Julia Prest

Pale imitations: White performances of slave dance in the public theatres of pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue

ABSTRACT This article offers an original and nuanced contribution to the larger discussion of dance in the colonial Caribbean. Its focus is on the largely neglected phenomenon of the colonial imitator, and specifically on white imitations of local slave dances in the public theatres of Saint-Domingue in the 1770s and 1780s. Colonial accounts of different types of slave dance (calenda, chica and vodou) are examined as an important point of reference for the subsequent analysis of theatrical performances of what were heralded as slave dances. The majority of these formed part of the performance of a local Créole-language work called Jeannot et Thérèse, set explicitly in Saint-Domingue and featuring slave characters. Despite a number of claims to verisimilitude in relation to these dances, it is clear that they bore little resemblance to their supposed models and that what was presented was, from the colonial perspective, a less threatening, more Europeanized form of slave dance. Most revealing of all is the fact that white dancers in the theatre appear never to have imitated vodou dances, which were bound up with spirit possession, even in a work that does allude to local vodou practices. Rumours had no doubt spread of the involuntary imitations that some colonials had experienced when spying on vodou rituals in secret. This avoidance of vodou dance – and the careful negotiation of a pseudo-vodou ritual in the body of the work – is further evidence of a genuine fear – and, crucially, recognition – of the potency of vodou practices even before the Haitian revolution.

The Struggle for Influence

It was seen in Chapter 1 that the newly incumbent Louis XIV was faced with a number of potential threats to the stability of his country and a number of fronts on which he would seek to assert his kingly authority. Above all, Louis had to avoid what was understood to be a genuine threat of schism within the Church. Although the Jansenist controversy and the Tartuffe controversy are not one and the same, they are intimately bound up in chronology and context and, crucially, to the extent that one needed to be resolved before the other could be. For, as will be seen, the crucial moments in the unraveling and subsequent resolution of the Jansenist controversy in the 1660s coincide almost exactly with the unraveling and subsequent resolution of the Tartuffe affair. The two controversies also involved two of the same protagonists: the Archbishop of Paris, Perefixe, and Louis XIV himself. According to Salomon, Bazin was probably the first critic (in 1848) to note the relationship between the Peace of the Church and the lifting of the ban on Tartuffe.1 In Moliere et le roi, Rey himself has more recently and for the most part very convincingly pushed the link further than anybody else. While my own reading is indebted to Rey’s, my emphasis is on interpreting those events via the notion of what I have called throughout this book the struggle for influence in the early reign of Louis XIV.

In Chapel, on Stage, and in the Bedroom: French Responses to the Italian Castrato

Abstract Although the castrato was conspicuously absent from French opera, castrati sang regularly at the Chapelle Royale throughout most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Visiting castrati also performed in France during Mazarins attempts at importing Italian opera during the 1640s and 1650s, and when they visited the French court as part of their travels around Europe. Meanwhile, the majority of Frenchmen and women who heard castrati sing in Italy found their performances compelling. Drawing on the writings of two French authors who held contrasting views on the castrato, I focus on the question of the castratos suitability for the role of on-stage operatic lover (praised by the Abbé Raguenet), set against the backdrop of his ability to perform sexually off stage (questioned by Charles Ancillon). Within the Italian tradition, the castrato emerges as being eminently suited to the young lover who comes of age by becoming a hero thanks to his unique combination of femininity, masculinity and youthfulness. Off stage, the castrato is revealed to have a highly complex sexual identity that calls into question received ideas about the nature of sex, its relationship to procreation, and especially to female desire.