Turning into Subjects: The Male Dancer in Romantic Ballet

Abstract

This essay starts from the observation that in the course of the nineteenth century male dancers were, at least in the Paris Opera, gradually removed from ballets. As becomes apparent in Théophile Gautier’s writings on ballet, men had to define their physicality against both the old aristocracy and the laboring classes — and moreover against the bodies of women with their distinguishing feature, the womb, and the emotional and social codes in which the female body was conceptualized. Masculinity in nineteenth-century ballet is not an essence but relational. This chapter argues that, as in La Sylphide (1832), the male dancer is the representation of the male gaze lurking in the shadows and yet organizing the whole field of vision according to its principles. While the male body in the Romantic ballet phantasmatically becomes one with the detached gaze, it nonetheless remains an abstract entity that is inscribed in the geometrical ordering of the dancing bodies in space. In order to be the dominant structure, any claim to a positively defined masculine identity must be abandoned. With Vaslav Nijinsky’s Le spectre de la rose (1911) the male dancer enters the frame of representation, thus becoming a subject by being an object of female desire. Like the sylph he acquires a body only in the process of becoming a disembodied thing that is always on the verge of turning into an image. Thus, unlike the male gaze in La Sylphide, once the male dancer has entered the picture, his modern gaze is split. There is something he can no longer control from his newly gained position: the gaze of the other that gives him a body.