Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL
Review: Degas’ Magnificent Obsession Author(s): Joellen A. Meglin Review by: Joellen A. Meglin Source: Dance Chronicle, Vol. 30, No. 3 (2007), pp. 507-517 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25598125 Accessed: 28-06-2016 17:47 UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Taylor & Francis, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Dance Chronicle
This content downloaded from 65.51.58.192 on Tue, 28 Jun 2016 17:47:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Dance Chronicle, 30:507-517, 2007 |”% pn| iflpHnP Copyright ? 2007 Joellen A. Meglin ? <* ^UU UeUye ISSN: 0147-2526 print / 1532-4257 online 8 % Taylor & Francis Group DOI: 10.1080/01472520701638862
BOOK REVIEW
DEGAS’ MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION
JOELLEN A. MEGLIN
Degas and the Dance By Jill DeVonyar and Richard Kendall. 303 pp. Illustrated. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002. $49.94 cloth, ISBN 0-8109-3282 2.
Going far beyond your typical coffee-table book, art history tome, or balletomane’s souvenir, Degas and the Dance explores a happy marriage, or better yet menage a trois, among artist, art medium, and subject. Edgar Degas: sublime spokesman of Impressionism? momentary light, sensuous surface, passing sensations, the visual layer of experience. What better subject than the ballet to capture an ephemeral impression, a tentative step, a lost look, a milieu, to document the almost lost passage of time? But in the dance Degas sought something else as well, lasting imprints of the body, clas sical genotypes of the human form, ancestral spirits, something real beyond one’s own impressions of it. This temporal paradox was ever at play in his work, only one of many paradoxes: realism and subjectivism engaged in a battle of wits; theatrically adorned bodies presented in unadorned poses; an anti-establishment artist depicting the danse d’ecole, anti-spectacle in the unprepared mo ment and the unpredictable asymmetry of bodies awaiting their turn in the sun.
Was Degas after the sudden impulse? That would be too dra matic. More precisely, he recorded waiting. Watching, yawning, aching, scratching, bending, fixing?in the tedium of hours of training?practicing, rehearsing, striving, watching, waiting, shift ing, adjusting, wondering what time it was. For what purpose? To initiate the viewer into the real regimen of art-making: to practice for hours in the studio, to exert infinite strokes to render the true
507
This content downloaded from 65.51.58.192 on Tue, 28 Jun 2016 17:47:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
508 Dance Chronicle
contour and thrust, to peer in hazy, half-light as one labors lovingly. Degas’ rendering of dancers was imbued with an implicit analogy brimming with dedication and bodily toil. As the dancer strove to place, shape, and shade her body, simultaneously, the artist strove to render these efforts and nuances in visual media.
These are some of the substantive themes that emerge in Jill DeVonyar and Richard Kendall’s superb Degas and the Dance. The visual intertwining of these two art forms is enough to send the reader into raptures. But that is only half the pleasure, one realizes, as one becomes immersed in the vivid, even suspenseful text of these art historians.
The book opens by situating Degas in relation to the Paris Opera. In the later nineteenth century the Opera was an im mense pleasure palace, a symbol of French historical pride and pre-eminence, and a nostalgic repository of the Romantic ballet, sparing no expense for technical display in decor and costume. De gas (1834-1917) made notebook sketches of dancers and opera productions as early as 1860-1862, a fascination that continued for over forty years. At the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, a critic noted his fascination with the foyer de danse and soon after he became known as “the painter of dancers” (p. 13). DeVon yar and Kendall probe the evidence of the artist’s affiliation with the Opera and his connections with its patrons and personnel in the form of correspondence, records kept at the sole point of communication from the front of the house to backstage?the porte de communication?names and addresses of ballerinas scrib bled on sketches. Degas’ status in the 1880s as an abonne, or regular subscriber, would have given him privileged access to behind-the scenes areas, but even before this he found ways to observe dancers, dance classes, and rehearsals. Meanwhile, scores of his paintings and drawings related directly to ballet and opera productions, in timating that Degas cultivated his patrons from “a select, informed clientele who recognized his subjects and understood their specific nuances and allusions,” including singers, musicians, critics, and Opera subscribers (p. 15). But even in his old age up to three quarters of his works, although far more idiosyncratic in their approach, were consumed by ballet themes, signaling a lasting obsession.
Not the least part of the value of this book is the curators’ geographic documentation of the rue Le Peletier Opera, the
This content downloaded from 65.51.58.192 on Tue, 28 Jun 2016 17:47:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Degas’ Magnificent Obsession 509
company’s home from 1821 to 1873, when the painter was thirty nine. Here ballet historians can see architectural plans, cross sections of theatres, seating charts, early photographs, popular prints galore, and paintings documenting structures: loges infer nales, paradis, parterre, amphitheatre and boxes to which women were confined, not to mention the four-degree rake of the stage and the elaborate system for “flies” to be lowered or raised.
Even more intriguing than the consideration of these physical contexts, however, is the authors’ juxtaposition of contemporary visual representations of the Opera and the social practices sur rounding it. On the one hand, Degas eschewed the exoticism, massive scale, architectural grandeur, and scenic precision propa gated in illustrated magazines, souvenir albums, sheet music, and popular prints. On the other hand, he absorbed the graphic tech niques, unconventional viewpoints, and wry social commentary of illustrators and caricaturists, among them Eugene Lami, Gustave Dore, Honore Daumier, Paul Gavarni, Albert-d’Arnoux Bertall, and Cham (Amedee de Noe). Placed alongside Degas’ early note book sketches of scenes from the theatre and paintings like Or chestra Musicians, one sees tangible evidence of the authors’ point: along with photography and the Japanese print, these popular prints were a formative influence on Degas. Witness their shared techniques: a narrow field of vision observing both spectators and performers, out-of-context action shots, cropped and truncated figures, “unorthodox images,” and a “cursory graphic manner,” all in the service of a modern “urban iconography” (pp. 40, 42).
While in becoming a theatre artist Degas also borrowed from the panoramic processions of bodies conventionally used to unfold historical events or dramatic narrative in painting, his “tableaux like surfaces” and “transverse dynamism” sought to capture the undocumented daily life of dancers in the classroom (p. 45).
Not that Degas shunned the momentous occasion completely. His paintings The Ballet from” Robert leDiable” (1872) and Ballet Scene from Meyerbeer’s Opera “Robert le Diable” (1876), as well as five ani mated studies of nuns dancing, may take today’s ballet aficionados closer to the sensation of witnessing this ballet than any other sur viving documentation. One gleans the wildness and eeriness of white, nebulous swirling figures, the unearthly light, the unseemly sway of nuns’ habits revealing bodies in abandoned, transparent ecstasies. In the horizontal split between poetic female exertion
This content downloaded from 65.51.58.192 on Tue, 28 Jun 2016 17:47:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
510 Dance Chronicle
and prosaic male consumption one senses the dual trends of the nineteenth-century?the fantastic and the realistic, the first like creeping ivy and the second like unstoppable undergrowth.
Another series depicting ballet rehearsals on the stage also straddles the twin worlds of theatrical illusion with its poised, posed gestures, and drab reality with its mundane fallen-into postures. Here, the authors bring out another key theme: Degas’ composi tions emerged from precise observation exercised in painstaking drawings of posed, in-studio subjects and deployment (and rede ployment) of these subjects in imagined scenes. The comparison between the processes of the visual artist and the dance artist is germane: “The synthetic nature of Degas’ creativity was, of course, vividly mirrored in the making of a ballet itself, as the different elements?musical, scenic, and choreographic?were studied and refined, and brought together in a final ensemble” (p. 60).
Degas’ originality cannot be emphasized enough. While to a certain extent he capitalized on nineteenth-century fascination with the spectacle of class, gender, and generational (not to men tion ethnic) mingling at the Opera, he steered clear of the cliches and stock characters in the popular press to create an entirely orig inal vocabulary and voice. True, the artist made a series of mono types probably intended to illustrate his friend Ludovic Halevy’s immensely popular backstage tales La Famille Cardinal, populated by young dancers, young men-about-town, and stage mothers. But outside of this series, as the authors show, predatory abonnes were minor figures and images of the foyer de la danse rare in his work. Even Degas’ scenes in the coulisses (theatre wings) focused less on dancers’ vanity, glamour, and contact with voyeurs and more on their obscurity as one of many, hurriedly attending to last-minute details of hair and costumes.
In the authors’ thorough analysis and estimation of the signif icance of Degas’ backstage subjects, the cycle of ballet classroom paintings figures most prominently. Here is also where the art his torians’ detective work achieves a climax. What was Degas’ archi tectural model for the ballet classroom? Indeed, was this series based upon a real place? Beginning with the 1820 ground plan of the rue Le Peletier Opera, sorting through a number of pop ular prints, unpublished photographs, and published accounts of the old opera house, and comparing these with Degas’ sketches and paintings, DeVonyar and Kendall deduce a likely candidate: a
This content downloaded from 65.51.58.192 on Tue, 28 Jun 2016 17:47:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Degas’ Magnificent Obsession 511
high-ceilinged room overlooking the courtyard of the eighteenth century Hotel de Choiseul, annexed and made into space for the artistic and administrative staff of the Opera in 1821. The reader feels like a jurist comparing the three tall windows, their config uration of square and odd-shaped panes, and the trees on view through them in painting and photograph. They match!
But this is only half the point, as the historians go on to show, because Degas drew upon both “verisimilitude and invention” (p. 83). Infrared and X-ray examination reveals the painter’s transpo sition, subtraction, and even addition of permanent architectural structures as well as dancers’ bodies as part of a painting’s history, comparisons between successive paintings showing a similar phe nomenon of re-inventing spaces and characters.
After the rue Le Peletier Opera burned down in 1873 and the Palais Gamier opened in 1875, Degas, whose reputation was ever on the increase, gained extensive access to its interior spaces and behind-the-scenes regimens. Yet, even as he spawned a num ber of imitators, ever the maverick he chose a different direction. Perhaps he found the Gamier Opera oppressively grand, a symbol of the establishment, as DeVonyar and Kendall suggest, preferring the “romantic shabbiness” and semi-squalid rooms of the Hotel de Choiseul’s decaying decor (p. 91). In any case, his paintings rarely refer to the Gamier, while his classroom and rehearsal series of the late 1870s nostalgically point to Le Peletier. Paradoxically, in
memory he sought discovery rather than precise documentation; his terrain became perceptual phenomena, the memory of a mo ment tinged with presence of the past.
In this shift, the authors explore Degas’ experimentation with the perceptual field of vision and the very act of viewing in a num ber of pastels and pastels over monotype. In Dancer with a Bouquet, Bowing (1877) or The Star (1878), for example, one sees not only the optic distortion produced by footlights, but also the dizzying enlargement yielded by opera glasses or binoculars. Ballet Dancers on the Stage (1883), a magnificent arrangement of dancers rever ently warming up on stage with the ritualistic grand plie a la seconde, synchronizes a sequential unfolding of action among six dancers placed at varying angles and in diminishing scale; a kind of optical acrostic, it compresses space as arms and legs splay, splash, and cut across in different directions. It is as if in seeing we could grasp a true distillate or essential cross-section of experience. Pastels over
This content downloaded from 65.51.58.192 on Tue, 28 Jun 2016 17:47:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
512 Dance Chronicle
monotypes like Dancers at the Old Opera House (1877) and The Chorus (1877) implicate the viewer as a privileged insider, sitting in a pri vate box situated on stage lateral to the performers. Scenes from behind the flats draw him or her close to the moment of entrance
and exit as if to taste the performer’s exhilaration or depletion. Degas’ cylindrical fan paintings, also of this period, may cap
ture the fleeting thrill of performance best. Japanese decorative art had seized the imagination of Degas’ generation and fans were a deliberate feature of the 1879 Impressionist exhibition. The au thors’ descriptions of Degas’ works in this format analyze tech nique even as they paint scenes with words. Of Fan: Dancers with Double Bass (1879): “Rapid flicks with the tip of an oriental brush were used to fix the girls’ bodies and strokes of pastel were applied beneath their limbs to suggest the effect of footlights, while a blur of white and vermilion gauze is almost left behind as they surge forward” (p. 101). It is telling that on a lady’s fan, meant to leave some things unrevealed, Degas’ obsession with the seen and the unseen in the land of curtain, flat, and coulisse comes to the fore.
Degas’ frieze paintings with their corridor-like formats dis close the quotidian gestures of dancers resting, waiting, fixing, and drawing up tights spelled out in Renaissance perspective. But the deliberate lack of epochal events, overlaid, as the authors point out, upon a mural-like presentation carrying the weight of European historical narrative tradition, again evokes Degas the “institutional outsider,” the celebrant of the unconventional (p. 112).
The chapter entitled “The Making of a Dancer” zooms in to in vestigate the accuracy of the artist’s portrayal of dancers’ postures and techniques of practice?the logic of location (placement) in counterpoise of limbs and torso. The juxtaposition of images and textual descriptions from nineteenth-century technical man uals, anecdotal accounts, postcards, illustrated newspapers, and the rich references from Georges d’Heylli’s 1875 Foyers et Coulisses:
Histoire anecdotique de tous les theatres de Paris and Paul Mahalin’s 1887 Ces demoiselles de VOpera [par] un vieil abonne to Sandra Ham
mond’s authoritative research on Leopold Adice’s unpublished treatise (1868-71) testify to the depth of the authors’ attempt to place Degas in the context of the historical practice of the ballet itself. But in the end it is the artist’s own prodigious output of pencil sketches in notebooks or chalk, charcoal, and pastel stud ies on paper?which, according to the authors, signify nothing
This content downloaded from 65.51.58.192 on Tue, 28 Jun 2016 17:47:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Degas’ Magnificent Obsession 513
less than his dance education?that yields the best evidence of his project to see beyond the conventions and voyeuristic cliches of his day to the verities of the body’s architecture and ballet dancers’ lives.
A little “Aha” escapes the reader upon seeing a figure from a studio sketch replicated in the distance in an elaborate painting? one of many cross-references that remind us that this volume was originally produced for a magnificently curated exhibit held at the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2002-2003. No dancer can be left unmoved by Degas’ render ing of dancers stretching their legs at the barre, executing a center floor adagio, or receiving correction from an instructor. Fifth po sition, tendu a la seconde (in the Spanish style), grand plie, grand battement, and port de bras?Degas’s thorough catalogue of steps seems to acknowledge untold legions of ballet dancers. The ballet historian and dance reconstructor in period style will delight in tangible examples of rounded arms in fifth position (en couronne), slightly relaxed knees in arabesque, and visible evidence that “ev ery ballerina in Degas’ pictures wore a waist-pinching corset under her bodice, both in the classroom and on the stage” (p. 153).
One of the aspects of the text that make it both engaging and credible is its framing by the scholarly discourse on Degas. Thus, the chapter “Picturing the Performance” opens with the debate on whether Degas stage scenes depicted specific ballets or opera divertissements or entirely original inventions of the artist’s imag ination. The first strategy would have heightened the appeal of his paintings to the select group of patrons who purchased his works; the second would have increased his stature as an artist. As the authors sort through the evidence, old and new, they narrate a balanced, both-sides-of-the-question argument, deftly disclosing objections and piquing curiosity about the finest details of produc tion. They convincingly connect Massenet’s 1877 opera Le Roi de Lahorewith Degas’ 1877 Dancer with a Bouquet, Bowing, based upon exotic props (orange sunshades) and costume designs (shoes with turned-up toes) in the background. Considering scenic elements visible in mock-ups of set design and costume etchings housed in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, a mise-en-scene found at the Bibliotheque de 1’Opera, even intimations of lighting design in the artist’s creations, they deduce links between Donizetti’s opera La Favorite, “performed virtually every year throughout Degas’ adult
This content downloaded from 65.51.58.192 on Tue, 28 Jun 2016 17:47:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
514 Dance Chronicle
career” (p. 170), and the Impressionist’s shimmering On the Stage (1876-77), Ballet at the Paris Opera (1877), and Dancer on the Stage (1877-80).
On the other hand, there is the dancer from Degas’ most famous ballet picture, LEtoile, (1876-77) posed on point in arabesque, arms outstretched in an oblique line, neck and decolletage exposed to what is presumably a high loge seat sit uated diagonally in relation to the stage. This exact figure recurs in On the Stage (1876-77) and in reverse in a charcoal and chalk sketch?direct evidence of a printing process by which “monotypes [are] pulled from the same plate” and individualized by the appli cation of pastel coloring (p. 164). In short, Degas’ creative process resembled ballet-making: his works were typically prepared in the studio, where a lexicon of postures and gestures were practiced, rehearsed, and culled from to make new creations. Still, as the authors emphasize, his works stand as a “visual archive.” One sees the choreographic impulse transcribed into visual values?group compositions that show variations on a theme, positions reiter ated in a variety of facings, permutated patterns: “repeated inter vals, echoing limbs” that conjure “musical and spatial progression” (p. 177).
The penultimate chapter traces identifiable dance figures in Degas’ portraits, studies, and dance scenes, with a longitudinal eye to their careers and fortunes as they resurfaced in his work. From celebrated stars like the beautiful Eugenie Fiocre to obscure mem bers of the corps de ballet like the pensive, working-class Josephine Gaujelin, the portfolio of ballet women evinces Degas’ regard for them as people as well as performers. Here, the authors docu
ment letters and notes demonstrating the artist’s lively interest in their affairs, not to mention their availability for modeling. Most intriguing in this respect are Degas’ representations of the leg endary Jules Perrot. At this time Perrot had returned to Paris and was informally teaching classes and coaching dancers at the Opera. In The Ballet Master, Jules Perrot (1875) Perrot stands with one arm propped across a staff, all bodily eloquence commuted to a hand gesture. This same figure was inserted into one of the artist’s dance class series (here Perrot apparently replaced Louis Merante, who was painted over) and one of his ballet rehearsal series (an unlikely event since Perrot was not employed in this capacity), underlining his “iconic significance” (p. 206) for Degas.
This content downloaded from 65.51.58.192 on Tue, 28 Jun 2016 17:47:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Degas’ Magnificent Obsession 515
Marie Sanlaville is another personality whose aura emerges equally from bodily posture and facial expression: in Mile S., Premiere Danseuse a TOpera (1886), a salty, fortyish miss sits pyramid like in perfect symmetry, feet splayed in a wide second position (unseemly for a woman) and hands holding an umbrella across her lap, revealing a stalwart soldier of the dance. Long before Martha Graham Degas advocated a philosophy that the body does not lie: “above all, be sure to give the same expression to the face that one gives to the body,” he wrote to himself in a notebook (p. 217). While he was known to use photographs to achieve un canny likenesses, his real subject matter most often returned to the body and its organizing principles of movement. Often he would use the same model to sketch the poses of distinct personae in the same picture?one adjusting a slipper, a second shaping the arches of her feet, a third poised as if in preparation for an en chainement?or, he would project a young aspirant into a starring role. Thus, he depended upon the anonymity of the least known as well as the recognition value of the best known of his subjects.
In the 1890s and 1900s, increasingly reclusive as a result of de clining eyesight, Degas continued to experiment with ballet sub jects, but in the makeshift ballet environments he set up in his large Montmartre studio. His studies of the human body grew ever
more detached from the specific details of locale, production, or the mildly social activity of the classroom, instead focusing on ac tions, balance, weight, and physical structure. In a narrative that is full of surprise and revelation, the authors pursue the connec tions between the artist’s latterday works and classicism. They share eye-witness reports of family, patrons, and friends who attested to Degas’ passion for antiquity or utterances about his art in relation to the Greeks?which sound like something Isadora Duncan might have said. Next, they skillfully situate his declared affinities to the Hellenistic revival of the period, as well as settings, subject matter, and critical discourse (think of TheophileGautier) harking back to antiquity in French ballet and opera of the long-term. The number of historical treatises that drew the arc between antiquity and con temporary dance in Degas’ day indeed gives one pause. In La danse Grecque antique, d’apres les monuments figures, Maurice Emmanuel compared steps and movements of dancing figures in Greek art to those of modern ballet dancers and proposed that “movement of the body is the essence of dance,” an idea which Degas could
This content downloaded from 65.51.58.192 on Tue, 28 Jun 2016 17:47:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
516 Dance Chronicle
have claimed as his mantra (p. 247). Nor can one ignore the mar ble bas-reliefs from Greek temples, terra-cotta Tanagra statuettes, and vase paintings housed at the Louvre to which Degas would have had easy access. Lastly, the authors point to Degas’ drawings, pastels, and oil paintings whose implied movement, balance, and frieze-like formats or Tanagra-like figures evoke comparisons.
Degas’ painting Frieze of Dancers (1895) is phenomenal in this regard: Classical in impulse is the layout of seated dancers tying ballet slippers to tapered feet, translucent tutus revealing the line of taut thighs and calves, yet thoroughly modern in execution are the overexposed colors (reflections of stage lighting?), the almost Cubist analysis of shape, the progressive rotation of the body in space. The subtle gradations in the tilt and turns of heads and convexities of curved over-spines create a rhythmic interplay of space and shape reminiscent of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze’s Euryth
mics. Degas’ real empathy with the ballet, it turns out, was a shared pursuit of archetypal forms?humanism given tangible form in the movements of the human body.
The interplay of line and color and an intense drive to exper iment come out most strongly in the works of the final decades of the artist’s life. Earthbound, emphatic lines anchor color har monies and dissonances that verge on the phantasmagoric. The depth of Degas’ experimentation is evident in a number of new series of variations on themes that demand constantly changing variables?new constructions of frame, angle, relations between figures, color schemes, media, and technique, as if the artist were trying to shake free of any givens. One also sees the influence of a younger generation: Seurat, Van Gogh, and Gauguin. Degas painted over works dating from previous decades to create visual textures reminiscent of Seurat. Elsewhere, he gave dancers’ faces the sunken curves, their bodies the horizontal tug of Van Gogh’s potato-eaters or peasants. Dancers on the Stage (1889-94), depict ing a tribe of bare-skinned dancers in earth tones, would be pure
Gauguin were it not for its subject matter. In Before the Performance (1895-1900), where costumes, backdrop, and lighting are ablaze in orange, yellow, and red, aesthetic descendants of the Sun King
might have immigrated to a South Seas island. Three Dancers in Yellow Skirts (1899) has one foot in the nineteenth century, with a sparseness and economy of means recalling “Symbolist reverie”
This content downloaded from 65.51.58.192 on Tue, 28 Jun 2016 17:47:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Degas’ Magnificent Obsession 517
(Mallarme and Valery were friends), and another foot in the twen tieth, with disks of paint applied by the fingertips (p. 275). Without Degas, the moving bodies in Matisse and Picasso are inconceivable.
It is probably too pedantic to wish for the original French titles of paintings, which would illuminate ballet steps and posi tions better, but this book was published by Harry N. Abrams in association with the American Federation of the Arts, whose broad mission is “to enrich the public’s experience and understanding of art” (p. 4). There is the occasional misprint, error in reference to a plate number, or overly determined interpretation over which the reader glides uncaringly.
Who should read this book? The art historian’s ways of read ing and deciphering visual images, analyzing them technically, comparing and contextualizing them, can do much to instruct the dance historian. Moreover, these art historians bring a whole new dimension to art history research with insightful juxtaposition of ballet librettos, technical manuals, costume sketches, set de signs, architectural plans, official records, memoirs, anecdotal ac counts, memorabilia, all the primary source documents that dance historians scrutinize. Historians of the nineteenth-century ballet, the Paris Opera, and entertainment in the French capital cannot thoroughly know their subject without reading this book. Let me rephrase the question: Who with the slightest interest in this sub ject should not read this book? This is interactive text and image at its best. Read every page. Pour over the plates. Enjoy.
This content downloaded from 65.51.58.192 on Tue, 28 Jun 2016 17:47:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Contents
p. 507
p. 508
p. 509
p. 510
p. 511
p. 512
p. 513
p. 514
p. 515
p. 516
p. 517
Issue Table of Contents
Dance Chronicle, Vol. 30, No. 3 (2007) pp. 359-560
Front Matter
Ave Atque Vale [pp. 359-362]
Uday Shankar: The Early Years, 1900-1938 [pp. 363-426]
Some Questions on the Original Version of Gluck and Angiolini’s Don Juan [pp. 427-438]
Choreographing Identities Beyond Boundaries: La Guiablesse and Ruth Page’s Excursions into World Dance (1926-1934) [pp. 439-469]
Pioneer on Pointe: Janet Reed, the Early Years, 1916-1941 [pp. 471-493]
Book Reviews
Rediscovering Paul Taglioni [pp. 495-500]
Treasures of the Romantic Ballet [pp. 501-505]
Degas’ Magnificent Obsession [pp. 507-517]
The Remarkable Dance of Anna Halprin [pp. 519-522]
A Rocket through the Zeitgeist [pp. 523-525]
Lincoln Kirstein’s Many Lives [pp. 527-532]
Dancing and Writing as Spiritual Exercises [pp. 533-538]
The Importance of Being Sally [pp. 539-545]
Letter to the Editors [pp. 547-550]
In Other Scholarly Journals [pp. 551-552]
Books Received [pp. 553-555]
Back Matter
