Sexual and Racial Violence in Henri Justamant’s Ballet Divertissements for Les Huguenots and Robert le Diable
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In recent years, the representation of sexual violence in opera has become a significant topic of musicological discussion, highlighted by a 2018 Journal of the American Musicological Society Colloquy. In her contribution to the Colloquy, Micaela Baranello has critiqued the current trend among opera directors to stage nineteenth-century opera ballets as displays of sexual violence against (voiceless) women, ostensibly as historicist deconstruction, though more often reproducing the hegemonic male gaze. Thus far, however, conversations about sexual violence in opera – and in particular the ballet divertissement – have not considered historical choreography and the extent to which it may have participated in the long-term normalizing of what is now recognized as “rape culture.” Though the offstage sexual exploitation of female dancers in nineteenth-century Parisian ballet culture is well documented (Kahane, 1988; Robin-Challan, 1992; Smith, 2001), the primarily oral transmission of dance has made it difficult to know whether overt sexual abuse also appeared onstage. In this regard, the staging manuals of choreographer Henri Justamant (1815–90) are a particularly valuable resource: Justamant’s detailed, easily decipherable notation system gives us the clearest view of what nineteenth-century ballet choreography actually looked like; furthermore, several of his ballets include disturbing scenes of intersectional sexual violence.
Using archival manuscript staging manuals held by the Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung der Universität Köln, this paper examines two Meyerbeer opera divertissements in which Justamant choreographed the capture and sexual assault of racially Othered women: the Act III “Danse Bohémienne” in Les Huguenots,as staged at the Paris Opéra in 1868; and the Act III Ballet of the Nuns in Robert le diable, for an 1863 production at Brussels’s Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie. (Although the ghostly nuns of Robert are not usually considered racial Others, Meyerbeer’s use of the alla turca style for the nuns’ bacchanale maps an Eastern Islamic alterity onto their orgiastic revelry and “wild” sexual deviance (Brittan 2017).) As notated by Justamant, both of these ballets depict marginalized women subjected to physical domination and forcible removal by victorious male aggressors, thus enacting narratives of intersectional subjugation and the expulsion of bodies deemed “threatening” to the dominant social order.
