The Role of Dance - and to purchase copies of this book in:

Our Lady’s Tumbler, and many adaptations deriving from it, lay emphasis on acrobatics and dance. As a result, people who had been exposed to the tale could be reminded of the medieval tumbler by any display of energetic dancing. For a case in point, consider a soiree in the Swiss canton of Ticino that was recounted by a collector and

historian of art and literature. The two central dramatis personae are a professor of English literature and none other than the Dublin-born and -bred author James Joyce.

On this occasion, the two became immersed in an intense discussion of opera and Verdi. Eventually the academic began banging out dance tunes on the piano, at which point the long-limbed writer leapt into motion, galloping from a waltz step of his own devising to a rubbery-legged solo of “wild jumps and kicks.” To sum up the episode, the anecdotist invokes the protagonist of our story. To the eyes of this observer, Joyce appeared “part juggling clown and part mystical reincarnation of Our Lady’s Tumbler.”

The hearsay about this very special Irish dancing helps show why the narrative would be conducive to exposition in dance and ballet. Beyond the fact that artistic athleticism is central to the thirteenth-century poem, and appears in many later that the account will resonate with choreographers and their charges: it describes a professional at the delicate and painful career stage when his body has begun to run to seed. The entertainer may be successful, as in the French poem from the Middle Ages, or he may be struggling, as portrayed by Anatole France and many others. In either case, he relinquishes a long performing life when he enlists in the monastery. In many versions, he breathes his last not long afterward.

Experiments in choreographing the juggler would have been made even without Mary Garden’s kinetic interpretation of Jean. Remember that Cosima Wagner called attention to the story’s potential for balletic alongside musical expression, and recall even more importantly that the opera’s libretto provides specific cues for when the jongleur should engage in such motion. The explicit mention of dance is altogether characteristic of Massenet, who was predisposed to find intersections between it and his sung theater: all but six of his operas include an outright appeal for dancing by the characters. True, Le jongleur de Notre Dame makes no mention of professional dancers or choreography. Yet the juggler belongs among the richest balletic parts in Massenet’s canon—and the composer was sensitive to the role of dance not merely as an enhancement but even as a must-have constituent of opera. The French musical drama makes a positive case for the serious treatment of the medieval entertainer for his capacities as a dancer. Antiquity had had Terpsichore, the muse of dance, but the art’s standing had plummeted after the advent of Christianity. Now it rapidly recovered lost ground.

At the start of the first act, the libretto contains the exhortation “let’s dance the bergerette.” The term has often been applied to a kind of pastoral song, but here it refers to a series of bodily movements. In the third act, the opera spotlights the balletic still more vigorously, by calling for a “dance of the jongleur.” The entertainer addresses the Madonna, almost as if inviting her to be his ballroom partner. The stage directions stipulate a bourrée (see Figs. 2.44 and 2.45), a type of dance in wooden shoes that originated in the Auvergne and eventually became a movement in classical dance music. The juggler is to step ever more up-tempo, with foot-stamping and exclamations, until he collapses at the feet of the Madonna and prostrates himself.

That turns out to have been a good move: clever clogs.

Fig. 2.44 Postcard of the bourrée in Auvergne, France (Paris: Lévy et Neurdein Réunis, early twentieth century).

Fig. 2.45 Postcard of the bourrée in Auvergne, France (early twentieth century).

With such potential, the tale would inevitably inspire dancers. In an early instance in Europe, Mary Wigman performed “Our Lady’s Dancer,” under a German title, in Zurich in 1917. She repeated the program with this piece in 1919 in the same Swiss city and later in German ones, including Hamburg and Dresden. This Hanover-born beauty was a pioneer of modern dance. A photograph from a decade and a half later conveys a sense of how she employed the chiaroscuro technique, so characteristic of expressionism (see Fig. 2.46). Another shot may capture her in the sort of medieval-style outfit she would have worn in this specific routine (see Fig. 2.47). Five years afterward the tale directly inspired Max Terpis, the Swiss-born choreographer who studied with

Wigman in Dresden in 1922. In the following year, he was hired to choreograph Our Lady’s Dancer, based on a play by Franz Weinrich. For his debut Terpis himself took the lead role of Brother Simplicius (see Fig. 2.48).

Another nugget of evidence would be Our Lady’s Juggler as enacted by the Rambert Dance Company, the oldest dance troupe in Britain. The performances took place from 1930 on. The company archive includes “a red Madonna dress with a gold pattern stenciled at the neckline” that Marie Rambert wore when she played the Virgin in 1930 (see Fig. 2.49). Andrée Howard also made an impression with her beauty and grace as The Lonely Lady. In her choreography, the ballet opened with a fizzy scene outside the gates of a Gothic church. The dance, although obviously in a medium quite different from opera, owed much to Massenet as reshaped by Mary Garden (see Figs. 2.50 and 2.51).

Around when the Rambert Dance Company promulgated “Our Lady’s Juggler”

in Britain, the story was transported to the southernmost reaches of what was then still called the Dark Continent. Dulcie Howes was a dancer, in her time the prima ballerina assoluta of South African ballet. She trained in London and plied her trade in England and Europe until returning to her native land in 1930. Thereafter she opened educational institutions. Among more than two dozen original ballets, she choreographed Le jongleur de Notre Dame: A French Legend of the 14th Century (see Fig.

2.52).

Fig. 2.46 Mary Wigman, beauty in expressionist chiaroscuro. Photograph by Albert Renger-Patzsch,

ca. 1933.

Fig. 2.47 Mary Wigman, in medievalesque costume.

Photograph by Charlotte Rudolph, ca. 1933.

Fig. 2.48 Max Terpis as Brother Simplicius in Weinrich’s Our Lady’s Dancer (1923). Photograph by Becker & Maass, 1923.

Fig. 2.49 Marie Rambert and Harold Turner in the Rambert Dance Company’s performance of Our Lady’s Juggler. Photograph by Armand Console, 1930.

Fig. 2.52 Images from Dulcie Howes’s Le jongleur de Notre Dame: A French Legend of the 14th Century. Fragments from scrapbook of Pamela Chrimes, 1936. Image courtesy of Eduard Greyling.

The four-part program, with this as its first component, also included in the second position A Chinese Idyll. The juxtaposition may have harked back to the nineteenth-century tendency to find analogies between the chronological alienness of the Middle Ages and the geographical one of the orient—chrono- and geoexoticism. In its staging, reviewers rendered tribute to the lighting. The cast was all female, but who can say beyond a doubt whether this reflected a fluke of demographics in the ballet school, or the distant influence of Mary Garden? No matter. The titles mentioned represent but a sampling from a large pool of dance routines that were ultimately an outgrowth from the medieval Our Lady’s Tumbler and that speak to the vitality of the story in this medium as well, especially from around World War I through the 1930s.

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