 my name is Anna Cooper. I'm a candidate in the Department of French and Italian and I'm here today to interview Professor McCarran about her new book which has just been published this year by Oxford University Press. Could you describe the genesis of this project and provide a brief overview of what it's about? This project came out of work that I'm doing with the cultural history for dance seminar in Paris at the École du Institut d'Aussiast social with a group of young scholars who are working on the history of dance and the history of science they're working on the dance archive in history of body and I wanted to I was thinking about the ways in which the ballet stages the green world flora and fauna in nonverbal dance rules and these rules are ways to think about also historic conceptions of sex and race so we might think of them today as colonial but we can take a sort of post-colonial approach to the way that gender and race were being thought about were being made and were being nuanced in these dance roles on stage that's why I wrote the book. So Luscious is a ballet about it's an orientalist ballet there were many of them performed in the 19th century but this one also has a sort of environmental narrative a green story connected to it and in this character short it's a cartoon really from 1866 making fun of the ballet you see that they were taking the the environmental narrative and they were really running with it they were making fun of different classes of plants that were being mobilized in the ballet not just flowers but you know kitchen garden right and mushrooms plants that were being used as essentially as drugs right pharmacopia and they they're clearly they get the botany that the ballet is encoding but they're also able to gently mock it right to make fun of it and this shows that the audience was really thinking about plants and all of the kinds of knowledges that botany would encode. So the archive is a very fragile thing especially for dance but the archive in general as you know can disappear or it can move it's not very stable there's a very beautiful book by Arnett Tham about working on the police archive in Paris in which she talks about the historical agents that she's looking at as more real or more true than you know characters from literature for example but having been trained in literature I would say that those characters are also very real or very true often for us so when I'm working in the ballet archive I'm thinking all the time about other closely related archives literature is of course one of them but police archive the newspapers there are many kinds of archives to look at but for dance history we also have to look at the repertoire and it's that living continuing presence of dancers on the stage that make us understand something about what happened in mainstream so I had to look broadly across the range of archives but I had to also think about the living breathing archive of dancers and of the repertoire that gets me used to it. So flowers and flora and fauna in general the green world are very important in this ballet and as they were in many ballets from the 19th century from the repertory but this particular flower I argue isn't just ornamental or isn't just decorative but really encodes a kind of current scientific knowledge first of all historical knowledge from Bobney but also current thinking about the whole ecology right which was a new term in 1866 the what links what connects people to plants and animals so I argue that in this ballet actually people are thinking about plants in the same way that they're thinking about humans right who belongs with whom what does it take to survive things that we think of now as an Armenian narrative but these were playing out in Bobney throughout the 19th century and they were featured I think in this ballet and obviously I would also like to say that the flower obviously encodes something about love it encodes something about sex certainly plant sexuality was a really important site of study so it isn't just secrets and euphemisms that are circulating but it's really also thinking about the way that the plant life can reflect on human life and the way that human life can project itself onto the planet life so in the chapter of my book it's a bit of a detective story right like a puzzle that I piece together and I'm taking the reader to four historic performances and I'm arguing that the ballet might not play exactly the same way in these four historic moments so in 1866 I focus on the plants and the real interest in in biology and life science and the way the ballet stages this knowledge but in 1875 the ballet is programmed by a very new third republic and it's the gala opening in Suare where it's performed at the ballet game is led by the head of the the new head of the third public the general mike maul with the military history etc so it's going to play a little bit differently and it's going to have a different commentary for this audience and what I argue is that in this context it really reflects something that happened in 1869 because the opening of the Suez you can now so if you look at the iconography around the Suez you'll see that the Empress Eugenie appeared in a white dress and she was kind of presenting this French genius of water engineering right and the iconography actually looks like the 1866 ballet that preceded it that's called vessels and by 1875 I think every book was familiar with this iconography and there had been other water engineering marvels accomplished by this French genius you know around the world so I'm arguing that people watching the ballet in 1875 couldn't help but think about that cultural precursor but they were also seeing the ballet for the first time in this new theater golden opera house that we know today is the ballet game which everyone knows but had to pump water hours for the foundation for more than a year and which still holds underneath it a kind of mysterious lake right if you've seen the film on the opera you know about this lake under the opera house well it's it's a reality right so they were going to be thinking about the ballet in these technological terms reflecting the recent history of science and not just the botanical history that I argued was so important for the first audience so when the opera takes up this ballet from the archive and redone it in 2011 um there's a lot at stake right it wants to show that there's been an important French history of ballet that kind of ballet has been superior it's kind of its own style and they really focus on this like you know dream and reading challenge in order to sell it right and I do think this kind of columns out as you say that the core the really important historical core of the ballet which was that it was about knowledge and it was also constituting a form of knowledge about bodies about ecologies about hybridity and revitalization as I tried to show in the book so um what is what is it then about what does it become about well it is commenting on its own time but maybe not in the way that the original ballet did because if you think of ballet only as entertainment or as an enchantment you're going to miss the fact that the ballet can critique the state of things and critique it's every time when people think about bodies or the way they think about the green world just being represented on stage so it kind of takes away from ballet the very power that that I'm trying to show the movie has had historically so in 2011 one of the things that the ballet didn't comment on was the Arab Spring which was very much drawing everyone's attention right there's a scene in the ballet where a young woman is unveiled precipitously by a suitor and in 1866 this had a bit of a shock but it was really part of a colonial we could see it as a colonial gesture now right in sync with French activity, French policy, French aggression even in North Africa well in 2010 the law that was passed was based on really concerned about you know terrorism and jihad related to things that were going on in the Middle East and there was concern about people forcing women to wear the veil the fine for forcing someone to wear a veil was much deeper than the fine for wearing a veil or a total veil in public space in France the whole thing is a long-standing story in France and a real problem what the Arab Spring showed in 2011 was that women can be veiled and very much part of pro-democracy movements the veil doesn't have to be considered to be at odds with the notion of French republicanism France has not been able to understand that it seems and this is quite different from Britain for example or other places in my own experience living in the Muslim world I've seen many women members of my own family my husband's family choosing to wear the veil and it isn't about oppression or submission anyway so when this scene plays out in 2011 it's described in the libretto as an unthought faultless quick gesture the suitor wants to see the face of his beloved but of course it's much more than that it really becomes a symbol for the republic determined to unveil women in a way that's really out of sync with what was going on in the Arab world that very year it's a great question thank you so the opera is trying to change it is trying to bring more minority dancers into its company from its school and it is trying to think about sustainable productions and sustainable work you know by its dancers so I hope that the general force of things is going to change you know this institution which has been very hierarchical and um in many ways old-fashioned right um I think what we saw in 2014 in La Source was just a hint of what it might have been or what it might be to take a ballet and a historic ballet that is thinking about both the environment and political questions that Isabel Stengers has called cosmopolitical right so thinking about this broader ecology of practices and really allow dance performers and dance choreography to to say something important about about the way that they're connected right now the this last production of La Source closed on December 31st 2014 and just less than a week later we had the attacks at Chavellier du later in 2015 we had other attacks and we also had the coup d'etat right the climate conference in Paris where the Paris supports were signed at the end of 2015 so this ballet was actually incredibly timely a historic a historical text that is really talking about things that are still very very powerful in in the world today and I think they are from missed a chance to to show the relevance of this historic piece but I think it it knows that it can do better and it will do better the really important detail for me here is that when François Hollande the president of the French Republic called for the state of emergency to be put in place following the November attacks he did later acknowledge that the reason for this was to secure the planet climate conference it wasn't so much about the violence right and this has been a narrative that we've been seeing over centuries right that we're going to always be focusing on political violence and on contemporary threat in the way we perceive it rather than the long-term concerns about all of humanity and about climate for example about the health of the planet right well it's very hard to summarize into one thought or one sentence but I think if readers could catch something of the excitement of the performance right but that's what's really important we pull something from the archive or we look at something that's in the repertoire today but we also want to think about the spectators right in the context of the production of these performances now right now in in in this moment of pandemic this is the thing that we've lost that we're very aware of having lost the coming together of people in public spaces the sharing of cultural production the incredible thought-provoking powerful ways that performance can move us make us think connect us to the past promise something for the future that's what I hope readers would take from this book