Dance and Dancers in the Victorian and Edwardian Music Hall Ballet (review)

Alexandra Carter has a bone to pick with dance historians. Adopting a tone reminiscent of 1970s feminism, she claims that historians have unjustifiably and purposefully excluded music hall ballets from the English ballet lineage because the association might compromise ballet's sanctity as a premiere art form. While the golden years of the Romantic ballet have been well documented, as has the edgy, sexy era of the Ballets Russes, little work has been produced on the years in between, the assumption being that the ballet at this time was an aesthetic wasteland, offering audiences little more than high kicks and automaton movement. Carter addresses this oversight by focusing on the years between 1884 and 1915 when the two largest music halls in London, the Alhambra and the Empire, churned out ballet productions as their feature attraction every night of the week for thousands of viewers of mixed social class and gender. These grand music halls evolved from amateur sing-a-longs in public houses to commercially run enterprises with all decisions about the performances based exclusively on popular taste and the bottom line. Contesting Lynn Garafola's claim that it was the Ballets Russes that attracted a more discerning and discriminating audience back to the ballet at the turn of the century, Carter insists that these music halls were in fact preparing audiences for the coming of the Ballets Russes.

While Carter occasionally borders on the pedantic and at times is overly Gradgrindian in her presentation of research materials, she nonetheless provides a fascinating account of the working lives of the music hall dancers and the popular reception of the more than 140 new ballets produced during these two decades. One of the challenges she faces, as do many historians working with ephemeral texts, is the lack of extant records of these ballets—no choreography, set designs, or music scores. To compensate for this lack, Carter works with what is there—reviews, playbills, fiction, popular songs, newspaper accounts, the invaluable works of ballet historian Ivor Guest—and recovers some great material. We learn, for instance, that principal female dancers usually "arranged" their own ballets, which explains the absence of choreographical notes and also calls into question the gendered assumption that female dancers embodied the ideas of male choreographers. Katti Lanner, for instance, not only arranged thirty-six ballets at the Empire, for which she received critical acclaim, but she directed the National Training School of Dancing located next to the Empire. The school and her training provided English corps dancers, who did not have the good fortune of being Italian or Italian-trained, with the opportunity to acquire the skills and artistry necessary for moving up in the ballet hierarchy.

Presumably this was no easy feat, considering the hierarchical rigidity of company lines. Principal dancers were foreign, trained primarily in Italy, prosperous, and literally cordoned off by management from the lower-ranking corps and coryphée dancers. Carter includes an anecdote from J. B. Booth's 1929 London Town of one principal dancer, La Belle Leonora, exercising her prima donna rights by insisting that a "corridor of curtains from her dressing room to the stage [be installed], and that all stage hands who should happen to cross her path [as she exited her dressing room to the stage] should immediately turn their backs" (120). Principals had their own private dressing rooms and dined at the Queen's Hotel during rehearsal breaks, while corps dancers ate with the stage hands at the back of the theatre and shared a small, poorly ventilated dressing room. The role of the corps dancers was to decorate the stage with their extravagant costumes, which in turn framed the principal dancer, who usually performed solo in the center of the stage. Corps dancers padded their behinds and busts to make their bodies appear more curvaceous, a practice that Carter argues helped to deflect the erotic gaze from the principal to the corps...