ABSTRACT
With these words, the critic Roland-Manuel begins his 1924 review of the Ballets Suedois’s final project for the stage, Relache, offering the venerable Dictionnaire Littre’s definition of the title’s single word. The 1993 Nouveau Petit Robert adds little to this primary definition except some further cited usages of the word, including a phrase from Romain Rolland, “nul repit, nulle relache” [“no respite, no break”], which echoes the citation of Beaumarchais’s elegant “Si constamment obligeantes, et toujours, et sans relache” [“So constantly obliging, always, without rest”].2 “Relache,” then, is a break, a rest, a pause, the disruption to the ever-present “always.” It is, in a sense, a “nothingness,” or at least a “disappearance”: that which has been present, the “painful state,” the performance, or the (aptly named) “representation,” is, in fact, absent during “relache.”
