In May 2018, a Chechen-born Frenchman killed one and injured several people in a knife attack near the Opera. A scene anticipated in the ballet La Source? In four historic performances, over 150 years, this book explores the sacrifice of an embodied Nature to the ballet’s contemporary cosmopolitics. The original ballet, via its natural history, reflected on the history of difference within France as well as the question of “force” or regeneration of the “race.” By 1875, La Source revealed the colonial stakes of national technologies, ethnic tensions and competition for resources, racialized and gendered differences, and cultural confrontation. In its 21st century revival, playing alongside the Arab spring and movements for gender and climate justice, the ballet stages the displacement of a narrative about the environment onto Muslim conflict. Rather than a platform to reconsider the caricatures of Muslims running through French cultural production, or the lack of minority representation, the ballet serves as an example of the state of emergency declared to protect planet climate negotiations but cast in the rhetoric of a war against Islamic terrorism. In 2011 and 2014, the ballet’s intrigues of environmental crisis and Muslim violence could not have been more current, but they were represented by the Opera under a banner of “re-enchantment” that disavowed the ballet’s historic centrality and continuing interest.
