On Assumptions and Invisibility

Despite good intentions, we are all complicit. Upon retrospect, when my book on the Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky came out in 2014, I really should not have agreed on the cover, which reproduced an illustration of the ballet Schéhérazade (first performed in 1910) by the French artist Georges Barbier.Footnote ¹ For me, Barbier's image was about how the Ballets Russes as a company is still represented—that is, the legacy of Orientalist readings of the Russians dancing who they really were when they thought they were representing their cultural others through broadly accepted stereotypes. However, for anyone else, the image simply reproduces a racist stereotype of a man in blackface kneeling in front of a white woman.

The man in the picture is Nijinsky, the Polish-Russian figurehead of the company, known for his virtuosic dancing; the woman is Ida Rubinstein, the Jewish actress known for such femme fatale roles, not her dancing skills. In terms of contemporary theories on race, there is a strange discord of who represents what in this image: Nijinsky is white performing not-white; Rubinstein is not-white performing white. However, although Rubinstein's Jewishness is frequently mentioned in research (e.g., Vertinsky Reference Vertinsky2014), the fact that Nijinsky is in blackface is never discussed as a fundamentally racist trope. Similarly, dance scholars have repeatedly noted the anti-Semitic prejudice in the reception of the Ballets Russes Orientalism, directed against the designer of Schéhérazade, Léon Bakst, but also against the prominent French Jews financing Diaghilev's enterprise.Footnote ² How the Golden Slave and numerous other blackface and brownface characters in the Ballets Russes repertory constantly escape notice perhaps indicates lack of sufficiently interested parties in the reception of the company, including research in which contemporary materials in Russian are also conspicuously absent. The power of the canon lies in forcing us into complicity at the face of offensive content.

My interest in canon formation originally led me to sources in Russian because these tell a remarkably different story of the Ballets Russes as a company than the one repeated time and again in the textbooks of dance and even much of academic research. In an overview of the first Ballets Russes season in Paris in May 1909, the critic of one of the leading theatrical papers in Russia wrote: “I have not encountered a single review in which, amidst all the compliments, there would not suddenly appear ‘furious, hoarse, wild, exotic, barbarian’ or some such expression” (‘N. N.’ Reference Noskov and Nikolaev1909, 359; my translation). The implication being that these were not words to be used of Russians; the critic also complained that this was not how Russian opera had been discussed the year before. Later, with Russian critics questioning both the aesthetic of and publicity for the Ballets Russes, it was in the interests of the Diaghilev coterie to buy into the Western Orientalizing rhetoric of the company. They did so wholeheartedly, denigrating Russian reviews as merely the outmoded opinions of a backward people, who did not understand the radical modernity of the artists involved in this export campaign of Russian art.Footnote ³ This latter version is what much of the subsequent research uncritically repeats.

Upon closer reading of prewar reviews in France and Britain in particular, the critic of Teatr i iskusstvo was more than prescient; from the first, something in the Ballets Russes catered to Western sense of cultural supremacy over Russia. Time and again, one encounters accolades in which the Russians are the last barbarians in Europe, as the novelist Jean-Louis Vaudoyer (Reference Vaudoyer1910) characterized them: people who had remained barbarians, left behind in time, as was their Julian calendar (quite literally “behind” the Gregorian in the twentieth century by thirteen days). The Russians were children, they were primitives, they were the opposite of the West, and their dancing was simply in their nature—and as such, beyond analysis.Footnote ⁴ Worse, it is precisely the critics most frequently cited in research who do this, using almost the same expressions of the dancing Russians as they would have used of any non-Europeans.

That “almost” is significant, here. In contemporary theories of race, Russians were definitely white. Even as the anti-Semitic prejudice against Bakst's designs proved the Russians’ Asiatic tendencies, it also emphasized how most of the company was acceptably white, if not quite as white as their audiences (e.g., Current Opinion 1913). Early twentieth-century racism in Europe rested on the biologized conflation of ethnicity, nation, and race, and consequent elaborate hierarchization of white races, plural, as superior to other races (e.g., Dyer Reference Dyer1997, esp. 11–13). Russia was in the East, and easily included in the Orient, especially given its unified landmass so unlike the Western European empires.

As subjects of an empire, second only to the British one in size, the Russian creators of the prewar Ballets Russes spectacles obviously thought that in works like Schéhérazade they were simply participating in the contemporary trend of Orientalism—fanciful representation of the East, distant in time and space—even if the location of their Orient differed from the respective Orients of Britain or France.Footnote ⁵ But as Vaudoyer's (Reference Vaudoyer1910) words reveal, they were frequently read as Orientals, as being of the Orient rather than representing it. As Edward Saïd ([1978] Reference Saïd1994, esp. 56–57) reminds us, the key characteristic of the Oriental in Orientalism is that they are silenced, rendered mute, exotic objects on display rather than as subjects with agency. In the corporeal roles of a silent art—dance—the Russians could be framed as “authentic” bodies, accurately expressing the Russians’ Orientality. For this reason, Russian critical opinion did not matter, and has not mattered since.

Through selective citation from the contemporary press and outright exclusion of contemporary Russian dance discourse, dance research has reproduced a power hierarchy in which the West speaks the truth for the rest. Time and again, we are told that the most insightful critics are precisely those who attributed the Russians’ creative processes to racial difference, as something that could not be emulated by Occidental minds and was therefore separate from the development of Western art (as with the frequently praised Jacques Rivière, see ‘J. R.’ Reference Rivière1913). The discourse is overdetermined by the voices of people for whom the Russian ballet was infantility, cruelty, barbarian luxury, foreign gestures, and feline flexibility in violent color and sheer insanity, to paraphrase Camille Mauclair's (Reference Mauclair1912a) specifications—authors who also tended to condemn any deviation thereof (Reference Mauclair1912b). Over the past century, this Orientalist preference for exoticization has resulted in a veritable rewriting of the history of the art form that severs the close ties of the Ballets Russes to ballet on contemporary European variety stages in favor of flimsy connections to American so-called pioneers of modern dance—a move that effectively positions America as the future of dance.Footnote ⁶

In picking the cover for my book, however, I failed to see that the racism evident in the blackface character of Nijinsky cannot substitute for this Orientalism because neither phenomenon is lodged somewhere back in time but continues to be present in the canonization of the company. In the following, I outline how blackface roles figure in two works used as exemplary of the Ballets Russes repertory in the canonical narrative, and how these figures conjoin with Orientalism and the Orientalization of Russia. The Golden Slave in Schéhérazade and the Blackamoor in Petrouchka stand out as focal characters around whom the plots of these celebrated ballets revolve. However, they are but the most prominent examples of blackface, a practice so commonplace in the Ballets Russes spectacles that it is confounding how research has not already addressed this topic in depth.Footnote ⁷ Building on postcolonialist theory, especially Achille Mbembe's (Reference Mbembe and Dubois2017, esp. 66–70) analysis of the three ways in which racial assignation functions, I argue that simple acknowledgement of blackface as a past, racist practice is insufficient to counteract the effects of the canon in the present. Because canons are upheld through repetition and re-performance, unconditional praising of ballets with stereotypically racist main characters also effectively reproduces their racism as unmarked and neutral, making research complicit in the continuation of the silent (white) approval of such hostile stereotypes. I end by proposing three strategies of resistance as starting points to critical engagement: naming willful ignorance for what it is; calling out scenarios of authenticity and modernity for the fictions that they are; and acknowledging that histories, plural, are unstable, political statements in the present for the future.

On Excusing Blackface I: The Whitening of the Orient

Spotting blackface hardly requires skills in Russian. As the Ballets Russes employed only white dancers, black characters like the Golden Slave of Schéhérazade or the Blackamoor in Petrouchka were danced by white dancers in blackface. However, when, in 2013, I pointed out to a senior colleague that no one has actually discussed Schéhérazade as a performance of blackface, they dismissed my concern: “But nobody performs Schéhérazade anymore!” Their argument was that the work is too racist to be performed, which certainly should be the case: the ballet revolves around the threat of miscegenation and the illicit fondling of white women by black men, and culminates in the death of the transgressors. Unfortunately, it is a repertory staple, especially for Russian companies; the Mariinsky company, for example, currently performs this ballet in an evening of one-act works by Mikhail Fokine.Footnote ⁸

However, even if Schéhérazade was not still present on ballet stages, its status as a masterpiece gives it currency in the dance discourse, to the extent that it is uncritically referenced in new work.Footnote ⁹ Such re-performances rely on the canonical status of the work in the broader discourse of dance. In addition to dance critics referencing these works as canonical masterpieces, the numerous centennial celebrations of the Ballets Russes 2009 onward have all reproduced the designs and photographs of the 1910 production in academic conferences and symposia, in museum exhibits and catalogues, in apparel, posters, and postcards, in advertisements, press materials, reviews, and puff pieces of all these. The reproduction cycle of the canon constantly re-performs the blackface characters as acceptable, even as exemplary performances in works deemed “masterpieces” in the dance canon. For over a century, these re-performances have established Schéhérazade as the epitome of the Parisian Orientalism of the Ballets Russes. Each performed return to a purported masterwork also restages its inherent racism as integral to the canon of the art form precisely because the re-performances are silent on this unnerving aspect of what is being reproduced.

Because of the status of the Ballets Russes in the canons of dance, in fine art, and in music, blackface is more than “a necessary evil” in a past work or a sign of “a different time.” At best, reviews and research alike excuse re-performances of blackface as remainders, as historical documents of an otherwise exemplary work of the prewar Ballets Russes aesthetic. Yes, without the blackface figure of the Golden Slave, the history would not be representative of the company; but why is naming the figure as a blackface stereotype seemingly impossible? After all, both scholars and audiences have long been critical of the precedents that Schéhérazade emulated: “black” slave figures populated Marius Petipa's La Fille du Pharaon (1862, set in Egypt); Le Roi Candaule (1868, set in Lydia [Turkey]); La Bayadère (1877, set in India); and Le Talisman (1889, also set in India), amongst others (see e.g., Ziter Reference Ziter2003; Issiyeva Reference Issiyeva2013). As the formal debt of the Ballets Russes to this tradition (known as “old ballet” in Russia) has been comprehensively outlined in research (e.g., Scholl Reference Scholl1994), one could reasonably expect any analysis of the genealogy of Orientalism or intertextual references in the Ballets Russes repertory to discuss the blackface legacy as well. Over the past decade, the stereotypically racist characters of ballets like The Nutcracker—that most popular ballet on American stages, as Jennifer Fisher (Reference Fisher2003) has attested—have been repeatedly called out for such racist representation (e.g., Angyal Reference Angyal2010; Robb Reference Robb2014; Culp Reference Culp2017), so the questions remain: What makes the Ballets Russes exempt from criticism? Why have the reproductions of Bakst's designs or photographs of dancers in blackface roles not been called out when displayed in recent exhibitions?

One reason for this critical silence may be the apparently easy distinction of Schéhérazade as staged today from the blackface version of the 1910s. As with re-performances of Les Danses Polovtsiennes and other Orientalist Fokine works with brownface characters,Footnote ¹⁰ the dark brown body paint used for the Golden Slave—as well as for the Chief Eunuch and the other black slaves in this imagined harem—has all but disappeared in present-day versions. Today, the darker skin of the principal male dancer seems more akin to the muscular, tanned whiteness of bodybuilders and peplum films, as discussed by Richard Dyer (Reference Dyer1997, esp. 48–51, 162–165), or to representations of Latin-ness that Juliet McMains (Reference McMains2001) has called brownface in competitive dancing. In the harsh stage lighting, the (artificially) tanned male muscles show to their advantage, but they are also read as emphasizing the “maleness” of the dancer in comparison to the whiteness and “fragility” of the women led on or symbolically ravished by these macho stereotypes.

As Dyer (Reference Dyer1997, esp. 48–51, 70–80, 162–165) notes, the tanned body in peplum films is analogous to the colonialist project in which whiteness is ascribed to a body as a rarefied and endangered status, threatened by the nonwhite Other. However, as white is a noncolor, its application to racial categorization results in complex gradation, a multiplicity that not only strengthens the hegemony of the white over the nonwhite but establishes a hierarchy within whiteness of those white and those not-white-enough. This multiplicity of whiteness, in turn, confuses the simple categories of “race” still prevalent in the American discourse, drawing attention to “race” as a fundamentally white fantasy of dominance (Gilroy Reference Gilroy2000, esp. 12–23; Mbembe Reference Mbembe and Dubois2017, esp. 173–177). McMains (Reference McMains2001, 55) similarly points to how dancesport is steeped in “eurocentrism and white-dominated systems of logic by which the industry is structured,” including a kind of privileged borrowing of affective characteristics associated with nonwhite ethnicity.

The slippery plurality of what counts as whiteness that Dyer and McMains discuss draws attention to how the whitening of the Golden Slave has not affected the staged othering of these roles. Although issues with early twentieth-century dance photography are well-known, a comparison of twenty-first-century productions to surviving images shows where the choreographed otherness—brown or black, Oriental or Moor—is effectively independent of skin tone and costume. The choreographic othering takes place through the grotesque in character dance (exaggerated en dehors movement, “broken” lines of the body), a deliberate rejection of the ideals of classical roles. Splayed fingers or exaggerated gesticulation (including facial expressions like leering), also apparent in the re-performances of these parts, are similarly transgressions of what is considered aesthetically appropriate in ballet.Footnote ¹¹ In other words, choreography already others such roles through gesture and composition that no amount of whitening or changes in costuming can erase. Such othering is particularly apparent in works like Schéhérazade in which the music does not support the plot of the ballet.Footnote ¹²

To praise such gesticulation as particularly truthful to the character or as requiring excellent acting skills, merely strengthens the underlying formal argument whereby these gestures, expressions, and movement qualities are “wrong” for the art form—the reason they are used for blackface characters representing the ultimate Other of ballet. After all, in the 1910s, the opposite of ballet in the dance discourse was not modern dance but the Afrodiasporic syncopated rhythms of ragtime. The contemporary rhetorical distinction created between the (race-appropriate) staged “natural” dancing, especially the dancing by whites of their cultural others, or ballet, and the seedy underside of the metropolis ruled by ragtime (as outlined in, e.g., Caffin and Caffin Reference Caffin and Caffin1912, 259–278) begs the question of how much of the Ballets Russes required the blackface roles to emphasize commitment to a racialized aesthetic of whiteness through distinguishing themselves from contemporary popular dance culture.Footnote ¹³

Historically speaking, the lightening of the Golden Slave's skin began in 1916, when the Ballets Russes toured the United States. The narrative of Schéhérazade punishes the illicit sex between the Golden Slave and the Sultana, Zobéïde—the Sultan, Schahriar, kills the slave, and the Sultana kills herself to deprive her husband the pleasure of murdering her. The scenario titillated not just by equating the Orient with sex, violence, and the femme fatale, but by replaying the threat of miscegenation for almost exclusively white audiences—and did so in a fashion that did not conform to American minstrelsy tropes, which guarded against transgressions of the color line. In a racially segregated country, Schéhérazade was too indecent and incendiary, even for advocates of the company; within days of its first performances, the management had to concede to change the hue of the blackface characters to a lighter shade of brown (more in Järvinen Reference Järvinen2010, 84–85, 100 nn. 25–27).

However, there is no evidence that the change was permanent, nor that audiences would have stopped reading the Golden Slave as anything but a stereotypical blackface male role. Although the Orientalism of Schéhérazade gradually went out of style, images of dancers in this role from the 1930s and 1940s still show them in full blackface.Footnote ¹⁴ It is rather curious that now that the racism of blackface has become less acceptable, the body paint of the Ballets Russes blackface figures has literally become invisible; many recent online descriptions of the character claim he is covered in “gold body paint,”Footnote ¹⁵ altogether erasing the preeminence of blackface roles in the Ballets Russes productions and severing the connection between an offensive practice and the black-and-white reproductions of Nijinsky and other celebrated dancers in blackface. This is an indication of how canonization protects white fragility by silencing and outright eliminating disconcerting evidence and criticism of the practice.

On Excusing Blackface II: The Modernist Masterpiece

The excusing of Schéhérazade as a product of its time indicates how blackface is often discussed as antithetical to modernity, a remnant of earlier times, even when contemporary politicians get caught wearing blackface “for fun.” For this reason, it is curious that another ballet with a principal blackface character is focal in the discourse of the modernity of the Ballets Russes company. Unlike Schéhérazade, which relied on (parts of) the preexisting symphonic work by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Petrouchka (1911) is canonized as a masterpiece of modernism in both ballet and in music, given Diaghilev commissioned Igor Stravinsky's famous score.Footnote ¹⁶ In the canonical history in which Schéhérazade is represented as the best example of Oriental splendor by the Ballets Russes, Petrouchka gets to epitomize the modernity of this company, firmly lodging it in the sphere of the avant-garde.

Like Schéhérazade, Petrouchka is rich in its intertextual connections, references to works like the Petipa–Tchaikovsky Nutcracker, to Russian popular and modernist theater (notably Aleksandr Blok's Balaganchik (Braun [1979] Reference Braun1995, 61–68), possibly even to Commedia dell'Arte (Bowden Reference Bowden and Adshead-Lansdale1999). Most notably, it ransacks the Saint-Léon–Nuittier–Delibes Coppélia, which also has a saber-wielding Moor character in the second act (Austin Reference Austin2016, 75–79). Unlike Schéhérazade, Petrouchka fulfils the conditions of an original work in all its aspects, from music and libretto to sets, costumes, and choreography, even if the legend of how its creators joined forces to ensure the creation of a total work of art is, at best, an exaggeration. As modernism, however, the work is attributed with timelessness: a masterpiece significant in the ever-shifting now, not just at the time of its making, or of the time that it represents in the manner of Schéhérazade. Petrouchka has been repeatedly praised for having a transtemporal quality that allows new audiences to appreciate the struggle of the eponymous main character as “universal” (e.g., Austin Reference Austin2016, 81–82). Through the association with modernism, Petrouchka is thus freed from being considered merely a product of its time in the manner of Schéhérazade.

However, as with Schéhérazade's Golden Slave, at the heart of the plot of Petrouchka is a blackface character of the most racist kind: the idiot Blackamoor, the stereotypical stupid black brute. If the Golden Slave is the threat of the oversexualized black man who has to be killed at the end of the work because he has sullied the white woman, the Blackamoor is the threat of the killer, the primitive Other, the rebellious slave who would not remain content with his lot. Together, these characters are, as Stuart Hall (Reference Hall and Hall1997, esp. 262–264) has shown, the two most common negative stereotypes about black masculinity that still haunt the lives of black men. Just as the narrative of Schéhérazade is about the erotic titillation of a black slave fondling his white mistress, the plot of Petrouchka hinges on the behavior of the Blackamoor, who is the object of desire for the Ballerina character, and who the kills the eponymous hero also in pursuit of the Ballerina. (The Ballerina, of course, is the sole character without a room of her own and no agency beyond desiring the Moor.) From the perspective of the twenty-first century, if Schéhérazade embodies the white supremacist fear of miscegenation, the eponymous hero of Petrouchka is an incel troll.Footnote ¹⁷

How the Blackamoor has figured in research effectively makes visible how much of the appraisal of modernism in dance rests on presumed whiteness of this modernism—how black dance is still segregated from white with decidedly racist overtones, and how whiteness is assumed unmarked and neutral (e.g., Manning Reference Manning and Lepecki2004). The one book solely on this ballet, Petrouchka: Sources and Contexts, edited by Andrew Wachtel, briefly notes that both the Moor and the Magician (called in English sources “Charlatan”) are Oriental characters (Wachtel Reference Wachtel and Wachtel1998, 27). However, given the Moor's focal role in the work, the authors are quite silent about this role and, consequently, of their own celebration of a work with a blackface character. Tim Scholl (Reference Scholl and Wachtel1998, 46–49) sees the Moor's dance as a novel caricature of classical roles in ballet but not as a racist caricature of black people—he simply does not go there. Janet Kennedy (Reference Kennedy and Wachtel1998, 63) discusses the Moor's chamber as a reference to Matisse, and sees the fact that one of Benois's sketches explicitly titles it a “zoo” as hailing Benois's childhood visits to the Shrovetide fair, completely ignoring the association made between people of African descent and animals in racist rhetoric, and the displaying of exotic others on European fairgrounds (cf. Eichberg Reference Eichberg, Teich and Porter1990).

This erasure of the Moor's narrative position in the ballet is also painfully evident in music scholarship. In Richard Taruskin's Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, not only is the Blackamoor's blackness or behavior not an issue (Taruskin Reference Taruskin1996, 678–681), but the music of the third tableau deserves one mention (Taruskin Reference Taruskin1996, 1447) out of context of the rest of the discussion on this composition. This reads as evasion, because for anyone trained in classical music, the Moor's theme in low woodwinds and cymbals, especially as developed in the third tableau, characterizes the Moor as an Oriental and as a simpleton in ways as audible as the (slowly) dancing bear in the fourth tableau. The acoustic marking of similarity between the Blackamoor and the bear is as deliberate as the snakes on the walls of the Moor's room. Indeed, watching Tero Saarinen's (2001) or Mauro Bigonzetti's (2005) versions, I have been struck by how much Stravinsky's narrative music conditions the reading of the choreography; the music calls attention to how the male dancers take up space, how distinctly their masculinities are construed in movement, and in Bigonzetti's version, how Latin dance steps are used to distinguish between the two male roles.Footnote ¹⁸

The manner in which the Moor's theme clashes with the high, militaristic brass of the Ballerina's during their brief duet illustrates the characters’ mutual incompatibility. However, it also draws attention to the function of the Moor as everything Petrouchka is not: he is not Othello, a decent man despite being black; nor is he Harlequin, mischievous and witty (as Bowden Reference Bowden and Adshead-Lansdale1999, 37 claims). In the music, as in the narrative, he is set up as a bit slow, animallike, not modern. Whereas the audience is expected to identify with the suffering of Petrouchka, the Moor is set up to be laughed at as he attacks a coconut and, failing to crack it open, immediately prostrates himself in superstitious servitude.

Like the figure of the Golden Slave, the Moor's characterization does not derive from the stereotypes of American minstrelsy, which is not to say that blackface minstrels would not have figured in how racist representation functioned in Fokine's choreographies. After all, American minstrels, especially comic duos, had been performing in major European cities at least since the 1870s as part of the wider adaptation of the international variety theater act circuit (Gerstner Reference Gerstner2017, 183–191). If anything, the presence of such racist representations on contemporary stages normalized them for audiences of the 1910s. However, it is notable that, prior to the First World War, the Ballets Russes did not reference stereotypical “deepest Africa” narratives common both in minstrelsy and in African-American ragtime, and all but one of their works (the Nijinsky–Debussy Jeux, 1913) were explicitly set in the distant past.Footnote ¹⁹ As the name of the character suggests, the Blackamoor of Petrouchka was built primarily on a much older European Islamophobic tradition of blackface—and this Orientalizing context is what made the figure similar to the Golden Slave.

In early modern Europe, “Moors” and black Africans had figured in Catholic Nativity scenes and were staged as jealous Venetian officers and fierce Saracen pirates. Over centuries, this blackface performance tradition even colonialized some of the self-representations of African and Afrodiasporic people.Footnote ²⁰ For Russians, the “Moor” (арап) was literally an Arab, and primarily associated with the (Orthodox) Christians’ fight against Islam—a Spanish Reconquista imagined onto the conflicts against the Ottoman Turks on the Balkan Peninsula that continued well into the twentieth century. In the decade prior to the First World War, Russia's interest in the Black Sea access to the Mediterranean contributed to the wars in the Balkans, staged by Panslavists as Russian defense of southern Slavs and by Western observers as evidence of Russian expansionism—or the Eastern tendency to warmongering, Russian and Turk painted with the same Orientalizing brush (Hobsbawm [1987] Reference Hobsbawm1989, esp. 312–315; Kern [1983] Reference Kern2000, 252; Lieven Reference Lieven2000, 128–130, 134, 228). The rhetoric of “the conquest” of the West by the Ballets Russes and their original state support from the empire's coffers predisposed critics to see correspondences between Diaghilev's company and Russian actions in the Balkans, if only in terms of military references and satire.Footnote ²¹ For Russians, the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774 during the reign of Catherine II the Great held particular symbolic import as a precedent to current imperialist politics in this part of Europe. Still seen as the era of Enlightenment in Russia, the Catherinian Era was also propagated by the circle around Diaghilev's Mir iskusstva magazine as exemplary of zapadnik (Westernizing) nationalism; the empress supported arts and sciences, including ballet, as well as colonialist expansion.Footnote ²² Enlightenment Orientalism also served as the visual model for both the blackface figures discussed in this article.

As Achille Mbembe (Reference Mbembe and Dubois2017, esp. 66–70) has analyzed, the logic of racial assignation functions in three interlinked ways: first, through occultation and denial that emerge as willful ignorance on the part of the white spectator; second, through restoration and disguise that relegate the other's otherness into the realm of the unpresentable; and third, through frivolity and exoticism that marginalize the Other as spectacle through disguise. Mbembe's example of all three is the character of the black slave in a feathered turban that is such a staple in colonialist representation, especially from the eighteenth century onward. Although Mbembe focuses on the French colonialist project, Russian nobility, too, acquired black slaves as status symbols and signs of their own whiteness (Novikova Reference Novikova, Raiford and Raphael-Hernandez2017, esp. 33–37). One such representation that both Léon Bakst, the designer responsible for Schéhérazade, and Aleksandr Benois, the designer and librettist of Petrouchka, may well have seen is a 1743 equestrian portrait of Empress Elizabeth of Russia with a black page by Georg Christoph Grooth (Reference Grooth1743)—a painting in the collection of the Hermitage Museum.

Benois painted a series of images the Empress Elizabeth (see e.g., Benois Reference Benois1903), but it is the manner in which he represents the Blackamoor in his two 1906 paintings The Bathing Marquise (Benois [Reference Benois1906] and image in Mamedova, Reference Mamedovan.d.), set in the same period, that give lie to any pretense that the characters of Petrouchka would have arisen as a critique or irony of Bakst's Schéhérazade. In both paintings, a leering Blackamoor is positioned as a voyeur in the shrubbery as an eighteenth-century noblewoman bathes in a pool of a formal garden in the French style. Even before these paintings that associate the Blackamoor character explicitly with the threat of miscegenation, Benois had already used the figure to conjoin racism with both the Enlightenment and enlightening children; in his 1904 Azbuka or ABC Book, the letter A is illustrated by a black page, Arap (Blackamoor). The Arap is almost identical to Benois's later designs for the eponymous character in Petrouchka (Taruskin Reference Taruskin1996, 679; Kennedy Reference Kennedy and Wachtel1998; Novikova Reference Novikova, Raiford and Raphael-Hernandez2017). Having accompanied the reader throughout the book, at the very end of the Azbuka, the Arap is shown not having learned that much as he scribbles in his bad handwriting about learning to read and write Russian—very poorly.Footnote ²³ The crooked mirror to the assumed diligent student, the Arap's judgment is placed in doubt; he is not “mischievous” as Kennedy (Reference Kennedy and Wachtel1998, 58) claims but unaware of his errors and self-aggrandizing, epitomized by his widespread stance and exaggerated gesticulation. These same gestures are repeated in Fokine's choreography for the Blackamoor (Fokine Reference Fokine, Fokine and Chujoy1961, esp. 192).

Like the Arap, the ballet's blackface character is un-Enlightened, ruled not by reason and learning but by violence, instinct, and superstition—according to Benois ([1941] Reference Benois and Britnieva1945, 326), “the embodiment of everything senselessly attractive, powerfully masculine and undeservedly triumphant.” In contrast to the rebellious Petrouchka, the Moor is a happy slave to the Magician, ready to subjugate himself if defeated—by an inanimate object, no less. Anything he might attain by his violence is, according to the designer, undeserved. The choreographer Fokine (Reference Fokine, Fokine and Chujoy1961, 185) agreed: “The Moor is the personification of the stupid self-satisfaction of the extrovert, the happy-go-lucky pet of fortune.” Together with the full objectification of the Ballerina (who is well-nigh absent in the accounts by Benois and Fokine), this emphasis on the Moor's success as not his due but nevertheless emphasizing the failures of the insufficiently masculine Petrouchka character, aligns the narrative with white suprematist and incel rhetorics of the twenty-first century.

Before returning to Mbembe's analysis, it is crucial to note how these blackface characters signify in Russia, today. The tones of imperialist expansion not unrelated to beliefs in Russian exceptionalism have made the Ballets Russes a particularly apt symbol for Russian neo-nationalism. For Russian fans of ballet today, the Fokine choreographies are a new addition to the official canon, part of the new post-Soviet discourse of the early twentieth-century conquest of the West by Diaghilev's company. Specifically, these works are a source of national pride because they are represented as showing Russian art to have been in advance of Europe at the time.Footnote ²⁴ Whereas the Petipa tradition of Orientalism was never in question in Russia, the fame of Fokine and the Ballets Russes was resuscitated as part of the postcommunist reevaluation of Russian cultural legacy in the 1990s. The Fokine works became the epitome of the so-called silver age of the turn of the twentieth century—artists and works that the Communist Party had viewed with a great deal of suspicion.

The significance of the Ballets Russes to the new nationalist ideology about Russia's role in world history is nowhere more evident than in the framing narrative around the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, which opened with a film showing the Russian alphabet (see Ernst Reference Ernst2014). In this alphabet, the letter и (i) stands for imperiia (empire); and the letter р (r) for Russkii balet Diaghilego, Diaghilev's company. The only reference to dance in the film, this effectively makes the Diaghilev troupe the penultimate representation of Russian dance and ballet—the incongruous image of ballerinas in tutus accompanying the letter only emphasizes this reinterpretation. Irina Anisimova (Reference Anisimova2018, esp. 141–142) rightly characterizes this appropriation of artists who made their careers outside of Russia as typical of the conservative and imperialist ideology of “the Russian world,” “an imagined diasporic community united by ideals of culture and language,” which has been used to justify Russian (military) interventions beyond its territory.

Moreover, the alphabet around which the story is told is explicitly framed as that of the Aleksandr Benois's Azbuka, seen at the very beginning in the hands of a suitably blond little girl. One copy of this book, now at the Houghton Library, used to belong to Princess Anastasia Romanova (Stinchcomb Reference Stinchcomb2014). Whether any association to the Romanovs is intentional in the film or not, knowing the connection exists makes it difficult not to see Liubov (Love) as connoting the family quite literally canonized in Russia in 2000. Benois follows the Arap with the fairy-tale witch Baba Yaga, but in the Olympics version, the turbaned black page is followed by ч for чучело, probably because this image includes a (stuffed) bear, a symbol for Russia (as in the mascot of the 1980 Moscow Olympics). The pages then flip, and the filmed alphabet arises, only to conclude in я, the last letter of the alphabet that is also the Russian first person singular. First seen on Liubov's T-shirt, я becomes the last letter of Россия (Russia) as the girl takes her place in a group of six equally white and blond kids. This all-white Russia in jeans and T-shirts is striking in contrast to Soviet representations of the multiethnic imagined community of the Communist international. If anything, this journey to the “I” of “love” recalls the affective economy of white supremacist love as discussed by Sarah Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2004). How the Ballets Russes figures in the neo-nationalist discourse explains something of why Russian companies in particular still unabashedly celebrate works with blackface figures. It also evinces that ballet discourses are never just about formal characteristics of dance or the knowledgeable discourses of critics and scholars.

On the Turbaned Other: Racial Assignation and Disguise

Of Mbembe's three interlinked ways of racial assignation, the re-performances of blackface characters and the discourse surrounding them exemplifies willful ignorance on the part of the white spectator. The evasions that take place when ballet aficionados are confronted by the fact of their condoning and propagating the normalcy of racist behavior (as in Fisher Reference Fisher and Davida2011, 58) are symptomatic of this first point. Any insistence upon necessity or importance of “accuracy” and “authenticity” of staged representation, or upon exceptions to the rule as making the rule irrelevant (like Frederic Frank's 1981 Schéhérazade for The Dance Theatre of Harlem), function as excuses to continue this status quo—a situation dictated by white voices for presumably white audiences in institutions dominated by white norms (as in Tobias Reference Tobias1981).

As feminist canon-critical researchers have noted (Nochlin Reference Nochlin1989b, esp. 145–158; Citron Reference Citron1993, esp. 19–22; DeNora Reference DeNora1995, 5–8, 186–191), hegemonies perpetuate themselves by assimilation of alternative interpretations as much as through excluding or silencing them. Any postcolonialist critique of a colonialist work, for example, tends to be either dismissed as irrelevant to the transcendent value of the artwork or as merely individual opinion, at best marginal and at worst outright misinterpretation of the master narrative. To be critical of the canon to the extent of calling out racism or sexism is therefore to risk one's career and position within the discipline, an intimidating prospect even for someone with privilege.

In dance, the conservative justifications for upholding the canon resolve into arguments about guarding the authors’ intent and legacy in performances that seek to preserve whatever is understood as “the authentic and the original work” for future generations. Little is usually said of how such efforts frame blackface as a formal characteristic; the claim that these works are, effectively, “classics” impervious to criticism, which should be taught because of their inherent aesthetic value, normalizes the racist order. “Classical” here refers not to an opposition to modernism as style or ideology but rather to an attitude whereby no true learning can take place without accepting the aesthetic superiority of particular masterpieces, seen as particularly characteristic of an important choreographic author and/or instrumental to later developments in the art form (Genné Reference Genné2000, esp. 133–134). In excusing offensive representation by recourse to “tradition,” on the other hand, recalls similar arguments made in the Dutch case of Black Piter (see Wekker Reference Wekker2016, 139–167) or the contested blackface figure of the King of the Moors in the Nordic Star Boys plays—cases that are fundamentally about the power of representation.

The Golden Slave and the Blackamoor, the Black Piter and the King of the Moors, and the Sultan of Schéhérazade and the Magician of Petrouchka are all costumed alike: bedecked with luxurious fabrics, turbans and jewelry, especially pearls. Their repertory of gestures and affects is similarly limited to the colonialist imagination in which representations of blackface are not understood as having effects on lives of black people and black communities (Hall Reference Hall and Hall1997, esp. 271–276; Wekker Reference Wekker2016, esp. 153–157). As such, they represent what Mbembe, in his third point about racial assignation, calls marginalization through disguise. By being set apart through Orientalized costume, the character is likened with the costume's material properties and easily objectified. However, the costume and the makeup of the blackface figure do more than the turban of the eighteenth-century page. The exotic dress now trivializes the character, evident in how all these figures are represented as either meant for children, reproducing children's entertainment, or requiring a childish mindset of joy and delight. In reality, of course, their purpose is to indoctrinate those who have not yet accepted prejudice as truth, to train parents and children alike in the expected response to a black(face) figure—dehumanization and dismissal through laughter, horror, or both (see e.g., Wekker Reference Wekker2016, 150–152 on the “children's entertainment” defense). What is rendered unpresentable—Mbembe's second point—is the humanity of the character stripped of agency in the name of “tradition” and “truthful” or “authentic” representation that are never traditions, truthful, or authentic from the perspective of black individuals. Willful ignorance then excuses this degradation, refusing the Other all agency and conflating them with preexisting stereotypes designed to focus attention on the excellence of white people.

Safeguarded by the willful ignorance of the white spectator, this unpresentable and yet trivialized blackness of the Blackamoor character is emblematic of the racism prevailing in the dance canon. The choreography of the black body's otherness in relation to the normative whiteness surrounding it on stage goes beyond skin tone or dress. Drawing attention to the colorful dress of the Golden Slave or the fanciful décor of the Blackamoor's surroundings effectively directs attention away from how bodies are choreographed to represent a stereotype and, in the case of Petrouchka, composed on the level of the music to be read in a particular, stereotypical way that prohibits individuality. Brown makeup to darken the skin of the dancer, or, in more recent examples, typecasting a nonwhite dancer (as with Carlos Acosta's Golden Slave in the 2013 Classical Selection performances of Schéhérazade in London or Shevelle Dynott's Moor in the English National Ballet 2009 Petrouchka) can never dismantle the racism of the choreographic and narrative dimensions of these works. On the contrary, typecasting makes the dancer complicit in racist representation and, at its worst, enables a reading in which the racist stereotype can be attested as “truthful” by the nonwhite body dancing the role.Footnote ²⁵

To elaborate a little further on Mbembe's analysis, any canon of art functions to deny its inherent racism and reliance on the colonial Other as the provider of exotic materiality that still is bare materiality without agency. As in the portrait of Empress Elizabeth (Grooth Reference Grooth1743), the slave's body is a status symbol, a property without a proper name—in other words, the Golden Slave and the Blackamoor are not coincidentally but emblematically unnamed. The slave, as Mbembe (Reference Mbembe and Dubois2017, 36, 153) points out, never has a right to a name. Defined solely by their role, their relationship to whiteness, none of the slave characters in the prewar Ballets Russes works had names (in Petrouchka, Petrouchka is, in effect, the only character with a name). Unlike Zobéïde and unlike Petrouchka, even beyond program notes, the Golden Slave and the Blackamoor are clearly and fundamentally deprived of agency in the narrative; they do not act but rather react to their surroundings.

If contemporary sources naturalize the blackface character as a black character, in that no distinction is made between character and racial epithet in program notes and reviews,Footnote ²⁶ in scholarship, the erasure of blackface takes place in outright erasure of the purported race of the character or worse, conflation of the character with the white dancer. The metaphors used in primary sources and reminiscences to describe Nijinsky's or Orlov's representation of black otherness—bestiality, danger, lack of refinement and control—now populate research. Characterizations of Nijinsky as “wild and uncontrolled” (Bellow Reference Bellow2013, 38) “sex incarnate, … erotic primitive” (Garafola Reference Garafola1989, 32, 33) even ascribe the role as illustrative of the “self” of its original performer along the same lines that Fokine (Reference Fokine, Fokine and Chujoy1961, 155–156) copying Beaumont (Reference Beaumont and Montenegro1913, 1–3) did. Nowhere is this conflation of the role with the dancer's self more evident than in the queer reading of the Diaghilev company in which the performance of Nijinsky as the Golden Slave becomes a performance from which we can learn nonhegemonic masculinity.Footnote ²⁷ That the character is also a stereotypical representation of black masculinity is not even worth a mention, as fans laud whatever they imagine Nijinsky to have been on stage and off. For Kevin Kopelson (Reference Kopelson1997, 61), the Golden Slave is Nijinsky, “a tragic early gay death” instead of a spectacle of violent murder of a black character. In a similar vein, Michael Moon also equates Nijinsky with his roles, representing the dancer as virtually Diaghilev's slave, his mental illness caused by the open secret of living in a closet:

Whereas in primary sources Nijinsky is the quintessential minstrel, supreme in his channeling of nonwhite maleness, in reminiscences and research he is conflated with the slave and, specifically, Diaghilev's slave (a trope largely due to Grigoriev Reference Grigoriev and Bowen1953, 32). “Nijinsky” thus becomes mere material for erotic fantasy, an object to be used or discarded at will. With the historical person rendered inarticulate, as silent as his art form,Footnote ²⁸ any desires can be projected onto his absent body, which Kopelson (Reference Kopelson1997, 66), in a characteristically Orientalist move, claims both “ultra-natural” and “ultra-artificial,” the qualia of the gay, the balletic, and—as if to exemplify the hierarchy within the plurality of whiteness—the Russian. The artificially darkened skin of this allegedly natural dancer trained to the artifice of ballet is utterly invisible, erased from the analysis of a performance the researcher imagines from photographs of said blackface role. Instead, the exotic, dancing Russian is noble savagery peeking under the layer of silks, the quintessential slave subjected to the researcher's dominating gaze and sexual imagination, as once more the artificiality of ballet masks the hypersexual beast within.

Strategies for Resistance?

The erasure of the racist underpinnings of celebrated works is epistemological violence. It raises the question: What is so terrifying in the blackface figures of the Golden Slave and the Blackamoor that they cannot be critically encountered in research? Fundamentally, what is at stake, here, is what the Ballets Russes actually justifies in the canon of dance, that list of “works everyone should know” in which the nature of this knowing is indexical, not epistemological. The canonical work is deemed canonical through a circular argument that explicates how the work (and its designated author) deserves attention precisely because it references earlier canonical works and is referenced in turn by later canonical works. Who selects what qualifies as worth inclusion or when and why such inclusion takes place is silenced. Although usually represented as such, canons are neither neutral, homogenous, nor unchanging. On the contrary, as Linda Nochlin (Reference Nochlin1989a, xvi, 33–59) has noted, canonization is fundamentally a colonialist endeavor seeking to legitimize cultural imperialism. Merely adding to the canon cannot therefore counteract the power hierarchies producing and upholding canonicity of some but not others, as it obscures how the canon reflects the discriminatory structures of professional art making and the accompanying ideological assumptions about propriety, creativity, genius, and so on (Nochlin Reference Nochlin1989a; Battersby [1989] Reference Battersby1994, esp. 10–13).

In art dance, the canon dictates what of the past gets remembered, re-rehearsed, and re-performed—in other words, whose works get given the necessary time and funding of preserving them in the repertory and which works become reference points in histories of the art form. In this regard, what substantiates the Ballets Russes as “vanguard” and justifies their importance is the exclusion of contemporary women ballet choreographers through the myth that ballet prior to Diaghilev was in “decline” and that only this company made ballet art again, at a time when the future of art dance was epitomized by American pioneers like Isadora Duncan. As Sarah Gutsche-Miller (Reference Gutsche-Miller2015) has shown, historical source materials do not bear out either part of this myth; nonballetic art dance was not an American invention, and ballet was not seen to be in decline by critics who actually followed dance. Russian critics were, in fact, quick to note that French accolades of the Ballets Russes came from authors uninterested in dance as an art form. Conversely, the company's impact abroad was kept marginal precisely because their art was seen in racial terms, at the end of the regular theatrical season, and as apart from the local discourse on dance (Järvinen Reference Järvinen2008).

The reason this last argument is particularly pertinent is that, as Thomas DeFrantz has succinctly put it, over the past decade or so we have seen “a bourgeois retreat into travel to dance festivals and art galleries as a standard of dance research, and a displacement of progressive minoritarian performance practices for the sake of a new canon of (unmarked) white dance artistry” (Reference DeFrantz2007, 189–190) In the light of the Eurocentricity of what qualifies as “vanguard” in the art form, and the manner in which this vanguard performance is supported by (white male European) philosophical tradition in dance scholarship, decolonialization of the discourse as well as the practice is more than urgent. It is crucial that we note prejudices in how both performances and texts interpellate canons and, through this constant hailing, reinforce those earlier works’ canonical status, fixing them as edifices that should not be critically dismantled. Scholarship has to go beyond reading new work as referencing the already hegemonic white vanguard of dance, and recognize how aesthetic value is linked to economic and social value—not “neutral” but deeply embedded in formalist traditions of exclusion of the not-white-enough (see e.g., Jackson Reference Jackson and Adshead-Lansdale1999; Seetoo Reference Seetoo2013, x, 28, 44; Gutierrez Reference Gutierrez2018).

Revealing how not only representation but academic research is characterized by willful ignorance is but a first step in resisting the canon. Tracing out the long lineage of racism masked as Russian ingenuity, the Orientalism of Bakst or Benois turned into a representation of Oriental authenticity and artistic genius, and a repertory that keeps circulating racist representations as natural and unquestioned—these all reflect a larger question of how white bodies in ballet are represented as neutral and somehow “unmarked,” much as in philosophy in which the white male body is the standard by which everyone else is measured (Dabashi Reference Dabashi2015, 30–36). Because of the prevalence of the “classical” conservative modes of thinking, the hegemonic histories of the hegemonic dance form that receives the majority of both sponsorship and public funding is in dire need of rewriting and restaging, a decolonializing practice that would, for example, combat the constant erasure of already existing histories of black dancing bodies (e.g., Howard Reference Howard2015; Bourne Reference Bourne and Akinleye2018) or institutional barriers (Brown Reference Brown2018) contributing to the whiteness of the form.

To counteract occultation and denial, it is therefore necessary to make visible how “modernity” is defined in dance and in ballet in a manner that represents the racialized Other as mere material for white authors in the Eurocentric idiom. How past works representing contemporary life or imagined futures have been represented as unworthy of serious attention, while repertories churn out new versions of the fantastic, exotic, and retrospective tradition in support of colonialism or “the Russian world.” Historical references and historical narratives are too often seen as conditioning what can and cannot be claimed of the past when in actuality history is always written in the present for the future. In Eurocentric forms like ballet, it is the archive, not the repertoire, that can contest the canon.

If the first strategy is naming, the second strategy could be calling out scenarios of authenticity and modernity as toxic fictions. “Ethnographic authenticity,” regularly used as a justification for canonization of works of art that exemplify racist, sexist, and colonialist attitudes toward the Other, simply excuses racist, sexist, and colonialist attitudes. For example, Fokine is praised for the “ethnographic authenticity” of the dances he composed: “In these ballets Fokine worked primarily as an ethnographer,” writes Garafola (Reference Garafola1989, 12) of the choreographer's 1906–1918 character dance work. As with similar anecdotes told of Denishawn (Shawn Reference Shawn1929, esp. xi), the stories of Fokine's travels (including Fokine Reference Fokine, Fokine and Chujoy1961, esp. 56–59) not only reproduce precisely the power structures that recent ethnographic theorizations have sought to contest, but they also mark the dances of the Other as something to be picked up in a matter of days, often in contrast to the years of arduous training required of understanding white forms of dance such as ballet. As such, they treat all corporeal knowledges as subsets of European ballet or American modern dance paradigm, and simultaneously relegate all other forms of dance as the subject of ethnochoreology, not art.

Through the idea of modernism, further occultation of racism occurs in the discourse, because modernity is, historically speaking, entangled with European colonialism; the colonies both enabled European modernity and were justified through the need for modernization (as bringing this European modernity to the colonies). Modernism as an aesthetic paradigm, although seemingly about aesthetics of form, is equally indebted to colonialism. The reappropriation of ukiyo-e, the Floating World, by impressionist painters; the exotic Other of Gauguin's Tahiti; or the so-called primitive masks so lauded in the paintings of Picasso and yet simultaneously eroded as merely ethnographic objects, not art—formal innovation is the colonial Other regurgitated by the European singular authors. These examples from painting could well be from other arts; the arabesques of Debussy or The Heart of Darkness of Conrad (1899) could not have emerged except from this encounter, a fascination with the exotic that is still somehow frivolous, as Mbembe (Reference Mbembe and Dubois2017) points out, something practically forgotten in the name of originality, another fictional characteristic of the avant-garde, as Rosalind Krauss (Reference Krauss1988) has argued.

If the first strategy was naming the issue, and the second making the repeating scenarios visible and subject to criticism, the third strategy could be called a strategy of active resistance that involves epistemological and ethical questioning of the self. Any researcher, in their choice of topic, is bound to the canon by strings too often invisible and uncontested—such as my ill-advised choice of a cover image. This is what I meant by “being complicit”; becoming aware of the complexities involved in the formation of subject positions, the painful acknowledgement of years of indoctrination, is as crucial to understanding privilege as it is to any resistance.

As Dabashi (Reference Dabashi2015, esp. 24–26) shows, it is important not to claim for the Other a hegemonic role in the name of justice, because this would be to simply replace one cantankerous power structure with more of the same. Rather, we should all resist the colonial heritage of the canon through making ourselves aware of our own formation as subjects, including, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Reference Tuhiwai Smith1999) and Boaventura de Sousa Santos (Reference de Sousa Santos2018) have attested, the positional superiority of Western knowledge and academic disciplines. The more entrenched and hegemonically white our discipline, the more we are each and every one of us called to interpellate that epistemology, to refuse to perpetuate sexist and racist canons, to cite also those who are not the always-already cited, and to learn to dismiss the dead white men who haunt our formation as subjects. There is no counterargument to justify racist representation. I am not claiming that any of this is easy. Outspoken critics rarely get promoted in the system, especially when they belong to small minorities or hail from outside the hegemonic Anglophone world. It almost seems that any attempt at questioning the existing, larger disciplines imbued with a sense of history and self-worth lands one in one of the more recently founded “interdisciplinary” marginal departments that serve the double function of a safe haven for misfits and a safeguard against any need of the older, established disciplines to change. However, because we are all complicit, change requires not individual excellence but strength in numbers, an intersectional alliance across minoritarian positions, with shared expertise in every possible front. A revolution that acknowledges, in the words of Emma Goldman, “everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things” like dancing (Reference Goldman1931, 42).