The Styles of Eighteenth-Century Ballet

Edmund Fairfax’s The Styles of Eighteenth-Century Ballet is a modest but startling addition to the literature on theatrical dance in eighteenth-century Europe. It is modest, that is, in terms of its layout: Fairfax, who has worked as a historical costume designer, has chosen to include his own line drawings made after original illustrations rather than rare prints and lithographs—a concession, no doubt, to their prohibitive cost. The book is startling, however, in that it sets out to challenge what Fairfax sees as prevailing misconceptions about the nature of eighteenth-century dance—misunderstandings, he says, that are perpetuated by “contemporary” scholars. In challenging these misapprehensions, Fairfax attempts to unseat a number of the foremost dance historians active in the 1960s and 1970s. His mission is to lay to rest the currently received but utterly erroneous view that the theatrical dance of the eighteenth century was earthbound and limited in both number of steps and range of movement, that the eighteenth-century ballet dancer scarcely left the floor in the few jumps he did and utterly eschewed any exaggerated movements of the limbs in order to conform to a Victorian-like sense of decorum, such that the dance of the ballroom and theater were scarcely to be told apart. (viii-ix)

Fairfax asserts correctly that contemporary dance historians have had difficulty gaining access to primary sources. Because historical data about eighteenth-century ballet is scant, and because those materials that do exist are frequently difficult to translate, scholars have not questioned, he says, the transmission of misinformation about the styles, choreography, character, and technique of the ballet. With this book, Fairfax launches a project to correct “deeply entrenched misconceptions,” proposing to publish two further volumes with a second devoted to eighteenth-century dance technique and a third dealing with pantomime ballet. Given Fairfax’s scrupulous research, his rigorous assimilation and analysis of extant treatises by French, Italian, Spanish, German and English dancing masters, his general fluency with the period, and his specialization in European languages and linguistics, these forthcoming volumes are likely to prove valuable.

Fairfax includes “a very large number of quotations from a broad range of primary sources . . . in English translation in order to let the age speak for itself as much as possible.” He provides “quotations from a great variety of writers and from all parts of the century in order to ensure a balanced view” (xix-xx). While the reader might find it cumbersome to progress through multiple lengthy quotations which all speak to the same point, the citations do give credibility to Fairfax’s assertions. His first point—that the “formal dance of the eighteenth century was largely the brainchild of the French,” and that all European courts looked to the French to be leaders in this area—is unassailable and unchallenged by most current scholars. He goes on to elaborate that the theatrical dance, unlike the more decorous and refined social dance, was “specifically intended to be seen on a large stage in a purpose built theater before a throng of spectators” (1). The forms were entirely distinct, insists Fairfax, pointing out that while the ballroom dance was “marked by its modesty and simplicity,” theatrical dance was defined by “exaggeration, vigor, and complexity” (42-6). The succeeding chapters are devoted to thorough explications of various aspects of theatrical dance: its four traditional styles, the men’s technique as distinct from the women’s, its overall voluptuousness, and the dancer’s individuality in performance. He includes, too, an informative appendix on costuming in eighteenth-century ballet.

Although the book represents a substantial contribution to dance literature, Fairfax’s agenda unfortunately shows him to be out of touch with current scholarship, and his outbursts against earlier dance writers—including Selma Jeanne Cohen (1960), Shirley Wynne (1970), Agnes De Mille (1963), Marian Hannah Winter (1974), and Wendy Hilton (1981)—seem unnecessarily vitriolic. The English translations and the assiduous comparison of manuals written by a range of European dancing masters will make The Styles of Eighteenth-Century Ballet valuable for many students of western theatrical dancing. Yet though the comparative analysis of eighteenth-century dancing manuals is welcome, the “received” scholarship he complains about is—for the most part—no longer assumed to be “fact.”[1] Indeed, it would be justifiable to remind readers that the mid-twentieth-century authors Fairfax singles out for criticism have provided significant and sturdy platforms for more recent scholars to build upon. Drawing on the work of their predecessors, for instance, Rebecca Harris-Warrick and Carol G. Marsh published Musical Theatre at the Court of Louis XIV, Le Mariage de la Grosse Cathos (New York: Cambridge University Press) in 1994. This work (which Fairfax refers to as an unpublished manuscript) anticipates several points Fairfax addresses at length: the technical prowess of professional male dancers and the frequent practice of dancers choreographing or even improvising their own solos, for instance.

Further, Fairfax falls into the very traps he accuses others of blundering into. While he charges earlier writers with creating a “big bang” theory in order to account for the changes in dance technique observed in the early nineteenth century, Fairfax himself seems to know very little about nineteenth-century ballet. He creates his own “big bang” theory in this passage, in which he contrasts the sensuality of the eighteenth-century ballet with the supposed “disembodied” quality of the nineteenth century:

The eighteenth-century dancer’s preoccupation with voluptuousness and seduction becomes perhaps most apparent at the very end of the period when seen in sharp contrast with an emerging preference in the nineteenth century for an idealized and even sexless ballerina, a disembodied spirit in her airy white purity, who is more a denizen of the other world that of the boudoir. (309)

I can only assume that Fairfax has never read the Romantic poet, ballet librettist, and dance critic, Théophile Gautier, whose essays often focused attention primarily on the shapely legs, dimpled elbows, and comely breasts of his favorite nineteenth-century ballerinas. Unfortunately, he also has not read current scholarship by Lisa Arkin and Marian Smith such as their “National Dance in the Romantic Ballet” in Rethinking the Sylph: New Perspectives on the Romantic Ballet (ed. Lynn Garafola; Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1997; 11-68) or by Lynn Garafola such as her introduction to Rethinking the Sylph and her article “The Travesty Dancer in Nineteenth-Century Ballet (Dance Research Journal 17.2 and 18.1 [1985-6]: 35-40). These authors have done much to recuperate the importance of the highly sensual and very earthy national dance in the context of the Romantic ballet.

Fairfax eschews any discussion of dance within the larger artistic, social, cultural, political world and touches only briefly on the relationship of dance to other eighteenth-century art forms:

this tremendous penchant for embellishing steps with brilliant beats in the air, was in fact a manifestation of the eighteenth-century’s passion for ornamentation in general. None of the performing and visual arts from music to painting, not to mention such other fields of applied art as fashion and interior design, were left untouched by this desire to divert the senses in a plenitude of embellishing detail. (64-5)

To my mind, this approach is not necessarily a drawback, for Fairfax’s comparative study of the original treatises has much to recommend it. However, in light of Fairfax’s harsh criticism of earlier scholars, the sense that he writes in an eighteenth-century vacuum strikes me as problematic. It is often unclear what he means by “contemporary” or “modern,” as in the following examples in which he discusses the capacity of the eighteenth-century ballet dancer to improvise his or her own dances:

Such an ability to create dances spontaneously was no mean feat in an age wherein choreography was ideally to reflect the character, expressiveness, and rhythm of the music, in sharp contrast to so much modern choreography, which proceeds largely on its own, independent of Euterpe, disassociated from phrases, climaxes, and rhythm of the music. (251)

Similarly,

Even when following the choreography invented by someone other than himself, the eighteenth-century dancer could still exercise his caprice and embellish the general idea of the choreographer, even independently of the other dancers performing with him, in contrast to modern practice, wherein the dancer is but an instrument at the disposal of a choreographer, whose work is often treated as if inviolable. (252)

Such incidental comments make me question just what modern choreography he is watching, and while they are mostly peripheral to his main discussion, they result in the author’s appearing out of touch and, frankly, curmudgeonly. This is a shame because Edmund Fairfax’s The Styles of Eighteenth-Century Ballet is an enormously valuable work of scholarship.

[1] Today’s dance history undergraduates may get their historical background from the 2001 anthology edited by Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright, Moving History/Dancing Cultures (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press), which includes an essay by Catherine Turocy titled “Beyond La Danse Noble: Conventions in Choreography and Dance Performance at the Time of Rameau’s Hipployte et Aricie” (202-9). Turocy explicitly describes the various categories of dance in the eighteenth century and the expressive purposes of dances within the scope of an entire opera: “The purpose of any dance is defined by its placement in the context of the opera. By its very nature, the opera requires different kinds of dance, not just the danse noble style” (203). Often the dances require buoyant, jubilant dances requiring an acrobatic and vivacious dance style; sometimes dancers are required to express conflict or great passion, and thus they move outside the boundaries of modest decorum. They are rarely, in other words, confined in their dance movements. Another commonly used undergraduate textbook is Susan Au’s 1991 Ballet and Modern Dance (New York: Thames and Hudson). Au stresses the rise of professionalism in theatrical dance at the end of the seventeenth century: “Professional dancers began to evolve technical feats that demanded a high degree of training and skill, such as pirouettes, cabrioles and entrechats . . . more and more, the professional’s achievements exceeded the range of even the most accomplished amateur” (23).