'"The Opera Rat": Costume and Representation of a Physiology of Theatres in the Nineteenth Century'

From the 1830s, students at the Paris Music Academy were referred to as "Opera rats" by fashionable socialites, caricatures and writers who had fun describing life behind the scenes and in the "home" of ballet dance. The Opera rat, as described by Théophile Gautier, was a poor young dancer from the Ballet School who spent her days at the Opera, and her evenings on stage appearing in operas and ballets. The emergence of this essentializing physiology of the nineteenth century can be explained by the construction of literary ad iconographic discourses based on habits, and descriptions of the way young dancing girls were thought to move and to express themselves. The costumes that adorned the theatre actor were represented in their materiality - fabrics, hats, colours, accessories were evoked with great precision - but were also a social construction. The staging and costuming of this little theatrical character contributed significantly to the construction of this little theatrical character contributed significantly to the construction of the enduring figure of the Opera rat. By examining administrative, literary and iconographic sources, we explain in this presentation how the criteria that distinguished dance students physically and morally, also contributed to forging the figure of the rat in the imagination of opera lovers. 

Emmanuelle Delattre-Destemberg - Associate Professor of History at the Hauts de France Polytechnic University in Valenciennes - is a specialist in the history of dance and performance in the nineteenth century. Currently, she coordinates a project funded by the National Research Agency (ANR) which focuses on the history of dance teachers from the seventeenth to the twenty first century in France and Europe, in collaboration with Marie Glon (MCF, University of Lille) and Guillaume Sintès (MCF, University of Strasbourg). Her latest publications include a contribution to the collection Spectactrices! De l'Antiquité à nos jours edited by V. Lochert, M. Bouhaïk-Gironès, M. Traversier (CNRS Editions, 2022) and an article on the making of dancing bodies published in the revue Romantisme in 2021.