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Abstract
My work brings together three different disciplines (literature, medicine, and dance) across three periods (the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries) in order to investigate the figure of the dancer as the emblem of a new aesthetic in both nineteenth-century literature (Emile Zola, Théophile Gautier and Charles de Boigne) and contemporary dance (Maurice Béjart, Alain Buffard, Bill T. Jones and Thomas Lebrun). As I argue, the figure of the sickly but visually spectacular dancer troubles modern medical ideals of bodily perfection and challenges the exclusion of disgust (dégoût ) from the realm of taste (goût). First, I explore what I call the "naturalist dancer" as an emblem of the fin de siècle literary tradition that reunites its fascination with the visual beauty of the female body and its preoccupation with the invisibility of disease. It is during this period that medicine "discovers" and defines the virus, differentiating it from bacteria, microbes, and other, less visible diseases such as syphilis or tuberculosis. I argue that the discovery of the virus greatly transforms modern representations of illness and invisibility, holding a particular resonance with the female dancer whose body was often seen as gorgeous, yet potentially diseased. The aesthetic of the female dancer's body is thus built on a paradox, since its most visually stimulating form could (and often did) contain the hidden threat of viral illness. The naturalist novel, as I demonstrate through an analysis of nineteenth-century dance criticism read through Zola's Nana, takes up dance and its bodies in order to work out the prevailing tensions between medicine and art, or more specifically, diseased bodies and the image of beauty they may nonetheless transmit.
Tragically, at the end of the twentieth century, the dance world was once again ravaged by another viral epidemic: AIDS. In this case, the male rather than the female dancer became the body at risk. Even though AIDS eventually devastates both dancers' and non-dancers' bodies, performers, at least in the early stages of the disease, can remain without physical marks of illness. Unlike Nana and other naturalist dancers, who met their (fictional) demise in terrifyingly ugly ways, male dancers at the end of twentieth century came to embody the fantasy of a younger generation that was sick or dying while still remaining beautiful. Here again, I contend that dance becomes the scene for grappling with the relationship between aesthetic production and pathology, even as the dancing body is politicized through activism and social movements. In my final chapter, I turn to contemporary representations of illness on stage in order to investigate the creation of a post-AIDS aesthetic. My analysis focuses on one particular contemporary ballet, Three Decades of Fenced-in Love (2013), choreographed by Thomas Lebrun, that I read through the lens of post-AIDS literature. In this context, I point out the shift from physical symptoms to a psychical, "emotional immunodeficiency," as I call it. In my reading of Lebrun's work, I interrogate the double stigma illustrated in Three Decades of Fenced-in Love: a physical mark that punctures the skin, and a symbolic trace that reckons with the generation's trauma and as such, comes to redefine the "health" of twenty-first-century bodies. Ultimately, I identify in dance - and the performing arts associated with it - the dancer's positive viral effect that, like a parasite, penetrates not just the realms of literature and performance, but the core of modern society.
