The new ballet

This chapter analyses the use of gesture in Antony Tudor’s 1936 ballet Jardin aux Lilas, an innovative work that contrasts formal ballet gestures of strict public propriety with more naturalistic gestures conveying repressed private anguish. Drawing on theoretical discussions of gesture in the work of Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, the chapter argues that Jardin aux Lilas is a ballet of the loss of the Western bourgeoisie’s gestures, a crisis that nevertheless holds out the promise of a more progressive future.