Writing, Dancing and the Art of Embodiment

Abstract

The essay discusses the introduction of the term “dance monkey” as characterization of an inferior aesthetic mind into the public discourse of the 1840s and 1850s by German-Jewish writer Heinrich Heine. Ballet makers, according to him, required intellectual guidance to arrive at a meaningful, substantive work that displayed thoughtful narratives and plots. On suggestion of the manager of Her Majesty’s Theatre in London, Benjamin Lumley, Heine wrote two ballet libretti in 1846 and 1847: Die Göttin Diana (The Goddess Diana) and Der Doktor Faustus, neither of which was performed during his lifetime. He blamed the choreographers Perrot and Paul Taglioni for the rejection of his libretti, both at the time engaged by Lumley, and accused them of unacceptable interference. He considered ballet in urgent need of philosophical infusion: performers required the assistance of intellectuals to guide them towards satisfactory operas or ballets. Heine made sure that his libretti were printed as independent literary contributions after his hopes of their realization on stage collapsed. They and other written works that focused on dance and movement reveal his perspectives on contemporary ballet and offer an insight into the political, social and cultural battles that defined the European bourgeois, theatrical stage.