The Dancer as Statue and the Geopolitics of Neoclassicism

Abstract An examination of the influences of German thought on French dance theory, an area of scholarship that has been neglected, but is beginning to emerge in the interest in Nietzsche’s influence on Valéry. Lifar epitomized the idea of the dancer as animated marble figure sculpture, an idea traced back to Winkelmann and Hegel’s Lectures on the Fine Arts. Lifar operates in a triangle of cultural influences including France, Germany, and Russia. This chapter thus reveals the influence of eighteenth-century German aesthetics on the Russo-French theory of ballet neoclassicism. Particular attention is paid to Lifar’s interpretation of Apollo in George Balanchine’s Apollon Musagète in its first years.