Training Of Dancers Research Articles

Belles and Beaux by Mary Grace Swift. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1980. 312 pp., footnotes, select bibliography.

Looking at over twenty-five ballet on the American stage from 1820-50, Mary Grace Swift attempts to fill that gap, as she understands it, providing us study in of the history of dance in the Early Republic. Swift brings together information on relatively unfamiliar dancers that came to the United States, including Madame Francisque Hutin, Arnaud Leon, Charles and Maria Vestris, Ann and William Barrymore, Fanny Achille, and Madame Lecomte. The task of looking at all these performers in depth is ambitious, and one wonders at the outset, considering the mere 312 pages that comprise the volume, if this herculean task is possible. Swift's catchy title, and Beaux on Their Toes: Dancing Stars in America, leads us into her period and subject: Young America is one of the terms by which the period of the 1820s and 1830s in the United States identified its nationalism. The new republic is a complex period: a rank and class of economic and political leaders shared cultural taste with ever-widening populace demanding equal participation. Jeffersonian idealism and centralized government by intellectual elite moved into Jacksonian democracy and into government that was de-centralized and popular. Cultural tastes moved from the ideals of neo-classicism and the Enlightenment steadily into the romance and enthusiasm of the independent spirit. Burgeoning transportation, communication, and public institutions bound the nation; industrialism spurred the pace of economic and social development. A growing generation of theater businessmen began to define audiences they wished to reach by the theatrical fare they offered, and American society growing steadily more diverse and plural chose theatrical entertainment from a diversity of genres and styles that included French, English, Italian, and native American performers and repertories. The phrase Belles and beaux on their toes relates clearly to young dancers of the ballet who were part of the quickening and thickening pace of American cultural life. Swift, however, warns us in her Preface that [t] he history of ballet in earlier years is seldom a clean-cut subject, for it is difficult to separate ballets from pantomimes and harlequinades. Some of the early dancers had varied talents: they could be rope dancers, mimes, and eventually dramatic stars (p. vii). The historic period 1820-50 in the United States which Swift undertakes to define through the dance art is multifaceted. Dancers training and the dramatic and dance elements that made up the performance genres and styles of the period are just now being explored. One thinks of the current research by Lawrence Senelick (Tufts) on the later pantomime family, the Hanlon Brothers and other performers whose traditional training came from this earlier period; the ongoing NEH-sponsored research by Shirley Wynne (University of California, Santa Cruz) which tests an hypothesis regarding what she suspects to be a continuing tradition to be traced from the notation scores of the early 18th well into the 19th century (Dance Scholars Newsletter, Spring 1977, p. 5); Marian Hannah Winter's book on performance traditions, The Pre-Romantic Ballet (New York: Pitman, 1974); Ivor Guest's exploration of cooperation between theater artists in The Romantic Ballet in Paris (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1966); and my own article on the relation of elements of pantomime performance to audience tastes, Gabriel Ravel and the Martinetti Family: The Popularity of Pantomime in 1855, in American Popular Entertainment (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979). Swift, however, seems oblivious of these approaches to analysis and interpretation. She clings to assumption that guides her steadfast compilation of data about the artists: At this stage, [ 1820-50] dance history defied neat compartmentalization (p. vii). Although Swift's book brings together information which is helpful to have in one volume, her inquiry, without analysis and interpretation, is superficial. Furthermore, the limitations of a single volume restricts the display of her data. One thinks of George Odell's Annals of the New York Stage and The London Stage 1660-1800 as models for organizing vast amounts of data.