ABSTRACT
The contribution of women to the family income, however small, was vital. Even those in the seemingly glamorous world of the ballet earned their money to partially or wholly maintain their family. Paradoxically, however, in secondary source documentation they retain the stigma of their music hall performances. The dancers attached to the Alhambra and the Empire could be said to form a company in the sense that they were employed directly by the venues and were part of a clear internal structure. The hierarchy of the ballet companies was rigid and, if it happened at all, it was rare for dancers to progress from corps to principal status. The most important dancer to appear in the music hall ballets was, without doubt, Adeline Genee. The era of the supremacy of the Italian ballerinas came to a close during the first decade of the twentieth century. The performance vocabularies of the male dancers are far more difficult to discern.
