Pathology and performance : the hysterical dancing body on the ballet stage in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Paris

This interdisciplinary study explores the representation of the hysterical dancing body in ballet productions staged across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Paris. The analysis begins in the nineteenth century with the overt display of hysterical madness in the ballet Giselle. Examining the ballet's repeated waltz references, I provide an original rereading of the much-debated cause of death in the ballet, considering the medical and social perceptions of the act of dance. A comparative analysis of the waltz in Giselle and in the ballet's French parodies from the 1840s also unearths little-known archival material. I then examine the jerking, hysterical movements of Vaslav Nijinsky's choreography in the early 1910s and the craze for hysterical movement both onstage and off in the socialdance scene. The thesis concludes with an analysis of what was, ostensibly, the first ballet in France devoted entirely to the representation of the insane, set in an asylum: the Ballets Suédois' Maison de fous. Neglected in scholarship thus far, this performance not only signified a crucial moment in the history of modern dance, but also related closely to contemporaneous French medical discourse on hysteria. My research critically examines the social, medical and cultural motives and implications for the persistent, public appearance of the hysteric or hysterical movement in the domain of dance over several decades. This was a period of history preoccupied with new means of artistic expression, and this thesis is principally concerned with the representation of hysteria as a means of decentring and revolutionising traditional processes of signification and interpretation. Through the analysis of both celebrated and little-known ballet productions, this study investigates the key influence of French medical thought on the development of intermedial and anti-rational performance dance.