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  • The Choreography of Modernism in France: La Danseuse, 1830–1930
  • Paul Ryan
The Choreography of Modernism in France: La Danseuse, 1830–1930. By Julie Townsend. (Research Monographs in French Studies, 28). Oxford: Legenda, 2010. x + 144 pp. £40.00; $75.00.

This interdisciplinary study charts the evolution of the female dancer across a century of literary, visual, and performing art, and illustrates how the figure became particularly preponderant in continental modernism. Beginning with Romantic ballet, the text presents a genealogy of representations of the danseuse, whose fortunes were inextricably linked to the opinions of the chief ballet critic of the era, Théophile Gautier, throughout nineteenth-century French culture. Chief among the sociohistorical factors that engendered the reinvigoration of the danseuse from the July Monarchy onwards were the demands by the bourgeoning middle-classes for new plot-orientated ballets, the privatization of the Opéra, the sexual drama of the coulisses, eroticized ballet and dance (cachucha), as well as the complex correlation between constructions of femininity and social class structures. These factors triggered even more profound changes in the late nineteenth century, characterized by a greater male spectatorship, increased cultural commodification, and voyeuristic fantasy, with Zola’s Nana and Degas’s representations of the reality of the unglamorous coulisses being noteworthy exemplars. The reconfiguration of the dancer’s narrative is especially discernible in the works of Degas, who eroticized the female performer, and Toulouse-Lautrec, who depicted the increasing popularity of the fin-de-siècle music halls, but equally in the writings of Zola and Huysmans with their narratives of decadence and degeneration. The Symbolist fascination with the danseuse is exemplified in the work of Mallarmé and, later, Valéry, for whom the female dancer was a central metaphorical figure, and who crystallized the language of dance in a highly poetic and philosophical discourse. Significant analysis is devoted in this study to the manner in which avant-garde choreographers, female writers, and filmmakers reinterpret the danseuse in modern media. As a contrasting response to the male representation of dance that prevailed in the nineteenth century, a ‘feministic’ aesthetics emerged at the turn of the century in performance as [End Page 545] well as in the writings of fin-de-siècle artists such as Colette and Loïe Fuller. Concomitant developments in popular culture, experimental theatre, avant-garde visual art and film in the early twentieth century revitalized the medium and ultimately led to the emergence of modern dance. The foremost expression of these revolutionary modernist innovations were, of course, the Ballets russes, followed by the interdisciplinary and even more radical Ballet suédois of the 1920s, to which Picabia, Fernand Léger, and René Clair contributed significantly. The final chapter focuses — arguably too selectively — on the Armenian Armen Ohanian, whose autobiographical fiction and coulisses literature depict dance as a highly gendered form of colonial currency, and Colette Andris who, in a different manner, de-romanticizes the dancer. This book shows how representations of the dancer, from classical ballet and the music hall to modernist dance, function not only as a trope for an assortment of ideological positions, but as an articulation of gendered, political, sociological, and aesthetic identities. In short, this is an engaging and concise chronology of modernism through dance, with the danseuse constituting the correlation between performing, visual, and literary modernisms.

Paul Ryan
Waterford Institute of Technology
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