Dr%20I%20Julia%20B%C3%BChrle: List of publications

Dans un ballet, en particulier classique, la frontière entre spectacle et salut est particulièrement floue, puisqu’il s’agit du passage d’une série de mouvements chorégraphiés à une autre. Que se passe-t-il au moment du salut ? L’article explore entre autres les spectacles d’adieu des danseurs, représentations où le salut a une importance et une chorégraphie particulières.

This paper deals with scenes of salvage and salvation in a number of nineteenth-century ballets which were mostly inspired by works of literature, and their afterlives. The term ‘salvage’ will be used in several metaphorical senses here. By tracing back ‘salvage’ to its wider etymological origins in the Latin word ‘saluus’, which refers to both physical and spiritual salvation, I will employ this term to describe the saving of the bodies and souls of ballet protagonists. I will argue that the evolution of ballet costumes and technique was linked to the appearance of a number of unconventional salvage scenes in which traditional gender roles were reversed and women saved men. Several examples will be used to demonstrate how ballet librettists changed the literary sources when they transposed them into libretti in order to add these scenes. The term ‘salvage’ can also refer to ‘the saving and collection of waste material [. . . ] for recycling’.1 Now, in this sense ballet libretti ‘recycled’ literary source texts, and so enact salvage through adaptation.What is more, elements from previous libretti were recycled in nineteenth-century ballets, through the re-enactment of certain archetypal situations, including rescue scenes and acts of spiritual salvation.

One of the most famous ballet films of all times, Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes from 1948, ends with a death which raises many questions – suicide, accident or involuntary act provoked by the diabolical red shoes? The film reflects the mystery surrounding the death of numerous protagonists throughout ballet history, for instance Giselle, who also loved dancing too much, or Odette and the prince in Swan Lake. <br/>In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which saw the flowering of the court ballet in France and the subsequent emergence of the “ballet d’action”,1 dance was mainly used for joyful divertissements, and it seemed inappropriate to let the protagonists of a ballet kill themselves on stage. The irreligious, unappetizingly violent act of suicide seemed equally at odds with the poetic universe of the Romantic ballet, the well-ordered system of the tsarist regime and the optimistic and pragmatic ideology which prevailed in Soviet Russia. In Western Europe, the experience of the two World Wars gave rise to a wave of ballet suicides of unprecedented variety and realism. The poetic, romanticized suicide of the earlier centuries was complemented by the more realistic suffering in the “psychological” ballets which came up during the second half of the twentieth century. <br/>Since suicides in ballets often correspond to a work’s literary or historic source, it might seem difficult to look for the specificity of the ballet suicide. However, the choice of these sources and the ways in which choreographers of different periods have adapted them reveal some information about characteristic trends of suicides in ballet.

This study deals with the transposition of works of literature into ballets. It focuses on texts that constitute the basis for a ballet plot, which include ballet libretti as well as texts which were not written for that purpose. The detailed comparison of works of literature with the libretti and ballets they have inspired serves to explore how librettists and choreographers have adapted literature throughout the history of ballet. It also reveals 'choreographic' elements in several literary classics. Thus, this book contributes to the growing field of study on generic transformation which already deals with the cinematic and operatic adaptations of literature, but has hardly been opened yet to the domain of the story ballet.