15 - The romantic ballet and its critics: dance goes public

Summary

The extraordinarily successful phenomenon of the romantic ballet represents a period of renewal of theatre dance but also a symbiosis between the performed and the written, between dancer and critic. Romantic ballet is an aesthetic movement both embodied and discursive. Ballet in the 1830s and 1840s cannot be considered without taking into account its written testimonies, which described a new and sensational physical technique, suggestive stage technology and an elaborate dramatic style. A cult of the romantic ballerina grew up that soon reached the higher spheres of myth-making. While there had always been admiration for stellar dancers, the ‘star system’ came into its own in the nineteenth century. The new writing on dance followed an era of aesthetic redefinition and fits perfectly in to Habermas's theory of the emergence of Öffentlichkeit or the “public sphere”. The commercialisation of opera performance brought in its wake a demand for consumer information and led to a flood of journalistic and fictional writings that grounded ballet firmly in the rapidly developing field of publicity. Audiences expanded and diversified. They extended to those who did not have to be present at a performance at all, to the “liseuses de feuilleton” and to those who enjoyed being able to observe the dancers through the eyes of a critic who might even allow glimpses into the secret spaces behind the stage, the green rooms of Europe's theatres to which only the lucky few were admitted.