Choruses, Community, and the Corps de Ballet

Abstract

In ‘Choruses, Community, and the Corps de Ballet’, Fiona Macintosh reinserts the history of dance into discussion of the reception of the ancient Greek chorus and probes the prejudices towards the dancer in the second half of the nineteenth century that account for its earlier omission. The roots of the nineteenth-century corps de ballet lie not in the court of Louis XIV but in the French revolutionary choral festivities, which took their cues from antiquity. In the early nineteenth century, the corps embodied the (often) perilous power of female collectivities at a time when the emergent principal ballerina was bathed in the newly invented stage gas lighting.