Butterflies in the Flames

Romantic Ballet and the Spectacle of the Burning Ballerina

Abstract

Some of Romantic ballet’s best-remembered dancers are those who burned to death in horrific stage accidents. Emma Livry, the rising hope for the French ballet, was scorched during a rehearsal when her costume caught fire, lingering in a state of perpetual agony for eight months before dying of infection. In the United States, four sisters dancing together at Philadelphia’s Continental Theatre, as well as a number of other dancers, perished when their dressing room went up in flames.

The remarkable phenomenon of the burning ballerina spurred public outcry against unsafe conditions for dancers, and yet as a grisly form of visual spectacle, the image of the dancer-aflame both disturbed and excited those who watched and wrote of it. The English ballerina Clara Webster died during a performance of The Revolt of the Harem, inspiring author and influential early ballet critic Théophile Gautier to include a fictionalized version of her death in one of his novels. Using the histories of several nineteenth-century ballerinas who burned in stage accidents as its focal point, this article will examine how the figure of the burning ballerina is rendered—immortally—as a dual emblem of hyper-ability and disability, living virtuoso and dead angel of the dance. Onstage, her body, dancing on the brink of destruction, generates a powerful affective miasma that is perceptible to the spectator; on the page, she metamorphoses beneath the weight of the competing aesthetic configurations that ballet writers impose upon the narrative of her death, configurations of pious disembodiment and agonizing ‘hyper’-embodiment (in which the body is made to carry not only the weight of its own visceral matter, but also the weight of aesthetic figuration).

This article will discuss the frightening delights of looking at—and writing about—another body as it is on the cusp of decay, death, and dissolution, even at the height of its aesthetic perfection. All the while, this body possesses a powerful and moving affect of its own, never exhaustible, never fully recoverable, but always inviting us to look again.