When Ballet Became French: Modern Ballet and the Cultural Politics of France, 1909–1939. By Ilyana Karthas

Abstract

When Ballet Became French uses dance to examine French nationalism, aesthetics, and gender in the first half of the twentieth century. Situating her work at the nexus of cultural history and dance history, Ilyana Karthas makes a compelling historiographic argument that in neglecting dance as a site of historical analysis, historians have missed a critical set of sources that are especially attentive to the body and gender. In this work, her first monograph, she seeks to repair this oversight for the interwar period in France. This book is not, however, a straightforward or formalist dance history. While Karthas is attentive to formalist changes in ballet technique, her focus is on critical writings from arts critics of the period, rather than choreographic reconstructions of ballets. Karthas shows how ballet criticism discursively reflected many anxieties plaguing France during the interwar period, claiming that “critics used the medium of ballet to forge coherent ideas about national identity, modern aesthetics and gender norms” (6). She contends that ballet is a particularly fruitful site to look at gender as well as France’s relationship with Russia during this period, both of which are central themes in the historiography.