ABSTRACT
The 1909 arrival of Serge de Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in the French capital announced some two decades of frequent and productive collaboration among litterateurs, painters, musicians, and choreographers, marking Paris as the site of extraordinarily fertile exploration among the arts. The appearance of this troupe shocked a public not accustomed to seeing the Russians’ trademark splashes of bright colors in the decor, their multihued, multiformed costumes, or their powerful, sexy dancers. The spectators who famously had found pleasure in scoping their confreres in attendance suddenly found increased visual interest in what was offered by the stage; the Parisian public seemed to be suddenly not watching (only) itself. The audience left the performance spaces of this new dance theater only metaphorically breathless, however, filling newspapers, memoirs, and specialized revues with their reflections and reactions. Through its analysis of these morning-after commentaries read alongside myriad texts produced by the works’ collaborators, critics, and historians, this book posits the performing body on the Parisian stage as a site where desires, drives, and anxieties of the early twentieth-century French public were worked out.
