La Danse Théâtrale en Europe: Identités, Altérités, Frontières ed. by Arianna Beatrice Fabbricatore (review)

Theatrical Dance in Europe: Identities, Otherness, and Borders (La danse théâtrale en Europe: identités, altérités, frontières) provides a much needed response to another recent book published in France, The Opera Ballet: Three Centuries of Supremacy Beginning with Louis XIV (Le Ballet de l’Opéra: Trois siècles de suprématie depuis Louis XIV), edited by Mathias Auclair and Christopher Ghristi.¹ The “supremacy” in the subtitle of Auclair and Ghristi’s volume is a symptom of a wider problem in European dance historiography—namely that clichés and genealogies crafted by dance critics and scholars of the past remain unquestioned, even when archival sources might reveal another story—and in La danse théâtrale en Europe, editor Arianna Beatrice Fabbricatore, in partnership with the volume’s authors, has endeavored to tackle it.

However, this is not the editor’s only goal; the volume begins with a preface by José Sasportes signaling Fabbricatore’s invitation to think about dance history in European terms, emphasizing the importance of the circulation of bodies and ideas across borders but also the role played by dance in the construction of collective identities and the presentation of self and other. These issues form the core that links together the volume’s chapters, grouped into pairs that provide two thematically related studies of a particular subject. Although the volume’s focus is European, France remains central in this story, as does the opposition of so-called French and Italian cultural practices and the role played by this type of stereotype construction in feeding nationalist discourse. However, this is surely in part because scholars have historically placed France at the center of ballet’s history, and one of the tasks undertaken in this volume by a number of its contributors is to interrogate the rhetoric that fed (and continues to feed) this construction. The narratives the reader encounters are thus not centralized around national institutions and their officially sanctioned histories but rather studies that engage critically with historiography and critical discourse as well as narrate histories of dance in popular venues. Regarding the latter, Edward Nye’s chapter “On the Importance of Foreign Actor-Mimes and External Perspectives on Romantic Ballet” (“De l’importance des acteursmimes étrangers et du regard externe sur le ballet romantique”) and Marie-Françoise Bouchon’s chapter “Italian Ballet at the Eden-Théâtre (1883–1893) : Fluidity and Resistance of Cultural Identities” (“Le ballet italien à l’Eden-Théâtre [1883–1893]: Fluidité et résistance des identités culturelles”) provide key evidence as to the interplay between high and popular culture in France’s history. Furthermore, the volume is explicitly constructed with interdisciplinary perspectives in mind, its authors drawn from disciplines ranging from dance studies to musicology to literary studies.

Attention to representations of the exotic— whether in ballets of nations or via depictions of colonization—is a recurring theme that features in many of the volume’s essays. Benjamin Pintiaux, in his chapter “Nations and Taste for the Foreign in Suites of Dances during the Baroque Era” (“Nations et goût étranger dans les suites de danses à l’époque baroque”) for example, describes the reference to a particular nation as a “stylistic process” within musical composition (69). Yet, he continues, diplomatic usage of these suites of dances created a scenario in which stylistic differences could be perceived as ideological choices. Ultimately, Pintiaux argues, this “extremely vague orientalism” was successful for several reasons: it represented the political success of the monarch, appealed to “taste for the mysterious,” created a space for farce grounded in otherness, and allowed for the questioning of European society that would not be permissible in representations of subjects closer to home (74–75). Flavia Pappacena’s chapter “La Scoperta dell’America da Cristoforo Colombo (Gasparo Angiolini, Turin, 1757): Ideal Model for Foreign Relations” (“La Scoperta dell’America da Cristoforo...