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Madame Mariquita, Greek Dance, and French Ballet Modernism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 February 2022

Sarah Gutsche-Miller
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Abstract

This article seeks to correct prevailing narratives of French ballet modernism, which exclude one of its earliest and most significant choreographers, Madame Mariquita. Although long overshadowed by the Diaghilev enterprise and by dancers such as Isadora Duncan, Mariquita's experiments with creating dances that drew on ancient Greek imagery while ballet mistress at the Paris Opéra-Comique in the early 1900s were central to ballet culture in France at a pivotal moment in dance history. This article discusses Mariquita's nascent ballet modernism through her choreography of Greek dances as well as her engagement with early twentieth-century French dance and broader cultural trends.

Keywords

Fin-de-Siècle ParisFrench Ballet ModernismGreek DanceMadame MariquitaOpéra-Comique
Type
Article
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 53 , Issue 3 , December 2021 , pp. 46 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Dance Studies Association

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Footnotes

My thanks to Hanna Järvinen, Patty Argyrides, and Samuel Dorf for their comments on earlier versions of this article, and to Stephanie Frakes for helping collect reviews and discussing what we found.

References

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