Ballet in an Age of Revolution

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Ballet in an Age of Revolution

Destruction and Change.

The onset of Revolution in France in 1789 produced profound changes in the production of all the arts. Both opera and ballet had flourished in Paris in tandem with the Opera, a royal institution that had long been nourished by the court's patronage. As the Revolution approached, bankruptcy loomed as the only way out of an engulfing royal financial crisis. In the first few years of the Revolution the special privileges of the clergy and nobility as well as many of the ancient prerogatives of the monarch were abolished in a series of progressively tightening measures directed at all forms of ancient privilege. At first, a new constitutional monarchy was fashioned, but King Louis XVI's attempt to escape from France with his queen in

June of 1791 turned the tide of opinion against such an option, leading to the abolishment of the monarchy and the establishment of a new republican government. As a result of these swiftly moving events, Louis XVI's patronage of the arts at first rapidly diminished as he was forced to cut costs to fit with his dramatically straitened circumstances, and then dried up altogether. As the new republican government moved to establish its control over all elements of the state, a pervasive Reign of Terror ensued in which anyone suspected of monarchical sympathies might fall prey to persecution and execution. Many of the institutions that had long nourished ballet and opera thus faced great trials during the Terror, since their longstanding ties to aristocratic society marked them as bastions of privilege. An older musical and dramatic culture, sustained by aristocratic sensibilities, quickly disappeared in Paris and other French cities, and the political leaders of the Revolution advocated art that might express the democratic principles and revolutionary ideals that lay at the heart of their movement. Such principles were aptly suited to the rising form of the ballet d'action, since its narrative dances provided one way of presenting stories that fit neatly with the new revolutionary impulses. While ballet did not disappear as a diversion within the operas of the time, its place as an independent art form became firmly established by the end of the eighteenth century in Paris as the revolutionary government embraced it to defend republicanism.

Changes in Ballet.

Despite the monumental changes that were occurring in French society at the time, the Paris Opera continued to flourish in the tumult of Revolution. As aristocrats disappeared from the ranks of its audience, new spectators appeared from among the middle classes. While financial shortfalls were typical at the institution during the early days of Revolution, they subsided somewhat after the city of Paris assumed its control. At first, the ballets and operas staged there continued in much the same pattern as they had over the previous two decades. Many ballets, in other words, were performed that relied on ancient mythological or heroic themes. As the fervor of republican sentiment grew in Paris in the years after 1790 and the Revolution grew more radical, the commune—that is, the city's own municipal government—demanded that the company stage new revolutionary dance dramas. The Opera's ballet performers were also enlisted to dance in productions held in other Parisian theaters. During the Reign of Terror between 1792 and 1794, the revolutionary government commissioned many new ballets and dances to mark key events in the Revolution. The establishment of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the execution of King Louis XVI were two events that were celebrated with the staging of elaborate dances. Dance dramas commemorated important events in the Revolution's history, but they also marked some of the momentous changes that the revolutionary assembly attempted to implement in France. The Worship of the Supreme Being, a state-sanctioned deistic religion opposed to traditional Christianity, became mandatory throughout France in May 1794. Within a month a massive festival was mounted to commemorate the new change, and an elaborate series of dances that involved hundreds of participants was staged in the open air. Dance commemorated the Revolution even as the Paris Commune and the national assembly's Committee of Public Safety exerted a tightening grip on the kinds of operas, ballets, and plays that were performed in the city. The Committee of Public Safety, for example, decreed that from henceforth no aristocrats should figure as characters in any theatrical productions. In this way art conformed to revolutionary demands, and the Committee dispatched police officials and soldiers to supervise ballet and operatic productions. These years of the Terror were particularly difficult for many artists, especially ballet dancers and opera singers who had long enjoyed the patronage and largesse of the nobility. A number of key French dancers left France during this period, many taking up residence and performing in London at the time. Jean-Georges Noverre, Auguste Vestris, and Jean Dauberval were just a few of the many Parisian dancers who took refuge in England. For those who stayed in France, participation in the new revolutionary ballets, with their story lines that defended liberty and republican government, provided one way of averting the regime's suspicions and avoiding imprisonment and the guillotine. In the heightened atmosphere of persecution that revolutionary demands produced, there was consequently no shortage of volunteers to dance in the Revolution's ballet spectacles.

Growth of Troupes.

Despite fiscal crises and revolutionary upheaval, the ballet flourished in Paris during the years of the Revolution. Old patronage networks that had been supported by the aristocracy had disappeared, but dance's new role as a promoter of republican ideals at festivals guaranteed its lavish support even while the new regime faced chronic shortages of funds and supplies. Elsewhere in Europe, the final decades of the eighteenth century were times of great expansion in ballet troupes as well. In Italy, most major opera houses employed around forty dancers at this time, while in distant Stockholm their ranks numbered around seventy. By 1770, the Paris Opera's own troupe had risen to more than ninety performers, and although the chronic fiscal crisis of the 1780s may have caused these numbers to shrink somewhat, the elaborate spectacles staged with professional dancers from the Opera point to its continuing vitality. By the end of the eighteenth century, the purpose of these urban troupes was in most places twofold; the ballet troupes of the time still performed divertissements, entr'actes, and concluding ballets within operas as they had done for almost two centuries, but they also performed pantomime ballets or ballets d'action. Ballet's long apprenticeship to opera had not completely ended by the year 1800, but the art form had achieved a striking degree of independence during the course of the previous century. One sign of this new reality, and a harbinger of even greater innovations to come, occurred at the very end of the eighteenth century as the Italian dancer and choreographer Salvatore Vigano instituted drastic reforms in costuming and footwear to the dance troupe at the Venetian Opera. Vigano introduced light and loose-fitting Neoclassical dress, and he required his dancers to wear either sandals or slippers. His emancipation of dancers from much of the elegant trappings in which eighteenth-century aristocratic society had long placed them opened up the way for the striking innovations in dance technique that occurred in the nineteenth century.