Degas and the Ballet Dancers

I've always been interested in the paintings of Edgar Degas, both because they are beautiful paintings, but also because they show the progression of the visual problems he suffered during his later life.

Here's an interesting essay that goes into the background behind the many paintings of ballet dancers that Degas produced. 

Edgar Degas, The Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage, ca. 1874. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I wasn't aware of the exploitation suffered by many of these dancers (although it doesn't surprise me at all) - I've never paid much attention to ballet, current or historical. 

The formerly upright ballet had taken on the role of unseemly cabaret; in Paris, its success was almost entirely predicated on lecherous social contracts. Sex work was a part of a ballerina’s reality, and the city’s grand opera house, the Palais Garnier, was designed with this in mind. A luxuriously appointed room located behind the stage, called the foyer de la danse, was a place where the dancers would warm up before performances. But it also served as a kind of men’s club, where abonnés—wealthy male subscribers to the opera—could conduct business, socialize, and proposition the ballerinas.

These relationships always involved an unbalanced power dynamic. Young female members of the corps de ballet entered the academy as children. Many of these ballerinas-in-training, derisively called “petits rats,” came from working-class or impoverished backgrounds. They often joined the ballet to support their families, working grueling, six-day weeks.

And so dancers’ earnings and careers were beholden to the abonnés prowling backstage. They were expected to submit to the affections of these subscribers, and were frequently encouraged by their own mothers to fan the flames of male desire. Such relationships could offer lifelines for the impoverished dancers; not only did these aristocrats and financiers hold powerful positions in society, their patronage underwrote the opera’s operations.

As the article points out, Degas was quite aware of this culture, and you can see it in his paintings.

The sexual politics that played out in the foyer de la danse was of great interest to Degas. In fact, very few of his depictions of the dance show an actual performance. Instead, the artist hovers behind the wings, backstage, in class, or at a rehearsal. In works like L’Étoile (1878), he depicts the curtain call at the end of the performance, with the curtsying dancer bathed in the unflattering glare of the lights. Behind her, a man in an elegant black tuxedo lurks in the wings, his face hidden by the goldenrod curtain. Such sinister figures also appear in works like Dancers, Pink and Green (ca. 1890). Sometimes, the viewer himself is thrust into the leering perspective of the abonnés: In Dancers at the Old Opera House (ca. 1877), the action onstage is seen from behind the curtain.