Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet (review)

In Apollo's Angels, Jennifer Homans constructs a powerful and distinct history of ballet by situating the dance within its social context. Beginning with what she refers to as the "physical facts" (the steps) and continuing outward to their cultural context, Homans demonstrates that ballet's history is indelibly linked to the social conditions in which it was produced. Moreover, she observes, it seems to develop cyclically, flourishing in one country while lying dormant in another. She argues that this cyclical pattern is essential to ballet's survival; after a balletic tradition becomes stale or no longer culturally meaningful, it finds rebirth elsewhere in the work of a choreographic genius or impresario who regenerates the form in a new way. Indeed, Homans maintains, if ballet has not flourished in all countries at all times, if its history has been characterized by the fluctuating movements of artists across borders, it is because ballet is contingent upon the social, economic, and political stability of the culture to which it gives expression.

Following a chronological outline that is divided into two sections of six chapters each, Apollo's Angels begins by situating ballet's history within sixteenth-century aristocratic traditions. Ballet originated as a form of etiquette at the French court, but soon became a political instrument, used to demonstrate the court's power through opulence and spectacle. Only during the Enlightenment, after ballet's transition to a form of theatrical rather than social dance, was a narrative plot added. Interestingly, Homans notes, this was also the period when the French ballet's developmental trajectory became indelibly entangled with the intellectual projects of the philosophes, important for the development of the ballet d'action, a type of pantomime ballet that aspired to emulate Diderot's new natural conception of the theatre. Homans's analysis of the era's theatrical reforms, such as the removal of stage masks and use of pantomime to convey narrative, draws on her in-depth knowledge of literary history. These reforms, however, were not implemented in a lasting way until the French Revolution, when the first modern corps de ballet appeared as a group of revolutionary women in white, foreshadowing the sylphs of the Romantic era and ushering in Marie Taglioni. Ballets from this era of sylphs and undines make up the earliest surviving works in the modern repertoire. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, theatregoers became more interested in realism, and Romanticism in France gave way to commercial entertainment like the Folies-Bergère and the Moulin Rouge. The Romantic ballet, however, was not lost. Preserved by August Bournonville in an idealized form, it was picked up by the Danish school, which combined Romantic themes and style with virtuosic male dancing. Although the tradition of male dancers had gone out of style in France during the 1820s concurrently with the rise of the ballerina, it was considered culturally appropriate in Copenhagen, where male dancing did not reflect the "discredited and debased aristocracy" (180) that it did in France following the Revolution.

In the second part of Apollo's Angels, Homans returns to ballet's courtly origins, locating her reader in imperial Russia where Peter the Great eagerly imported ballet from France as a style of physical comportment that confirmed the cultural values of Westernization. After centuries of travel from Western Europe to St. Petersburg, with ballet masters like Arthur Saint-Léon and Marius Petipa imported from France to lend foreign credibility to the imperial theatres, the ballet returned westward in the early twentieth century. Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, with its innovative "invention" of Russian ballet—for the first time a truly Russian art based on Russian stories, music, and choreography, rather than an import of Western culture—revitalized what was a dying art form in Paris and sowed the seeds for what would become a national tradition in Britain and the United States, demonstrating the ways in which cultural transfer has guaranteed ballet's survival.

That the dance would become a national tradition in the...