One Dead at the Paris Opera Ballet (Video)
- [Music]
- Hi, my name's Anna Cooper. I'm a candidate in the department of French and Italian
- and I'm here today to interview professor McCarren about her new book
- which has just been published this year by Oxford University Press.
- Could you describe the genesis of this project and provide
- a brief overview of what it's about.
- This project came out of work that I'm doing with the cultural history for dance seminar
- in Paris at the L'École des hautes études en sciences sociales
- with a group of young scholars who are
- working on the history of dance and the history of
- science. They're working on the dance archive in history of body.
- And I wanted to- I was thinking about the ways in which the ballet stages
- the green world, flora, and fauna in non-verbal dance roles and
- these rules are ways to think about also historic conceptions of sex and race.
- So we might think of them today as
- colonial, but we can take a sort of postcolonial
- approach to the way that gender and race were being thought
- about, were being made, and we're being nuanced
- in these dance roles on stage. That's why I wrote the book.
- So La Source is a ballet about- it's an orientalist ballet, and there were
- many of them performed in the 19th century. But this
- one also has a sort of environmental narrative, a
- green story connected to it. And in this
- caricature- it's a cartoon really from 1866 making fun of the ballet,
- you see that they were taking the environmental narrative and they were
- really running with it. They were making fun of different
- class's plants that were being mobilized in the ballet,
- not just flowers but, you know, kitchen garden, right, and mushrooms-
- plants that were being used as essentially as drugs- right, pharmacopoeia.
- And they're clearly- they get the botany
- that the ballet is encoding but they're also
- able to gently mock it, right, to make fun of it.
- And this shows that the audience was really thinking about plants
- and all of the kinds of knowledges that botany would encode.
- So, the archive is a very fragile thing
- especially for dance, but the archive in general
- as you know can disappear or it can move, it's not very stable. There's a very
- beautiful book by [INAUDIBLE], about working on the police archive
- in Paris in which she talks about the historical
- agents that she's looking at as more real or more true than,
- you know, characters from literature for example. But having been trained in
- literature I would say that those characters are also very real or
- very true often for us. So when I'm working in the
- ballet archive, I'm thinking all the time about
- other closely related archives. Literature is of course one of them,
- but police archive, the newspapers, there are many kinds of
- archives to look at. But for dance history we also have to
- look at the repertory, and it's that living, continuing,
- presence of dancers on the stage that make us
- understand something about what happened in the history.
- So I had to look broadly across a range of archives, but I had to also
- think about the living breathing archive of dancers and of the repertory that
- continues today.
- So flowers and flora and fauna in general, the green world, are very
- important in this ballet and as they were in many ballets
- from the 19th century from the repertory. But this particular flower
- I argue isn't just ornamental or isn't just decorative
- but really encodes a kind of current scientific knowledge.
- First of all, historical knowledge from botany,
- but also current thinking about the whole ecology, right, which was a new
- term in 1866- what links, what connects
- people to plants and animals. So I argue that in this ballet,
- actually people are thinking about the plants in the same way that they're
- thinking about humans, right. Who belongs with whom?
- What does it take to survive? Things that we think of now as a domineering
- narrative. But these were playing out in botany throughout the 19th century
- and they were featured I think in this ballet and on this stage.
- I would also like to say that the flower
- obviously encodes something about love, it encodes something about
- sex, certainly plant sexuality was a really important site of study.
- So it isn't just secrets and euphemisms that are circulating, but
- it's really also thinking about
- the way that plant life can reflect
- on human life, and the way that human life can project
- itself onto plant life.
- So in the chapter of my book it's a bit of a detective story, right,
- like a puzzle that I'm piecing together. And I've taken the reader to four
- historic performances and I'm arguing that the ballet might
- not play exactly the same way in these four historic moments. So in
- 1866 I focus on the plants and the real interest in biology
- and life science, and the way the ballet
- stages this knowledge. But in 1875 the ballet is programmed by
- a very new third republic and it's the gala opening soiree where
- it's performed at the ballet [INAUDIBLE],
- is led by the head of- the new head of the third republic
- the general [INAUDIBLE], with the military history et cetera.
- So, it's going to play a little bit differently and it's going to have
- a different commentary for this audience.
- And what I argue is that in this context it really reflects something that happened,
- in 1869, which was the opening of the Suez Canal.
- So if you look at the iconography around the Suez, you'll see that
- the Empress Eugenie appeared in a white dress
- and she was kind of presenting this French genius
- of water engineering, right. And the iconography actually looks
- like the 1866 ballet that preceded it that's
- called La Source, which is the subject of my book. And by 1875
- I think everyone was familiar with this iconography and
- there had been other water engineering marvels accomplished
- by this french genius, you know,
- around the world. So I'm arguing that people watching the ballet in 1875
- couldn't help but think about that cultural precursor but they were
- also seeing the ballet for the first time in
- this new theater, golden or perhaps that we
- know today as the Palais Garnier, which everyone knows
- had to pump water out of the foundation for more than a year and which still
- holds underneath it a kind of mysterious lake,
- right. If you've seen the Phantom of the Opera you know about this
- lake under the opera house, it's a reality,
- right. So they were going to be thinking about the ballet in these
- technological terms reflecting the recent history of science
- and not just the botanical history that I argued was so important
- for the first audience.
- So when the opera takes up this ballet from the archive
- and re-does it in 2011, there's a lot at stake, right. It wants
- to show that there's been an important French
- history of ballet, that French ballet has been superior, it's
- had its own style, and they really focus on this idea of
- dream and re-enchantment in order to sell it, right.
- And I do think this kind of calls out, as you say,
- the core, the really important historical core
- of the ballet which was that it was about knowledge and
- it was also constituting a form of knowledge
- about bodies, about ecology, about hybridity, and acclimatization
- as I try to show in the book. So what does- what is it then about, what
- does it become about? Well it is commenting on its own time
- but maybe not in the way that the original ballet
- did. Because if you think of ballet only as entertainment
- or as enchantment you're going to miss the fact that the ballet can critique
- the state of things, it can critique its own time and the way people think about
- bodies or the way they think about the green
- world as being represented on stage. So it kind of takes away from ballet the
- very power that I'm trying to show it really
- has had historically.
- So in 2011 one of the things that the ballet
- didn't comment on was the Arab Spring, which was very much drawing
- everyone's attention, right. There's a scene in the ballet
- where a young woman is unveiled precipitously
- by a suitor. And in 1866 this
- had a bit of a shock but it was really part of a colonial-
- we could see it as a colonial gesture now, right,
- in sync with French activity, French policy, French aggression even
- in North Africa. Well in 2010 the law that was passed was based on
- really concern about you know, terrorism and jihad
- related to things that were going on in the middle east and there was
- concern about people forcing women to wear the veil. The fine
- for forcing someone to wear a veil is much steeper than the fine
- for wearing a veil in public space in France.
- The whole thing is a long standing story in France
- and a real problem. What the Arab Spring showed in 2011 was that women could be
- veiled and very much a part of pro-democracy movements.
- The veil doesn't have to be considered to be at odds
- with the notion of French republicanism.
- France has not been able to understand that,
- it seems, and this is quite different from Britain, for example, or other places.
- In my own experience living in the Muslim world,
- I've seen many women members of my own family, my husband's family,
- choosing to wear the veil and it isn't about oppression
- or submission in any way. So when this scene plays out in 2011 it's
- described in the libretto as an unthought,
- thoughtless, you know, quick gesture- the suitor wants
- to see the face of his beloved, but of course it's much more than that.
- It really becomes a symbol for the republic determined to unveil
- women in a way that's really out of sync with what was going on in the Arab world
- that very year.
- That's a great question, thank you. So the opera
- is trying to change, it is trying to bring
- more minority dancers into its company from its school and it
- is trying to think about sustainable productions and sustainable work,
- you know, by its dancers. So I hope that the general
- force of things is going to change. You know, this institution which has
- been very hierarchical and in many ways old-fashioned, right.
- I think what we saw in 2014 in La Source was
- just a hint of what it might have been or what it might be to
- take a ballet, a historic ballet that is thinking about
- both the environment and political questions
- that Isabelle Stengers has called cosmopolitical, right; so thinking about
- this broader ecology of practices.
- And really allow dance performers and dance choreography to, to say something
- important about, about the way that they're connected, right.
- Now the- this last production of La Source closed on December 31st
- 2014 and just less than a week later we had
- the attacks at Charlie Hebdo, later in 2015 we had
- other attacks and we also had the [?], right,
- the climate conference in Paris where the Paris accords were signed at
- the end of 2015. So this ballet was actually incredibly
- timely, a historic- a historical text that is really talking
- about things that are still very, very
- powerful in the world today. And I think the opera missed a
- chance to show the relevance of this
- historic piece, but I think it knows that it can do
- better and it will do better. The really important detail for me
- here is that when François Hollande, the
- president of the French republic called for the state of emergency to be
- put in place following the November attacks. He did
- later acknowledge that the reason for this was to secure
- the planet climate conference, it wasn't so much
- about the violence, right. And this has been a narrative that
- we've been seeing over centuries, right. That we're going
- to always be focusing on political violence
- and on contemporary threats in the way we perceive it
- rather than the long-term concerns about all humanity and about climate for
- example- about the health of the planet, right.
- Well it's very hard to summarize into one thought or one sentence
- but I think if readers could catch something of the excitement
- of the performance, right, that that's what's really important.
- We pull something from the archive or we look at something that's
- in the repertory today, but we also want to think about
- the spectators, right, in the context of the production
- of these performances. Right now in in this moment of pandemic this is the
- thing that we've lost that we're very aware of having lost.
- The coming together of people in public spaces, the sharing of
- cultural production, the incredible thought-provoking
- powerful ways that performance can move us, make us think, connect us to
- the past, promise something for the future, that's
- what I hope readers would take from this book.
- [Music]