Ballet Imperial.

`So everything, in its ruin, seems in England to live a new life; and it is only this second life, this cottage built in the fallen stronghold, that is English'. (1) Writing during the First World War, it is not surprising that the American philosopher, George Santayana, should indicate the end of English predominance. Yet his point is that the English have always been like this. The base of power, the geographical nation itself, is on such a small scale that even in its grandest ventures, Santayana suggests, there has always been something essentially domestic and familial about English motives and conduct. The nation's intention was not to assert some abstract ideal of power, but to extend `home' throughout the world. Conversely, when the English imported ideas and styles from abroad, they broke them down to fit the English sense of things. In architecture, the `military, religious, or civic' significations of French and Italian design were copied by the English, but with a new subordination of part to part: the Englishman's castle was homely.

Santayana was dealing in cliches. England had long been seen as quaintly venerable by American visitors. One detects the strong influence on Santayana, as on so many others, of Washington Irving's cosily picturesque Sketch Book (1819-20). There is a pleasurable lamentation over the decline of England, signalling as it does the rise of America. Equally, while the sense of ancientness is perhaps an aspect of every empire's claim to legitimacy, the balance between past and present shifts when decline sets in. The present becomes harder and less rewarding, while the past expands and develops. Santayana's vision of England as the `cottage built in the fallen stronghold' was one that would become increasingly recognizable to the English themselves. But what about the `second life', of the `cottage built in the fallen stronghold'? What cultural forms were used to maintain the guise of power after the real power had gone? One increasingly important sign of this domestic or feminine afterlife of empire was, I will argue, the rise of English ballet. There is a great deal to be written of the connections here, taking in the gender and aspirations of such pivotal figures as Ninette de Valois and Marie Rambert, as well as the regal self-effacements of `princess ballerinas' such as Markova and Fonteyn, and the softening of manner that would define the English balletic style. There is also the thematic and symbolic content of the repertory, from the ironic pretence of Ashton's Facade in 1931 to the revival of The Sleeping Beauty in 1939. Further, one needs to look at the contemporary critical response, and the composition and reactions of the audience. I touch on all of these things in what follows. But the cultural function of ballet between the wars, and especially in relation to Englishness and gender, is conveniently brought into focus by a novel for children that, although a `classic', has received little critical attention. Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes, set in the early 1930s and published in 1936, offers a remarkable commentary on post-imperial decline and, more particularly, on the feminization of national identity that ensued. First, though, what of ballet, power, and femininity?

The ballet aesthetic has always turned on a paradox of self-projection and self-effacement. The dancer's body is a customized body, in that it is made over to particular designs. With the `turn out' from the hips and the centring of movement and balance in the small of the back, it is a body that is at once powerful and erect, but deliberately and completely vulnerable to the gaze of the audience. For `turn out' flattens the profile, making more of the dancer available to the looks and desires of the viewer. It also enables the dancer to move quickly in any direction without elaborate preparation, and in this respect it emphasizes and makes visible the fact that the body is also made over to the demands of the score and choreography. Although the dancer's is a dominant and admired body, it is also `in service'. This subservience fits with the social history of the ballet, in that traditionally dancers were subject to royal patronage. The early dancers of the Imperial Russian Ballet were literally owned by the Tsar, and even after they had acquired the status of civil servants, they were still heavily dependent on the goodwill and financial support of the ruling class. Aristocratic interest was often dependent on sexual favours. Similarly in France the female dancer was often seen as a particular kind of prostitute, whose arts and performances were little more than a display of her wares. The dancer may well have been a star, but this could create a misleading aura of agency. In effect she symbolized and embodied the buying power of her audience. A psychoanalytic reading of the ballet aesthetic confirms the historical fact. Several feminist scholars have suggested that the female dancer's definitive technique, that of rising on to her points, is a testament to the power of the male audience. The argument is that although the ballerina may produce soft and lyrical movements, the straightening of the leg and foot creates a `phallic pointe'. (2) In embodying the phallus, the dancer assuages the castration anxieties of the male viewer. In this reading, the male dancer stands in for the male viewer: `He carries her erect. [...] He handles her as he would his own penis. Fondly he holds the phallus in his arms, longingly he looks into his princess's eyes, ecstatically he lifts her, his hands around her long, stiff tube of a body.' (3) In this interpretation, even the Romantic heroine's doom provides an oblique gratification: `Her death, the point at which she at last goes limp, [is] the orgasm of the phallus that she represents in the fantasy of the hero' (English, p. 18). The ballerina's power, then, does not contradict male power. Rather, she acquires a subordinate power in performing the maleness or phallic aspect of rightful power. In this sense, she is always secondary, even when she is centre-stage: `Even as she commands the audience's gaze, she achieves no tangible or enduring identity. Her personhood is eclipsed by the attention she receives, by the need for her to dance in front of everyone' (Foster, p. 2).

Small wonder, then, that ballet induces such contradictory attitudes, even in its leading exponents. Margot Fonteyn exemplified ballet's tendency to make the woman supremely visible while also causing her to disappear. She remarked on this with some poignancy at several points in her autobiography:

My identity was clear to me only when I assumed some make-believe character. [...] My own identity was completely eclipsed by my idea of the image I should project to others; a glamorous, chic personage; gracious and a little aloof; but effervescent with gaiety after the performance--this last bit, at least, came naturally. [...] The created image was in danger of taking over. In retrospect, I can see that I had reached the furthest point in the great arc of my life, and was out in the emotional wastelands of some fallacious person who was yet, in some ways, also me. (4)

What Fonteyn captures so well is that the danger lies in the undecidability: the `fallacious person' is `also me'. It is tempting to make the connection at this point between the psychoanalytic structuring of ballet and the eating disorders suffered by female dancers. The woman has to be very thin to look right, to make those phallicly straight lines. But the extreme cases of self-starvation seem to relate to the question of agency and embodiment: the dancer reduces her corporeal self further and further, seeking either to be left with her `own' self, or to get rid of that self and be left only with a balletic line. The anorexic dancer uses her body to pose in ever more urgent but unresolvable form the question of the `fallacious person' and the `me', of power and female self hood.

Although ballet has had a variety of positive values for women and for men, it seems that it can also typify woman's role within a patriarchal sexual economy, whether Imperial Russian or French bourgeois. But what if the surrounding context is altered? The meaning of any cultural expression is determined to some extent by the `structure of address', the socio-political relation between performer and audience. (5) Although English ballet would proclaim its allegiance to the Imperial Russian tradition, it was the focal point for a characteristically post-imperial expression, and, I will argue, its representation of women reflects this.

The English interest in ballet was resuscitated by the Diaghilev phenomenon of the 1910s and 1920s. It had been thought that ballet had declined from its Romantic heyday of 1840-1860, but Diaghilev's artistic seriousness, and the avant garde prestige of his associates, drew a new, wealthy, and sophisticated audience. It has been argued that Diaghilev rescued the ballet by making it more of a masculine pursuit. In the beginning, at least, his key associates were men, Fokine, Benois, Bakst, Stravinsky, and, even more tellingly, Diaghilev's productions were frequently oriented around a male dance star in Nijinsky. A large part of the appeal of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, though, was based on a near-scandalous sensuality. There were the orgy scenes of Scheherazade (1910), the autoerotic gesture of L'Apres-midi d'un faune (1912), and the generally sexualized excess of the various other `oriental' ballets, including Cleopatre (1909) and Le Dieu Bleu (1912). (6) This seems perilously close to the titillations of ballet in its low phase of the late nineteenth century, and some perceived the productions in this light. The theatre designer, Edward Gordon Craig, argued: `The Russian Ballet is essentially the "Art" which is created by the Body. Its perfection is physical. Its appeal is to our senses, not through them.' (7) But many other artists and intellectuals fell in love with the Ballets Russes, and tried to affirm the value of ballet in more cerebral terms. Several of the great modernists praised Diaghilev's work because it fell into line with the growing separation of the work of art from old-fashioned notions of self-expression. Much of Diaghilev's work offered unashamedly dificult and progressive music, advanced conceptual schemes, and radical scenic images. In keeping with symbolist and modernist tendencies, in the Ballets Russes the human form was alienated within or subordinated to an `autonomous aesthetic'. (8) The frilly pretensions of the feminine or effeminate dancer were disciplined by a series of highly geared, male-authored texts: score, scenery, choreography. Even when the production seemed closer to the decadent lushness of the past, it could appeal to modernist taste on the grounds that it seemed to be `primitive'. Modernists tended to disdain mass culture and the middle and lower-middle classes that were thought to consume it. When Pound wrote `Les Millwins' in 1913, he used the ballet audience to structure his own contempt for lower-middle class interlopers, the `Little Millwins' who stare at performance and audience with `large and anaemic eyes'. In the face of what they saw as a mediated and debased art, modernists such as Yeats, Eliot, and Lawrence turned to the more `authentic' expressions of pre-industrial cultures. The Ballets Russes may seem like a continuation of fin-de-siecle decadence, but its `faunes', `Egyptians' and `Persians,' and its very Russianness, could seem like a pure and uncontaminated passion to the intellectuals of London and Paris. Also, the Ballets Russes in its earliest phase was connected not with the middle classes but with the aristocracy. It played expensive theatres, ticket prices were high, and Diaghilev was a master at ensuring the financial support and conspicuous attendance of social notables. (9) In both its aesthetic and social aspects, it by-passed the middle and lower-middle classes.

In its pre-War guise, then, the ballet, newly prominent with the arrival of Diaghilev, was in an imperial or elite phase. Diaghilev himself was an aristocrat, the majority of his dancers had been trained in the Imperial academies, and his audiences were drawn from the ruling classes. All that would change over the following five years. The Tsar would fall, and the caste values of the Edwardian and Belle Epoque eras would be damaged. One was no longer being dazzled by a sign of the Tsar's immense power in going to see the Ballets Russes. If anything, it could serve as an exercise in imperial nostalgia. Ballet took on a kind of belated glory, and it came to depend increasingly on the wonder and the pity of the less privileged. Effectively, ballet suffered class endangerment, and this was clear from the post-War fate of the Ballets Russes. Diaghilev had scorned the music halls in his better days, saying that his great art should not appear between performing dogs and `a fat lady playing a silver trombone' (Koritz, p. 122). But after the War, without the same level of royal and aristocratic patronage, he was obliged to offer productions to the music halls simply to keep going. He took the company only to the grandest halls, such as the Coliseum, the Alhambra, and the Empire, but tickets were nearly ten times cheaper than they had been for Covent Garden. The common, music hall audience had already been exposed to ballet in the form of small, populist troupes built around star dancers such as Pavlova, Genee, Karsavina, and others. Diaghilev's productions enjoyed mixed success in the halls. His tremendous prestige commanded respect, and many who had been unable to afford Covent Garden prices now came to see what had so impressed the wealthy and the distinguished. But the true music hall audience could, Virginia Woolf observed, be `a little contemptuous' of the more avant garde items. Clive Bell thought that if the audience had liked Diaghilev's ballets better than the performing dogs, they liked them `distinctly less than the ventriloquist'. (10)

The Ballets Russes shows how the arts were conflated with class, and how ballet in particular was being downgraded. After the War, the Ballets Russes would seem dethroned, and dependent upon the mercies of the market. Diaghilev took his company back to Covent Garden, but he also depended on such as the `Little Millwins'. Both he and the ballet would resemble Santayana's `cottage built in the fallen stronghold'. The point about this preamble with Diaghilev is that it was precisely in this perception of endangered and even lost power that ballet identity and English identity would meet. Ballet has never altogether lost its elite image, but it has also met the desires of an aspirational audience. There was a new cohort of ballet fans who, in Cecil Beaton's opinion, were `lank', `untidy', and `shapeless'. Ballet was comparatively accessible to the comparatively uneducated, and seemed to requite both the rises and falls of British fortunes. It represented a new alignment of interests, in that the English ballet would be a retreat within an imperial facade, a reproduction in homelier dimensions. Garafola summarizes with a different metaphor:

Little by little the art was `Englished', acquiring an identity that mirrored the features of its indigenous public. Before the war ballet had been a hothouse bloom, a rare and cosseted species. Now it took root among the pinks and primroses, naturalizing itself as a perennial of the English landscape. (p. 333)

Over the coming years, and especially as English ballet began in earnest, the status of the art as the feminine afterlife of empire would become ever more pronounced. One obvious factor here is the provenance of the so-called English ballet. The most significant figures were Ninette de Valois, an Irish woman otherwise known as Edris Stannus, and Marie Rambert, a woman of Polish-Jewish origins, who had changed from Cyvia Rambam to Miriam Ramberg, before deciding, like de Valois, to go for the more acceptably French modulation. Both dancers had worked for Diaghilev; indeed, with Diaghilev's death in 1929 and the subsequent collapse of his company, one might say that de Valois and Rambert emerged from the ruins of the Ballets Russes empire. In becoming `French' and relocating in London to found `English' ballet, these two women identified with centres of established power. This enabled their ambitions, and it also disguised their otherness with an instantly recognizable (if spurious) cultural identity. In an approximation of Fanon's `black skin' and `white masks', the self became creative, but as a regulated and approved entity. Many other figures made similar moves, often at the behest of the great re-packager, Diaghilev himself. Patrick Healey-Kaye's Irishness was Russianized as Anton Dolin, while the London Jewish resonances of Alice Marks were disguised as Alicia Markova. In this sense, English ballet was always a nostalgic reconstruction of vanished Russian power as well as an attempted identification with the diminished but still significant power of England. That such latterday renewals were peculiarly suited to English decline was officially recognized in 1956, when de Valois's Sadler's Wells Ballet was made the Royal Ballet.

In time, the English ballet would prove a secondary empire, in that it became one of the country's prime cultural exports. In sell-out tours around the world year after year, the Sadler's Wells Ballet would eclipse indigenous companies with its fabulous designs, its well-drilled corps de ballet, and the mystique of its prima ballerina. Yet this was achieved with a characteristically `small' and `feminine' style. In the early 1950s, when the Sadler's Wells Ballet had reached a peak of international status, the American dance critic, Edwin Denby, noted in the company an `English sweetness of temper', a `general outlook of honesty, [a] sense of good manners, and [a] reticent willingness to dance'. He found the English style almost `too small-stepping', and thought that even a `certain sanctimonious decentness' might be detected. He also thought there was a correspondence between this aesthetic and the attitude of the English audience. Denby observed that the English ballet-goers `looked at the ballet so to speak discreetly, almost as one watches family theatricals, as if the dancers weren't professionals'. (11) As with Santayana's observations on the English conversion of French and Italian styles of architecture into something domestic, the Sadler's Wells company had managed to take the grand and often sensual gestures of ballet and reproduce them in a smaller and more modest form.

What should be clear from all this is that ballet in the 1930s operated within a symbolic field that had particular relevance for girls and young women. In a period of depression, and following on from a period of emancipation, ballet had to negotiate the issue of women working outside the home. In fact, the Sadler's Wells Ballet seemed magically to resolve the problem, in that the English professional dancer had somehow hung on to her amateur status. As Denby suggests, she was still `reticent', and her performances had the air of `family theatricals'. The ballet gave her an acceptably enclosed and miniaturized realm in which to have a career. While ballet placed women in an approximation of an imperialist role, the connotations were as much those of rescue and nostalgia. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that ballet should serve as a popular setting for fiction for girls. It offered the girl-character and the girl-reader an important but protected field of activity. The figure of the ballerina held out to the girl a non-transgressive form of ambition, a dedicated careerism that was still feminine. But children's fiction serves a function for adults as well, whether adult authors or adult readers. The return to childhood may well be a strategy for reformulating one's present situation. Tracing the transition from young girlhood to the growing responsibilities of late adolescence and of young womanhood--the Bildungsroman, indeed--the adult can make another approach to current predicaments. In this sense, the fiction of growing up nearly always serves as an allegory for arriving at a satisfactory way of thinking about an adult preoccupation. Children's fiction is a fiction of rescue, of `getting it right'. It is always a `second life', but this belated childhood may be approached with some degree of parental assurance. (12) Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes, as I hope to show, fulfils all these expectations. It instructs the child, or rather, places an ideological burden upon her, while oVering a strategic recompense for the adult's historical sense of loss.

Ballet Shoes tells of three orphan girls. Pauline is a survivor from the a ship that `struck an iceberg'; Petrova is the child of emigre Russians; and Posy is the daughter of a ballet dancer. What one notices about the girls' origins is that they all represent shaded powers. Each embodies suggestions of an endangered elite: even though the chronology does not match up, Pauline's background seems to allude to the grand folly of the Titanic, whereas the backgrounds of the other girls signify fleeing White Russians, and a dying artist. These girls are `collected' by Great Uncle Matthew, known as Gum. He is an explorer and a collector of fossils, and so the girls are given the surname of Fossil. The name also perhaps indicates a sense of belatedness, of being out of step with a more prosaic and commercial age. They form a kind of museum to go alongside Gum's other artefacts and specimens. This is affirmed by one of the first things we learn about them: that they often walk from their house on the Cromwell Road to the Victoria and Albert Museum to see the dolls' houses. The novel opens with a flurry of references to what is left behind, what can be conserved against decline. The girls are presented in the guise of throwbacks to an earlier and more privileged era, before they were `fossilized', and this is associated with the predominance of Victorian England. Now they live a protected secondary life that rehearses the struggles of empire, but in a scaled down, dolls' house manner. Great Uncle Matthew confirms this in the pun of his nickname: the English male still wanders the world looking for plunder of various kinds, but in a gently toothless way. His name also has a Victorian echo in that one thinks of Gladstone, who was known as the GOM, or Grand Old Man. Even the rather limp figure of imperial masculinity that is Gum is removed from the girls' lives when he disappears on another collecting adventure. The challenge for the Fossil sisters thereafter is to maintain the appearances of power when the real power has gone. To this end they are supervised by Gum's niece, Sylvia. She is known as Garnie, a childish corruption of Guardian. That Sylvia is only the guardian is telling, in that she is guardian of the girls for Gum. She occupies a powerful but ultimately subservient position.

After several years, it seems that Gum will never return, and this necessitates a continuous retreat from within. It is hard `looking after a house when there isn't any money', and the large shell of the Cromwell Road home hides the fact that the inhabitants are living humble, cottage lives. (13) Sylvia and her wards occupy only a part of the house, and take in boarders to make ends meet. In what seems an overwhelming preoccupation with post-imperial depression, Streatfeild even creates boarders to fit this theme. Mr and Mrs Simpson had been out in Kuala Lumpur, but they too have to retreat from the farther outposts, and decide to set up in London. Other boarders include two spinster PhDs who have made livings from coaching people for examinations. They have their own imperial archive or interiorized `Dark Continent' in the form of their library. Pauline is astonished by the wall-to-ceiling extent of the knowledge that they have colonized together. And though they have never had public responsibility, the spinsters understand only too well the Kiplingesque burdens of the imperial subject: `As both doctors had spent their lives coaching people for terribly stiff examinations--though of course they taught quite easy things to the children--they never got the idea out of their minds that a stiff examination was something that everybody had to pass some day' (p. 52). The same thematics is also figured in the dancing school that the girls attend. The Children's Academy of Dancing and Stage Training is a mix of the domestic and the expansionist in that it is three houses joined together. Though it has a grand name, the Academy is another instance of cobbling together and making do, of getting bigger while remaining small-scale. The Academy's star graduates are further exemplars of the same thing: their photos adorn the walls, signed with `Little Doris', `Babsy', `Baby Cora', and `Tiny' (pp. 42, 45). Although the Fossils scorn this coy infantilism, the truths that they will learn in their training and early careers will confirm both the aggrandisements of success and the fact that they provide a model of power without attaining the real thing. Dancing, as we have already seen, signifies both power and surrender. It is a discipline that creates a sense of control but which also empties or externalizes self hood. The body is no longer one's own; it is made over to the ballet aesthetic. The novel's title is evocative here, in that it suggests the stepping into a role (the shoes are there to be filled) and the acquisition of privileged knowledge. It is an escape into a larger or more conspicuous identity for character and reader alike. But the lesson that Ballet Shoes teaches is that success is won by submission and the studious reproduction of others' thoughts and intentions. When Pauline's acting brings her money and fame, she tests the extent of her new power by breaking the rules of backstage behaviour. As a punishment, her role is given to her understudy, and she quickly realizes that star power is inconsequential in comparison with the theatre-manager's power. Above all, she must learn that `the play [is] the thing' (p. 141). On the other hand, Posy, the most talented dancer, is allowed her star complex. She declares: `When I dance [...] nobody else will do instead of me; they'll come to see me, and if I'm not there, they'll just go home' (p. 141). Petrova reflects that when Posy says such things it is not conceitedness, though Petrova cannot work out the logic here. The narrator records then that Posy falls asleep murmuring the components of her enchainements: `Two chasses, pas de chat, pirouette, two chasses ...' (p. 142), and perhaps this gives the reader the clue. Posy's apparent arrogance is belied by the fact that, as the ballet dancer, she has the greatest burden of all. Her irreplaceability is the result of her total surrender to her discipline. Posy's life will be utterly dominated by the imperatives of her art. She absconds so that she can see a performance by the great `Manoff', and then tells her sister: `I've got to learn from him, Pauline--I must' (p. 225). When it is pointed out to her that Manoff teaches in Czechoslovakia, she is still resolved: `Posy, however, was beyond reason' (p. 226). Once Posy has found her ultimate master in Manoff, she is, of course, beyond agency and therefore beyond responsibility. She is made over to the ballet and its male creators.

The other aspect of the theatre that relates to the post-imperial preoccupation lies in the nature of performance. Live performance requires a mastery of self and other. When Petrova confesses her nervousness to Mr Simpson before a big performance, he tells her that he had similar feelings when, out in Kuala Lumpur, he `had to go and stop a native strike' (p. 95). Also, the roles that Pauline is given to play are symptomatic. She is Edward in Richard III, a role that mirrors her life in that it involves taking power and responsibility because the authentic power has gone. For her, as for Edward, it is too early and too late. The same note of endangered privilege is signalled in her film role as Henrietta, the young sister of Charles II. Pauline's film career also confirms what her ballet training has taught her. She notices that the actor playing Charles II is able to summon up a convincing display of emotion for his scenes, however many takes are required of him. She sees that the authentic performance is produced not by true feeling but by a deauthentication. The crucial thing is not to be your self, but to customize, to empty and re-build your self, to play the game.

My title, `Ballet Imperial', is taken from Balanchine's ballet of that name, which he choreographed to Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 2 in G Major. It was first performed in New York on 29 May 1941, and entered the repertory of the Sadler's Wells Ballet in 1950. Balanchine intended Ballet Imperial as a tribute to the great French choreographer of the Imperial Russian era, Marius Petipa. A lot of the steps are borrowed from Petipa, but reproduced in the cleaner, de-Romanticized manner that would define Balanchine's New York City Ballet. Balanchine required a more modernist style of movement, which was slightly oV the beat in comparison to Petipa. In this ballet, as in many others, Balanchine had taken something he greatly admired, and produced a tribute that superseded and even gave an ironic twist to the otherwise revered source. Balanchine's neoclassicism was the kind of tribute that encapsulated and effectively demoted the classical precursor. In Denby's reviews of the New York City Ballet and Sadler's Wells Ballet, he detected an `Anglo-Saxon shiny white hardness', though he thought this was disappearing from the English ballet. Ballet Imperial occupied a slightly problematic place in the Sadler'sWells repertory precisely because Fonteyn, a classical ballerina, could not or would not produce this `hard' style. She and the company that she dominated were too much immersed in a museum style, the style they had learnt from the Imperial ballerinas themselves. It is no accident that the new empire of ballet with its `shiny white hardness' should be located in New York and not London. Balanchine chose America as the site of his neoclassical empire, while England maintained a custodial relation to its art. Both Sadler'sWells and Ballet Shoes are symptoms of this feminized, post-imperial Englishness, this `looking after' that hardly dares to be proprietorial. This is a guardianship rather than an ownership. There is a going behind the scenes, but the heart of the mystery remains closed to character and reader alike. Alongside the female acquisition of expertise and power, there is a good-natured refusal to know too much.

(1) George Santayana, `English Architecture', in Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922; repr. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), pp. 77-83 (p. 80).

(2) See Susan Leigh Foster, `The Ballerina's Phallic Pointe', in Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power, ed. by Susan Leigh Foster, (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 1-24.

(3) Rose English, `Alas Alack: The Representation of the Ballerina', New Dance, 15 (1980), 18-19 (p. 18). English is adapting Laura Mulvey's classic Lacanian analysis of film and audience, `Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'.

(4) Margot Fonteyn, Autobiography (London: Allen, 1975), pp. 57, 127.

(5) I take the phrase `structure of address' from Barbara Johnson, `Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora Neale Hurston, Critical Inquiry, 12.1 (Autumn 1985), 278-89.

(6) The dates are for the first performances in the West; these were usually in Paris.

(7) Quoted by Amy Koritz in Gendering Bodies/Performing Art: Dance and Literature in Early Twentieth-Century British Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 125.

(8) See Koritz on the male hierarchy and its `autonomous aesthetic' (pp. 3, 121, 123).

(9) Koritz discusses the Ballets Russes and modernism, but see also John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (London: Faber, 1992), and Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

(10) Lynn Garafola, Diaghilev's Ballets Russes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), gives the relative ticket prices (p. 231), and quotes Woolf and Bell (p. 331).

(11) Edwin Denby, review of Ashton's Cinderella, Ballet (February 1949), and `Some Thoughts About Classicism and George Balanchine', Ballet (August 1953), both reprinted in Edwin Denby, Dance Writings and Poetry, ed. by Robert Cornfield (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 181-87, 235-43. The `certain sanctimonious decentness' is Denby's articulation of what he takes to be Balanchine's objection to the Sadler's Wells Ballet.

(12) For more on the interpellation of adult as child, see Glenn Hendler, `Tom Sawyer's Masculinity', Arizona Quarterly, 49.4 (Winter 1993), pp. 33-59.

(13) Noel Streatfeild, Ballet Shoes (1936; repr. London: Puffin, 1949), p. 21.

PETER STONELEY
Queen's University, Belfast