Dancing Lives: Five Female Dancers from the Ballet D’Action to Merce Cunningham (review)

Throughout the past several decades dance scholars have broadened the scope of the discipline so that today, few critical inquires examine dancing bodies without careful contextualization. Karen Eliot’s Dancing Lives: Five Female Dancers from the Ballet d’Action to Merce Cunningham acknowledges this in its effort to create an “embodied history” (2). Focusing on five distinct careers, this study puts forth a series of microcosmic analyses, allowing readers to learn about dancers who were “recognized in her own time” but “not necessarily the most famous of their eras”—with the hope that their stories will inform the larger project of ballet and modern dance histories (3). Yet instead of filling the “gap” left in dance history and situating these women within a larger matrix, Eliot’s methodological approach highlights the individual dance careers of each (5).

From the outset, readers are told that Dancing Lives is meant to centralize the “work” of the dancer (1). By employing this term, Eliot refers to the actual moments of dancing, years of training and rehearsing that fall out of historical narratives when eclipsed by accounts of final performances; applying Walter Benjamin’s notion of “erasure,” the author questions how the ephemerality of dance might be written into its history (4). Herself a former dancer with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC), it is clear that Eliot now seeks to champion how dance is made. She writes, “Dancers are the stuff of which dance history is made, but there are few histories focusing on their lives as working professionals” (3). In this vein she writes Dancing Lives—a five-chapter book composed of brief entrees into the lives of four ballerinas and one modern dancer whom she considers to be in the historical shadows. Thus we learn about the life and work of the late-eighteenth-century ballerina Giovanna Baccelli (1753–1801) not Gaetan and Auguste Vestris or Jean-Georges Noverre; read about the experiences of French romantic ballerina Adèle Dumilâtre (1821–1909) rather than her non-French contemporaries like Taglioni and the other Pas de Quatre luminaries; are told that Imperial Theatre ballerina Tamara Karsavina (1885–1978) had a life other than the one frequently told in relation to Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. It is also in this way that we are treated to a retelling of how Scottishborn ballerina Moira Shearer’s (1926–2008) choice to be Vicky in The Red Shoes solidified her destiny to “follow Margot Fonteyn” (112, emphasis mine) and how it was former Cunningham dancer Catherine Kerr (1948) instead of Carolyn Brown who epitomized the MCDC aesthetic for many years. (Importantly, Eliot does not discount the dancers she compares these five to but rather makes plain that Baccelli, Dumilâtre, Karsavina, Shearer, and Kerr were each held to the standards of others.)

The careers of the women illustrated are “second-tier” (a description used from Alphonse Royer in regard to Dumilâtre on page 3 and by Eliot in relation to Shearer on page 105) and Eliot takes it upon herself to replace their careers as seminal. In so doing, she reminds us that forces other than dance technique often determined who ended up on the French and Russian ballet stages and how that affected dance historiography. She tells how one of Dumilâtre’s patrons “offered the sum of 100,000 francs” to ensure Paris Opéra Ballet director Léon Pillet produced Lady Henriette ou la servante de Greenwich for her, and later how “Balanchine made the unprecedented gesture of asking de Valois to provide him with a special rehearsal with Shearer” contrary to Ninette de Valois’s rule that “only [Margot] Fonteyn was allowed to work with outside coaches and choreographers” (55, 116). These examples make the reader presume Dancing Lives will afford new insights about the kinds of forces that determined the course of dance history and provide an...