In Ballerina: Sex, Scandal, and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection, journalist and dance critic Deirdre Kelly chronicles the fascinating double life of the ballerina, personifying perfection on the stage and facing poverty, exploitation and unsafe working conditions behind the curtain.
Since the ballet itself paid most dancers too little to cover their lavish costumes and other expenses, most acquired wealthy patrons and the most successful became mistresses of royalty. Philippe d’Orleans, regent to Louis XIV’s great-grandson and successor, Louis XV had an affair with Emilie Dupré, a ballerina with peasant origins. Sophie Hagman, a dancer in the Royal Swedish ballet, began her life as the daughter of a gamekeeper but eventually became the official mistress of Prince Frederick Adolf of Sweden. Kelly provides countless other examples of women from humble origins who used the role of the ballerina-courtesan to rise to the pinnacle of high society.
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The Feminization of Ballet
The Reign of the Courtesan
She floats on air, a swan, sylph, or spirit haunting our imaginations from beyond the grave. Throughout her history (and it is a relatively brief one, considering that men dominated the art of ballet from its origins in the courts of the Renaissance until the Romantic era, when the cult of the ballerina took flight), the ballerina has been perceived as an otherworldly creature. Dancing in hard-tipped shoes that appear to lift her above the earth, she occupies a realm above the everyday. Historic lithographs of Romantic ballerinas show them with elongated necks, boneless arms, and flesh as pale and translucent as the wings pinned to their backs. The ballerina comes across as a feminine ideal, unblemished and ethereal, inspiration incarnate. The British novelist and poet Rayner Heppenstall describes the ballerina as “a woman on her points [who], because of the change in significant line and stress and action, ceases to be significantly a woman. She becomes an idealized and stylized creature of the Theatre… there is a kind of eternal virginity about her. She is inaccessible. She remains unravished.”
But the reality behind the curtain is another story. The history of the ballerina is tarnished by institutionalized suffering, starvation, poverty, and sexual exploitation. She has had to suffer enormous deprivation to maintain the ideal of the classical dancer as a symbol of perfection, enduring pain, frequent humiliation, and even starvation to create the illusion of weightlessness on stage.
From her beginnings as a dance professional in the seventeenth century until today, the ballerina’s identity has been shaped by forces that go beyond those of mere art. More than an aesthetic symbol, the ballerina is also a social construct, a complex product of her time and place. If, as British sociologist Bryan S. Turner says, the body is the site of incorporated history, then the ballerina’s body is the incorporated site of ballet history. In the words of pioneering American ballet dancer and choreographer Agnes de Mille, “Theatre always reflects the culture that produces it”: an observation that is true also of the ballerina. Since the beginning, she has mirrored local conditions that contribute to the production of art and of historically specific ideas that govern her role and identity as a professional woman of the theater.
But what were those conditions? What social practices and attitudes turned her into a type of idealized female in the first place? How is it that she appears to personify the dichotomy of spirit and flesh? What makes this wing-backed creature, a popular archetype, so fascinatingly inscrutable?
From the beginning, the image of the ballerina has been cast in contrasting ways. This is the source of her duality. From one perspective the ballerina is a subservient supplier of delights to male audiences and patrons, a concubine or prostitute. An opposing point of view sees her as an artist of the highest order, the embodiment of the loftiest cultural ideals and the image of femininity itself. A key contributing factor to these conflicting perspectives is that the ballet has been, since shortly after its inception, a meeting place of the social classes, a zone where aristocrats and commoners, rich and poor, commingle and negotiate their desires and identities. Ballet was an object of fascination for the daughters of domestic servants and of monarchs alike. For some girls, such as Anna Pavlova, the illegitimate child of a Russian laundress, ballet represented the road out of poverty. For others, such as Britain’s young Queen Victoria, an avid ballet fan and collector of ballet dolls, it was a fantasy world where she could flee the cloistered loneliness of her overprotective upbringing.
That the rise of the ballerina coincided with an epoch of unprecedented radical social change is central to understanding her seemingly dual nature. As the age of agrarian feudalism and aristocratic privilege was being swept aside by the age of commerce, industry, and mass democracy in late-eighteenth-century Europe, the role of the ballerina was concomitantly being redefined. She went from being an amateur of noble birth to a professional of often humble origins, a creature of the marketplace subject to the whims and tastes of a paying audience. By the twentieth century, when ballet had become an established art form, the ballerina had become an object of both idealization and scorn in popular culture, particularly in the 1940 film Waterloo Bridge, where the ballerina, played by Vivien Leigh, becomes a prostitute whose death in the end symbolizes her fall from grace. Such conflicting messages about the ballerina have confused and confounded public perceptions of this iconic female artist while obscuring aspects of her real history. The fairy tale story lines of ballets in which maidens in tutus are rescued by handsome princes have long contributed to popular perceptions of ballet as an art form of the upper classes. This perspective, however, has tended to obscure the working-class origins of many ballerinas and the authoritarian nature of ballet culture, as well as the effort, dedication, and sacrifice increasingly demanded of the professional ballerina in doing her job. Pain in ballet is often denied, hidden behind a façade of skilful composure. This stifling of discomfort has produced a culture where deprivation and degradation co-exist alongside the pursuit of an ideal, often rendering the ballerina a victim of her own beauty and artistry. It’s this Black Swan/White Swan duality that fascinates, intimating that there is much more to the ballerina than meets the eye.
The persistent perception of the ballerina as sublimely beautiful, breathtakingly delicate, and gracefully poised—perfection personified—stems from ballet’s beginnings as a courtly art. From the very beginning of her history, the ballerina has been expected to embody aristocratic ideals of deportment, dignity, and decorum, values of etiquette developed in the courts of Europe but especially in the court of France. This is where ballet—the word is French, derived from the Latin ballare, meaning “to dance,” and also from the Greek βαλλίζω (ballizo), meaning to jump about—was originally used to instruct boys and young men of the aristocracy in the proper positions for fencing and other military maneuvers. Ballets, when staged for court entertainment, were not the intimately enclosed presentations seen today on a stage; they were lavish and elaborate productions, often presented outdoors and for days on end, and employing whole battalions of soldiers, in addition to choreographed herds of stampeding horses, to create rigidly defined yet flowing patterns of movement representing the virtues of discipline and order. Women were not central to these displays of militaristic action. Men were the first ballet dancers, dancing female roles en travesti and wearing masks; at the beginning, ballet belonged to men, almost exclusively.
The star dancers were the kings themselves, and there was no challenging the status quo. Louis XIII (1601–1643) both danced and wrote ballets, among them Le Ballet de la Merlaison, which he created in 1635, casting himself in a comedic part. Louis XIV (1638–1715) was an even more committed balletomane, one of the art form’s great practitioners; he made his debut in 1651, at age thirteen, in Le Ballet de Cassandre. Louis XV (1710–1774) also danced and was a keen observer of the goings-on at the Paris Opéra. Louis XVI (1754–1793), however, appears to have abstained from dancing and even attending dance performances, which might help to explain his lack of popularity among the people. During his reign, ballet was not an integral part of court life; it flourished more on the professional stage, performed by men and women of low rank. Ballet’s golden age belonged to the time of Louis XIV, when ballet was truly a noble pursuit. Throughout his reign, Louis regarded ballet as a most serious art. He was both observer and die-hard practitioner, said to have danced as many as eighty roles in forty major ballets until his early retirement from performing when still in his thirties. His marriage to a pious queen who frowned upon ballet as unseemly for a king in middle age may have been why Louis stopped dancing: his body had given out. As a younger man, the king had excelled in fleet-footed sequences and airborne turns. At the same time as he lost his hair, he lost his stamina. To appear less than mighty when performing before his subjects would have been anathema to a king who had spread his reputation for invincibility on the wings of the ballet.
On one level, ballet represented an athletic pursuit for a pleasure-seeking king known to sequester himself inside a studio for up to six hours of daily practice. But ballet at the French court was also the means by which Louis maintained control over his courtiers. That need for control, which the discipline of ballet so forcefully represented, was a result of the violent upheavals of the Fronde, an attempted coup d’état by members of the nobility who wanted to challenge the existence of an absolutist French state. When Louis was just a boy, he was driven into temporary exile, together with First Minister Jules Mazarin, who reportedly had squandered “precious state resources on importing his beloved Italian dancers, singers, and designers to the French capital.” For Louis, this attempted rebellion was a traumatic occurrence he never forgot; it confirmed his belief that the nobility was a force whose energies needed to be carefully and calculatingly contained, much like the body when performing a ballet. Louis would craft himself as the choreographer, while his courtiers would serve as the performers of an intricately devised court dance in which the king would always play the central role.
Symbolizing the centrality of the king was a 1653 artistic and political tour-de-force, Le Ballet de la Nuit, which commenced at sunset and depicted a series of nocturnal scenes with mythological creatures representing chaos and destruction: the powers of darkness. At dawn, the fifteen-year-old Louis appeared as Apollo, Greek god of music, poetry, reason, and harmony. Befitting the god’s identification with Helios, bearer of light, the young king’s costume was aglitter with jewels. Louis was the sparkling center of a ballet symbolizing not only the ascendancy of his absolutist regime but also the role of the French king as a quasi-religious figure. Louis became known as the Sun King as a result of this role. At this time in history, ballet was the message. Being so favored, the art form grew in scope and authority throughout his reign.
Ballerina: Sex, Scandal and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection