How to represent dance? How a painting, drawing, photography or video can express the movement that is inherent to dance? How to show the expression or charisma of a dancer? How to catch the atmosphere of a show? These are the questions the exhibition organised by The National Library of France at Garnier Opera offers to answer. The point of view is original considering it is to recount the different representations of dance over time, through around a hundred sketches, prints, photographs, sculptures and paintings. This exhibition also allows the National Library of France to expose its collection on dance, which is one of the largest in the world.
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Portrait de Germaine-Yvonne Franck
Jean-Gabriel Domergue — ©ADAGP |
The journey starts in the 17th century, continuing with the ballet costumes sketched with a nimble hand by Louis-René Boquet in the following century. From the early 19th century, dance acquired a legitimacy it had never had before with the explosion of Romantic ballet. One sees that at this time, the concern is as much to represent the expression of the movement than to be close to its social representations and to reflect the fantasies that it feeds. Dancers, who were once beyond the scene, were elevated to the level of myth. The romantic Marie Taglioni, her rival, the sensual Fanny Essler and Carlotta Grisi, as many famous interpreters than representations of dance. The popular imagery accounts a social status still apart, with the dancers' body and occasional prostitution caricatured and mocked as well as the underlining of the fetish of the foot and tutu. As well as the paintings of which one is by Degas, (where one sees the dancers at work or at rest, on stage or behind the scence), one notices the numerous sculptures by Jean-Auguste Barre or by Maurice Charpentier-Mio. This is proof that this art of material is paradoxically not the least appropriate to reflect the movement.
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Danseuses s’exerçant au foyer de l’Opéra
Edgar Degas — ©BMO |
Unfortunately the exhibition seems unfinished, leaving the visitor along the way, with the avant-gardist photographic works of Man Ray or Arturo Bragaglia from the early 20th century. Despite the evocation of the magical performances of the American Loïe Fuller and her posters from the 1900s, the allusions to the trend of renovation of dance and the technical challenges that it conducts, a few pictures of the second half of the 20th century, no videos and with only a few dancers alive : no place is given to the results of the current research on the representation of dance. Nothing seems to exist since the famous Nijinsky's jump photographed by Druet except some quickly picked photos, for example those of Béjar. The exhibition asserts the new possibilities that cinema and video have not diminished the power of photography in its reflection of the movement: . The contemporary period is omitted, which finally gives a fairly dusty image of dance.
Unfortunately this ambitious exhibition does not reply to all the questions that it asks. According to the information in the last room, the exhibition apparently ends turning around its intentions.
The exhibition runs until the 11th January 2008.
Bibliothèque-musée de l’Opéra Palais Garnier
Place de l’Opéra – 75009 Paris
Tel. +33 (0)1 53 79 37 40
Open every day from 10am to 5pm
(closed on afternoon performance days)
www.bnf.fr