Between them, Sallé and Camargo inadvertently shifted the course of ballet and pointed it toward the nineteenth century, when the ballerina would eventually displace the danseur at the summit of the art. This would take time, however, and along the way women who took on the serious style or became virtuoso performers were typically described as imitating the look and carriage of a man. Camargo was said, in spite of her provocative style, to “dance like a man,” and Anne Heinel, who distinguished herself in the serious style some years later, was described as “a superb man in woman’s clothing.” As another observer explained (referring to the preeminent male dancer of the time), “it was like watching Vestris dancing as a woman.”19
It is worth pausing for a moment to consider why it was that women, and not men, were suddenly in the vanguard of ballet. In part, their willingness to strike out may have had something to do with dancers’ social status, which was quite peculiar and vexing. By the turn of the eighteenth century, most dancers at the Paris Opera were from theatrical, artisanal, or other low backgrounds, and as employees of the theater, they were servants of the king. For the men, this was fairly straightforward: duties were owed and protections afforded. But for women the situation was more complex. For them, the Opera often served as a haven from overbearing paternal or spousal control, since a woman in its employ fell under the exclusive control of the king and the gentilhommes du roi; fathers and husbands were deprived of their customary financial and moral hold.
Thus, in sharp contrast to women in French society at large, dancers at the Opera kept their own earnings and enjoyed an unusual independence, although they were also more vulnerable to slander, abandonment, and financial ruin.20 Many capitalized on their freedom and beauty by doubling as courtesans, and the cliché of a young dancer taken in by a protector of means who is then bled for all he is worth had real and enduring historical truth. There were others in addition to Prévost and Camargo: Mesdemoiselles Barbarini, Petit, Deschamps, Dervieux, and Guimard (to mention just the best-known) were all accomplished eighteenth-century dancers who juggled multiple lovers and often lived in astonishing luxury. As one exasperated police official noted, the Opera was “the nation’s harem.”21
These women thus had a curious relationship to nobility, both as a social class and as an idea. Professional women dancers were a relatively new phenomenon, and when they first took the Opera stage in the 1680s they were often performing dances that were also performed (in simplified form) by noblewomen at court and in high society. Onstage, ballerinas therefore acted like aristocrats even when in real life they most emphatically were not. And they did so at a time when the distance between theatrical illusion and reality was much less pronounced than it is today. When an actor fell dead on the eighteenth-century stage, he was understood (for that moment) to really be dead, and a dancer was (for that moment) truly noble. Moreover, in real life dancers often mixed with royalty and many had the wealth and trappings of status and the elegant manners to go with them (though how they spoke was probably another matter). The clause de non-dérogation protecting nobles from losing status if they danced on public stages conferred an air of respectability on the dancers’ profession, even when they were also regarded as courtesans. The filles d’opéra themselves were not usually under any illusions about their status, but many cunningly tried to turn the ambiguity of their position to advantage.
La Camargo, for example, was one of the few to come from a family with a real claim to noble descent (Spanish and Italian). But the family was impoverished, and her father sent his daughters to the Opera because they could earn their livelihood there without technically compromising the family’s noble status. There were, however, other risks. Camargo and her sister were soon spirited away to a secluded retreat by the Comte de Melun, a wealthy and jealous admirer. Camargo’s father wrote an angry, indignant complaint insisting that his daughters be treated as women of high birth and that the Comte offer marriage or else be brought to justice by the authorities. Neither happened, and Camargo’s life resumed its course. In 1734, at the height of her fame, Camargo reportedly left the Opera for six years to live with the high-ranking Comte de Clermont, abbé de Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He secluded her in various houses around Paris, and she had two children before he abandoned her and she returned once again to the fold of the Opera.
To take a more colorful example, in 1740 the dancer Mademoiselle Petit was slandered for her illicit relations. She retaliated in print, openly admitting that she had taken a position at the Opera with the sole ambition of turning her beauty to social and pecuniary gain. But she insisted that she had always acted “as a woman of high birth” and ought to be treated as such. Her poise, she insisted, was no less real for being instrumental, and she was indignant at the charges of impropriety leveled against her. But Petit knew that her indignation rested on shaky ground, and in a spirited defense she turned her weakness to advantage by likening her own position to that of the men who so often courted her: tax farmers.* Her profession, she asserted, was really no different from theirs. Both began from nothing; both were cold-blooded and juggled many clients at the same time. They owed their status to riches, she to her charms. But at least the men she ruined loved her, whereas the tax farmer was a figure of hatred and derision. These feisty allegations met with a sharply indignant response: the Fermiers Généraux, a powerful organization of tax collectors and financiers employed by the king, published a pamphlet in 1741 rejecting the slanderous assertions of this “little Actrice,” who was idle and useless and whose loose morals stained the social fabric. Nothing came of this pamphlet war, but it is hard not to admire Petit’s gumption. By going public, she had broken all the rules and exposed the fragility of her own position—and theirs.22
The ambiguous social identity of Opera dancers even became the subject of a lawsuit in 1760, when an architect filed against the notorious dancer (and courtesan) Mademoiselle Deschamps for failing to pay for his professional services. Deschamps was married but legally separated. She was in the service of the Opera and protected by powerful, wealthy interests (among others, the Duc d’Orléans and a tax farmer named Brissart). Who was responsible for the architect’s fees? The lawyers were stumped:
The Actresses of the Royal Academy of Music are privileged and virtually indefinable beings. They are useless, though unfortunately regarded as necessary, not so much authorized as protected, and tolerated by the political Government, though not by legislation. Isolated at the heart of civil society, they rule in a sphere that is quite apart from any other.… They belong neither to parents nor to spouses: in a sense they depend only upon themselves.23
On behalf of the purportedly injured architect, the lawyers accused Deschamps of having renounced all legitimate ties. She was a social blank with no civic identity, they said. Yet they could not deny that in reality her ties to the Opera gave her a certain social standing. Uncertain how to proceed, they sidestepped her inconvenient social identity and focused instead on economic necessity. To sustain a viable economy, they argued, individuals had to be held responsible for their actions in the marketplace. Though she was a woman, this had to apply to Deschamps as well. (Records suggest that she paid.) As she grew older, however, Deschamps fell on hard times and crippling debt and was forced to sell her possessions in a public auction. Lines of carriages brought the cream of Parisian society to gape at the acquisitions of this fallen fille d’opéra. The crowds were so pressing that tickets were distributed, admitting the most distinguished visitors first, as if her demise were the final act of a well-loved opera or ballet.*
Thus the social position of women of the Opera did not necessarily make them freer or more secure, but it did seem to give them a certain (sometimes reckless) courage. These women had less to lose and substantially more to gain by stepping out of line or acquiring notoriety, sexual or otherwise. The artistic consequences were not always obvious, and we do not know exactly how eroticism, art, and status cohered in the lives of dancers who typically left
only the thinnest trails of their own thoughts and motives. But thanks to them, the ways in which dancers slipped between art and a decadent demimonde became a dominant theme in the history of ballet, and the reputation of a ballerina often rested on her private conduct as well as her artistic merits. And it is no accident that many of the most daring performers of ballet in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were women. Sallé and Camargo set the mold: in calculated ways they used the contemporary taste for eroticism, popular theater, and sentiment to turn the French noble style in a distinctly feminine direction, expanding the perimeters of the art and opening the way for future developments.
The notion that pantomime, music, and dance could tell a story without the help of words had been around for some time: in the commedia dell’arte and in the fairgrounds, in the ballets between the acts of Italian operas, and in Jesuit plays. John Weaver and Marie Sallé had drawn on these traditions in their own pantomime dances. But—and it is a big but—the idea that dance could tell a story better than words, that it could express some essential human truth with a moral force that words simply could not convey: this was an idea that came directly out of the French Enlightenment. And it was this idea that changed ballet from a decorative ornament (within opera in the French case) to the independent narrative art form that we think of today as the story ballet. Once the idea that dance could carry its own dramatic weight had taken hold, the way would be open to freestanding narrative ballets such as Giselle (1841) and later Swan Lake (1877), The Sleeping Beauty (1890), and others. To understand how dancers and ballet masters moved from Weaver’s tentative Mars and Venus or Marie Sallé’s modest pantomimes to full-fledged, self-contained dramatic ballets, we must turn to the life and work of Jean-Georges Noverre (1727–1810).
Noverre was a French ballet master and self-appointed critic of the dance who wrote an important and sprawling book, Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets. Packed with practical advice, theoretical musings, long-winded descriptions of the plots of his own ballets, and opinionated commentary—including lavish praise and damning critiques of dancers at the Paris Opera—the book documented Noverre’s fierce (at times blind) ambition to reform his art. He was not always original and his bombast and arrogance could be off-putting, but if his ballets and writings were at times irritating or derivative, his clean grasp of certain important ideas and his unremitting determination to apply them to dance set him apart from his colleagues everywhere.
Noverre’s career spanned Europe. He worked in Paris, Lyon, London, Berlin, Stuttgart, Vienna, and Milan, and when he published his Lettres in 1760 he was recognized across the Continent for his radical ideas. By the time he died, in 1810, the Lettres had been republished (with revisions) and read in cities from Paris to St. Petersburg. Noverre saw himself as a progressive figure, a kind of philosophe manqué, and he liked to boast of his contacts with leading figures of the French Enlightenment, especially Voltaire. But it was not only Noverre’s writings that won him acclaim. He composed some eighty ballets and twenty-four opéra-ballets along with dozens of festivals and special events, and his works were performed and restaged (often by his students) in cities and courts across Europe, making him by far the best-known ballet master of his time. His renown only increased in the years after his death: though his ballets were eventually lost, Noverre’s Lettres were praised and excoriated in equal measure by dancers and ballet masters through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from August Bournonville and Carlo Blasis to Frederick Ashton and George Balanchine.24
Born in Paris to a Swiss father and French mother, Jean-Georges Noverre was raised in the Protestant faith and given a solid education. Intellectually curious and grounded in classical literature and thought, he had tools that few others in his profession possessed. His father was a member of the Swiss Guard and steered Noverre firmly toward a military career, but Noverre’s passion for theater eventually prevailed, and it was finally arranged that he would study with the esteemed danseur noble of the Paris Opera, Louis “le Grand” Dupré. By talent and training—not to mention ambition—Noverre thus seemed set on a well-worn path to a career at the prestigious Opera.
But this did not turn out to be the case. Instead, in 1743 Dupré was hired by Jean Monnet, the newly appointed director of the Opéra-Comique, to assemble a company of dancers and to stage ballets. Monnet hoped to create a respectable theater with the best possible talent, and he also recruited the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau and the painter and costume designer François Boucher. Dupré in turn brought Marie Sallé on board along with one of his students, the sixteen-year-old Noverre. Thus, although Noverre had been trained in the highest noble style by one of its most venerated interpreters, he began his career in the popular theaters and fairs with Marie Sallé at his side. And although she was some twenty years his senior, Sallé and Noverre became fast friends, and in later years he would hold her up as a model of expressive dancing.
The fact that Noverre began at the Opéra-Comique nonetheless pointed to a theme that ran through his life—and caused him considerable frustration and anguish. The Paris Opera remained the undisputed summit of the art, and Noverre could not help being drawn to it. This was a matter of prestige, but it was also a question of opportunity and resources: the Opera was still the only Parisian theater allowed to produce tragédies lyriques and opéra-ballets. Noverre tried hard to win a place there: in the 1750s, having earned something of a reputation for his work abroad and in the provinces, he put himself forward for the position of ballet master at the Opera. But even the support of the intelligent and cultivated Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV’s influential mistress, could not overcome custom and intrigue: Noverre was humiliatingly rejected in favor of a less talented inside candidate. As one observer later sardonically noted, “If there is anyone who can drag us out of the childhood in which we are still in the matter of ballets, it must be a man such as this Noverre. The Opera should secure and pay well such talent; but for the very reason that they should do so, they will do nothing of the sort.”25
Noverre’s first real break came from London. In 1755 the actor and director David Garrick invited him to stage a ballet at the Drury Lane Theater. The two men shared a common background. Like Noverre, Garrick did not come from a theatrical family but was raised in a bourgeois household of French Protestant descent. Well educated and acutely aware of the proprieties of his class, he worried that his choice of profession would taint the family’s respectability—most London theaters at the time were in dark and impoverished backstreets among brothels and other disreputable institutions. Picking up where Weaver and Steele had left off, Garrick set out to rescue theater, clean it up, and make it respectable. Like them, he believed that English theater could be moral and useful in ways that might reflect the freedoms of England’s political system; he lived a scrupulous married life and encouraged his actors and actresses to do the same.
Garrick successfully established Shakespearean drama as a high art and national heritage. To draw audiences, he mixed popular fare with more serious plays, and his theater offered pantomimes, clowns, and spin-offs from the commedia dell’arte. To encourage concentration and propriety in spectators, he darkened the auditorium and took away the seats on the stage. Garrick was himself a riveting performer and master of pantomime, famous for his clay-like features and virtuosic ability to mold his face—no mask—to express love, hatred, and terror in rapid succession. Above all, he eschewed traditional overwrought techniques of declamation in favor of a simpler and more plainspoken delivery that would illuminate the text and appeal directly to people across social classes.
Noverre arrived in London prepared to mount one of his most lavish ballets, Les fêtes chinoises, which drew on the contemporary fashion for chinoiserie and had been previously presented with great success at the Saint-Germain fairgrounds in Paris. With richly decorated sets by Boucher and a large cast of dancers, it was full of extravagant visual effects, such as a scene with eight rows of Chinese bobbing up and down i
n imitation of the ocean’s waves. The timing of Noverre’s visit to London, however, was unpropitious: when he arrived in 1756, international hostilities had precipitated rumors of a French invasion, and Garrick was hotly criticized for importing an “enemy” company. In spite of his efforts (he climbed onstage and tried to calm the jeering audience by assuring them Noverre was Swiss), the theater erupted in violence and the ballet was withdrawn. Noverre fled into hiding. But if his relationship with English audiences was forestalled, the episode firmly established Noverre’s friendship with Garrick. He returned the following year, and when he was taken ill and unable to work, Garrick opened his home and Noverre convalesced there. Ensconced in Garrick’s impressive library, which held a wide literature on pantomime, Noverre began to write his Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets. He later acknowledged the great actor’s profound influence on his own work, saying that Garrick had done for acting what he himself hoped to do for dance.
When Noverre wrote his Lettres, however, his mind was not only in London: it was also in Paris. By midcentury, ballet in the French capital had entered something of a crisis. Marie Sallé and her generation were gone, and dance seemed to be sliding toward empty and meaningless virtuosity. Artists and critics mounted a vigorous critique of what they took to be ballet’s hollow artifice and insincere guile. “Like a dancing master” became a common epithet to describe anything that had fallen into a false or decadent state. This critique did not come out of nowhere: it belonged to the wide-ranging cultural upheaval of the French Enlightenment. Discouraged by the decline of seventeenth-century French classical culture into decorative excess and rococo dissipation, a rising generation of French artists and writers found themselves dispiritingly at odds with the society they lived in. But the Enlightenment was not only a critique of the principles underlying the ancien régime; it also expressed a profound anxiety about its forms: about appearances and how people dressed, moved—and danced. Politics, but also art, fashion, theater, opera, and ballet were pulled into a sharp and searching debate, and it is no accident that many of the articles written about dance were published in Diderot and d’Alembert’s influential Encyclopédie, compiled in the years 1751–80.
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