Overview

In 1866, when the ballet La Source debuted, the public at the Paris Opera may have been content to dream about its setting in the verdant Caucasus, its exotic Circassians, veiled Georgians, and powerful Khan. Yet the ballet's botany also played to a public thinking about ethnic and exotic others at the same time-and in the same ways-as they were thinking about plants. Along with these stereotypes, with a flower promising hybridity in a green ecology, and the death of the embodied Source recuperated as a force for regeneration, the ballet can be read as a fable of science and the performance as its demonstration. Programmed for the opening gala of the new Opera, the Palais Garnier, in 1875 the ballet reflected not so much a timeless Orient as timely colonial policy and engineering in North Africa, the management of water and women. One Dead at the Paris Opera Ballet takes readers to four historic performances, over 150 years, showing how-- through the sacrifice of a feminized Nature-- La Source represented the biopolitics of sex and race, and the cosmopolitics of human and natural resources. Its 2011 reinvention at the Paris Opera, following the adoption of new legislation banning the veil in public spaces, might have staged gender and climate justice in sync with the Arab Spring, but opted instead for luxury and dream. Its 2014 reprise might have focused on decolonizing the stage or raising eco-consciousness, but exemplified the greater urgency attached to Islamist threat rather than imminent climate catastrophe, missing the ballet's historic potential to make its audience think.

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9780190061821

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Reviews

A lively journey deep into the Paris Opera houseand its dance ecologies that interrogates popular and elite culture in French society and its still unresolved postcolonial issues. McCarren brings into dialogue challenging ideas circulating on both sides of the Atlantic and suggests the possibility of more inclusive and more ethical dance worlds. * Laure Guilbert, Former Chief Editor of Dance Books, Paris National Opera * Felicia McCarren writes a much-needed political history of the Paris Opera Ballet as a distinct regime of knowledge in Modern France. Through her sophisticated intertwining of dance history, ecofeminism, new materialism, and postcolonial theory, McCarren's timely meditation on La Source offers vital insights into choreography's hybrid ecology of practices. * No'emie Solomon, writer and curator *

A lively journey deep into the Paris Opera houseAand its dance ecologies that interrogates popular and elite culture in French society and its still unresolved postcolonial issues. McCarren brings into dialogue challenging ideas circulating on both sides of the Atlantic and suggests the possibility of more inclusive and more ethical dance worlds. -- Laure Guilbert, Former Chief Editor of Dance Books, Paris National Opera Felicia McCarren writes a much-needed political history of the Paris Opera Ballet as a distinct regime of knowledge in Modern France. Through her sophisticated intertwining of dance history, ecofeminism, new materialism, and postcolonial theory, McCarren's timely meditation on La Source offers vital insights into choreography's hybrid ecology of practices. -- Noemie Solomon, writer and curator

Felicia McCarren writes a much-needed political history of the Paris Opera Ballet as a distinct regime of knowledge in Modern France. Through her sophisticated intertwining of dance history, ecofeminism, new materialism, and postcolonial theory, McCarren's timely meditation on La Source offers vital insights into choreography's hybrid ecology of practices. * Noemie Solomon, writer and curator * A lively journey deep into the Paris Opera houseand its dance ecologies that interrogates popular and elite culture in French society and its still unresolved postcolonial issues. McCarren brings into dialogue challenging ideas circulating on both sides of the Atlantic and suggests the possibility of more inclusive and more ethical dance worlds. * Laure Guilbert, Former Chief Editor of Dance Books, Paris National Opera *

Author Information

Felicia McCarren, Professor of French at Tulane University in New Orleans, has been a fellow of the Paris Institute for Advanced Study and the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme (2016-17). She is a member of the seminar in the cultural history of dance at EHESS, Paris and the international research group PARIFA (Performance, Archive and Repertory in the Francophone Atlantic).

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