New German Dance Studies

2. Lola Montez and Spanish Dance in the 19th Century

2. Lola Montez and Spanish Dance in the 19th Century Claudia Jeschke The concept of alterity has often been applied in studies on the discourse about women in nineteenth-century dance.1 These studies focus predominantly on male fantasies of otherness, and their projection onto the female body through strategies of containment and control. Yet as the example of the self-declared Spanish dancer Lola Montez (c. 1820–1861) demonstrates, otherness can also provide particular insights into a woman’s own discourse. Apart from her specific style of dance, Montez also produced a number of successful writings, among them her Memoirs (1851), Lectures of Lola Montez, (Countess of Lands­ feld) Including Her Autobiography (1858), and The Arts of Beauty; or, Secrets of a Lady’s Toilet. With Hints to Gentlemen on the Art of Fascinating (1858).2 While Montez established dilettantism as a transgressive quality in dance, her texts display her potential to self-fashion through stylized femininity, professional marketing of her public persona, and provocation of social morals. In contrast to the above-mentioned male discourse, the female performer deployed alterity as a mode of emancipation. The sociologist Alois Hahn defines alterity as a social “ascription,” as the definition of a “relation.”3 For Hahn, being “other” involves two dimensions: the dimension of “being different” and the dimension of “not knowing.”4 Hence Hahn widens the focus of the definition of the other from ethnic difference to diversity even within an ethnic group; he sees alterity as something opaque that cannot be fully analyzed. As encounters with the unknown, experiences of otherness are generally of ambivalent quality. In a positive sense, this can be understood as a chance for a repositioning. Conversely, it can also be experienced as a threat to the (individual and collective) self. The oscillation between these two perceptions leads to either revulsion or the strengthening of one’s identity.5 i-xii_1-284_Mann.indd 31 4/5/12 3:29 PM 32 claudia jeschke The construction of alterity is a historically specific cultural practice. It is therefore necessary to (re-)construct the social, aesthetic, political, and historical systems within which the other is defined. Indeed, alterity must be understood as a dual process of production and reception. The goals of producing otherness, the commercial forms this production takes, and the location of its reception within the cultural field must all be considered. Lola Montez provides an apposite example for studying the construction of alterity, as a brief biography of the dancer reveals: Eliza Gilbert staged herself as the “Spanish dancer” Lola Montez—whose name and (supposedly Spanish ) origin and profession are invented, fictitious. Without being a trained dancer, Lola Montez traveled to European and non-European countries. As the mistress of the Bavarian King Ludwig I, she became a dubious celebrity in Bavaria—in the course of the political upheavals around 1848, his love for her cost him his throne.6 Her traveling is similar to that of other famous ballerinas of her time; but in contrast to them, she insisted on a transnational biography. In her memoirs, Montez presents herself as a “global player”: “Irish through my father, Spanish through my mother, English through my education, French by inclination and cosmopolitan through the circumstances, I can say of myself that I belong to all nations or none.”7 As a survival strategy and through a mixture of cold reasoning, playfulness, and narcissism, she appropriated (contemporarily innovative) strategies of consuming and producing alterity in a web of newly developed media and forms of presentation. The illustrated press provided a perfect second “stage” for Montez’s spectacles; her scandalous performances fueled critical comments by the (primarily male) reviewers and caricatures by the (primarily male) caricaturists , which gratified the (also male?!) readers lusting for sensation.8 Later in her life—no longer just as a dancer, but as a writer—she also endeavored to elicit positive reactions from female audiences. The fact that Lola Montez was known over a period of twenty years—throughout Europe and in the British “colonies,” United States, and Australia—was also due to these forms of reception. As a protagonist of alterity and a privileged visual object, Montez became a target of public discussion, a media star, a cult star. Even when Lola Montez presented herself as Spanish, she represented multiple identities and attracted her contemporaries precisely through the embodiment of various different facets of otherness. Lola Montez—such is my thesis—administrated various possible forms of alterity in the mid–nineteenth...