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  • Ballet and the Queer Sensibility
  • Mark Franko (bio)
A Queer History of the Ballet. Peter Stoneley. London: Routledge, 2007. x + 206 pp.

Peter Stoneley's premise in A Queer History of Ballet is that "ballet provided images, legends, spaces and institutions through which queer artists and fans could achieve some degree of visibility" (2). This is certainly an excellent reason to take ballets "seriously" once again and to subject the ballet anew to historically informed critical scrutiny. This book looks at the queer potential of the classical and modernist ballet tradition in Europe and America between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In returning scholarly attention to ballet Stoneley points out that this art form has been "treated hastily and with embarrassment by present-day scholars" (2) for a variety of reasons. Notably, nineteenth-century ballet has long seemed unbearably naïve, disallowing serious critical treatment. There is a reverse trend in motion as indicated by the recent publication of the Cambridge Companion to Ballet.1 Stoneley points to ballet's potential for the display of a queer sensibility, as hinted at by the phrase "some degree of visibility" and underlined by the fact that contemporary ballet productions dealing explicitly with gender and sexuality are only treated in brief at the conclusion. So, for example, Matthew Bourne's rewriting of Swan Lake (1995) with an all-male cast of swans is said to "de-sublimate the traditional ballet" (158), although the emancipatory qualities of this rewrite are seriously doubted by the author (159).

The first chapter establishes some interesting parameters for why and how ballet's spaces, bodies, and movement manifest a gay sensibility. Stoneley evokes the space of the proscenium stage as a locus of the personal fantasy, of the ballet body as a "customized body" (9). This means that ballet training retools the dancer's instrument to underplay assumed gender assignment based on sexual identity, which training precedes the regendering of that body in the service of narrative. The dancer's identity is thus "performative," a notion that Stoneley feels is built into the technical and aesthetic regimen of the ballet's forms.2 Finally, and most evocatively, he pinpoints ballet's paradoxical "resistance to embodiment," [End Page 448] how ballet's illusionism furthers a "queer power": "Queerness must subsist in ephemeral gestures" (21). This is perhaps his most counterintuitive, yet insightful, position and could stand further development.

Other chapters pursue particular themes such as the figure of the fairy and other unreal creatures in French Romanticism and the significance of the swan from the viewpoint of Tchaikovsky's biography. As the composer of Swan Lake, Tchaikovsky might seem distant from the actual mechanics of ballet, but the author makes us realize how much the concept of the swan-maiden owed to the composer. Stoneley delves into Tchaikovsky's troubled homosexual life as an upper-class Russian artist in the nineteenth century, and the links between that life and the actual ballet are inconclusive although suggestive. His analysis seems to be a critical-ephemeral gesture meant to evoke ballet's queerness much in the way the ballet itself is said to do. That is, the viability of queerness in classical ballet is perceptible in the atmospherics. It is often a case not of the ballets themselves but of the lives of choreographers, composers, impresarios, and spectators that show through these ballets in subtle ways.

Perhaps the strongest chapter is "Queer Modernities," in which the Ballets Russes tradition and the impact of Sergei Diaghilev and his associates on dance modernism are explored at length. Using "ballet to revive and extend a queer iconography," Diaghilev "reworked old ideas and images of same-sex desire" (69). Most interesting in this study is the way ballet is conceived as a process of rewriting in which queerness gains multiple foci over time. Also typical of this and the following chapters is the focus on individual personalities such as the Tchaikovsky Diaghilev-Kirstein cycloid. Methodologically, there is frequently a tendency to leave aside the analysis of space, bodies, and movement, as pertinently outlined in the first chapter, for biography, anecdote, and psychological profile. These shifts are always done sensitively and with measured judgment but are...

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