Theatrical Dance in Europe: Identities, Otherness, and Borders (La danse théâtrale en Europe: identités, altérités, frontières) provides a much needed response to another recent book published in France, The Opera Ballet: Three Centuries of Supremacy Beginning with Louis XIV (Le Ballet de l’Opéra: Trois siècles de suprématie depuis Louis XIV), edited by Mathias Auclair and Christopher Ghristi.Footnote 1 The “supremacy” in the subtitle of Auclair and Ghristi's volume is a symptom of a wider problem in European dance historiography—namely that clichés and genealogies crafted by dance critics and scholars of the past remain unquestioned, even when archival sources might reveal another story—and in La danse théâtrale en Europe, editor Arianna Beatrice Fabbricatore, in partnership with the volume's authors, has endeavored to tackle it.
However, this is not the editor's only goal; the volume begins with a preface by José Sasportes signaling Fabbricatore's invitation to think about dance history in European terms, emphasizing the importance of the circulation of bodies and ideas across borders but also the role played by dance in the construction of collective identities and the presentation of self and other. These issues form the core that links together the volume's chapters, grouped into pairs that provide two thematically related studies of a particular subject. Although the volume's focus is European, France remains central in this story, as does the opposition of so-called French and Italian cultural practices and the role played by this type of stereotype construction in feeding nationalist discourse. However, this is surely in part because scholars have historically placed France at the center of ballet's history, and one of the tasks undertaken in this volume by a number of its contributors is to interrogate the rhetoric that fed (and continues to feed) this construction. The narratives the reader encounters are thus not centralized around national institutions and their officially sanctioned histories but rather studies that engage critically with historiography and critical discourse as well as narrate histories of dance in popular venues. Regarding the latter, Edward Nye's chapter “On the Importance of Foreign Actor-Mimes and External Perspectives on Romantic Ballet” (“De l'importance des acteurs-mimes étrangers et du regard externe sur le ballet romantique”) and Marie-Françoise Bouchon's chapter “Italian Ballet at the Eden-Théâtre (1883–1893) : Fluidity and Resistance of Cultural Identities” (“Le ballet italien à l'Eden-Théâtre [1883–1893]: Fluidité et résistance des identités culturelles”) provide key evidence as to the interplay between high and popular culture in France's history. Furthermore, the volume is explicitly constructed with interdisciplinary perspectives in mind, its authors drawn from disciplines ranging from dance studies to musicology to literary studies.
Attention to representations of the exotic—whether in ballets of nations or via depictions of colonization—is a recurring theme that features in many of the volume's essays. Benjamin Pintiaux, in his chapter “Nations and Taste for the Foreign in Suites of Dances during the Baroque Era” (“Nations et goût étranger dans les suites de danses à l’époque baroque”) for example, describes the reference to a particular nation as a “stylistic process” within musical composition (69). Yet, he continues, diplomatic usage of these suites of dances created a scenario in which stylistic differences could be perceived as ideological choices. Ultimately, Pintiaux argues, this “extremely vague orientalism” was successful for several reasons: it represented the political success of the monarch, appealed to “taste for the mysterious,” created a space for farce grounded in otherness, and allowed for the questioning of European society that would not be permissible in representations of subjects closer to home (74–75). Flavia Pappacena's chapter “La Scoperta dell'America da Cristoforo Colombo (Gasparo Angiolini, Turin, 1757): Ideal Model for Foreign Relations” (“La Scoperta dell'America da Cristoforo Colombo [Gasparo Angiolini, Turin, 1757]: Modèle idéal de politique étrangère”) analyzes Angiolini's ballet within the greater context of ballets about colonial subjects, arguing that Angiolini attended to moral concerns in the ballet's narrative despite choosing not to take a position for or against colonization.
Emmanuelle Delattre-Destemberg's chapter “Dominating Europe of Dance: The Rhetoric of Supremacy at the Académie de Paris during the Nineteenth Century” (“Dominer l'Europe de la danse: la rhétorique de la suprématie à l'Académie de Paris au XIXe siècle”) is one of the highlights of the volume for its incisive examination of language used to craft the ideas of so-called national schools of dance. The author first questions, and then eschews, the use of national labels in association with ballet schools, opting to label training at the Académie de Paris as Parisian, rather than using the ideological term, the “French school.” From the end of the Ancien Régime until the beginning of the Third Republic, Delattre-Destemberg argues, “French” dance was promoted as an ideal to be disseminated across the European continent, and the rhetoric used to describe it, shared by voices from inside and outside the dance studio, helped to create a politics of assimilation that privileged French academic dance. Carlotta Zambelli, for example, though trained in Italy in the style of Carlo Blasis, classified the Académie Nationale de Musique, her adopted theater, as a superior training ground for professionals compared with La Scala. This discourse, in which the Paris Opera is upheld as the epitome of ballet performance and training (which, the author points out, continued to circulate even during the mid-nineteenth century, a time during which the Opera Ballet and its school encountered major difficulties), continues to surface in recent histories of dance, in which the traditional narrative posits that French ballet technique, in decline in Paris, was preserved in Saint-Petersburg by Marius Petipa and then returned to Paris via the Ballets Russes. Delattre-Destemberg shows, conversely, that this discourse harks back to the Paris Opera's origins, via the monarchy, as “an instrument of power and influence in Europe” (271).
Yet the French style does not always appear from the perspective of a normalizing or universal ideal. Many of the volume's authors highlight the multicultural identities of performers and choreographers, the active roles of these individuals in constructing their own identities, and how they were in turn perceived by the press. The authors also interrogate the fate of dance practices originating in one cultural context and in turn developing new features as the dancers who trained and practiced these forms and styles worked in new cities and theaters. The first of two paired chapters under the rubric “French Otherness in Europe: Appropriations, Inclusions and Exchanges” (“L'altérité française en Europe: appropriations, inclusions, échanges”), Kathrin Stocker's “Identity and Otherness: Ballet at the Court of Württemberg after the Thirty Years War” (“Identité et altérité: le ballet à la cour de Wurtemberg après la Guerre de Trente Ans”), considers the Stuttgart Court within the context of international exchanges rather than a single national tradition. Stocker painstakingly maps out layers of influence by tracing the careers of various individuals engaged in ballet production at the court, calling attention as well to trends and preferences visible in the ducal library. At the end of the seventeenth century, she explains, French theater became less prominent, and German became the theater's main language. Yet opera libretti during this time were often bilingual, in French and Italian or French and German. The engagement of traveling performers as well as multilingual libretti (in these language combinations as well as others) marked the court as a site of international encounter, yet also aligned it with other European courts, each sharing the goal of demonstrating power and influence through the arts.
The second of the two chapters in this pairing, Bianca Maurmayr's “Return Effects of Cultural Exchange: A Critical Look at French Dance on Venetian Stages (1670–1700)” (“Effets de retour des échanges culturels: regards croisés sur la danse française des scènes vénitiennes [1670–1700]”) complicates the traditional understanding of the interplay between French noble dance and Italian acrobatic forms. Citing the dramma per musica, Amulio e Numitore (1689), in which an “air à la Française” appears in the score for opera's first act, accompanying—seemingly incongruously, for music in the French style would typically accompany a dance in the noble style—a dance for a group of sea monsters, Maurmayr proposes that Venetian choreographers and performers may have “appropriated French dance to the point where the French public no longer recognized it” (147). This mixing of styles, cultivated by a constant circulation of performers, also ultimately created a framework in which performers on Venice's stages would consciously perform in the French or Italian style based on a ballet's choreographic and narrative exigencies.
This kind of attention to dismantling received history through critical reevaluations of archival and journalistic materials, undertaken by an interdisciplinary team, is critically important to the crafting of a rigorous, nuanced history of dance. La danse théâtrale en Europe is an important contribution to the reevaluation of dance history in which discourse analysis features front and center, and archival sources are harnessed in view of critically reappraising the past.
