Dancing the Nation? French Dance Diplomacy in Allied-Occupied Austria, 1945–55

Abstract

These excerpts from critical reviewscovering French dance tours in Vienna, Salzburg, and Innsbruck reflect the scale and variety of French cultural engagement and its growing public visibility in Austria. Out of the four Allied powers, it was France, and not the Soviet Union with its “ballet capital,” that made most use of dance and ballet fornation-brandingpurposes, both in sabots and on pointe. France's dance diplomacy exported all genres of dance to Austria in order to portray the politically and militarily weakened nation as arayonnantcultural leader of Europe, whose diversity, supremacy, and grandeur were not undone by 1871 and 1940.