Pinning Down Cupid: The Anacreontic Ballet, 1790-1815

What exactly is an "Anacreontic" ballet? Is it a style, a genre or simply a catch-all for any ballet featuring mythological subject matter? Why is there a sudden flush of these ballets during the turbulent decades immediately following the French Revolution? And what is the relationship between Anacreontic ballets and satirical representations of the winged male dancer? In this paper, I'll provide an overview of the appeal and significance of Anacreontic ballets, contextualising these works within a broader uptake of Grecian modes in the Literary and visual arts of the period. With an emphasis on Anacreontic ballets presented in London, the paper will survey the themes and attributes that distinguished these works, and consider a new form of idealised masculinity which they brought to the stage in an era marked by warfare and political turmoil. The paper will also consider how we might understand ballet's Anacreontic moment in relation to Romanticism's growing influence on British theatrical culture, asking: Are these ballets the last gasp of the classical ballet d'action? Are they "transitional" in their relationship to later Romantic ballets? Or are they works that are fundamentally participatory in the Romantic ethos of the post-Revolutionary decades? 

Caitlyn Lehmann is a cultural historian specialising in ballet and eighteenth-century studies. She is a Research Assistant within the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, a freelance writer for the dance industry and a former critic for The Dancing Times (UK). Her doctoral study of fashionable society and ballet at King's Theatre is the subject of a forthcoming monograph to be published by Routledge. Her research interests are diverse, ranging from dance at Astley's Circus to the cultural reception of ballet in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 2020 she was an invited speaker for Ballerina: Fashion's Modern Muse at the Museum of FIT, New York. She is also a recent recipient of the Houghton Library's John M. Ward Fellowship in Dance and Music for the Theatre, Harvard University.