Coppélia's Human-Objects: Winding Up Racialized Automata on the Ballet Stage

Abstract

This article focuses on how dance companies have restaged three of the original automata characters from the ballet Coppélia (Arthur Saint-Léon, 1870), described as the “Negro,” the “Moor,” and the “Chinaman.” In conversation with scholarship on the racialization of objects and the object-ification of humans, I claim these characters embody and reenact the ontological effects of slavery and colonialism, in which notions of human and object collapse into one another. I further argue that such processes vary among the roles, illuminating ways the white colonialist perspective constructs the imagined Chinese body differently than the Black body through human-object relations. As a contribution to discussions within the ballet world surrounding the use of blackface and yellowface, this article exposes how ballet choreography both participates in and reveals object-centered acts of racism through embodiment practices.