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Coppélia's Human-Objects: Winding Up Racialized Automata on the Ballet Stage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 May 2024

Mara Mandradjieff
Mara Mandradjieff*
Affiliation:
Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, US
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Abstract

This article focuses on how dance companies have restaged three of the original automata characters from the ballet Coppélia (Arthur Saint-Léon, 1870), described as the “Negro,” the “Moor,” and the “Chinaman.” In conversation with scholarship on the racialization of objects and the object-ification of humans, I claim these characters embody and reenact the ontological effects of slavery and colonialism, in which notions of human and object collapse into one another. I further argue that such processes vary among the roles, illuminating ways the white colonialist perspective constructs the imagined Chinese body differently than the Black body through human-object relations. As a contribution to discussions within the ballet world surrounding the use of blackface and yellowface, this article exposes how ballet choreography both participates in and reveals object-centered acts of racism through embodiment practices.

Keywords

balletblackfaceCoppéliaobjectsontologyraceyellowface
Type
Article
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , December 2023 , pp. 30 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Dance Studies Association

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