Serenade, page 9
Pierre Rameau, dance master and author, explained in 1725 the importance of Beauchamps’s codification:
What is termed a position is nothing more than a separation or bringing together of the feet according to a fixed distance, while the body is maintained upright and in equilibrium without any appearance of constraint, whether one walks, dances, or comes to a stop. These positions were discovered through the application of the late Monsieur Beauchamps, who wished to give a definite foundation to the art. Before his time these positions were unknown, which proves his deep knowledge of this art. They must be regarded as indispensable and unbreakable rules.
They remain “indispensable and unbreakable” to this day.
The English poet Soame Jenyns prophesied far-reaching historical significance for dance notation’s effect in his 1729 poem “The Art of Dancing.”
Hence o’er the world this pleasing art shall spread,
And every dance in ev’ry clime be read.
By distant masters shall each step be seen,
Tho’ mountains rife, and oceans roar between
Hence, with her sister arts shall dancing claim
An equal right to universal fame,
And Isaac’s rigadoon shall live as long,
As Raphael’s painting, or as Virgil’s song.
The ambition to write down dance so as to tether its inherent flight to some terrestrial form is now well over three hundred years old and has had many brave adventurers along the way. But, in truth, none have accomplished the permanence Jenyns predicted—a quality not only antithetical to the form but directly opposed to its very purpose. Dance, like desire itself, evaporates even as it conquers—like Mr. Isaac’s noble rigadoon,[*6] whose exquisitely drawn notation now resides only in dusty dance archives, hardly the fate or fame of Raphael’s Madonnas or Virgil’s Aeneid.
Mr. Isaac’s “The Rigadoone” in Beauchamps-Feuillet notation, 1721 (Dancing by the Book : A Catalogue of Books, 1531–1804, in the collection of Mary Ann O’Brian Malkin)
The Beauchamps-Feuillet system named and illustrated in broad, moral terms “the good/true positions” (“les bonnes positions”: toes out) and, curiously, “the false positions” (“les fausses positions”: toes in; i.e., pigeon-toed), while also outlining with intense specificity no less than ninety-four forms of pas de bourrées—a virtual periodic table de bourrées.
“When I came to France,” wrote the king’s sister-in-law, the Duchess of Orléans, in her memoirs, “I saw there a gathering of men of talent such as will not be found again for many centuries. It was Lully for music; Beauchamps for ballets; Corneille and Racine for tragedy; Molière for comedy.”
And of these immortals, only Beauchamps, ballet maker, remains all but unknown, having endured centuries of vagaries, not least the uncertain date of his death. Though it is often stated as 1705, there exists public record of his living more than ten years longer, and an obituary has yet to be found. He has no dedicated biography, and none of his many ballets survive—a particularly ironic footnote for the man who invented a way of “writing dance.” He left no wife or children, only some notable paintings by French and Italian masters (Poussin, Raphael, Giorgione, Veronese) that now hang in the Prado, the Hermitage, the Louvre, and the Metropolitan Museum. The single lithograph bearing his likeness is an imagined concoction devised a hundred years after he lived, and even his very name continues to be spelled two ways, with and without the final “s.” Though it appears that in this last alone, Beauchamps left us written evidence: a signature so round, clear, and musical as to echo his profession.
While history has lobbied against this balletmaster, he nevertheless labors on daily, in righteous anonymity but evident visibility, in perhaps the most fitting inheritance of all. Thousands upon thousands of ballet dancers over the centuries have stood in his first position—the beautiful field of Beauchamps’s circumscription—to begin their daily morning class. Surely more first positions have been taken, will be taken, and are being taken as you read this than there are stars in the universe. Always first in first. As we stand now in Serenade at minute 1:33, in our shamelessly open first position, each of seventeen dancers doubles Beauchamps’s prescribed 90-degree angle to a saucy 180 degrees: the finished line of progress. Firmly planted inside the legacy of the love of a king and his loyal balletmaster for dancing, we stand, truly, with history rushing underfoot.
top “Good” first position—toes turned outward 90 degrees—in Beauchamps-Feuillet notation, 1700. The two adjacent circles indicate the heels, and their two diagonal offshoot lines indicate the direction of the feet. bottom “Bad” first position—toes turned inward (pigeon-toed).
Skip Notes
*1 The timings in Serenade referenced in the text are based on the 1990 film (available on YouTube), but the seconds noted would vary slightly in any live performance depending on the conductor’s tempos.
*2 Prior to Louis’s ascension to the throne, the Académie Française was founded in 1635 and the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1648.
*3 Within eight years, in 1669, the academy was folded into the Académie Royale de Musique and became what is now the oldest ballet company and school in the world, the Paris Opera Ballet.
*4 History, however, has shown that such a transmutation of liveness to paper, of animate to inanimate, of three dimensions to two, is a battle rarely won in ballet. Unlike the absolute precision of a musical score to reproduce music accurately, dance notations are not easily reconstituted to living bodies.
*5 A century earlier, a French Jesuit cleric, Thoinot Arbeau, produced a curious treatise titled Orchésographie, a handbook as much a dating manual as a dancing one. Dance, he opined from his priestly perch, was to be perfected to attract and please the “damsels,” so as to “not be reproached for having the heart of a pig and head of an ass.”
*6 The celebrated Mr. Isaac was the British queen Anne’s dancing master, and he composed his rigadoon, in 1711, to celebrate her forty-sixth birthday.
7. POINTE
It is now a minute and thirty-five seconds into the ballet, and while our feet have spun wide, our legs have still not moved. From this first position, we lift our arms softly sideways and extend the right leg to the side in battement tendu. This is one of ballet's most basic steps, and Balanchine liked to say—and he said it often, taunting us—that if you could do a tendu well, you could dance “anything.” This kind of statement kept things very clear for us, in our tunneled vision. It conveyed an impossible order of deceptive simplicity, one that will keep any ballet dancer at the barre all her life.
While appearing to be just an extension of the foot on the ground of no more than twenty inches with a straight and turned-out leg to the front, side, or back—or anywhere between those three—this move, in fact, takes years and years to master and, being a perfect step, is never perfected. A tendu, a small and short movement, is the great physical metaphor for the pursuit of virtue that is a ballet dancer’s vocation: it requires the entire body, head to toes, in a state of unwavering fortitude and precise one-pointedness, to execute with the kind of beauty and conviction that will register as an event in the farthest rows of a theater.
And there, at the tips of those seventeen taut right legs in tendu, is a pointed foot, its toes sheathed in peach satin, ankles bound in ribbon. It is now one minute and forty-one seconds into the ballet, and so much already has passed, yet only now do we point our toes. Here is ballet.
There they are, an upward breath, those feet, those shoes, these shimmering crescents of improbability; upon their silhouetted soles begins our art. These great arcs of light upon which many a poet and photographer have settled their sentimental lens, require, in truth, arches of iron, and minds more so. It is here, on the ground, at our farthermost reaches, where flesh crashes into the spirit of Terpsichore most definitively, for inside those pastel tubes of tight uniformity lie our feet, our ten toes, and the wounds and scars from our crusade against gravity. An unlikely wager is won inside these satin cylinders, Newton’s apple upended, cored, and spun into a vertical liquid of unlikeliness.
Not only is pointe dancing, unique to female ballet dancers as a serious endeavor, as a way of life, ballet’s most recognizable attribute, but its mastery also defines a world, sending a dancer into yet another dimension—a higher plane—and also into the realm of blisters and calluses, even as it raises her inner being to far greater heights than the six inches that it raises her body. To be up there with ease, where the act is no longer a gravitational gamble but a war won, changes a girl forever. She has landed on Olympus, and the cliff’s edge is now her home.
And as she stands there, she rests upon the toes, as it were, of Mlle Marie Taglioni, the first wayfaring sylph who dared this absurdity and who now resides in immortality on her impossibly tiny pointy pointes in lithographs as if in actual memory. This young ballerina—called “the most famous dancer that ever moved on a stage” by one critic—learned to dance on her toe tips with, as history has it, no visible effort at all, and in slippers, without the hard, supportive blocks of today’s pointe shoes. But her will was very great.
With Taglioni’s rise, ballet had turned east from its French epicenter to Italy for its next great injection of innovation and energy. With pointe dancing, all movement literally leaned frontward, as ballet dancers moved their balance from Louis XIV’s heels to Taglioni’s toes. But it also lifted the ballerina up from flat-footed life, so that gravity now bends around a tilted orbit. This is indeed a forward move—of opening, of offering, of availability—and yet the increased agility also aids speedy escape. Pointe dancing provided an erotic repositioning of the entire body.
The great ballerina, in her vast fame as an early-nineteenth-century superstar, also established the supremacy of female dancers, of the ballerina, over the male-dominated dancing of Louis XIV’s court, two hundred years earlier. Taglioni became the muse to the French poets of her day—Théophile Gautier, Victor Hugo, Dumas père, Chateaubriand—as the epitome not only of femininity and grace but of a freedom of spirit that rendered her “both saintly and a force of anarchy and dissolution.”
“She swims in your eye like a curl of smoke, or a flake of down,” wrote one American male admirer. And you “find with surprise that a dancing girl, who is exposed night after night to a profaning gaze of the world, has crept into one of the most sacred niches of your memory.”
But, more notably, Taglioni captivated women. Countess Dash explained how she presented to them an alternative to their ever-understated, proper behavior, suggesting they might “abandon their soft and calm existence” for “storms of passion” and “dangerous emotions.”
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Marie Taglioni was a formidable Italian-Swedish woman, born in 1804 in Stockholm, whose entire career unfolded under the strict guidance of her equally formidable Italian father, Filippo Taglioni, a member of a dancing family of Taglionis. Until then, dancing on the toes was only an amusing stunt, a grotesquery, used on occasion by the Italian Grotteschi dancers, but Taglioni’s refinement transformed a trick into a language all its own, lifting ballet’s proposition of grace, from the pointed shoes of Louis XIV’s court to pointed feet. And there it has remained, albeit with many a mishap, ever since.
Taglioni describes in her Souvenirs the kind of work she did in the endless hours of daily training with her father in the six months prior to her debut, at age eighteen, on June 10, 1822. This study took place in a room in their apartment in Vienna that Filippo had outfitted with a steeply raked floor to mimic the theatrical stages of the time, which required negotiating verticality differently than on dry land.
Marie Taglioni in La Sylphide (Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library)
During these six hours, at least two were devoted only to exercises, thousands for each foot. It was extremely painful, arid and boring, and yet it is the only means to soften the nerves, to fortify them, and to arrive at a certain perfection…Then two more hours were devoted to what I will call aplombs, or adagio. Thus I would take poses held on a single foot…and I counted up to a hundred before leaving it…These poses must be done by standing on demi-pointe on one foot—that is, by raising the heel so that it does not touch the floor.
The final two hours of training, just before bed, were devoted to jumps. She would begin “by loosening the instep and the tendons (the most delicate part of our person).”
We do thousands of these exercises before we attain a certain degree of perfection, and then we start to jump…Finally I will say by dint of jumping, one ends up finding the spring of a doe. For me I know I could launch myself across the stage in one or two leaps…One did not hear me land, because it was always the tip of my foot that landed first and my heel would come down gently…I actually vibrated in the air.
Taglioni was famously unbeautiful, rendering her mythic status as a creature of magical beauty all the more moving, an example of self-creation through discipline and devotion under the tutelage of morality. “Ill-made,” wrote one who saw her, “almost deformed, quite without beauty and without any of those conspicuous exterior advantages that generally command success.” Her brutal self-assessment is an example of that required of any ballet dancer of real merit:
When one has to appear before the public, one naturally exposes oneself to its criticisms; that is why we must make a general study of one’s whole person—see one’s defects and seek as much as possible to make qualities out of them. Thus, I was not pretty: The top of my body left much to be desired. I was slim without being thin; my legs were very well made—a little elongated, but well proportioned; my foot, remarkably small and graceful. I knew how to walk on the stage like nobody. Finally, what I am going to say will seem ridiculous: I had spiritual feet and hands.
One does not doubt her. That she sought to perform on her toes with such weightless poise was a truly radical undertaking. Is not standing, not to mention residing, on the tips of one’s toes impossible? In channeling her integrity and desire and no small ambition into her feet, Taglioni literally raised an entire art, encoding it with the language it still speaks today. She could not have known the repercussions. This was not innovation but revolution: Taglioni guillotined human flat feet and honed her pointes into blades that would pierce memory, slashing her craft open to longevity and lifting ballet to an art form that could depict spirit and purity. Thus it began to depart from its long, though ever-lingering, association with women of pliable bodies and easy virtue. A ballerina’s pointe shoe became the upright motif of a woman worthy of respect, despite the tulle and pretty legs above—unveiling what Akim Volynsky called a “vertical culture” where “everything will ascend upward…the conscious spirit in its highest moral and individual soaring.” And this instruction was the brilliant, conscious intent of Taglioni’s father for his daughter from the start.
Louis Véron, the director of the Paris Opera during the time of Taglioni’s reign, wrote of the ruling French balletmaster Auguste Vestris demanding “provocative smiles,” “postures without decency,” while counseling his students, “Be charming, coquettish; display in all your movements the most stirring freedom; you must, during and after your pas, inspire love, [to the extent that] the audience and the orchestra would wish to sleep with you.” In contrast, Véron explains that “Mr. Taglioni père said quite the opposite”:
He demanded a graceful ease of movement, lightness, above all elevation, ballon; but he did not allow his daughter a gesture, a posture that lacked decency and modesty. He would say to her: “Women and girls must be able to see you dance without blushing; let your dance be full of austerity, delicacy and taste.”…Mr. Taglioni demanded an almost mystical and religious naivety in dancing. While one taught pagan dance, we can say that the other professed dance as a Catholic. Mademoiselle Taglioni danced better and differently from the others who had danced before her…among her admirers she had all the women and men of good society.
This embrace by “good society” enabled Taglioni to marry an aristocrat: Count Alfred Gilbert de Voisins. But here, her offstage life, absent from her memoirs—“all the past would be too painful” to recollect, she wrote, while she was “very happy in all that was related to my art; I do not think there was a woman more beloved and more spoiled by the public”—renders this sylph a breathing flesh-and-blood woman offstage.
She left the count within three years—though retained the title of countess all her life—and, while still performing, proceeded to have two illegitimate children by two different lovers, culminating in the father of her son, Prince Alexander Troubetzkoy, marrying her daughter (by her previous lover) when the girl was sixteen. The prince bought his lover—and future mother-in-law—the Venetian palazzo the Ca’ d’Oro, the first of four she would own, all on the Grand Canal. In addition to her Paris, London, and Lake Como homes, Taglioni’s real estate holdings today would render her, in a profession known for the poverty of its remuneration, the wealthiest female dancer in ballet history. All this from those much-darned little pointe shoes and the soles of steel inside them.
Each time any dancer rises on pointe around the world for all time to come, though she likely will not know it, she stands upon Marie Taglioni’s delicate daggers of defiance. Just look inside any well-anointed pointe shoe and see the bleeding beauty that connects us all to her.
