Pantomime-Ballet on the music-hall stage: The popularisation of classical ballet in fin-de-siècle Paris
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation explores the history and aesthetic of ballet in Parisian music halls at the turn of the twentieth century. Although the phenomenon is now long forgotten, ballet was for more than four decades a popular form of entertainment for a large audience. Between 1872 and 1918, nearly two hundred ballets were staged in Paris's music halls, more than half of which were premiered by the three most prominent halls: the Folies-Bergère, the Olympia, and the Casino de Paris. These newly written, composed, and choreographed ballets were often complex productions with lavish scenery and costumes, large ballet corps, and star ballerinas. Although they were in many ways structurally comparable to ballets staged at the Paris Opéra, music-hall ballets reflect the preferences of their fashionable, pleasure-seeking audiences through their emphasis on catchy up-beat music, stage spectacle, and the female body. My doctoral research brings to light this important ballet culture and repertoire. I begin with an overview of the historical circumstances that made it possible for variety theatres to adopt ballet. I then examine ballet's new context in order to establish the institutional features that helped shape music-hall ballet, and provide biographical information about the artists who created and performed them. This is followed by analyses of music-hall ballet's conventions, with sections on the types of subjects favoured by librettists, the formal structures of popular ballets, the choreographic elements that were typically incorporated, and the musical characteristics of the genre. I end with an exploration of the visual and musical elements that distinguish music-hall ballet as a popular genre, and discuss its mediation of high and lowbrow features and intersections with contemporary popular culture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".