Dance and Costumes. Elna Matamoros

and how exactly she performed them– and the preserved paintings of her do not convey everything we would have liked to know about the dancer. Portrayed by Louis-Michel van Loo (1707-1771), we see a beautiful woman sitting on a rococo chair in a classical, light dress that in no way reminds us of what La Camargo must have worn on stage. Our attention is drawn to the light veil that adorns her head, a pendant of soft muslin that perhaps suggests the light tunics that covered her body on stage,⁶⁸ a subtle reference made by the way she skilfully holds it. Chazin-Bennahum quotes some lines from the newspaper Le Mercure de France in 1734, which refer to Sallé on stage “without panniers, without a skirt, without a corset, without any ornaments on her head… in a simple muslin robe draped in the style of a Greek tunic.”⁶⁹ It was almost how she was portrayed by van Loo.

      2.7 - Portrait de Mademoiselle Sallé. Oil on canvas by Louis-Michel van Loo, 1737. Painting recovered at the end of the Second World War… (please see ‘Figures: location and credits’).

      But Sallé, says Chazin-Bannahum, had another audacity on stage: she appeared in transvestite in the ballet Les Caractères de l’Amour, playing Cupid.⁷⁰ Marie Sallé unified the technique of La Camargo, with her own boldness and the growing artistic openness in the narrow morality of the time; dance teachers were able, in a period of just a few years, to make the most of the recent incorporations which emerged throughout the 18^th century. The great dance revolutionary Georges Noverre (1727-1810), who at the age of 17 had met Sallé, quickly understood the lesson and knew how to use the new artistic trends. His famous Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets⁷¹ are a compendium of the great advances that will crystallize in the scenic dance during the following century. Noverre’s commitment to the absence of masks in the story-telling ballets,⁷² the need for lighter costumes that would allow greater mobility for the dancers,⁷³ or his public defense of the capacity of dance to represent the passions, emotions and complexity of the stage drama by itself,⁷⁴ meant a considerable qualitative and quantitative leap for the ballet.⁷⁵ Suddenly, we find images of dancers wearing lighter clothes, exhibiting bodies that we perceive as instruments capable of performing technical prodigies unconceivable until then; from that moment forward, masters and choreographers would tend to seek, principally, new positions to impress the public and reveal the physical faculties of the dancers.

      The life of Noverre continues being a territory little explored⁷⁶ and of his choreographies, we barely have registered their titles and their categories according to the differentiation of genres of the time: ballet tragique, héroï-pantomime, ballet anacréontique, petit ballet en action, ballet pastoral, ballet en action… However, his written work has been republished in multiple languages and admired by choreographers of all ages;⁷⁷ his Lettres sur la danse et les arts imitateurs are a complete treatise on what the creation and performance of the dancing spectacle in the 18^th century entailed, ranging from references to dance in antiquity to a complete enumeration of the virtues and defects of the dancers who were active during those years. Noverre dedicates almost half of the pages to the qualities and formation that both the dancer and the maître de ballet⁷⁸ must have. From them, there are two specific letters referring to “The Expression of the face; inconvenience of masks”⁷⁹ and “Costumes.”⁸⁰ Noverre complained, justifiably, of how dance was very disadvantaged in its intervention in operas and although it justified in some way the negligence in the meticulousness of these complex scenic artifices in favour of the spectacularity of the productions, he defended the need not to be carried away by this sumptuousness and to bring some precision to the stagings of ballets.⁸¹ The usual uniform in ballet was the core of his attacks: “Variety and truth in costume are as rare as in music, ballets, and simple dance. Stubbornness is equal in all parts of the Opéra […]. Greek, Roman, Shepherd, Hunter, Warrior, Faun […], all the clothes of these characters are cut on the same pattern, and differ only in colour and embellishment.”⁸² He complained about the use of tonnelets⁸³ (puffed underware made of rigid fabric) and defended costumes that are “simple and lightweight, contrasted by colours, and distributed in such a way that the dancer’s figure⁸⁴ is not revealed.”⁸⁵ When he focuses on the dancers’ costumes, his criticism becomes even more bitter, since street fashion, perhaps a little quirky in his opinion, had reached the stage: “The Opéra has long been regarded as a school of good taste, the costume was observed, actresses and dancers, above all, dress elegantly […]. Everything has changed, Sir, the Opera, from being a model to being a copy of the women of the city […], changing shape and costume every month […] by a whim that is without precedence, they have left their hair, this magnificent ornament that nature has placed on their heads to crown their forehead and serve as a tiara to beauty. This simple and noble ornament was replaced for some time by ridiculous wigs. Women, who are brown today, are blond the next day […]. These wigs have passed from the city to the Opéra. The inhabitants of Paris who adopted these extravagant masquerades are today Titus, the next day Caracalla, and the day after Brutus. The Opéra took the costume of the day, and dedicated themselves to all the possible wigs.”⁸⁶ He also openly criticized the use of masks on stage:⁸⁷ “It is, as you know, Sir, on the face of man, that passions are imprinted, that the movements and affections of the soul are unfolded…,” he would explain, in defence of the visibility of the dancers’ faces.⁸⁸ “Those who love masks, who are attached to them out of habit, and who would believe that art degenerates if the yoke of the old Opera sections is shaken, will say, to allow for their bad taste, that there are characters in the theatre that require masks; such as the Furies, the Tritons, the Winds, the Fauns, etc. This objection is ridiculous; it is based on a prejudice that is as easy to fight, as it is to destroy. I will prove first that the masks used for these kinds of characters are poorly modelled, poorly painted, and that they have no credibility [to what they represent]; second, that it is easy to render these characters with truth without any external help.”⁸⁹

      2.8 - M. Deshayes et M. d’Egville dans le Ballet Pantomime d’Achille et Déidamie. Lithograph by Villers Huët, hand-coloured, 1804.

      The image of the dancers André Jean-Jacques Deshayes (1777- 1846) and James Harvey d’Egville (ca. 1770-1836) in a hand-coloured lithograph of Villiers Huët printed by Antoine Cardon in 1804, is a clear example of dance without artifice –nor tricks– and also of the capacity –to which we referred above– of the new dancers to perform technical prodigies hitherto unthinkable.⁹⁰ In a pastoral surrounding, and wearing clothes according to the characters that represent the Ballet Pantomime d’Achiles et Deidamie –composed by D’Egville himself– the dancers perform a daring and acrobatic elevated position: D’Egville lifts Deshayes, supporting him by the hands. Deshayes, who rests his body weight on the left hip of his partner, looks desultory over his shoulder. D’Egville, wearing a short Grecian tunic girded with a buckled belt, covers his back with a leopard skin which maintains the silhouette of the animal. The naked shoulders, the bare torso and the effort of the dancer/athlete are evident in a porté that undoubtedly dazzled the public at the time.

      Although already in some court dances small portés were performed, as in the case of the galliard –in this instance called volté due to the simultaneous travelling and turning action⁹¹–, these movements would not tread the stages again until the 18^th century, so they were forgotten for almost a century. Perhaps there were moral causes that limited the use of these steps in which the man lifted the woman, but there was also the safety of the dancer involved; Thoinot Arbeau, pseudonym of Jehan Tabourot, advised about returning the woman to the ground when he supposed that his partner might feel unstable: “…whatever good composure she may show, her brain shaken, full of dizziness and head in whirlwinds, and you didn’t feel better.” On the other hand, to correctly perform the dancer’s lift, the author indicated that the man should place his right hand on the woman’s back and his left hand under the bust, pushing her up with his right thigh, which he should place under her buttock. Certainly, this was just barely on the edge of the decorum of