Staging the “Far East”: Representations and Perceptions of East Asia on European Ballet Stages in the 19th Centuries

How was East Asia imagined and staged on nineteenth-century European ballet stages? Following the immense success of Jean-Georges Noverre’s ‘Les Fêtes chinoises (1754)’, European theatres increasingly produced ballets that evoked or portrayed the cultures of the “Far East.” As the eighteenth century progressed, expanding trade with the Japanese Empire and Qing China, together with the influx of paintings, porcelains, silks, and tea, stimulated the European imagination and transformed stage aesthetics. Beginning with Noverre’s chinoiserie ballet, this paper examines two relatively understudied works: the Japoniste three-act ballet ‘Yedda (Japanese Legend)’, premiered in Paris in 1879, and ‘Die Braut von Korea (The Bride of Korea)’, staged at the Vienna Court Opera in 1897. Although no choreographic record survives, this study investigates how the “Far East” was staged by analyzing surviving musical scores, photographs, narrative structures, and articles and reviews. The expansion of trade between Asia and Europe, the rise of travelogues and diplomatic reports, Western imperial ambitions, Japan’s Meiji Restoration, internal changes within the Qing dynasty, and the opening of Joseon, all reflecting the geopolitical upheavals of East Asia, appear across these works. Within this context, the research moves beyond viewing these ballets merely an assemblage of Orientalist representations, arguing instead that they functioned as complex theatrical spaces where limitations of knowledge, political interests, commercial expectations, and Europe’s search for identity converged to construct a multifaceted vision of the “Far East.”

Nahyung Kim is a South Korean researcher whose work examines dance and musical heritage across East Asia and the Asia-Pacific region. She has a strong interest in transnational and cross-cultural perspectives in dance, particularly the historical encounters between Europe and East Asia and how these encounters have been represented within Western theatrical traditions. Trained as a traditional Korean dancer, she received her BA and MA in Dance Studies, Dance History, and Dance Anthropology from the Korea National University of Arts, where she also served as a research assistant at the Institute for World Ethnic Dance, developing expertise in Asian dance and music traditions. She later taught cultural studies and dance history at the Korea National University of Arts, School of Dance. She is currently pursuing PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, where her doctoral research focuses on Korean ethnicity and the nationalistic aesthetics of dance and music during East Asia’s modernization period.