Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg
Burlesque Costumes

Les Fées des forests de Saint Germain (Paris, 1625) is a paradigm of burlesque ballet: A cross-dressed fairy courtier leading an oversized animal on a leash appears in all five scenes (entrées). In the last entrée, comic and grotesque become serious, noble dance: An allegorical message emerges. 1
Characters:
Lackeys play the game of tourniquet with Bertrands (apes). Lackeys are disciplined servants, while Bertrands are servants, but not disciplined. Lackeys symbolize lovers subjugated to women.
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Lackey's récit:
Love made a lackey of me, it is my highest office.
I know how to serve all to their content;
But however wants to obtain the fruit of my service
Must only seek it in bed.
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The name of the game is tourniquet. The name means something however: "niquet" means trifle (a gesture), where "soufflets" means trifles. However, "soufflets" also means slaps. Thus tourniqet means "turning" "gestures". Thus lackeys slap Bertrands, but who is really the lackey, who the Bertrand? Thus this entrée has a seditious meaning: "Impotent courtiers or aristocrats have the potential of role reversal: to reverse the power of the king."
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"The theme of games and gaming in the first entrée of Les Fées des forests de Saint Germain refute the aesthetic of choreographic improvisation and novelty central to the form [of burlesque]. ... Court ballets cultivated the aura of impromptus, which Molière subsequently turned into a genre that could stage criticism and theory. Later, Molière employed the 'lack of control' trope freqently to characterize the production of his own court performances. The importance of improvisation points in turn to the idea that burlesque ballets had more than one choreographer. ... The license to improvise without ultimate responsibility for the work left ample space for any dancer to work against the text of his récit, producing unexpected ironies." This allowed a degree of latitude to oppose state political policies. Thus the enormous cynicism and ambivolent ideology of this satire. In the interstices of conventionally condoned experimentation, with its requisite negativity, a space of critique becomes possible." 2
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Eroticism combined with suggestions of different course of events or reversibility of political referents with the monarch implicated as the source (a dialectic based upon modal possibilities) produces symbols of political change. The second entrée in Les Fées des forests de Saint Germain focuses upon lunacy, the entrée is performed by four groups: The first two groups suggest carnivalesque reversals of courtiers. Official, permissible dance vs. impermissible dance which transgressed rules, art and legality to support vanity, madness, and melancholy. An official transgressive "official" grotesque style was created to represent an official type of "madness". 3
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Further analysis of burlesque ballet shows "madness" as courtiers impotence to confront the king about the "madness" of war. 4
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In "... burlesque costuming, the body became a composite spectacle in its own right. Burlesque ballets clearly eschew a linear in favor of a spatial deciphering of the visual image." 5
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Burlesque ballet is political as it "is ideologically subversive and, therefore, politically destabilizing. 6
1 "Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baoroque Body", Mark Franko, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993, pp. 87-91, and Appendix 2
2 Ibid., p. 94
3 Ibid., p. 95
4 Ibid., p. 100
5 Ibid., p. 104. Thus rhetoric tacens not only used gesture in dance in place of linear text, but extends rhetoric tacens to a 2- and 3-dimensional gestural (assertoric modal language) of rhetoric.
6 Ibid., p. 106

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