The Contradanse, the Quadrille and the Cancan: Dancing Around Democracy in Post-Revolutionary Paris

Paper given at the Established Scholars' Conference, Society for Dance Research, Roehampton University, 15th March 2008

Abstract

This presentation addresses three social dance forms in which France’s spasmodic transformation from monarchy to republic, from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, was performed, and new models of the body and society were tested and negotiated: the contredanse, the quadrille and the cancan. These dance forms were influential in reshaping not only the French body politic, but also various European and American body politics in nineteenth- and twentieth- century modernity.

The cancan emerged as a variation on the quadrille, a social dance popular in the 1820s in France. The quadrille itself was a standardisation of the contredanse française (Clark, 2002), a French version of the English ‘country dance’ (Thomas, 2004). With its non-hierarchical arrangement of dancers as a social group, the contredanse revolutionised French court dancing, embodying the de-centralisation of political and social power that was already taking place within the French aristocracy (Cohen, 2000).

In the post-revolutionary period, the accelerating breakdown of class distinctions encouraged the standardisation and simplification of the contredanse, making it accessible to all levels of society. However, this social situation paradoxically made the construction and display of identity more important than ever, especially for the rising bourgeoisie. Therefore the dance maintained an aesthetic of civilised sociality that made its performance appealing as a signifier of social superiority. The dance became a site for negotiating the tension between post-revolutionary liberalism and persisting hierarchical social structures, and this new form was called the quadrille (Clark, 2002).

For those at the very bottom of the social scale, however, the quadrille had not yet gone far enough. Although it eroded class barriers, it did so using the bourgeois model of the civilised, rational body, which young members of the working class found increasingly restrictive (Price, 1998, 3; Cordova, 1999, 140). Consequently, in the late 1820s, working-class male dancers began to incorporate new improvisations into their performances of the quadrille, which became known as the cancan or chahut, meaning uproar. These variations imitated and parodied the freedom of movement that was being performed on the Paris Opéra stage in romantic ballet (Gasnault, 1986). In Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1984) terms the movements produced were grotesque, replacing a rational, civilised, contained body with one that was irrational, unbounded, and open to interaction with bodies of different classes, genders, and ‘races’.  This allowed the cancan to evoke radical new social and political possibilities, including utopian socialism, and republicanism. At the end of the nineteenth century, the cancan’s liberal connotations would be co-opted by French republican nationalism, and in the twentieth century, American artists would appropriate the dance to bolster their own liberal national identity.

The methodological approach will be informed by recent work on the body as the site of a major challenge to Enlightenment notions of identity and status based on rationality in the nineteenth century (for example, Stallybrass and White, 1986; Young, 1995), following Bakhtin (1984) and the postcolonial theory of Homi Bhabha (1994a). The presentation will be supported by contemporary descriptions and visual depictions of the contredanse, the quadrille and the cancan.