My analysis of the ballet Coppélia and of its reception in 1870 in Chapter 4, reveals the different conceptual and social strands which were woven together to create the dancer as a particular kind of body, moving as though it were a mechanised object. These different strands, which formed a nexus of concerns in the art form of dance, both existed in, and were fed into it from, the greater cultural context in which dance was embedded. Similarly, today, the conception of the body-as-clockwork is one which exists both in popular culture and in the culture of dance, taking on myriad different forms.
In this chapter I trace several of the different incorporations of the clockwork body in the present. I show how the clockwork body appears in three distinct kinds of activity in dance: in performance, in writing, and in practice. In the category of performance, I include the new creation of dance works as well as continuing performances of the repertoire. In that of practice, I analyse the institutions which surround and support the training of a dancer, as well as the methods of teaching dance technique. In respect to the writing of dance, I discuss a kind of scholarly writing about dance that uses categories which are indebted to the clockwork-body.
The above manifestations of the ghost-body-as-clockwork are sometimes explicitly evoked, as in the case of the classical repertoire, where, as I have discussed, the ideal of the interchangeable ballerina, and of the interchangeable body, forms part of the mechanism of the ballet academy. Inside the tradition of ballet, the reappearance of the clockwork body, through the themes treated in a ballet, through how the stage space is treated, and through how the collective body of dancers is used, often constitutes a means by which a choreographer lays claim to the ground of tradition. But at other times, particularly in the work of contemporary choreographers
and teachers, the appearance of the ghost-body-as-clockwork may be less consciously evoked, and may even appear despite these practitioners’ quite other intentions.
Sightings in the Present: The Ghost-Bodv-as-Clockwork in Performance
As I argued in Chapters 1 and 4, the repertoire is a powerful tool through which the body-states of past times are visited upon bodies in the present. The repertoire is an inanimate body of knowledge which lives through and beyond the animate bodies that create it. In Chapter 3 I stressed the temporal aspect of this phenomenon, writing that the bodies of Saint Léon and Bozzacchi had found eternal rest during the year of their creation of Coppélia, while the ballet itself remained alive in the Paris Opéra repertoire. Yet here I would like to add that the ballet surpassed its creators, not only in time, but also in space. Coppélia was exported in various versions to Vienna (1876), to Berlin (1881), to London (1884 and 1906), to St. Petersburg (1884), to New York (1887), to Munich, and to Copenhagen (the last two both in 1896) (Koegler 104).
The history of the ballet Coppélia shows the extent to which two of the strands I am considering separately—performance and practice—are intimately entwined. Up until the 1960s, the ballet Coppélia remained in its original version, complete with a ballerina en travesti as Frantz (Koegler 104). In 1966, the then ballet director at the Paris Opéra, Michel Descombey, re-choreographed the work, in what seems a precursor of the trend of revivalism now prevalent in contemporary dance, in which choreographers such as Matthew Bourne, Mats Ek, Mark Morris and Maguy Marin have all made use of certain themes of the repertoire, all the while disregarding its original dance material. Descombey’s version was set, not in the eighteenth century like the original, but rather at the end of the nineteenth century, at the World’s Fair in Paris, a setting which emphasised the theme of technology. The pair of lovers escaped the wicked Coppélius in a Montgolfier, while they were themselves show cased as dancers of a heightened technicity. The demands of this new technicity, especially in the pas de deux between Frantz and Swanhilda, meant that the travesty convention was dispensed with, and the role of Frantz given to a male dancer. (One of the reviews of the 1966 revival of Descombey’s version wrote with regret of the
passing of this tradition, reminiscing on Pauline Dynalix, famous for her characteristion of Frantz, “qui dans le rôle de Frantz, alors, travesti, nous aurait donné des goûts contre-nature”.)* This dancer was Cyril Anastassof, who is now a senior teacher at France’s most respected school of dance, outside that of the Opéra: the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse. He was dancing opposite Claude Bessy as Swanhilda, the same Bessy who for the past thirty years has been the director of the Opéra’s school, and who has recently come under attack in the press, for her “comportement autoritaire”^. From December 2002 to April 2003, a series of articles appeared in the French newspapers denouncing Bessy’s regime at the Opéra’s public-funded ballet school at Nanterre. Dominique Le Guilledoux reporting in Le
Monde, noted that a private investigatory service, as well as staff, parents and
attending doctors, accused Bessy of the moral harassment of the young dance students under her direction, in a regime which consisted in a “denial of pain, blows to dignity, a discipline of psychological terror, and verbal outrageousness”.^ Refuting these accusations as “calomny”, Bessy, who is now seventy years of age, was quoted as saying:
I was brought up by the stick. Today when you do a bloody stupid thing, there isn’t any punishment. People work less and less and earn more money for it. Everyone cavils. I have nothing more to do with this society. (32)"*
Bessy’s inscription in a certain tradition, which was produced in part through incarnating the automaton Coppélia, is precisely what she now tries to reproduce on and in the bodies of her young charges.
The body Bessy has most famously produced is that of Sylvie Guillem, whom Bessy recruited to the Opéra school at age 12, diverting her from a planned career as a gymnast. A month after the scandal around Bessy became public, Guillem came to her defence in print in an article by Dominique Frétard that also appeared in Le
Monde. Here, while admitting that Bessy was a difficult woman, Guillem insisted it
‘ Pauline Dynalix was so delightful in “the role o f Frantz, then danced by a ballerina in travesty, that she could have given us tastes running counter to nature” Olivier Merlin, Le Monde, May 7, 1966. ^ D.L.G. Le Monde, 1 December, 2002
^ déni de la douleur, d ’atteintes à la dignité, de discipline de terreur psychologique, d ’outrances verbales.
Moi, j ’ai été élevée à la baguette. Aujourd’hui quand tu fais une connerie, il n’y a plus de sanction. Moins on travaille, plus on gagne de l’argent. Tout le monde discute. Je n’ai plus rien à voir avec cette société.
was up to the children “to learn to dominate the situation” (26)/ Yet the ideal of domination that Guillem upholds was ironically at the heart of the problem. For what was known in the Paris dance world, though so potentially embarrassing for a State- funded institution that it was kept out of the newspapers, was the event which had occurred to bring Bessy’s responsibility into question in the limelight. The inquiry around Bessy’s direction had apparently been sparked by the rape of a twelve year old boy by two boys of fifteen years, who were all students at the Opéra school. My source of information, a kinesiologist with ties to the Opéra, wishes to remain anonymous. But when she recounted the event to me, she declared herself to be unsurprised that such an event could have occurred, and that, rather, it seemed to her entirely logical and foreseeable. For her, the atmosphere of the Opéra school instils an imperative within the young dancing subject, a directive that he or she must master his or her body. For my source it was thus natural that the relationship which characterises that of the dancer to his or her own body should become the model which shapes relations between the self and the other.
Conscious Coppélius and Unwitting Ones
If Descombey’s 1966 version reworked Coppélia's theme of technology, in 1978 Roland Petit’s version, which premiered in Paris at the Théâtre de la Porte St. Martin, underlined its diverging gender identities. As if aiming literally to embody Janin’s 1840 writing, Petit’s version boasted two corps de ballets. One was male and dressed as soldiers; the other was female and dressed as ballet girls. The gender roles which Petit explored in 1978 by division and exaggeration, would be explicitly critiqued, by the contrasting means of conflation in 1994. This later version of
Coppélia, choregraphed by Maguy Marin for the Ballet de Lyon, would dress the
entire cast, both men and women, as identical dolls. In Marin’s production the automaton was imaged, not as the doll-as-ballet-dancer, perhaps because this form, which spoke powerfully to late nineteenth-century French culture, no longer reaches contemporary French audiences. Instead, Marin translated the doll-woman automaton into a contemporary idiom. If the ballet enjoyed a central role socially and artistically
in the nineteenth century, its form of specularity has given way to the worlds of cinema and fashion. In Marin’s version of Coppélia, the doll Coppélia is figured as a cross between a movie-star and a top model, an ideal of woman which shows the connection between eroticism, new technology, and consumerism. For the movie- star/top-model is produced and held in the public eye by the technologies of film, in large part through a project to sell a way of life and consumer objects to mass audiences who attempt to be like her. In the filmed version of Marin’s Coppélia, the Coppélius figure is characterised as a reclusive photographer, whose technological control over woman’s image allows him to do without a real woman. Able to reproduce the part of woman he wants by technological means, by focusing in on a part and capturing it on film, Coppélius is associated with a sad and solipsistically fetishistic pornography. (Frantz, who also wants to take only what he wants from woman, is shown as a Coppélius in the making.) But even idealised visions may have their revenge. In Marin’s many-layered filmed version, it is Swanhilda’s pre-filmed
image who drugs both Frantz and Coppélius, as they watch a movie starring their
favourite sex-goddess. In this drugged state they are terrorised by the replication of their idol. A host of identical dolls—a cross between mass-produced Barbies and the multiplied image of Marilyn Monroe of a Warhol silk-screen, costumed in red 1960s suits, with stiletto heels and peroxide-blonde wigs—runs amok and creates havoc.
While the above versions name their relation to Coppélia and may explicitly reiterate or criticise the clockwork body, the clockwork body is present in undeclared ways in other works of contemporary choreography. The doll Coppélia enjoys a cameo roll in Lloyd Newson’s Enter Achilles: not by chance, I am suggesting, in a work which critiques the rigidity of gender stereotypes. In Newson’s piece the inhuman clockwork dancer that Hoffmann imagined as the unsuitable object of Nathaniel’s desire appears in a new guise as a blow-up sex toy. Appearing only briefly onscreen at the beginning and the end of Newson’s piece, this facsimile of the dumb-blond bimbo incarnates his critique of the way in which society mechanises, and institutionalises the process of sexual identification, and polarises those identities.
In the opening frames of the film, we see a man in the bedroom of his flat above a pub, with the plastic sex-doll which he seems to adore. The camera then follows the man as he descends to the pub where the man ostensibly works, and where the film’s main action is set, the local haunt of a group of young men. For Enter
Achilles explores the fine line between homosociality, which Newson sees as
permitted and even encouraged in British pub culture, and homosexuality, which is virulently rejected and punished. Newson imagines a scenario in which two kinds of men confront each other: one, a group of beer-drinking lads; the other, their “Achilles’ heel”, a sole man who enters their territory and disturbs the group’s rites of identity and solidarity, and who does so by dressing and drinking—but above all by dancing—differently.
The lads have been occupying their “local” with expansive, energetic gestures, deploying movements that are competitive and goal-oriented; Achilles engages in more lyrical movements in which the body’s role as manipulator, and the object’s role as manipulated are confused. Exemplary of the lads’ goal-oriented movement is a sequence in the opening scene in the pub, when two of the men hold a full glass of beer aloft by the contact of their bodies pressed together in different ways. Like the huddles and scrums of players in contact sports such as rugby, the clearly ambiguous pleasure of the contact between male bodies can be enjoyed without the implication of homosexuality through the alibi given to them by the presence of an object, the glass. This glass both unites and separates them, and, when they manage to set it unspilled and upright on the floor, it becomes that by which their mastery and masculinity are proved.
By contrast, Achilles’ relation to objects is seen as effeminate and therefore punishable by the lads. Thrown a ball, Achilles spins it on his fingers, manipulating it, but a moment later his body responds to the motion of the ball and takes on some of its character as, in order to keep the ball rolling over his back, shoulders and hips, he begins to undulate his torso in smooth circular patterns, as if continued play and not mastery were his intention. Observing this, one of the lads grabs the ball from him and bounces it vigorously on the floor, as if to demonstrate its proper use. Struggle and mastery constitute the proper mode of relating with an object, he seems to say, for such a dialectic constructs one’s (masculine) subjectivity; play and interplay are an improper mode of such relations, for these do not not make clear who is the user in the game. But Achilles seems not to know, and determined not to learn, what objects are “for”. Suddenly he seems to grow enraged, and taking out a knife he threatens the other man, forcing him to strip off his clothing and lie down, as though he planned sexual violence. Yet once the man is cringing, naked on the ground,
Achilles sprays shaving cream at him and thrusts the knife violently, not into his frightened victim, but into the ball which deflates in a moment of bathos.
Here, the ball metonymically replaces the sex-doll, that we have seen in the opening frames of the film. For this other plastic inflated toy is also stabbed violently at the very end of the film, by the group of lads who have discovered the doll inside their mate’s bedroom, “killing” it before his eyes and taking great pleasure in the pain this gives him. This character has been one of the ring-leaders in the gay-bashing behaviour that was dealt out to Achilles, and now that he has become a figure of derision himself, he can no longer successfully organise the bullying by the others. The doll thus becomes the measure by which the piece distinguishes between men who can assume their divergent and complex sexual identities and tolerate them in others, and those who can not.
If Newson’s treatment of the theme of gender in Enter Achilles was premised upon a re-incamation of a Coppélia-like doll, the ghost-body-as-clockwork has likewise reappeared in contemporary works where technology has been a central concern. Norbert Corsino is perhaps the foremost French choreographer who uses computer technology to create choreographic works for multi-media. The body that he deploys in his digital productions is a computer-generated model that moves within a virtual landscape. Yet despite the sophistication of the technology that he employs, Corsino’s dancing body remains a resolutely clockwork body. Corsino presented his work in the context of a Master of Arts degree programme in Dance History, entitled “Pour la culture chorégraphique”, directed by dance historian Laurence Louppe. The programme collected, as its students, a number of contemporary dancers, choreographers and dance teachers. In discussion, after having viewed the work, choreographer Michèle Marcucci asked a question about the technology of the computer-generated dancing body. In designating the model, Marcucci spontaneously spoke of the virtual dancing body as “la poupée” and then referred to it as “la Barbie”. These appellations seemed to disconcert Corsino, but they also drew sighs of recognition from the others in the group. Corsino then explained to the group that the model had been created by placing lights on certain parts of the body, which were then mapped during motion. The points chosen to be lit were, unsurprisingly, the body’s articulations. For, as I have argued, a focus on the articulations can make it possible to understand the body as a collection of segments which all have their own
precise, local, invariable, mechanical movement, rather than seeing it as an organism, in which the movement of the parts may be influenced by the higher levels of that unity. Corsino’s exploration of new technology only made clearer the limits of the perception that were conducting it: that produced by and dedicated to the clockwork body.®
One further way in which the ghost-body-as-clockwork is reanimated in our day is through a choreographic interest in extreme precision. For the last twenty years, the bruxelloise Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker has been showing her work at the prestigious Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, a distribution which has allowed her to influence generations of French dancers and choreographers, all the while spearheading^ a style of movement and choreography known in France as “la danse beige”. ^ The Théâtre de la Ville is a state-funded institution. This keeps the prices of the tickets down, and means that the dance community in France can afford to attend the theatre. A substantial part of this theatre’s audience is made up of dancers and choreographers. When this dance community attended De Keersmaeker’s first performances there in the 1980s, it had been accustomed to seeing the dancing body presented in unisex unitards à la Cunningham. It was therefore immediately struck by the new look that De Keersmaeker had invented through her costuming.® The members of her all-female company, Rosas, were dressed in identical short black