Rediscovering a theatrical dance work of the past inevitably prompts the question: did it enact a story? In French court ballet, the narrative content, or lack thereof, has been a particular concern for critics who conceptualise the ballet de cour as a stage in a logical progression towards opera, the eighteenth-century ballet d’action or the nineteenth-century story ballet. While there are undoubtedly close links between the ballet de cour and these later forms, this teleological view of dance history may lead to an evaluation of court ballet according to the aesthetic principles of the theatrical dance that succeeded it, rather than its own distinct artistic values.
To explore storytelling in historical dance-based theatrical spectacle, I have chosen as case studies two seventeenth-century French court ballets based on ‘Cupid and Psyche’ by Apuleius that exemplify opposing ends of the narrative spectrum. Le Ballet de la Reyne, tiré de la fable de Psyché (1619), one of the last so-called ‘melodramatic ballets’, re-enacts a sustained storyline roughly analogous to Apuleius’s plot. Le Ballet de Psyché, ou la puissance de l’amour (1656), on the other hand, is a ballet à entrées, a theatrical dance form in which each section or entrée had its own subject matter and characters, but was linked to an overall theme suggested by the title. The 1656 ballet is thematically framed by the Cupid and Psyche story, but does not attempt to dramatize it, and its contents deviate substantially from Apuleius’s tale. This might suggest that, quite simply, the 1619 work contains a narrative and the 1656 work does not. On closer examination, however, it becomes clear that the function of narrative in the ballets is not straightforward. Court ballet manipulated la fable (the source story) very freely, using it as a set of reference points rather than a template for dramatization. The aim of theatrical imitation in this context was not to engage spectators with the plot or the plight of the protagonists, but rather to represent the essential defining qualities of the characters, emotions and situations portrayed in accordance with prevailing conventions. Furthermore, the fable of Cupid and Psyche was instrumentalised to transmit the stories the French monarchy wished to tell about itself, stories relating both to prevailing political circumstances and perennial monarchical mythology.
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Katherine Goodson Walker recently completed a PhD at the University of Manchester exploring narrative, love and monarchy in French court ballets on the theme of ‘Cupid and Psyche’. Her current research explores dancing slaves, the rhetoric of love as enslavement and real-life slavery in the early modern period. Katherine is currently teaching courses on French politics and culture at the University of Manchester. She has also worked in secondary education as a French teacher, in television as a producer of educational documentaries for BBC and ITV, and in the theatre as an actor and dancer.