote 20 affirm a teleological vision of history, as well as a nostalgic ideal of “purity” (Christout Reference Christout1995, 215), which would presumably have been followed by a process of “perversion” (Bourcier Reference Bourcier1994, 17). Such terms essentialize an “identity” for French dance that promotes an extraordinarily sterile opposition of cultures—nourishing fears of the Other and of change.
History has a political function, and historians cannot ignore that with the choices they make, they take a stance, positioning themselves in relation to the past, but also in relation to the present. In producing modes of intelligibility and ways of seeing the world, historians must be responsible for the representations they create—because these representations remain active, they impact our practices, our relationship with others, and our decisions.Footnote 21 Dance history cannot escape these fundamental considerations and the necessary vigilance such questions impose: we need to question what “doors to the past” (Jouhaud Reference Jouhaud2007, 27) we choose, as well as the historiographical banalities and elements we assume we already know, and remain alert to uses of history that may seek to illustrate or legitimate a supposed “identity” of a dance and thus a power over others.
To students, and to all the readers who have consulted Le Ballet de l'Opéra de Paris: Trois siècles de suprématie depuis Louis XIV, or other works disseminating this type of presupposition, we wish to assure you that such values are far from being representative of the practices, concepts, and analytical categories mobilized in the discipline of history. Some basic guidelines in the practice of history, such as using comparison and seeking to establish the intertextuality of primary sources, allow historians to clarify the diverse perspectives of the historical actors vis-à-vis a historical performance and its reception (Werner and Zimmermann Reference Werner, Zimmermann, Werner and Zimmermann2004, 15–49). Such a methodological approach allows us to avoid taking on the unique perspective of, for example, the director of an institution to the detriment of its employees, a cultural capital to the exclusion of the provinces, or a single nation to the exclusion of a diversity of cultural contributions. In addition, the need to contextualize,Footnote 22 to examine texts and images in light of the logic of their production, allows us to avoid employing them as simple illustrations of a preconceived interpretive schema.
Let us conclude by mentioning that research projects examining various ways of writing history, both rigorous and open to the complexity of cultural exchanges and circulations, do exist—and it is urgent that they be recognized and employed by those who, notably in the realm of publishing and teaching, continue to disseminate dance histories that are blind to the enthralling developments that are taking place in current scholarship. Let us cite examples of recent works in the history of performance that attempt to decentralize the object of study: up until now, historical studies have rarely been written about dance spaces or theaters in the French provinces (the centralization of cultural practice in France—historically constructed—guides most interest toward the major cultural capitals, as well as the conservation of source material within select “major” institutions); today the project THEREPSICOREFootnote 23 is investigating the history of workers, repertoires, and theaters in the French provinces with the aim of redressing this Paris-centric attitude. Other studies look at caricatures of French dance that were published in other countries during the eighteenth century, pointing out the diverse and contrasting attitudes in the reception of this “dominant model” (Milhous Reference Milhous2011, 29–52).Footnote 24 With respect to contemporary history, research currently under way about the Paris Opera ballet under Nazi occupation utterly disrupts the accepted image of an institution that, during its entire long history, has exuded “French splendor.”Footnote 25 A recent synthesis of modern dance history places at the center of its analysis the “fascination with elsewhere” and the cultural exchanges that resulted (Suquet Reference Suquet2012). And there are other stimulating, innovative, and nuanced examples of this kind of work that shed light on little-known aspects of history. They invite us to revisit our own historical knowledge, as well as our ways of thinking. And they demonstrate that dance history merits more than peremptory affirmations about cultural superiority.
