Art, Dance, and the Body in French Culture of the Ancien Régime

The dustjacket of Sarah Cohen's beautifully illustrated and presented Art, Dance, and the Body in French Culture of the Ancien Regime provides a key to the scope of the book. Looking at the front cover, we see a detail from Watteau's " Fetes Venitiennes " (late 1710's) that depicts a dancing couple performing perhaps a minuet. Turning the book over, we see the youthful dancing body of Louis XIV poised to make his entrance as Apollo, in a drawing attributed to Henri de Gissey (c. 1663). The king is alone, while the couple is at a fete with gossiping onlookers behind. The reverse chronological order of the cover can be seen as a technique that highlights visually one of Cohen's themes of her study: to see the danse noble of Louis XIV and the representation of the dancing couples in Watteau as part of same trajectory when they are usually seen in opposition. This balancing similarly is seen in the paired relation of the introductory and last chapters, and reinforced by the placement of the eight plates which open the book.

The same illustration of the young Louis XIV in the costume of Apollo in the Ballet de la Nuit (1653) forms the basis of the second plate. Cohen describes and interprets the plate in such a detailed and evocative way that it serves to embody the theme of the artful body. It also is representative of her style that is articulate, knowledgeable and unobtrusively didactic at the same time:

The spikey radiance of the sun costume is enhanced by the sleekly crossed gold legs and by a subtle torsion within the posture, as the feet angle off to the side and the arms and torso twist to confront the spectator in a manner echoing the splayed headdress above. A sense of physical presence is brought out through a delicate shadowing of the limbs as well as through obvious portraiture in the face, but the quality most suggestive of life-and, paradoxically, the most artful in its finesse-is the suggestion of breath round the lifted arms and hands, as if the body's sustenance had been transferred to its outward performance (3).

As can be seen, her explication is so clear that a reader who is not an expert in the area of French Baroque art or dance can understand not only what the interpretation is but also see the interpretation unfold. In this way, her method makes her research accessible to a wider audience.

This second plate forms an antithesis to the portrait of the middle-aged king that opens the book. Although no longer a dancer in 1701, we observe that this is a performing body still, for we note the turned-out position of his feet, his shapely, muscular calves and thighs most effectively set off by his apparel, and his stance of torso, arms and head. Cohen states how there is a gap in the research about Louis'" strategic use of his own physical presence " as an autocratic governor ". She is interested in the "specific ways the body would appear in an image or perform in a room" ephemeral and kinetic qualities that are implied and have gone relatively unexplained. She considers that dance "offers an expressive paradigm for the qualitative properties of representation since its basic content lies in the body's process of organizing itself " (2).

Art, Dance, and the Body in French Culture of the Ancien Regime consists of an introduction and seven chapters. In the " introduction " Cohen states that since " bodily artifice projects identity on the most concrete and visible level "(2) her aim is to discuss the " artful body " in different forms and functions in French aristocratic culture of the late 17th and early 18th centuries (3). She focuses on the danse noble style which began as a court ballet, but as an " enacted philosophy " underwent several transformations such as becoming a public spectacle in the Parisian Opera (1669) and forming the basis of social dancing at court and in Paris. Her approach is interdisciplinary in that she examines the interconnections among the architecture, graphic arts and painting, considering all to part of a single cultural project (6). Her use of cultural theory utilizes both baroque theories of art and dance as well as contemporary, postmodern theories. Also, by her understanding of the place of the viewer or spectator of the dances and paintings, she seeks to educate us into the perspective and mindset of the Baroque mind which is different to the Enlightenment.

In chapter one, " Court Ballet " Cohen discusses the innovations Louis XIV brought to court ballet and how he had ballets constructed with himself at the centre, with himself enacting the part of the sun at the core of the universe. Interesting for contemporary audiences is the discussion of cross-dressing. Since Louis' potency was considered to cross usual boundaries of gender and sex roles, Louis would enact goddess roles as well as those of gods. The second chapter, " Art as Spectacle " moves the focus out from the ballroom at court to consider how the art and architecture commissioned by Louis can be interpreted as an extension of the court dance: namely, as a " material spectacle that paralleled the language of the ballet " (64). Cohen examines the fetes at Versailles and the commemorative books which were published to mark the events as a way to extend court culture to a wider audience. Although Louis stopped performing in 1670 while in the midst of his transformation of Versailles, the role of the sun king was embodied in the architectural design of the palace and its gardens. Chapter three, " aristocratic traceries " continues the ideas of the previous chapter to examine in detail the decoration of Versailles, especially the ornamental designs called grotesques or arabesques. The nobles who walked the paths and mazes also traced these shapes by their bodies in a similar way to when they danced. Cohen also discusses the move away from performance dance to couple dances performed one pair at a time. Significantly, in terms of gender analysis, by including consideration of the viewer, Cohen demonstrates that mirror steps performed by women and men are not exact reflections of each other. Rather, the women possess some autonomy in that the partners perform along diagonals covering the surface of the floor in a similar way to the arabesque designs (127). In chapter 4, " The Universal Masquerade " Cohen examines the passion for masquerade balls as a kind of leveling device. She observes how the dances served as a " boundary crossing " device in that gender, and class roles were subverted and she aptly brings out comparisons and relevance to today's attitudes. Here, she includes discussion of the contradanse which was imported from England and enabled multiple couples to dance at once. This resulted in the group interaction taking precedence over an individual couple. Also since the steps and figures of these dances were relatively easy to perform, dancers could pay more attention to their partners. Since this, as Cohen notes, is a performers' dance not a viewers' dance (162) and linked with the nobles not the king, this shift could be considered as a kind of de-centering of Louis' power.

The last part of the book is, as Cohen notes in the acknowledgements, based in her dissertation. Chapter five, called " Watteau's Performers " switches the focus to representations of dancers and masquerades in the art of Watteau and presents his art as part of the process of transformation whereby an aristocratic performance becomes a product accessible to a wider public. Cohen examines Watteau's figure drawings and paintings in terms of being boundary crossing forms that combine both aspects of the fashion print and drawings of comedic performances at the fair theatres of Paris. She also continues her investigation of art as dance by examining the poses of figure drawings in terms of Pierre Rameau's ballet illustrations of the period (179-180). Cohen demonstrates how Watteau's revised the arabesque form: in art featuring a single a couple embedded in the design she considers him to emphasize the social appeal and erotic energy in a way similar to the couple dances which were becoming popular at the time (187). In his group pictures, she similarly compares their placements and gestures in relation to the group dances which were also gaining favor (194ff). Her most elaborate discussion concerns a discussion of the composition of two paired paintings " L'Enchanteur " and " L'Aventuriere " as if they were a contradanse by comparing them to Feuillet's " La Valantine " (199-203). Cohen then examines the implications of the leveling of hierarchy and gender roles possible in such dances by including the viewer as an imaginary participant in the dance (206).

Chapter six: Collective Rituals draws on similarities between the artistic representation of Watteau's " fetes galantes " and the growing collective sociability of aristocratic gatherings that crossed status. Cohen focuses on " Les Plaisirs du bal " (c. 1717) and especially the two versions of the " le Pelerinage a l'Ile de Cythere " (c. 1717) by interpreting Watteau's " enchainement " as employing the serpentine or Z pattern of the minuet. She then employs descriptions of dancing masters Rameau and Tomlinson in text and illustration to interpret the paintings as galant performance. (230 ff). Chapter seven " The Artful Body in Question " continues the main ideas and approaches of the two previous chapters, considering Watteau's ability to reprise gestures and figures to be similar to a that of a choreographer. She compares Watteau's depiction of complex couple arrangements in paintings after his academy piece to resemble the complex dance choreography of Pecour whose work was notated the 1720's by Dezais in a denser, graphic style than Feuillet's twenty years earlier. She interprets " Fetes venitiennes " (late 1710's) as perhaps being a fragmentary memory of the Sal de Balle at Versailles in that the painting is a " culminating manifestation " of the artful body the end point of a process when bodies were considered to be continuous with artful systems, whether they be physical, choreographic, decorative, or scientific (249). She then examines a couple of Watteau's late paintings. First she considers " Gersaint's Shopsign " (1721) to continue spirals of movement that are neither decorative nor a figure of a dance but rather purposeful within but the narrative of the painting (262-63). She concludes by examining the large " Pierrot " (late 1710 " and it's depiction of a the Commedia dell'arte stock figure as costumed but unwieldy to be the beginning of an interest in the ungainly, un-aristocratic body and thereby serves as an inverse image of the magnificent Louis XIV who " opens " the book as he did his balls with his " natural grace " (p.3)

The structure of Art, Dance, and the Body in French Culture of the Ancien Regime is as elegant as the subject. Cohen begins as danse noble does with the body of the dancing king at the centre and then moves progressively outward from the centre to study the architecture and then design of the walls, gardens, and walking and dancing nobles. She then turns to representations of the king, court and the dance culture of the masquerade. In terms of the history of dance the shifts from the actual king dancing to surrogate king dancing alone to a (male and female) couple dancing and then to multiple couples dancing in contradanse is a fascinating tracing of a trajectory of the power dynamics of the "politics of dancing " as Cohen expresses it " the power relations that can play out through the nuances of bodily display and interaction " (10).

A mentioned above, Cohen employs a wide range of Baroque and contemporary theory and she presents this in a marvelously cross-disciplinary way: the cross-over between art (architecture, graphic art, and painting) and dance is perfectly balanced, not only does she interpret art in terms of dance and here she includes little consulted art forms such as costume design and fashion prints, but she interprets early examples of dance notation as an art form. Cohen succeeds fully in her aim of including dance in art discussion and moreover using the knowledge of the dance, and dance theory of the period and the present usefully to inform a study of the " performing body " and self definition, one of today's main interests. This is unusual and fascinating. Her style also evokes her subject. Cohen's graceful ability to move back and forth between disciplines recalls the polyglot knowledge of the Baroque court masters such as Le Brun who could move gracefully back and forth between the visual arts and the performing arts (55).

There are only a couple of small critical comments. One concerns the slight seam at the beginning of the section linking to Watteau. Specifically, this concerns the discussion of the commedia dell'arte tradition that has not been previously introduced enough to warrant the assumption of knowledge she seems to expect. Another point concerns the representation of baroque as an exclusively visual medium. Viewing a reconstruction by Thomas Baird of Louis XIV's famous " Entrée d'Apolon " this reviewer was struck by the virtuoso power and beauty of the dancer (Whitley-Bouquess, 1999). Watching the dancer perform complex steps, turns, leaps and patterned arabesques around a center, it seems as if the image on the cover and plate 2 has come to life. The extremely difficult moves appear light and effortless, and this reviewer was " seduced " by the power of the young surrogate king, as Cohen argues. Indeed, this surrogate and hence the king is and was a beautiful body and a beautiful machine. As Cohen discusses in her first chapter this dance is based on one of the two collections of dances which were bound into Chorégraphie, by Raoul-Auger Feuillet who first published a dance notation system in 1700. My criticism concerns the silence and stillness of the mode of art criticism. As Cohen beautifully demonstrates, art is indeed dance, and dance art. Yet by definition dance demands both a kinesthetic and an aural dimension that are somehow lacking.

Finally, it would be interesting to see one aspect more developed : Cohen provides brief but insightful comparisons between the period of the ancien regime and the present day-especially gender as performance and cross-dressing, but also the implications of the criticism from Le Rochefoucauld that " the world is composed of nothing but outward appearances" (4) have relevance today. Cohen offsets this point by stating at the end of her introduction that being preoccupied with surface does not signal shallowness. These issues are important ones and this reviewer would like to hear her thoughtful elaborations on these points.