Here, I renounce the mysterious. I illuminate everything, I underline everything. Sunday vacuity, human ugliness, ready-made expressions, the disassociation of ideas from flesh and bone, the ferocity of childhood, the poetry and miracles of everyday life.
Jean Cocteau, “Preface”, 192477
75 “Et voila: il est dangereux de trop lire./ Il est dangereux de se promener le dimanche./ Il est dangereux d’etre une mere./ Il est dangereux d’etre un petit garcon./ Toute chose est dangereuse en ce monde./ Et le mimodrame auquel vous venez d’assister/ Etait pour l’historie, les paroles et les costumes de Jean Cocteau./ Pour la musique de Hans Werner Henze. […]/ Gute nacht. Good night. Bonne nuit. Rideau. ” (Aschengreen, p. 264, my translation)
76 Paris Modern, p. 35.
Jean Cocteau’s Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel is the most significant first achievement in the evolution of the ballet of words. The pervasiveness of text in the piece marks at once a shift in the definition of ballet as well as an expansion of its technical possibilities. Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel is certainly innovative in many respects, but, importantly, it conspicuously places the human voice (and the text it speaks) in prominence onstage alongside the dancing body. In that respect, it is worth reconsidering Cocteau’s experiment as a critical moment in ballet’s formal shift. Through Cocteau’s text, it is possible to read the radical changes the Ballets Suédois promised to make. When Cocteau joined the team (having formed a close friendship with founder Rolf de Maré) he was third in a line of poets-in-residence for the company, after Claudel and Cendrars. Les Mariés was Cocteau’s first ballet project outside of the Ballets Russes, and demonstrates his deep interest in ballet even while unattached to the magnetic Diaghilev.78
In Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, what is classically presented as the subject of ballet (romance, magic, myth, etc.) is unapologetically displaced by the study of urban ennui. The subject of the piece is a wedding luncheon on the first level of the Eiffel Tower which, after a series of colourful entrances and exits, ends in massacre. The cast of characters includes “Le photographe”, “La cycliste”, “La baigneuse de Trouville”, “Le général”, etc., resembling a pageant of Parisian archetypes. But their apparent normalcy is set in contrast to less likely dancing bodies, such as an ostrich, a lion, and two phonographs. Cocteau’s incorporation of technical devices into an already ambitious visual scheme refocuses the spectator’s attention from what it is used to (the ballet dancer) to what is new (technology). Cocteau attempted an effect that was both synaesthetic and epic, layering the production with the score by Les Six.79 The performance featured voices projected through and 78 In his dramas, Cocteau experimented with various narratological presences, such as the omniscient Voice in The Infernal Machine. Instead, I am concerned here with the narration’s specific relationship to Cocteau’s dance.
79 ‘Les Six’ is the collective name for Parisian composers Georges Auric (1899–1983), Louis Durey (1888–1979), Arthur Honegger (1892–1955), Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), Francis Poulenc (1899– 1963), and Germaine Tailleferre (1892–1983). Bound as a group by their common idolisation of
amplified by offstage narrating gramophones, Noh-inspired oversized masks and physically limiting costumes (see Figures 6 and 7), and electrical effects.80
Figures 6 and 7. Cocteau’s costumes and scenic design for Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel.
Cocteau’s preface to the 1924 Nouvelle Revue Française edition contains an illuminating exposé on his intentions and methodology in the case of Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel.81 He positions himself at the helm of the ballet project first and foremost as a poet:
The poet must leave objects and feelings of their sails and their haze, show suddenly so bare, so fast that the men hardly recognize them. They then hit with their youth. This is the case of platitudes, old, powerful and universally accepted as the masterpieces, but whose beauty, originality does surprise us more strength to use. In our show, I rehabilitate the common place.82
Erik Satie and represented informally by Jean Cocteau, Les Six represented the active modern experimental composers working for and alongside the two ballet companies.
80 The nature of the production’s language and text is of course the focus here, but it is important to keep in mind the overarching ambitious innovation of Cocteau’s work for the Ballets Suédois. 81 When Cocteau worked to compile the selections for publication in his complete theatrical works, he included Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel and, in 1928, Librairie Gallimard published Les Mariés alongside Cocteau’s version of Antigone, the two of them alone in one volume, sharing permanent space. These intertextual associations or distinctions, by asserting cultural value as well as a sense of equality between an avant-garde ballet and perhaps the ultimate canonical text, claim for the work a significant measure of literary value.
The latter claim represents a sensibility present not only in the avant-garde ballet but throughout the context of modernism. To rehabilitate (we might say to “reposition” or “reintroduce” it through aesthetic elevation) the ordinary is the blatant mission of Les Mariés in its subject-matter. However, in its execution, it is anything but the identifiably common; instead, Cocteau offers the unfamiliar, remodeled vision of the common-place as something that perhaps should not be viewed as such.
Allan Pero has noted Cocteau’s own definition of the ballet as “a drop of poetry under a microscope”.83 It is a fruitful metaphor when we consider Cocteau’s desire to interrogate norms, even the mundane, in the unlikely setting of the ballet stage.84 But Pero goes on to say that Cocteau’s work “places the poetic work itself under a microscope in order to investigate the otherwise invisible worlds that exist within it”.85 I wish to manipulate the semantics of this observation to suggest that Cocteau’s work deliberately reintroduces “otherwise invisible” words into the theatrical scheme, incorporating his own poet’s voice in the guise of narration into the very performance, producing an effect unfamiliar to conventional classical ballet. I see Cocteau’s conflation of physicality and language as one mechanism among many through which he attempted to negotiate a new place for text in the changing modern definition of dance.
Whereas for his sketch of Parade Cocteau resorted to an overtly practical kind of rhetoric resembling an inventory of characters and actions, here, the text tells the whole story of the ballet’s action. In its completeness and its appeal to readership, the scenario establishes itself as bearing its own aesthetic value and usefulness as a companion piece to the more abstract ballet. Excusing its obscure meaning, Cocteau’s opening quatrain encourages the reader to recall and reconsider his established identity as a poet:
83 Alan Pero. “The Feast of Nemesis Media: Jean Cocteau’s The Eiffel Tower Wedding Party”.
Modern Drama 52:2 (Summer 2009), p. 192. For an extended analysis of Cocteau’s 1922 ‘Preface’
to the ballet and its influence on his dramas, see Annette Shandler Levitt’s “Jean Cocteau's Theatre: Idea and Enactment” Theatre Journal 45:3 (Oct. 1993), pp. 363-372.
84 Pero, p. 193. 85 Ibid.
I imagine their eyes upturned towards the temples While in the middle of a hot pool
They exit the Lotus; we see prints Round his pale pillow…86
The quatrain is recognisable as poet’s rhetoric, and consequently imbues the text that follows with a sense of artistic value. The very presence of this “argument” in the hands of the audience indicates that they were meant not to forget text when confronted with a purely sonic/visual art, but were challenged to “read” the ballet while viewing and listening. The act of reading is merged with spectatorship.