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Beauchamps on Broadway: Ballet's Transition from Royal Privilege to American Popular Culture

Kaufman, Eric H
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7022-6265
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1704297292729721

Abstract Details

2024, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, History.
Even as ballet is often associated with elite, dominant-class culture, it has become popularized through artistic, political, and social mechanisms beginning in the eighteenth century in Europe and continuing into the twentieth century in the United States. Utilizing visual, textual, and critical archival sources, and ethnographic and choreomusicological method, I argue that American musical theatre dance and its offshoots in the twentieth century popularized ballet as dance form in the United States. The choreomusicological concept of diegetic dance is useful in the revealing of musical theatre audiences’ willingness to accept balletic form when characters “know they are dancing.” Although US society has difficulty grappling with issues of class generally and working-class experience and values more specifically, working-class content has been embraced in musical theatre toward the presentation of a common Americanness. This imagery of universality, in contrast to the realities of structural class inequality, created both the acceptance of ballet by a class-diverse audience, and its contribution to the definition of dance in the popular imagination—in evidence in a vast range of seemingly-divergent, non-ballet dance genres. From its origins in the sixteenth-century French royal court, through bourgeois-democratic and socialist revolution, and liberal democracy in France, the Soviet Union, and the United States, ballet form has endured. A significant body of scholarship deals with ballet institutions in the face of cultural change. I seek to understand how the physical technique has endured in societies that rhetorically reject monarchic and aristocratic assumptions. In coming to terms with the ways in which ballet informs definitions of dance and the genre’s popular reception, I suggest that transitions in this small corner of the cultural landscape help to explain tendencies in American culture to both invest in hierarchic systems and appropriate elite privileges as universal rights.
David Steigerwald (Advisor)
Morgan Liu (Committee Member)
Karen Eliot (Committee Member)
Paula Baker (Committee Member)
343 p.
Dance; History; Theater

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Kaufman, E. H. (2024). Beauchamps on Broadway: Ballet's Transition from Royal Privilege to American Popular Culture [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1704297292729721

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Kaufman, Eric. Beauchamps on Broadway: Ballet's Transition from Royal Privilege to American Popular Culture. 2024. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1704297292729721.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Kaufman, Eric. "Beauchamps on Broadway: Ballet's Transition from Royal Privilege to American Popular Culture." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2024. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1704297292729721

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

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© 2024, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.