Le Ballet de l’Opéra: Trois Siècles de Suprématie Depuis Louis XIV ed. by Mathias Auclair and Christophe Ghristi (review)

As authors who contributed to an edited volume, we were startled to learn that editors added a subtitle that broadly declared French balletic supremacy.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 2013), 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.² Such a title participates in a type of competition better identified with nation states, capitals, or European theaters after the seventeenth century.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 entourage⁴; 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.⁵

The list of these clichés is extensive. They are partly transmitted by works we can categorize as relatively outdated,⁶ but since these works have rarely benefitted from revision, they remain (despite their outmoded values) authoritative.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.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...