Where Is the Dance?

From the outset, I have to admit I am partial to new scholarship on the Ballets Russes, particularly interdisciplinary scholarship that offers new perspectives on staged dance as an art form. Hence, two recent books on a company famous for striving for the total work of art effect sounded like an absolute feast. I may have set my expectations high, but these books actually exemplify how easily dance becomes secondary to music and set design in discussions of past performance, and how “interdisciplinary” studies often are anything but. In both books, the analyses offered of dance are, for a dance scholar, implausible, specious, even outright incomprehensible, and the dance-related topic emerges as servile to agendas of other disciplines, namely those of music and art history.

In five chapters set between a longish introduction and a much shorter conclusion, art historian Juliet Bellow offers analyses of works by the Ballets Russes that span the two decades of the company's existence. The first chapter, “Modernism on Stage,” focuses on the pre-war company; the second discusses Parade (1917) as cinema; and the third covers Sonia Delaunay's 1918 designs for Cléopâtre (originally Egipetskii nochi, 1908). The topic of the fourth chapter is Matisse and Le Chant du rossignol (henceforth, Chant) of 1920, and the fifth is Giorgio de Chirico and Le Bal (1929). From the list of contents onward, it is evident that canonized stage decorators receive the lion's share of the author's attention, to the extent that she constantly forgets to mention sources for her claims on dance and choreography. The canonicity of the artists discussed emerges as a self-evident assumption, while much of Bellow's source critical discussion is buried in the extensive endnotes. Despite her professed emphasis on the total work of art, dance is not merely secondary to Bellow's argumentation: dance and choreography—the physical bodies dancing on stage—are almost entirely absent, nothing but an extension of the visual ideas of famous painters.

As with previous dance publications from Ashgate (Batson Reference Batson2005), Bellow's book suffers from scant editorial attention. The array of outright errors is remarkable: apparently, Gabriel Astruc, the French impresario of the Ballets Russes, was merely its “supporter” (Bellow 30–1); Marius Petipa “imported Western European dance technique to Russia” (35); and Fokine advocated “asymmetrical, unbalanced poses” (36). All of these examples are from Bellow's first chapter, which follows a badly structured, confusing Introduction. These are not, as I first thought, simple typographical or terminological errors (“decrescendi” for diminuendos, 50); they reveal a lack of interest in dance scholarship and a preference for art historical interpretations of the Ballets Russes (including many unpublished dissertations) that becomes more pronounced in later chapters. Unfortunately, sets and costumes are not choreography.

Bellow's chapter on Parade rests on the presumption that this work aimed at “images in a moving picture,” “paper-thin dancing figures” (90). Her reading is conditioned by unstated authorism, which attributes choreographic ideas to Picasso (and Cocteau), rendering the few descriptions of movement (109–10) as echoes of Nijinsky's work. In part, this is clearly due to Jeux (1913) being the only Ballets Russes precedent for the Western, urban, popular culture setting of Parade—but setting, as noted, is not choreography. Although many of Bellow's ideas—such as that of the human-machine hybrid (esp. 93) or, indeed, the work's utilization of popular culture (94–8)—are intriguing as such, her argumentation suffers from lack of contextualization within dance and of primary-source evidence on dancing. Hence, the plausibility of these ideas remains questionable. Frankly, in a chapter that, with notes, runs to forty pages, one would expect a little more than three pages (94, 109–10) on the choreography and at least some discussion on contemporary reception of the actual dancing bodies on stage.

Chapter 3 on Sonia Delaunay starts from the important point of gendered roles for female artists, where I expected a reference to Linda Nochlin's (Reference Nochlin1989, 145–78) seminal 1971 essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” or at least some discussion on canonization as gendered practice. Instead, Bellow (135) offers a very one-sided view of the New Woman and women's citizenship, surprisingly atemporal and ahistorical (that is, not taking into account the major changes caused by the First World War). She then contrasts Cléopâtre—the versions of which meld into one another—with (again) Nijinsky's choreographies and his public image (136–137), rather than, say, Ida Rubinstein's career or Fokine's compositional principles. Although Bellow offers interesting analyses of specific photographs and designs, dance is quite secondary to everything that is being said. There is nothing, for example, on the specific considerations crucial to successful dance costume design (such as material and its cut) and only little (146, 148) on what the design looked like in movement, though it is tantalizingly evident in some of the accompanying images (notably 3.12).

The description of Bakst's contribution (137–141), which Delaunay was commissioned to replace, not only reads as repetition of Chapter 1, it (probably accidentally) produces a hierarchical relationship of the female artist (Delaunay) as a mere reaction to the original, male artist (Bakst). Notably, the same does not happen when Bellow (172–4) contrasts two male artists, Benois (for Le Rossignol, 1914) and Matisse (for Chant, 1920). At the end of the chapter, Bellow (160–2) returns to the question of the new woman as a consumer, finishing with an ambiguous claim that Delaunay imagined “a way that a woman could occupy public space without becoming too great a spectacle.” This left me wishing Bellow had used the chapter to discuss the female flâneur, if only to contrast it with Griselda Pollock's (Reference Pollock1988) reading in “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity” (mentioned in 163n13, not in the bibliography).

Chapter 4 opens with a fascinating quote from Louise Faure-Favier suggesting that Le Chant du Rossignol depicts not ancient China as much as a world of ancient china—wordplay that Bellow then uses to discuss the Matisse designs. Yet, her reading gives an odd impression of stopping short just before it would reach a point (169) when she contrasts Matisse's “timeless, placeless realm” not only with postwar reality but with the “prewar modernisms” of both the designer himself and the Ballets Russes—a troupe that had relied exactly on the kind of exoticism and escapism evident in Matisse's designs! The contrast to prewar escapism simply makes no sense. By the time Bellow continues the argument to claim that Chant marked a change in Matisse's attitudes toward the decorative (180–1)—something she elaborates quite nicely with selected quotations from reviews (185–6)—the reader has encountered numerous, similarly implausible assertions: for example, claiming that the work “disrupted the operation of the Gesamtkunstwerk” (172) or “relied heavily on pantomime” (175) would require far more elaboration than given here, as would the return, once again, to Nijinsky's choreographies (186).

Worse, Bellow's discussion on Orientalism (185–90) refuses to engage with the socio-political, which is crucial to both Edward Said's (Reference Said1994) original critique and to its subsequent art historical uses. In comparison to the complexity with which, for example, Reina Lewis (Reference Lewis1996, especially 236–40) engages with her subject matter, Bellow falls flat, managing to uphold rather than critique Orientalism. I suspect this has to do with Matisse's canonicity, but after her decent-enough points in the first chapter, I really expected more. As regards dance, the rest of the chapter reproduces the problems of the Parade chapter, making Matisse effectively the choreographer of Chant through (superficial) simile: the use of the terms sarabande and arabesque in both art and choreography.

In choosing to finish with Le Bal, Bellow's discussion skips almost a decade of Ballets Russes works. She notes some of these, together with other significant theatrical set designs (210–1) in order to agree with Émile Vuillermoz presaging the end of Diaghilev's company (209): Vuillermoz's presaged ruin is the ruin of de Chirico's design. Bellow claims Balanchine, Rieti, and de Chirico were all employing “a pastiche of classical styles,” but she does not engage with what “classicism” means in these three different art forms. Although her bibliography includes Beth Genné's (Reference Genné2000) excellent discussion on what, how, and when classicism signifies in dance, Bellow assumes the word's meaning is stable and unchanging.

Here, perhaps more than in any of the previous chapters, the overwhelming impression is that even when Bellow (231) uses a contemporary review to discuss the choreography, she has not thought through her claims on dance or, indeed, read sufficiently on dance to build a coherent argument. For one, I was surprised to hear that Petipa's heritage was “hotly contested” in Russia of the 1920s (213), since much of this contesting happened a decade earlier, and in addition was opposed by people such as Levinson whom Bellow repeatedly cites (213, 217). The argument becomes even more muddled when Balanchine is said to have “inherited” (215) this “Petipan tradition,” which soon becomes “choreographic montage” (219), a flippant remark without evidence or argumentation to support it.

The very short conclusion (245–51) argues against previous “Diaghilev-centered” accounts of the Ballets Russes, utterly failing to consider the obvious reasons for the impresario's position in histories of this company. Bellow's return to the familiar argument that the Ballets Russes rested on the total work of art principle also goes against the impression one gets from her book—that the famous artists engaged to do set and costume design for the company were the true auteurs of its works.

Dance research is in notably short supply in Bellow's “selected” bibliography, which does not separate primary from secondary sources, unpublished from published materials, and fails to inform the reader both of the dates of the sixteen (!) periodicals used (including Mir iskusstva, which was published outside the period under discussion and in Russia, which does not really figure in Bellow's text) and the abbreviations for the archival collections (including clippings files) used in the irritating, long-format notes.Footnote ¹ Since the illustrations are all discussed in the text and function as sources for the author's arguments, it is lamentable that many of the color plates are reproduced in excessively light hues and some are clearly skewed toward yellow—after all, image analysis is Bellow's strong suit. In this area, she avoids many of the pitfalls of earlier art historical readings: for example, she distinguishes Bakst's costume designs from the actual costumes (40) even if she does not do this with Matisse (168–9), and discusses color in relation to creation of space and form (e.g., 147, 168). In other words, despite its ungainly phrasings, numerous errors, and strange notions, Modernism on Stage is not without its merits.

In contrast, musicologist Davinia Caddy writes really well. She begins with a personal connection to Matisse's painting The Dance I, which she uses as a metaphor for her work. Possibly because I have read so much artistic (practice-based) research of late, this personal starting point and her flowing prose were a refreshing change from Bellow's often clumsy expressions. Like Matisse's dancers, Caddy's essays certainly are separate pieces, sometimes tenuously joined and at times about to fall down. The four chapters ostensibly discuss La Fête chez Thérèse (henceforth, Fête), a 1910 ballet performed at the Opéra with libretto by Catulle Mendez and music by Reynaldo Hahn; Nijinsky's 1912 L'Après-midi d'un Faune (henceforth, Faune); the Ballets Russes in the French press; and the 1914 Ballets Russes opera-ballet production of Le Coq d'or. There is no overall connection between the topics and no conclusion to the book. The flowing prose tries to paper over the fact that there is also little in terms of original contributions to research, particularly on dance.

In the Introduction, the picture painted by the researcher emphasizes her originality to the exclusion and outright distortion of previous academic research. Caddy starts by dismissing all dance research on the Ballets Russes with references to three journalistic pieces from Dance Magazine (13). She repeatedly claims to be using little-known or little-used primary sources when the opposite is true (many of the sources are exactly the same as Bellow's), and she offers no other reason for her selection of sources. Whereas Bellow clearly has read at least some contemporary papers quite carefully, Caddy's archival research seems mostly based on clippings files interspersed with quotations from research literature (such as Batson Reference Batson2005; Caddy 135–7). Some wordings suggest direct appropriation of other researchers' work—for example, when Caddy (4) states that “Archival sources suggest ...,” but her references are to research literature (most notably Berlanstein Reference Berlanstein2001 and Hindson Reference Hindson2007). As with Bellow, it is a definite asset that much of this contextualizing research is not dance-specific. Yet, the choice of research materials also means that Caddy treats opinions on contemporary theater as being about dance (as in Caddy 5n15) without explicating under what circumstances this could be done.

Characteristically, Caddy blurs historical timelines and uncritically mixes sources from different periods—for her, a source from 1888 illustrates how Parisians regarded cosmopolitanism in the 1910s (124n30). Say what one may of Bellow's analyses, at least she keeps within the bounds of historiographic plausibility! With undated sources often lacking the name of the original publication (e.g., Caddy 51n34–36), Caddy's claim to providing “context” for the Ballets Russes is glaringly absent. Beyond listing Parisian theaters (3), she does not care about venue, although this was crucial to the reception of the Ballets Russes (famously demonstrated in how Comœdia 12 May 1909 wrote of the renovations to the Châtelet theatre) and its works (notably Jeux and Le Sacre du printemps, henceforth Sacre), presented in the ultra-modern Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in 1913 (see Apollon 6/1913 or Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique 1914). Indeed, her choice of the Opéra as the comparison for the Ballets Russes shows her ignorance of the Parisian dance scene (see Gutsche-Miller Reference Gutsche-Miller2010).

Unlike Bellow (e.g., 29–30), Caddy never discusses the editorial lines of different papers or keeps track of specific critics—although both are crucial to understanding critical reactions. Like Bellow, she has an unnerving tendency to equate critical opinion with audience opinion and to conflate all performances. In her writing on choreography, there is no consideration of stage space, movement qualities, or choreographic structures, let alone the specificity of individual performers—which makes me seriously doubt whether she has even read the dance scholars in her bibliography, such as Thomas (Reference Thomas2003), Lepecki (Reference Lepecki2006), and Franko (Reference Franko1995) (referenced once: 22n60). In this, too, Caddy's book is remarkably similar to Bellow's—for both, dance seems almost incidental to actual analysis.

Caddy's inability to discuss dancing is painfully evident in the second chapter on Faune, which is based on her watching a video of the reconstruction—something about which she never thinks twice. Like Bellow, who bases her analysis of Sacre on Millicent Hodson's version, the issue of what is actually being analyzed (reconstruction, video, score) never enters the discussion. Caddy starts by claiming previous research on Faune has only treated Faune “visually”—a startling claim considering that her earlier analyses of visual imagery (e.g., Caddy 7–11) have revealed her unfamiliarity with basic methods of image analysis. Although this “visual” treatment may be true of Bellow's (50–55) account of the same work, Caddy actively misreads the quotations she offers from Lynn Garafola (Reference Garafola1989) and myself (Järvinen Reference Järvinen2009), failing to understand these are discussing the dancers' perspectives of the choreography and its peculiar staging.

As a result, Caddy's alleged “new” emphasis adds little to numerous earlier analyses—notably those by the reconstructors (see Guest & Jeschke Reference Guest and Jeschke1991). Like Bellow (63–68), Caddy even ends the chapter by repeating the old argument that Nijinsky used the convulsive movements of catatonic patients in the staging (familiar since Pierre Lalo's metaphorical connection between Sacre and “ataxics” in Le Temps 3 June 1913). Whereas Bellow (68–71) at least leads this argument toward a novel direction in drawing a parallel between department stores and women, Caddy's claims about dancing and choreography are far-fetched and spurious or else, reproducing claims that have time and again been shown to be untrue (such as the choreography being angular and opposed to the music—see Järvinen Reference Järvinen2009).

I would be more willing to forgive Caddy's straw men had her musicological or cultural analyses offered something surprising or novel. Caddy does make a bit of use of Marian Smith's (Reference Smith2000) point about music for dance versus for mime (Caddy 65) and uses Mary Ann Smart's Mimomania (Reference Smart2005) quite a lot (e.g., Caddy 21–2). But she also repeatedly uses notions like “pure music,” never noticing the modernist ideology implied in the term; indeed, in contrast to Bellow, her understanding of modernism is vague at best. Moreover, as is all too often the case in musicology, “music” is actually “the score,” atemporally reproduced by an unspecified incorporeal orchestra. There is absolutely no indication of performativity or historicity in Caddy's musical analyses, although one contemporary critical complaint about the Ballets Russes in the music press was precisely how this music was played—the frequent rearrangements (particularly in operas such as Boris Godunov and Prince Igor) and orchestrations (especially of Chopin for Les Sylphides and Schumann for Carnaval) as well as abilities of particular orchestras. Caddy alludes to these arguments almost in passing, never pausing to consider what the critics' experience or expectations actually were. Considering that new musicology has created very interesting interpretations of such sources (e.g., Johnson Reference Johnson1995), I really expected a little bit more from a book in a series titled “New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism”!

Here, the last chapter on Le Coq d'Or is particularly problematic, as its focus is on separation of expressive voice and expressive gesture. What is said of stage action is mostly based on an ahistorical reading of the libretto and musical score, and heavily reliant on earlier interpretations (notably, Taruskin Reference Taruskin1996). Caddy makes much of superposition in Futurist theater, and claims that “it is highly plausible that Benois and Fokine, known for their general receptivity to European theatrical practices, were aware of Futurist aesthetics” (Caddy 171–2). But both Benois and Fokine notoriously opposed such modern follies, with Fokine also simultaneously (and always retrospectively) taking credit for any significant developments in twentieth-century dance.Footnote ² With leaps and bounds, Caddy (205–10) adds Duncan and Dalcroze to this utterly implausible mix and finishes with what can only be called a confusing section that stands in for a conclusion of the whole book.

The gist of Caddy's argument seems to be that for music experts, ballet as a genre was more acceptable than opera. This is first noted in the first chapter, where she cites disparaging views of opera (29–30) and contrasts these with laudatory remarks on Russian ballet—utterly ignoring the Parisian praise for their opera productions, which in 1909 received far more lines in the press than the ballets. She then cites the Opéra's Russian ballet master's view from 1912 (34) as explanation why the Opéra ballet did not do Orientalist works but went for something like Fête—in 1910. So much more than meets her eye is at work, here—from the Opéra's desire to hire a Russian in the first place to the denouncement of Orientalism as vaudeville entertainment, which would distinguish the repertory of the Opéra not just from the Ballets Russes, but from the myriad dance spectacles in other Parisian theaters (see Décoret-Ahiha Reference Décoret-Ahiha2004). Orientalism was not, as Caddy (e.g., 58) seems to think, the property of the Ballets Russes, nor was this company exclusively Orientalist (even if read as such, see how Boyle Lawrence discusses Le Spectre de la rose in Pall Mall Magazine, September 1913). Once again, Bellow (especially 28–35, 47–50) does a far better job with her discussion. For example, Caddy never pauses to reflect why a Russian ballet company would perform Orientalist works in the first place.

In her discussion of Fête, Caddy not only ignores that the Ballets Russes was performing their version of Giselle in the same house (cf. Caddy 57–8), but she also misses the opportunity to compare these two companies. Caddy claims that Mme Stichel, the ballet mistress that Le Théatre (June 15, 1910) praised for whipping the Opéra company into shape, “was one of few women to occupy the much-vaunted position [of ballet mistress at the Opéra]” (Caddy 62). This is misleading, because the Opéra was not the major stage for ballet in Paris at the time (see, again, Gutsche-Miller Reference Gutsche-Miller2010). Mme Stichel, like the Opéra's previous ballet mistress, Mme Mariquita (whom Comœdia, May 19, 1909, listed as one of the three “illustrious” representatives of dance in Astruc's “corbeille”—the two others being Isadora Duncan and Rosita Mauri), primarily choreographed for variety stages. As such, these women could offer an interesting contrast to the all-male cadre of choreographers in the pre-war Ballets Russes—a company actively distinguishing itself from variety entertainment. The emphasis given to the latter would then make for a nice feminist point about biases in canonization.

Caddy's third chapter on the French press might have worked better as the first chapter. At the beginning she actually shows some inclination to think about who were the people she quotes and the papers she has, in previous chapters, presented as a homogenous mass. But then she follows this by claiming Comœdia illustré (est. 1904) was somehow unprecedented, when Le Théatre (est. 1898) had all the qualities she lists as novelties. Unlike Lenard Berlanstein (Reference Berlanstein2001), for example, Caddy does not note the distinctive qualities (and readership) of the boulevard press, separate arts journals from theatrical or music ones, let alone distinguish between the lines of particular papers or genres of specific articles. Hence, she cites Alfred Capus's text on Sacre (Le Figaro, June 2, 1913) without mentioning that it was a front-page editorial of a boulevard paper, indicating a specific kind of prominence for what was being said and a different readership to a performance review, or noticing that the piece is satirical.

The problems with this chapter are epitomized in the quotation of Louis Schneider's comment on Benois's famous “invasion” text in Rech (June 19/July 2, 1909).Footnote ³ Caddy has found Schneider's text in a clippings file, misattributed to Le Gaulois in 1910. Typically, she claims she has conducted “extensive searches” (Caddy 132n60) to find the original, which is in Gil Blas (like Comœdia and Théatre, a paper to which Schneider regularly wrote) and in 1909 (a fact evident in how Schneider speaks of Benois's “recent” text). It takes only minutes to find this text in Gallica (gallica.bnf.fr). Had Caddy noticed Schneider's later opinions on Nijinsky's Faune (Comoedia, May 30, 1912), she might even have connected this with the general change in how critics reacted to the Ballets Russes after this turn to “Cubism.”

Schneider's text also reveals just what is missing from Caddy's discussion on Russians as foreigners (Caddy 121–46). Here, she tries to tackle the complexity of contemporary thought, where “nation,” “race,” and “culture” produced a rather volatile mixture, but she does not specify who the speakers were. As with Bellow, the Russian side of the discourse is absent, despite Schneider's text showing how crucial it was to understanding the French reactions. Instead, Caddy simply compares her examples from 1909–1914 with how French critics were similarly provoked to anger when Richard Wagner, another foreign artist, praised his conquest of the City of Lights—in 1870!

What I hope to have shown is that even with her limited source materials, in-depth analyses of specific contemporary texts could have considerably improved Caddy's argumentation. But add to all of this the numerous factual errors, such as claiming that the Ballets Russes “was resident” in Paris (Caddy 25), the utter unfamiliarity with dance and the general ahistoricity of the readings offered of specific works, The Ballets Russes and Beyond does not live up to its title. Rather, it offers a bricolage of secondary sources interspersed with mostly well-known quotes from sources more or less contemporary to the topic. Obscured by her polished style, Caddy's arguments are unconvincing or badly formulated: even for a reader quite familiar with the topic, the text often requires tracing backward and forward to find the author's point or to follow her (tenuous) links between different works. Caddy (24) warns that the book does not have a coherent methodology; beyond analysis of (extensive quotes from) musical scores, these essays have almost no trace of any methodology, certainly not that of history. Overall, the book has little to offer to a dance scholar, and I would find it unfortunate were musicologists to take it up, as it presents a rather strange idea of what dance as an art form is like and deliberately misrepresents dance scholarship on this topic. Although much of the above also applies to Modernism on Stage, Bellow at least has done a lot of archival work and does not disparage existing research.

In the arts, interdisciplinarity rests on respect for the unique qualities of particular art forms and the methodological insights offered by the research in, on, and for these art forms. Superficial nods in the direction of prominent names in a given field do not suffice for such research—learning about an art form takes years of hard work that is apparently too much to ask in our current pressure to publish. With academic publishers eager to leave everything from proofreading to image copyright costs to the researcher, the results are truly depressing. Since the claims made on dance by these non-dance scholars are facile and implausible only to dance scholars, outside our small field these books stand for dance research and generate further work with equally ridiculous claims about dance, as evinced by Caddy's praise for Rhonda Garelick's (Reference Garelick2007) awful book on Loïe Fuller. For someone trying to find ways of discussing historical corporeality and dance practice, these books are a terrifying example of publishers' incompetence at evaluating scholarship and of the ease with which expertise on dance is given to people evidently incapable of discussing this art form. Interdisciplinarity should never appear as it does here—a justification for shoddy research.