ABSTRACT
In May 1911, the controversial production of Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien in Paris’s Theatre du Chatelet thrust a scene of extreme, sensual violence on its bourgeois public. Staging nightly the martyrdom of one of the Church’s most well-known saints, his body pierced by the arrows of his own band of archers, Le Martyre offered a spectacle of power, anxiety, and desire that my analyses will show to be a reenactment and a reaffirmation of drives marking French national and sexual identity. Imitating the theatrical model famously exploited by Serge de Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, whose arrival in the French capital only two years earlier had established Parisian dance theater as the site of extraordinarily fertile explorations among the arts, this meaning-rich production took form through the collaborative talents of Europe’s most sought-after artists. With libretto by Gabriele d’Annunzio, music by Claude Debussy, choreography by Michel Fokine, and set design and costumes by Leon Bakst, Le Martyre revealed cultural anxieties projected through the representing stage and onto the body and performance of the production’s star dancer-actor, Ida Rubinstein.
