Download When Ballet Became French: Modern Ballet and the Cultural by Ilyana Karthas PDF

By Ilyana Karthas

For hundreds of years ahead of the 1789 revolution, ballet used to be a resource of serious cultural delight for France, yet through the 20 th century the paintings shape had deteriorated besides France's foreign status. It was once now not until eventually Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes came upon good fortune in Paris throughout the first decade of the recent century that France embraced the chance to revive ballet to its former glory and rework it right into a hallmark of the nation.

In whilst Ballet grew to become French, Ilyana Karthas explores the revitalization of ballet and its an important importance to French tradition in the course of a interval of momentous transnational cultural trade and transferring attitudes in the direction of gender and the physique. Uniting the disciplines of cultural historical past, gender and women's reports, aesthetics, and dance background, Karthas examines the ways that discussions of ballet intersect with French issues concerning the state, modernity, and gender identities, demonstrating how ballet served as an incredible device for France's venture of nationwide renewal. bearing on ballet statement to subject matters of transnationalism, nationalism, aesthetics, gender, and physique politics, she examines the method in which critics, artists, and intellectuals grew to become ballet again right into a image of French culture.

The first e-book to review the correlation among ballet and French nationalism, while Ballet grew to become French demonstrates how dance can rework a nation's cultural and political background.

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Extra info for When Ballet Became French: Modern Ballet and the Cultural Politics of France, 1909-1939

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Chapter 4 details how the arrival of the Ballets Russes in Paris incited a plethora of commentary about ballet’s nature as an art form. It situates critical responses to the Ballets Russes’ “new ballet” within broader discussions about modern aesthetics and French tastes. In doing so, we will see that commentary on ballet was both a reflection of and a powerful force in shaping the artistic climate of France in the early twentieth century. The chapter begins by tracing the aesthetic development of ballet in France from its origins to its institutional and aesthetic decay in the nineteenth century.

This new exposure to dance certainly influenced critical responses to ballet. This new interest in athleticism and the body both substantiated and disrupted traditional gender boundaries. We will see how rhetoric on ballet celebrated this physical culture movement by emphasizing dancers’ athleticism and femininity. ”59 Such visions fall within the greater desire among the French for stability yet transformation. As this study will show, intellectuals used ballet as a platform upon which to work out definitions of French modern identity (particularly, the reconciliation of tradition and modernity) in this period of instability.

For example, we find critics increasingly emphasizing dancers’ athleticism, technical grace, and virtuosity, avoiding insinuations of the sexual availability of female dancers and stressing the masculine strength of male dancers. The neoclassical revival in the 1920s and 1930s, the new fervor for athleticism in both men and women, and the new comfort with the body all opened a space for a new modern aesthetic of ballet, the return of the male dancer, and a revitalized national institution: the Paris Opéra ballet.

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