Teaching dance to would-be nobles, gods and shrews: dance lessons in ballets
Dance lessons have always been popular with ballet masters as a means to include danced sequences in their ballet plots or highlight the social status of their protagonists. Under Louis XIV, polished dancing skills were a sign of noble breeding. The incapacity to dance indicated social inferiority in several com矇die ballets, such as Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670) by Moli癡re and Lully and a very popular ballet adaptation of this work by Pierre Gardel, La dansomanie (1800). In Eugene Scribe and Jean Aumers ballet Manon Lescaut (1830), the different styles of Manon and the court ladies underline their specific social status. The nymph Eucharis in Pierre Gardels T矇l矇maque (1790) gives a dance lesson to the God of Love who pretends to ignore this art. In Copp矇lia (1870) by Charles Nuitter and Arthur Saint-L矇on, Coppelius teaches his automaton several dances which she first performs mechanically and then more and more gracefully, like a petit rat of the Paris Opera developing into a ballerina. In the 20th century, choreographers continued to resort to dance lessons, sometimes to great comical effect, for instance in Frederick Ashtons Cinderella (1948) or John Crankos Taming of the Shrew (1969).
Iris Julia B羹hrle studied History of Art, Comparative Literature and International Relations in Stuttgart, Paris and Oxford. She has written numerous articles and scholarly papers on dance, and she recently contributed to the BBC documentary The king who invented ballet: Louis XIV and the noble art of dance. She also worked for UNESCO and the Paris Opera. Her publications include Robert Tewsley: dancing beyond borders (bilingual English/ German, W羹rzburg: K&N, 2011) and her Ph.D. thesis entitled Literature and Dance: the choreographic adaptation of works of literature in Germany and France from the 18th century to the present day (German, W羹rzburg: K&N, 2014). She is currently a Junior Research Fellow at 91酴圖眻畦, Oxford as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Oxfords English Faculty. Her research deals with ballets based on plays by William Shakespeare.