The Travesty Dancer in Nineteenth-Century Ballet

Abstract

More than any other era in the history of ballet, the nineteenth century belongs to the ballerina. She haunts its lithographs and paintings, an ethereal creature touched with the charm of another age. Yet even when she turned into the fast, leggy ballerina of modern times, her ideology survived. If today the art of ballet celebrates the danseur nearly as often as the danseuse, it has yet to rid it aesthetic of yesterday's cult of the eternal feminine. Like her nineteenth-century forbear, today's ballerina, an icon of teen youth, athleticism, and anorexic vulnerability, incarnates a feminine ideal defined overwhelmingly by men.

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