Getting across French revolution as a female dancer: life and works of Marie Madeleine Guimard
(Marina Nordera)
“The female dancers have naturally a greater ease of expression than the men. More pliable in their limbs, with more sensibility in the delicacy of their frame; all their motions and their actions are more tenderly pathetic, more interesting then in our sex. We are besides prepossessed in their favour, and less disposed to remark or cavil at their faults. While on the other hand, that so natural desire they have of pleasing, independently of their profession, makes them studiously avoid any motion or gesture that might be disagreeable, and consequently any contortion of the face. They, instinctively then, one may say, make a point of the most graceful expression.” These words by Giovanni Andrea Gallini (director of the dances at the Royal Theatre in the Haymarket) published in 1762, clearly reveal the ambiguity about what is “natural” for a dancing woman. Nature could be seen here as a restriction or an enlargement of freedom for the dancing woman on stage. This way of thinking the female dancing body echoes the tensions between the new ideas promoted by the Enlightenment and the active (or passive) social role of women in this very particular period of historical transition.
Marie Madeleine Guimard (1743-1816), a well known female dancer at the Paris Opera, was also an outstanding protagonist of artistic and intellectual Parisian society during the pre revolutionary era. Her artistic talent, her professional career as well as her life experience contributed to the construction of a new image of dancing woman on and off the stage, thanks to the fact that she succeeded in imposing her personal choices in terms of interpretation, costumes, and contracts and so on. And, as her contemporaries witness, she was doing that in a very “natural” way.
Marina Nordera, Nice, France
Marina Nordera is professor, chair of the Dance Department at Nice University (France). She has taught early dance and performed with the companies Il ballarino, Ris et danceries, Fêtes Galantes, L’éventail. She has been the curator of the exhibition and the editor of the catalogue of La construction de la féminité dans la danse, held at the Centre National de la Danse (2004 - 2005); she edited with Simone Beta, La danza (by Lucian of Samosata, Venice: Marsilio, 1992), with Susanne Franco I discorsi della danza. Parole chiave per una metodologia della ricerca (Turin: UTET Libreria, 2005) and the English version of the same book Dance discourses. Keywords for dance research (London: Routledge, 2007). Her contributions have appeared in collective volumes by Cambridge University Press and Larousse-Bordas. From 2001 to 2004 she has been president of AIRDanza (Italian Association for the Dance Research). She is currently working on a book on dance and gender in Early Modern Italy (Palermo: L’Epos, forthcoming) and on a long term research project on “Dance and memory”.
The aim of this paper is to show how Guimard acted specific strategies in order to cope with social, artistic and historical changes. In particular I will analyse the construction of her changing public image through the analysis and the comparison of some of the roles she choose to interpret at the Paris Opera and in her private “erotic” theatre. I’ll draw my theoretical tools from social history, the history of mentalities and gender theory.
