Dancing the Social Contract: The White Divertissement and the French Revolution
Gradual changes in the relationship between ballet and narrative took place in the years following the French Revolution of 1789. Through an intertextual analysis of livrets for eighteenth-century ballets, Revolutionary festivals, and early to mid-nineteenth-century ballets, as well as Revolutionary rhetoric, I explore the echoes of political concerns in the new ways narrative came to be expressed onstage. I focus especially on how these changes in ballet's narrative might have been perceived by nineteenth-century theatergoers.