Читать книгу Dance and Costumes - Elna Matamoros - Страница 11

The naked body provides liberty for the dancers’ movement. However, despite avoiding any physical impediments caused by the stage costume, until very recent times its appearance on stage has entailed much more. Prejudices and moral considerations for a long time have been far more decisive than aesthetics in limiting, censoring and even prohibiting specific outfits in front of the audience, both with regard to the dancer as well as the spectator. Even so, the dancing naked body is today just one more choice among all the options that any choreographer and costume designer have in mind when it comes to the overall project of their work. Moreover, the public’s reaction to the vision of more or less centimetres of bare skin has also influenced the evolution of stage dancing.

When the narrow border between dancers and actresses was defined and as soon as women jumped onto the stage, the first nude dancers appeared; mainly female bodies, of course, since both the main choreographers and the most prominent names sitting in the audience –the King and the high aristocrats– were men. The male nude in dance took centuries to be interesting to the eyes of the audience.¹ In 1661, at the Château de Vaux-le- Vicomte, the dancer Madeleine Béjart appeared more than light of clothing in Les Fâcheux,² comédie-ballet that Molière had written to entertain Louis XIV; the beautiful Béjart presented the performance standing on a shell, representing a beautiful naiad. She was –or seemed to be–completely naked, holding a light shawl. Only her necklace and pearl bracelets broke the uniformity of her skin; even today, as then, one doubts whether the dancer was really naked,³ and whether it was the mother –Madeleine, 43 years old at the time– who emerged from the shell before the King, or what seems most likely, her daughter Armande, barely eighteen years old. The effect was the same: benevolent courtiers and women offended by the sight of a beautiful woman who scarcely danced, who just needed to move slightly to impress the audience with her beauty.⁴ At a time when transvestism was common on stage, the attributes built by cotton that allowed dancers to become ‘naked’ nymphs were less scandalous, but of course, they were less credible and above all, not captivating at all.⁵ Also pretending nudity, Didelot appeared in 1791 in flesh-coloured tights, as a combination of long stockings and skin-fitted knickers under a transparent tunic.⁶

3.1 - Armande Béjart as La Naïade in Les Fâcheux. Sanguine portrait by Sébastien Bourdon, 1661.

Professional dancers after La Camargo⁷ were subjected to the most extreme surveillance, no longer in terms of the length of their skirts –that was specifically the great audaciousness of La Camargo, and what made possible for her to develop the foot technique that would make her famous– but of the almost invisible clothes that they had to wear under their skirts and panniers. An incident happened around 1754 at l’Opéra Comique in Paris that would change the customs on stage: a dancer fell while executing a very complicated enchaînement and uncovered something more than her legs, with the consequent scandal in the audience.⁸ Concerned that some of the spectators might be watching with their binoculars the intimate parts of the dancers –who did not use underwear, like most women of the time under their street clothes– decided to prohibit from entering the stage any dancer who resisted wearing the so-called caleçon de précaution.⁹ However, we can assume that La Camargo, who at that time was already retired from stage, would probably have belonged to the group of ‘irresponsible’ dancers; otherwise, between the pannier, the shoes and the bloomers, it would have been difficult for her to perform the famous jetés battus that made a celebrity of her.

It is easy to suppose, anyway, that with those safety bloomers no dancer would be able to perform any step which involved crossing of the legs, perhaps not even to keep them together in a 5^th position of the feet with the knees fully stretched;¹⁰ we must guess, in the case of those modest and virtuous dancers, that those light battus were performed almost touching one foot with the other, and not at all the way these steps are done today, when the dancer is asked to cross the whole leg from the thigh to the ankle. On the other hand, we know that women in England and France –where La Camargo spent most of her career– were not accustomed to using underwear under their street clothes until well into the 19^th century.¹¹ Let’s add, as a curiosity, some verses by Soame Jenyns, from his poem The Art of Dancing, 1729, as explicit as:

“[…] Let each fair Nymph, that fears to be disgrac’d,

Ever be sure to tie her Garters fast,

Lest the loos’d string, amidst the publick Ball,

A wish’d-for Prize to some proud Fop shou’d fall,

Who the rich Treasure shall triumphant show,

And make her Checks with burning Blushes glow.”¹²

Out of London or Paris, moral authorities were no more permissive regarding the use of safety pants; in Spain, there was a fine of two coronas for any dancer showing her panties, and in the Netherlands a 1768 law imposed up to six weeks’ imprisonment for dancers who scandalized the public by showing their most intimate parts. In Rome, by a papal order, all the dancers had to wear black velvet panties.¹³ To conclude the anecdotes, the famous Casanova reported that in 1750 he saw, with his friend Claude-Pierre Patu, La Camargo dancing in Paris a year before her retirement from the stage; Patu told him that the dancer did not wear bloomers under her dresses. She, however, would assert categorically from her retirement that she always wore that garment.¹⁴ Avoiding these frivolities, it still seems unlikely that La Camargo could perform her entrechats wearing such clothing, so we suppose a Camargo that we could describe as unlawful and shameless… because of the fear from moral authorities that the dancer would show something more than her ankles under the skirt. To compensate for so much freedom in the lower half of her body, and bearing in mind that women’s fashion was about to enter into the dictatorship of bras and corsets, we can imagine La Camargo with her waist oppressed by a strapless bodice under her beautiful dresses:¹⁵ nothing interesting to show at the moment in her upper part, since the focus of attention was mainly on her huge pannier while the public tried to guess of what was happening under her skirts.

3.2 - The Graces of 1794. Satirical print by Isaac Cruikshank. Hand-coloured, 1794.

Other dancers, however, flirted with necklines: Mlle Auretti exhibited part, if not all, of her cleavage on stage wearing dresses that lowered the neckline much further than what any demure woman should wear. It is surprising that the authorities, so concerned about the use of safety bloomers, approved a neckline that most likely would let the dancer show more than the upper part of her breasts as soon as she started jumping. The truth is that by the end of the 18^th century, once the pannier of the women’s wardrobe had disappeared, the total exhibition of the breasts –which now remained outside the neckline– would become habitual, perhaps as a consequence of the fact that breastfeeding babies became ‘fashionable’. An engraving from British Museum in London,¹⁶ the parodying the custom of the moment, illustrates Judith Chazin- Bennhaum’s The Lure of Perfection…. She quotes, in the words of Isaac Cruikshank: “It’s the watch fob that grabs the eye. Feminine dress of the present fashion is perhaps the most indecent ever worn within this country. The breast is altogether displayed; the whole drapery is made to cling to the figure. Well may it be necessary to veil the face.”¹⁷

3.3 - Reine des Abeilles. Design by Paul Lormier for Marie Taglioni, 1852.

A few decades earlier the neckline cut was already being lowered; something that, as seen in the portrait of Mlle Auretti, could be used to highlight the uninhibited character of the dancer. Some designers will use it again in the next century: Paul Lormier’s design from 1852 for the character of The Queen of the Bees in the opera Le Juif errant, by Halévy –in whose Act III Marie Taglioni starred in the pas des abeilles– leaves the breasts completely uncovered.¹⁸ It seems very likely, given Taglioni’s demure personality and her modesty on stage, that Marie would not finally come on stage so lightly clothed.¹⁹ In 1820, Carlo Blasis, in his Traité élémentaire…, depicted a female figure –representing the goddess Diana– with an exposed breast as an example of the “Genre sérieux” among the dance characters;²⁰ on the same plate we find four other women dancing with their breasts out in the air,²¹ and in The Code of Terpsichore we find up to five figures –among them, again, the goddess Diana– with their breasts exposed in their different dances.²² We are therefore not looking at anecdotes that may be more or less singular, but with well-measured explanatory examples in two notable dance treatises.

3.4 - Leon Bakst: Costume design for Felicita in Les femmes de bonne humeur. Pencil and watercolour on paper, 1917.

3.5 - “A Peep at the Parisot!”. Print by Isaac Cruikshank, 1796.

Much later, another designer –Leon Bakst, for a production commissioned by Les Ballets Russes– will imagine a dress that left the breasts uncovered; with The Good-Humoured Ladies²³ Léonide Massine created a ballet that overflowed with comedy by telling the intricate love affair between Costanza and Rinaldo, who must overcome the multiple obstacles their parents present to their relationship; Bakst designed for the character of Felicita (Costanza’s frivolous friend) a dress as audacious as the role proposed and, once again, as it had happened before with Taglioni’s costume for The Queen of the Bees, the modesty of the dancer Olga Khokhlova –by then already dating Picasso– was saved by the costume-shop seamstresses that took some liberties when interpreting Bakst’s design and slightly raised the neckline.²⁴

Another dancer would shake up the audience by showing more than expected: Marie Sallé, who became the erotic counterpoint to La Camargo when she lightened her pannier, corset and wig to perform on stage… and we don’t know if anything else, since apparently she was only wearing a light muslin robe rolled to her body, similar to a Grecian tunic.²⁵ The presence of a woman whose body was glimpsed through subtle layers of gauze had no erotic interpretation, but instead was intended to free the dancers from unnecessary ‘props’ that did not facilitate their movement, nor did adequately characterize them for roles that were often camouflaged under the fashion of those days. In Marie Sallé’s portrait by Van Loo²⁶ we find a face that, as Carlo Blasis would describe when referring to the ideal attitude of the dancers, shows “decent voluptuousness and ‘abandon’.”²⁷ The neckline of her dress shows, as we see, her charms without any timidity.

With the appearance on stage of short Grecian tunics and naked male torsos that allowed the dancers to boast of their strong musculature, we can only wonder what happened to those safety pants. While dancers had been required to follow the rules governing decency in every theatre, there had always been moralists scrutinizing under their skirts, anxious to see too much and criticize the artists; Antoine Dauvergne²⁸ went too far praising the technical prodigies of Mlle Coulon, who “shows at least ten times, in very long pirouettes, the highest button of her underwear; she was very applauded.”²⁹ Fortunately, it is to be supposed that, years later, once the skirts had been shortened to almost infinity and the public, artists and businessmen understood that the body of the dancers was to be seen and admired, not impudently desired, the responsible authorities might look the other way… and perhaps the dancers would wear a maillot. Particularly ironic are the numerous illustrations of that period preserved at the Jerome Robbins Dance Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, ridiculing the Bishop of Durham and the Duke of Queensberry for censoring some performances.³⁰ In 1798, in front of the House of Lords, the Bishop denounced Mlle Parisot –who apparently lifted her legs higher than usual at the time– for immorality in her interpretation of Le Triomphe de l’Amour. The consequence was that theatrical businessmen changed the nude colour of the inner maillots for a more obvious white,³¹ thus avoiding confusing the ‘sinful’ eye that believed to see a naked body under the costume. This today called a “maillot”, or adjusted body that the dancers used to wear under the stage costume, also has its own anecdote: its name probably comes from Mr. Maillot, a bonnetier –hat maker– who supplied the Opera in the 1820s, who made knitted underwear that moulded the legs of the dancers.³²

Larousse Dictionary explains maillot as “tight-fitting clothing worn directly on the skin by dancers, gymnasts, acrobats, etc.”, and it adds in the meaning “academic maillot”, a garment of a much later creation, from the 20^th century: “a one-piece maillot that encloses the dancer’s body, from the feet to the neck, as well as the arms.”³³ A word that is already used everywhere to name a garment used by dancers all over the world and that, with its obligatory use under the skirt, planted the seed of what we will later call tutu, inasmuch as it will imply a complete body –with an inner part, in the shape of a panty– to which the skirt is sewn. From the beginning, the number of layers that built that semi-transparent skirt seemed to be directly related to dancer’s decency: the usual number of layers could be between 5 and 10, although some of skirts incorporated up to 15 or 16 superimposed layers of fabric, which we suppose would practically prevent the audience from even trying to guess any movement of legs; moreover, the weight of so many meters of fabric would hardly let the skirt rise when moving.³⁴ The tutu, with time, went from being a problem of decency for some dancers to becoming their greatest ally, as it gave them a certain aura of purity, almost chastity, which prevented any designer or choreographer from pressing them to show more than they wished. In 1903, Mlle Eva Sarcy refused to play Salome in the ballet of Hérodiade³⁵ at the Théâtre de la Gaîté in Paris dressed in a tunic, surely afraid of having to take it off completely in the famous Dance of the Seven Veils.³⁶ The dancer imposed her right to wear a tutu on stage, as she had already done dancing the same piece in Bordeaux, although this time backed by a court order; thus, her decency was not called into question.

The Spanish dancers who some years earlier had made the bolero fashionable did not show more centimetres of skin than the other performers, although only by the intention of their dances and their less athletic bodies, they already displayed a different air on stage. The differences with the French were obvious, and Gautier would highlight even the most academic distinctions in their dancing: “Their way –would say Gautier about the Spaniards– has no connection whatsoever with that of the French school. In this case, the immobility and perpendicularity of the torso are expressly recommended; the body hardly participates in leg movements. In Spain […] it is the body that dances, it is the lower back that curls up, the sides that bend, the waist that twist with a softness of an Indian dancer^[37] or a snake. In the inverted poses, the dancer’s shoulders will almost touch the head; the arms, pale and dead, have a flexibility, a softness of a knotted scarf; it seems that the hands can barely lift and make the ivory castanets babble with golden braided cords; and yet, when the time comes, young jaguar jumps follow this voluptuous languor, and prove that these bodies, soft as silk, wrap steel muscles”³⁸.

3.6 - Different ways of posing in attitude. Drawings by Casartelli for Blasis Traité élémentaire…, 1820.

Imagination was triggered leaving the spectator, while unable to see what was happening under their costumes, to imagine provocative and novel evolutions. The costumes of these female dancers differed only slightly from those of other artists of the time, but a small detail added the necessary mischief to their performance when they were dancing with their partners: their ears (small and alert to the sound of the castanets), showing out of the head band with which the other European dancers also arranged their hair. The flowers, combs and kiss-curls that framed their beautiful faces provided the definitive touch of frivolity, although these ladies showed little more than the ballerina on pointe. Meanwhile, their partners wore –unlike the other European male dancers– a fitted taleguilla, or tight breeches, similar to that of the bullfighter’s costumes, which gave greater brilliance to their interpretation and balanced the dance itself as a couple.³⁹

Regarding men, it is quite possible that the first time their bodies were considered as worthy of contemplating and as dance instruments –away from any characterization– was the collection of images that illustrated the famous Traité élémentaire… de l’art de la danse by Carlo Blasis, published in 1820:⁴⁰ in this treatise, the drawings depicted male dancers in short fitted breeches leaving exposed their torso and arms.⁴¹ Until then, men had only appeared on stage as mythological beings far from the social environment of the spectator or by shamelessly covering their virile parts with a kind of skirt that fell on the breeches. The audience would have nothing similar to a naked male body in front of them almost until the explosive presentation of Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes in the 20^th century, but from the middle of the 19^th century the absence of characters to inspire any choreographic creation would definitively contribute to a new image of the dancer as a mere mobile instrument, as raw material on which to create and fascinate the spectator. Enclosed in a society imprisoned by moral stigmas but eager to reach new horizons, the body of the dancers became an anatomical archetype of creative freedom and the audience became a judge who, far from any romantic perspective, discovered the beautiful physique of the dancer.

Among the scholars, François Delsarte (1811-1871) would use the male body as an expressive model per se, showing in his analytical methods of movement half-naked male bodies that, through basic postures, sought to transmit emotions that went beyond the expressiveness of the interpreter: those bodies were, by themselves, pure dramatic tools.⁴² Shortly after, Isadora Duncan⁴³ revolutionized society’s view of dance not only because of her novel choreographic or plastic ideas, but also because she set up a moral question by presenting a female body free from the hindrances caused by the street clothing accepted by the society of her time. Free of corsets and petticoats that limited her movement and the perception of her evolutions by the spectators, Isadora would turn her eyes to Greece and classic Rome provoking scandalous reactions in the audience when she exhibited the same parts of the body exposed in the Greek sculptures that this same public contemplated satisfied in the museums.⁴⁴