Making Ballet 2

Making Ballet 2 provides a choreographic analysis of the ballet Rodeo, produced by Sergei J. Denham’s Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1942 with choreography and libretto by Agnes de Mille, music by Aaron Copland, and design by Oliver Smith. Drawing on archival sources and movement analysis, it argues that Rodeo narrates a jubilant portrayal of the resolution of social dissatisfactions into a unified nation during wartime. At the same time, however, new archival information is mobilized to argue that embedded in Rodeo’s production history is a political silencing of the socially conscious aesthetic of the 1930s. This phenomenon has not been acknowledged previously in scholarship on Rodeo. This interchapter contributes a more complicated understanding of this iconic American ballet that takes into account the deeper conflicts created by pressures of wartime unity and consensus, particularly for women, that lie beneath its lighthearted, comic surface.