Erasing Excellence: Resituating Catherine Littlefield’s archival absence to reveal feminism in the formation of American Ballet Modernism
Abstract:
The adoption of ballet into mid-twentieth century American culture stems from trans-oceanic traditions of imported performance to the United States. The wildly successful Ballets Russes brought a high-class, imperial brand of dance to all corners of a budding empire. Such dissemination cultivated the rise of a handful of women choreographers and producers, who established a distinctly feminist dialect of ballet in America. Yet, the history of ballet Americana is told largely through male figures who maintain relevance into the twenty-first century, but whose female counterparts remain peripheral at best, and lost within archives at worst.
For the purpose of this conference, I’d like to forefront Catherine Littlefield’s Philadelphia Ballet’s 1937 tour of Europe – the first all-American troupe to do so – as essential to the trajectory of ballet Americana. Littlefield’s trans-oceanic reciprocation of Euro-American cultural exchange offers a counterpoint to what companies like the Ballets Russes did with their North American tours earlier that century.
I use Steve Tillis’ concept of formal continuity and investments to challenge dance history scholars to think in “la longue durée,” wherein temporal, historiographical, and interdisciplinary reconsideration lends much-needed perspective to an art which threatens to self-extinguish. Further, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s notion of “provincializing Europe” illuminates the need for, and resistance to, repositioning “othered” gazes, specifically the patriarchal gaze which dominates modern ballet culture. Finally, Sharon Skeel’s monumental work on Catherine Littlefield situates this key player as not only integral to ballet history, but also essential to understanding how feminist excavation transforms current pedagogical and creative narratives.