A Genealogy of Dance Modernity

Abstract

Abstract 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.