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Banes was planning to deliver this talk at a Society of Dance History Scholars conference in 2002, but was prevented from doing so by her stroke. She gave a different version of her work on Balanchine’s dancing elephants at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education annual conference in Chicago in 2001. k In 1942 the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus commissioned the ballet choreographer George Balanchine and modernist composer Igor Stravinsky to create The Ballet of the Elephants for “fifty elephants and fifty beautiful girls.” The elephants wore tutus and glittering headdresses, and the star of the ballet, the elephant Modoc, was billed as the “premiere ballerina.” (The other performers were not listed but simply credited, collectively, as the Corps de Ballet and the Corps des Elephants.1) Modoc’s partner, at least on opening night at Madison Square Garden in New York City (which was a benefit performance for 344 k Elephants in Tutus : Planned paper, Society of Dance History Scholars conference, 2002 the Army and Navy relief funds and the President’s Infantile Paralysis Fund) was Vera Zorina, Balanchine’s then-wife and a ballet dancer who had also appeared in musicals on Broadway and in Hollywood films.2 Later, she was replaced by Princess Vanessa, “a Hindoo dancer,” who had appeared with the Ballet Russe and in Hollywood movies.3 Wartime patriotism, foreign exoticism, escapist entertainment, industrial “streamlining,” rural ballyhoo, urban sophistication, and high culture and low culture all collided in that year’s edition of the Big Top, entitled “Gayety,” which proved to be a crossroads of American culture and which indelibly shaped “the Greatest Show on Earth,” creating a style and approach for the circus that set the standard for future editions. Today I want to focus on some of the cultural implications of The Ballet of the Elephants, exploring in particular two issues: boundarycrossing between cultural strata and representations of female bodies. The Ballet of the Elephants was a conscious translation of ballet art from old world to new, and from the opera house to the big top—that is, from “high” to “low” culture along multiple strata. At the same time, it’s important to note that the ballet’s commission was part and parcel of a transformation of the circus genre itself, a deliberate attempt (not always successful with critics and audiences) to make the circus more artistic , more highbrow—as its producers thought befit contemporary, urban audiences. In terms of gender, the pairing of human and animal “ballerinas” on the one hand wrung new meanings out of familiar images of women and animals in popular entertainments, while on the other hand it reinforced standard circus representations of female sexuality at the time. In the early 1940s the new Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus impresario John Ringling North had decided to modernize America’s most popular of live popular entertainments, to streamline it in accordance with contemporary industrial design and artistic taste, and to make it a more unified and sophisticated spectacle. In 1937 North, the nephew of the original Ringling Brothers, had inherited a circus that was the largest and best known in the country, but that was also suffering from the Depression economy as well as from family infighting, management problems, and what North saw as an outmoded aesthetic. A Yale graduate who loved New York culture and nightlife, North began to bring in theater designers and directors to modernize the circus Elephants in Tutus 345 shows and heighten their sense of style. These included Charles Le Maire, costume designer of the Ziegfeld Follies, and Max Weldy, designer for Les Folies Bergère. North introduced air-conditioning, and he experimented with the use of floral fragrance sprays; a new, more compact and elegant dark blue big top replaced the off-white canvas that often appeared dingy and that let in sunlight during matinees. In 1940 North hired Norman Bel Geddes, the theater and industrial designer who had created the 1939 New York World’s Fair Futurama, to further the streamlining process. Bel Geddes envisioned a futuristic big top, without poles to obscure audience sightlines.4 In the meantime, he made the visual style of the circus more colorful and more unified: he tinted the sawdust in rings of red, white, and blue, added red sidewalls to the blue big top, and introduced modern lighting designs that decisively guided the spectator’s gaze; he gave the sideshow midway a bright, contemporary, poster-art look; he...

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