Kinetic Cultures: Modernism and Embodiment on the Belle Epoque Stage

By Rachana Vajjhala

Belle époque Paris adored dance. Whether at the music hall or in more refined theaters, audiences flocked to see the spectacles offered to them by the likes of Isadora Duncan, Diaghilev’s flashy company, and an embarrassment of Salomés. After languishing in the shadow of opera for much of the nineteenth century, ballet found itself part of this lively kinetic constellation. In Kinetic Cultures, Rachana Vajjhala argues that far from being mere delectation, ballet was implicated in the larger republican project of national rehabilitation through a rehabilitation of its citizens. By tracing the various gestural complexes of the period—bodybuilding routines, appropriate physical comportment for women, choreographic vocabularies, and more—Vajjhala presents a new way of understanding histories of dance and music, one that she locates in gesture and movement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Dec 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520976047

Rachana Vajjhala

Rachana Vajjhala is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Boston University.

Book preview

Kinetic Cultures

CALIFORNIA STUDIES IN 20TH-CENTURY MUSIC

Richard Taruskin, General Editor

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2. Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement , by Simon Morrison

3. German Modernism: Music and the Arts , by Walter Frisch

4. New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification , by Amy Beal

5. Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality , by David E. Schneider

6. Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism , by Mary E. Davis

7. Music Divided: Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture , by Danielle Fosler-Lussier

8. Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Art Music , by Klára Móricz

9. Brecht at the Opera , by Joy H. Calico

10. Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media , by Michael Long

11. Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits , by Benjamin Piekut

12. Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France , 1968–1981, by Eric Drott

13. Music and Politics in San Francisco: From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War , by Leta E. Miller

14. Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West , by Beth E. Levy

15. In Search of a Concrete Music , by Pierre Schaeffer, translated by Christine North and John Dack

16. The Musical Legacy of Wartime France , by Leslie A. Sprout

17. Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe , by Joy H. Calico

18. Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy , by Danielle Fosler-Lussier

19. Making New Music in Cold War Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival , 1956–1968, by Lisa Jakelski

20. Treatise on Musical Objects: An Essay across Disciplines , by Pierre Schaeffer, translated by Christine North and John Dack

21. Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono’s Selected Writings and Interviews , edited by Angela Ida De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi

22. The Doctor Faustus Dossier: Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, and Their Contemporaries, 1930–1951 , edited by E. Randol Schoenberg, with an introduction by Adrian Daub

23. Stravinsky in the Americas: Transatlantic Tours and Domestic Excursions from Wartime Los Angeles (1925–1945) , by H. Colin Slim, with a foreword by Richard Taruskin

24. Middlebrow Modernism: Britten’s Operas and the Great Divide , by Christopher Chowrimootoo

25. A Wayfaring Stranger: Ernst von Dohnányi’s American Years, 1949–1960 , by Veronika Kusz, translated by Viktória Kusz and Brian McLean

26. In Stravinsky’s Orbit: Responses to Modernism in Russian Paris , by Klára Móricz

27. Zoltan Kodaly’s World of Music , by Anna Dalos

28. Awangarda: Tradition and Modernity in Postwar Polish Music , by Lisa Cooper Vest

29. Magician of Sound: Ravel and the Aesthetics of Illusion , by Jessie Fillerup

30. The Art of Appreciation: Music and Middlebrow Culture in Modern Britain , by Kate Guthrie

31. Terrible Freedom: The Life and Work of Lucia Dlugoszewski , by Amy C. Beal

32. Kinetic Cultures: Modernism and Embodiment on the Belle Époque Stage , by Rachana Vajjhala

Kinetic Cultures

Modernism and Embodiment on the Belle Époque Stage

RACHANA VAJJHALA

UC Logo

University of California Press

Support for this book was generously provided by the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation also gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Ben and A. Jess Shenson Endowment Fund in Visual and Performing Arts, established by a major gift from Fred M. Levin and Nancy Livingston, The Shenson Foundation.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2024 by Rachana Vajjhala

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Vajjhala, Rachana, 1982- author.

Title: Kinetic cultures : modernism and embodiment on the Belle Époque stage / Rachana Vajjhala.

Other titles: California studies in 20th-century music; 32.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2024] | Series: California studies in 20th-century music; 32 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023014967 (print) | LCCN 2023014968 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520356276 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520976047 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Music and dance—France—Paris—20th century. | Ballets—France—Paris—20th century—History and criticism. | Ballet—France—Paris—20th century. | Modernism (Aesthetics)—France—20th century. | Gesture in dance. | Paris (France)—Social life and customs—20th century.

Classification: LCC ML3460 .V35 2024 (print) | LCC ML3460 (ebook) | DDC 792.8/09443610904—dc23/eng/20230606

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023014967

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023014968

Manufactured in the United States of America

33   32   31   30   29   28   27   26   25   24

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

For Richard

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I.   CIRCULATIONS

1. Ghosts in the House, Angels in the Machine

2. Telling Time

II.   IDENTITIES

3. Beauty’s Body

4. Mixed Doubles

5. Les Bébés in Toyland

III.   REGISTERS

6. Machines to Move Them

7. No Exit

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

FIGURES

1. Marie Taglioni in La Sylphide

2. Nijinsky and Karsavina in Les Sylphides, La saison russe

3. Decoration of runners on a panathenaic vase

4. Faune and chief nymph, Comoedia illustré

5. Bas-relief detail from the Debussy monument

6. Illustration of the téléphonoscope

7. Unpublished letter from Trouhanova to Vincent d’Indy

8. Trouhanova in Adélaïde

9. La Laide scenario in reverse

10. Data on professional susceptibility to neurasthenia

11. Photograph of Professor Desbonnet

12. Photograph of a student before and after training

13. Transcription of tennis play in musical notation

14. Maquette of Nijinsky

15. Satie, Sports et divertissements

16. Photograph of Karsavina and Schollar in Jeux

17. Maquette of the fountain pose from Jeux

18. Scenario and illustrations from score to La Boîte à joujoux

19. Bertrand, Gymnastique rythmique

20. Illustration from score to La Boîte à joujoux

21. Dramatis personae from score to La Boîte à joujoux

22. Unidentified typescript from Dansmuseet

23. Borlin in La Sculpture nègre, Das Schwedische Ballet

24. Sketches of Colin’s masks for La Sculpture nègre

25. Photographs of Josephine Baker, Florence Mills, and Joe Alex

26. Still from unidentified Dansmuseet footage

27. Stills of the ballerina sequence from Entr’acte

28. Sketch of Rolf de Maré, La Danse

29. Unpublished postcard from Dansmuseet

30. Funeral cortège from Entr’acte

31. Decor of lights from Entr’acte

MUSICAL EXAMPLES

1. Chopin, Nocturne in F Major, op. 15, no. 1

2. Ravel, Épilogue, Valses nobles et sentimentales

3. Fauré, Le Jardin de Dolly, Dolly

4. Debussy, Prélude and Quatrième tableau, La Boîte à joujoux

5. Poulenc, Prélude, Rapsodie nègre

6. Satie, Ouverture, Relâche

7. Satie, Rideau and Entrée de la Femme, Relâche

8. Satie, Musique, Relâche

9. Satie, Marche funèbre, Entr’acte

10. Chopin, Marche funèbre, Sonata No. 2 in B-flat Minor, op. 35

Acknowledgments

While I was writing this book, reading others was both a reassurance (it could be done!) and a respite (at that moment, I didn’t have to do it!). As a navel-gazing novel reader, I consumed only a few nonfiction works. Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind stuck with me. She suggests that, instead of being compared to computers or muscles, our brains might better be conceptualized as magpies, fashioning their finished products from the materials around them, weaving the bits and pieces they find into their trains of thought. . . . [T]hought happens not only inside the skull but out in the world, too; it’s an act of continuous assembly and reassembly that draws on resources external to the brain. Fortunately for this book, my magpie brain had an enormous number of external resources in the form of supportive people along the way.

Kinetic Cultures makes use of a wealth of primary sources. The librarians at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France kindly assisted me in the research process, as did the staff at the Dansmuseet in Stockholm. Even in this time of digitized everything, nothing can replace a benevolent expert helping a clueless musicologist navigate archival material she did not know she needed. Thank you again for putting up with me. I appreciate Raina Polivka’s generous guidance, especially in the final stages of the process when I felt most unmoored. Thank you to the tireless staff at UC Press, as well as the reviewers who made helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this manuscript. You are deeply appreciated.

This project began while I was working on my PhD at UC Berkeley. Mary Ann Smart and James Davies read and reread chapters with patience and grace, always offering new insights. Fellow graduate students—especially my dear cohort Emily Frey, Ulrike Petersen, and Garrick Trapp—helped me through that shadowed valley known as dissertation writing. My friendship with Rachel Vandagriff began while we were at Berkeley together but has extended long past. I have told her more than once I wouldn’t have finished school without her. The same could be said of this book.

Boston University has been a hospitable place to develop Kinetic Cultures. I could not ask for better colleagues in the Department of Musicology and Ethnomusicology. Victor Coelho acted as my Virgil while I interviewed for the position and continued to ably guide me in his role as department chair. The brilliant and unflappable Miki Kaneda radiates kindness and, more importantly, appreciates excellent ice cream. Any time I describe Marié Abe to others, I say: to know her is to love her. She is a treasured friend and colleague who also happens to be a fantastic cook, hiking buddy, and road-trip manager. When Michael Birenbaum-Quintero took over as department chair, he told me that one of his foremost responsibilities in that position was to mentor junior faculty like me. He has done so with the same thoughtfulness and excellence that he does everything. The support of Gregory Melchor-Barz, director of the School of Music, and Harvey Young, dean of the College of Fine Arts, is felt and appreciated. The Boston University Center for the Humanities provided generous financial support for publication costs. Many, many thanks.

I come from a family of immigrants, all of whom have pursued sensible professions in medicine, engineering, law, and business. By comparison, my job—talking and writing about music—seems downright fanciful. My parents, nevertheless, could not be more supportive. They are the best people I know, and somehow continue to become even better. All my gratitude and love to you.

Every magpie needs a wrangler, especially when flitting through a place as full of shiny baubles as the belle époque. Richard Taruskin was that, among many other things, for me. Here I could recount anecdotes about his intellectual rigor or examples of his flabbergasting memory for scholarly minutiae, but I had the luck of a lifetime to know him as a friend as well as a mentor. During unhurried constitutionals at Point Isabel, we had serious talks as well as silly ones. Richard loved to tell jokes (he had a tight five ready to go at all times); my spotty memory made me the perfect audience for his vintage material. One day, he demonstrated his three-against-four eyebrows, which was exactly what it sounds like. When we compared best-loved musical moments, he never hesitated to sing—opera excerpts included—exactly the phrase he had in mind. More than once his enthusiastic renditions attracted the attention of perplexed humans and their mildly alarmed dogs. I had my own conversational quirks, one of which was asking Richard arbitrary hypothetical questions—What if you had never come to Berkeley? What if you took that eyebrow act on the road?—to which he had a stock answer. My dear Rachana, he’d say, things would be so different if they weren’t as they are. I wish things were different. Instead of pale, written appreciation in these acknowledgments, I wish I could thank him during one more stroll together in the California sunshine.

Introduction

Belle époque Paris adored dance. Whether at the music hall or in more refined theaters, audiences flocked to see the spectacles offered them by the likes of Isadora Duncan, Diaghilev’s flashy company, and an embarrassment of Salomés. After languishing in the shadow of opera for much of the nineteenth century, ballet found itself part of this lively kinetic constellation. As the critic André Levinson wrote in 1911, Parisians who were only yesterday indifferent, perhaps, and strangers to the beautiful art of dance were a few short years later deeply fascinated converts. ¹

Kinetic Cultures is a book about music and dance in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century. It suggests that, far from mere delectation, ballet was implicated in the larger republican project of national rehabilitation through a rehabilitation of its citizens. Dance participated in contemporaneous culture physique, constituting a gestural complex in which movement was circulated and negotiated rather than quarantined to keep the aesthetic safe from the coarsely laic. Said another way, I attend to the belle époque’s kinetic cultures, which included but were not limited to the stages of prestigious institutions. Such a study makes possible a highly textured account of ballets that are often treated either as extant scores shorn of choreography or as collaborative art worlds that stop short of any discussion of actual gestures on stage.

For my purposes, the kinetic part of kinetic cultures operates in two ways. The term refers to various gestural complexes—bodybuilding routines, appropriate physical comportment for women, and choreographic vocabularies, to give but a few examples—that circulated during the belle époque. The second aspect of kinetic cultures is just that circulation. These complexes were themselves mobile, heterogeneous, and protean: in short, kinesis made kinetic. Culture has long been one of those terms that proliferates in academic discourse even as its use spawns squabbles aplenty. Dick Hebdige’s classic study outlines the two most basic ways culture cuts: as aesthetic endorsement (cultured activities such as opera, painting, and so forth) and as anthropological category (human societies grouped as distinct cultures). ² Taking a cue from Hebdige, I find in this terminological instability a critical opportunity. The ballets Kinetic Cultures considers have suffered from this same separation of the anthropological and the aesthetic, an excision of body from artwork. In this way, my use of kinetic culture is as multifarious as the kinetic cultures I study.

Even as the book zooms in to tell the story of how music and dance came to an uneasy détente of sorts during the early years of the twentieth century, it also zooms out to confront a persistent historiographical impasse. Musicologists and dance historians have long occupied distinct intellectual territories. This separation—institutional, methodological, disciplinary—has been curiously stubborn. Its implications are profound. Indeed, one could cite many examples of scholarly work in both fields that treat productions with musical and danced dimensions as either for the eye or for the ear. Choose choreography or score, but allegiance must be pledged. The most manifest disciplinary divide is, of course, notation. Western art music has had a stable literate system for centuries, while dance of the same cultures has not. A significant consequence of this difference is that historians of musical texts can refer to a written record, which other scholars can then consult to ratify, revise, reject, or otherwise reconsider. I do not mean to overstate the fixity of the score, and fully acknowledge the lurking vagaries of even the most hallowed urtext. Musicologists such as Carolyn Abbate have deftly demonstrated the imperative to attend to the drastic as well as (perhaps even over) the gnostic, the act as well as the text (in another familiar formulation). ³

A humanistic distaste for positivism aside, lack of notation poses an evidentiary problem for the historian. Scholars who study danced works before the invention of certain recording technologies face a crucial choice: to forage for archival detritus and then attempt a reconstruction, or to abstain from such investigation entirely and instead concentrate on better-documented works from more recent times. My project proposes a third option. I want to detect the way gesture circulates within historical moments and infuses adjacent movement practices in unexpected ways, a system of exchange I call a kinetic culture. (An analogy might be the shift from studying a score or performance to examining a soundscape.) The goal is thus not to hoard details about a particular performance so that, one fine day, someone might stage that event again. To do so is impossible and absurd, analogous to the efforts to hear Bach’s music as he and his contemporaries once did. In some ways the situation I am describing here parallels one that plagued musicology decades ago. Interest in historical performance practice spawned the myth of an authentic interpretation that not only recreated the conditions of a work’s premiere but also captured the composer’s intentions. As Richard Taruskin has contended, authenticity stems from conviction. Conviction in turn stems as much from belief as it does from knowledge. ⁴ Perhaps danced works of any kind could benefit from a more potent admixture of belief and knowledge, a methodology more pliant, as those long-lost bodies themselves once were.

TAKING TURNS

In its broadest iteration, Kinetic Cultures raises historical issues of intermediality during the belle époque that have become hoary historiographical ones plaguing scholars even now. Stated plainly, though not at all simply: how did, could, and should music and dance interact? And how do we, as scholars of these media, write about such interactions given the general asymmetry of surviving archival materials? There have been occasional attempts to address these questions. ⁵ Davinia Caddy’s chapter on L’Après-midi d’un faune in her Ballets Russes and Beyond, for example, makes a serious effort to consider the musical and the choreographic dimensions of the ballet together. ⁶ In Moving Music, Stephanie Jordan questions a basic assumption about sound and gesture—specifically the tendency to view their natural state as one of heavenly symbiosis—and instead posits that there are loads of reasons why music and dance might be at aesthetic cross-purposes. ⁷ Kinetic Cultures resists this impulse to decouple historical inquiry from methodological reassessment. As urges go, it seems reasonable to want to face down one thorny issue at a time. But it is precisely this relentless singularization that has led to heavy tomes on an assortment of danced works, replete with intricate musical analysis, that decline any mention of choreography. The reverse—discussions of gesture with little attention to sound—also exists. Myopia can be a transdisciplinary affliction.

But bifocularity, though laudable, is tricky, not only at a personal scholarly level but also at a wider disciplinary one. The codification of musicology as an academic discipline dates to the turn of the century as well, the same period Kinetic Cultures scrutinizes. Empirically minded forebears such as Guido Adler and Curt Sachs focused on stylistic classification and historical periodization, thereby inaugurating an era of positivism and philology that would last until the new musicology of the 1980s. Indeed, though diverse and multifarious in its own right, musicological scholarship that attends to concerns beyond the text has become de rigueur. But in A New History of the Humanities, Rens Bod contends that stratification continues, and has perhaps even calcified: The two traditions do not appear to be reconcilable—the stylistic and computational analysis of art, music and literature is a long way from the poststructuralist and deconstructivist approach, and vice versa. There are two art histories, two musicologies, and two literary studies that operate without any real contact, usually ignorant of each other’s attainments. ⁸ While unnecessarily stark in its assessment, this perspective does capture the intradisciplinary issues musicology has had, and continues, to face.

This small