Ballet Immemorial: Princess Tutu, Meta-Ballet, and the Fatal Significance

Oliver, Katy

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/126110 Copy

Description

Title

Ballet Immemorial: Princess Tutu, Meta-Ballet, and the Fatal Significance

Author(s)

Oliver, Katy

Issue Date

2024-12-16

Keyword(s)

• Affect
• Anime
• Anime and Manga Studies
• Anime Studies
• Ballet
• Dance
• Gesture
• Magical Girl
• Mahou shoujo
• Meta-ballet
• Metapictures
• Mime
• Nineteenth century
• Pantomime
• Princess Tutu
• Romantic ballet
• Shoujo
• Visual studies
• Visual culture

Date of Ingest

2025-03-04T14:47:18-06:00

Abstract

In W.J.T. Mitchell’s essay “Metapictures,” Mitchell claims that Diego Velásquez’s painting Las Meninas is “a veritable whirlpool of interpretive ‘aspects,’ switching and alternating the places of painter, beholder, and model, the viewer and the viewed… The figure of the ‘whirlpool’ suggests a way of specifying (or picturing) the multistability effect in a graphic form” (75). Mitchell’s “whirlpool of interactive ‘aspects’” provides an excellent means of grafting the concept of the metapicture onto different artistic discourses—here, ballet and its counterpart, meta-ballet (75). I contend that meta-ballet has two components: it comprises both the deliberate act of referencing the balletic canon and also the process of exploring the constituent parts of the balletic tradition (gesture and bodily movement, staging, performativity, and so on) in a way that mutates normative understandings of ballet. This paper’s aims are twofold: firstly, I develop the concept of meta-ballet and apply it to the show Princess Tutu. Secondly, I explore the uniquely meta-balletic nature of ballet pantomime and bodily motion as deployed by the show. Princess Tutu is quite self-consciously a meta-ballet, making constant references to real-world ballets, ballet techniques, and balletic pantomime. Its playful re-articulations and references to the canonical Western ballets of the nineteenth century illustrate the rich possibilities within ballet’s vast and variegated archive of bodies, texts, performances, and gestures.

Publisher

Illinois Open Publishing Network

Type of Resource

text

Genre of Resource

article

Language

eng

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21900/j.jams.v5.1199

Copyright and License Information

• Copyright 2024 Kathryn Boyer
• This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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