Jacqueline Smith

Thesis Title: Fairy Tales en pointe: Ballets That Made the Tale & Tales That Made the Ballet

Supervisor: Professor Diane Purkiss

Doctoral Research: My research investigates the relationship between fairy tale forms and Romantic ballet as a storytelling medium throughout the long nineteenth century. While ballet can certainly be credited with giving new life to an old tale, like Perrault’s "La Belle au bois dormant" in Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty, we must also recognize its ability to create a relatively original one: ballets such as La Sylphide (1832) and Giselle (1841) literally made, from an array of folkloric source material, the stories of undying love and unwitting betrayal that we know today. I am studying various performance records—including libretti and choreographic records from the ballet companies, as well as criticism in newspapers and other historic accounts—in order to compile a database of productions significant to the development of select fairy-tale ballets. Most existing collections of "tales from the ballet" do not account for the influence of variation in the development of these narratives, and I am particularly interested in how the 19th-century feminization of ballet affects the way these tales were/are constructed, portrayed, and consumed. I will be using this selective database, along with the production records, to narrativize these ballets and analyze their contextual significance in a critical tale collection that illustrates ballet's unique, female-centric contributions to the fairy tale canon.

Research Interests: British Romanticism/Victorianism; fairy tale & folklore collecting; Romantic ballet history; literature in the performing arts; female authors, characters, & themes