Folklore and Parade from Jean Cocteau and Paul Valéry to André Varagnac

This chapter reflects upon the commentary of two literary observers who were also in different ways practitioners of French ballet of the 1920s and 1930s—Jean Cocteau and Paul Valéry—and, of one anthropologist—André Varagnac—who developed the notion of folklore, and folkloric dance in particular as a form of popular innovation or, in other terms, an emergent rather than residual form. With all three, the notion of the popular in dance stood in implicit opposition to the academicism of Russian émigré critics in Paris—notably André Levinson and André Schaïkevitch—who advanced the idea of neoclassicism as the dominant form of dance in modernity. While the Russo-French neoclassicists emphasized the importance ballet’s exploration of its founding technical principles these French commentators had recourse instead to the historical notion of parade or sideshow. This chapter uncovers the dual face of neoclassicism, one formalist and idealist, the other populist. Both Cocteau and Valéry have significant connections with the popular, which I propose to elucidate through the notion of parade or sideshow.

Introduction: The Transnational Path Toward Corporeal Fascism

This chapter begins by outlining the meaning of the classical in French cultural production since the seventeenth century as a way to situate neoclassicism in ballet with modernism itself. The situation of ballet differs from other arts in that neoclassicism cannot be considered a betrayal of modernism but actually furnishes the condition for modernization. This prompts the question of the political engagements of neoclassicism in dance given that it is often considered to be politically conservative. The growth of interest in folk dance and folk arts more generally in interwar France places the historical component in popular culture in a comparative perspective with neoclassicism. Serge Lifar’s position within the interwar dance field is sketched out and differing critical discourses on the neoclassical are introduced.

The Critical Reception of Serge Lifar (1929–1939)

Chapter 2 analyzes the critical reception of Serge Lifar at the Paris Opera during the 1930s. Evidence is presented of Lifar’s poor critical reception at the start of the decade and the characteristics of his dancing are analyzed in relation to the developing ideals of neoclassical ballet. The analysis reveals a gradual drift in critical language toward a fascist conception of Lifar’s dancing body as a polarity machine. This vision of Lifar is put forward with respect to the double level of artistic activity demanded of the dance artist who, as choreographer, is the contemplative painter of compositions, but who as dancer is the sculptor whose artistic material is his own body. Lifar seemed to embody by turns both the Apollonian and Dionysian sides of Nietzsche’s influential argument on the origin of tragedy. The chapter also covers the debate over the meaning of neoclassicism in French ballet during the 1930s and the role Lifar played in this debate both as an object of discussion and an interlocutor. Critics include Russian émigrés under the influence of Akim Volynsky: André Levinson, Julia Sazonova, and André Schaïkevitch and their French compeers Roger Lannes and Maurice Brillant. Arguing for a formalist and idealist conception of balletic neoclassicism, the Russo-French school used the work of Serge Lifar as their main example. This chapter also explores in depth André Levinson’s change of heart concerning Lifar and the relation of Lifar to Vaslav Nijinsky in Levinson’s criticism.

A Genealogy of Dance Modernity

This chapter looks at a variety of phenomena including folkloric dance that contained old regime materials, the ballet itself, and the scholarly research and collecting devoted to the grand siècle at the turn of the century. Three distinct seventeenth centuries were under construction in the historical imagination of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century dance. Research conducted in the early 1970s shows that elements of la belle danse found their way into regional folkloric performance; the seventeenth century became a predominant subject of ballets; musicology—a nascent discipline in France—turned to the discovery and reading of texts of musical theater that were no longer performed. These three activities engendered three versions of the seventeenth century in dance that I refer to as survival, revival, and archival. Survival corresponds to the emergence of ethnography thanks to Van Gennep and later Guilcher; revival refers to the principles of ballet evidenced in the writings of Volynsky on the basis of which new work could be created; archival refers to the discovery of the past as other in the research of Henry Prunières. These led in turn to concepts of performance as artifact, myth, and document, which together constituted the dispersed field of neoclassicism as I understand it in this book. Each of these versions of the seventeenth century came with a political potential with respect to questions of national identity.

From the Neoclassical Turn to the Baroque Return

This chapter begins with an overview of Lifar’s postwar career at the Paris Opera. It then traces the development in the postwar era of a French notion of the baroque that had remained unacknowledged under interwar neoclassicism. This chapter tracks the gradual emergence of the French baroque as an idea from the early 1950s through the 1980s when it exerted a decisive impact on choreographic culture in France, as well as elsewhere in Europe and in the United States. I view the baroque in the postwar period not as a cyclical or structural response to interwar neoclassicism but as a historic reaction in historical terms. This trend is investigated in literature and literary criticism, philosophy, and dance. Baroquism is understood as a historically conjunctural concept related to articulation and theatricality. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Francine Lancelot’s company Ris et Danceries in the 1980s and the emergence of the baroque as a choreographic paradigm of postmodernity.

Serge Lifar and the Question of Collaboration with the German Authorities under the Occupation of Paris (1940–1949)

This chapter examines the political and artistic activities of dancer and choreographer Serge Lifar at the Paris Opera during and immediately after the Occupation of Paris. Although Lifar was condemned as a collaborator in a postwar trial he was rehabilitated after a brief exile and returned to work at the Opera until his retirement in 1958. The question of collaborationism has arisen again in light of performances by the Paris Opera and other dance companies of his ballets. Using archival materials usually ignored by dance scholars, the article examines Lifar’s political activities, his political convictions, and his political ambitions. His theory of ballet as set forth in La Danse: Les grands courants de la danse académique (1938) and two of his successful ballets of this period—Joan de Zarissa (1942) and Suite en blanc (1943)—are discussed in light of his politics. The chapter concludes with an analysis of corporeal fascism from a theoretical perspective including discussion of Carl Schmitt, Georges Bataille, Louis Marin, and Claude Lefort.

The Dancer as Statue and the Geopolitics of Neoclassicism

An examination of the influences of German thought on French dance theory, an area of scholarship that has been neglected, but is beginning to emerge in the interest in Nietzsche’s influence on Valéry. Lifar epitomized the idea of the dancer as animated marble figure sculpture, an idea traced back to Winkelmann and Hegel’s Lectures on the Fine Arts. Lifar operates in a triangle of cultural influences including France, Germany, and Russia. This chapter thus reveals the influence of eighteenth-century German aesthetics on the Russo-French theory of ballet neoclassicism. Particular attention is paid to Lifar’s interpretation of Apollo in George Balanchine’s Apollon Musagète in its first years.