Senelick, Laurence. "Ballroom Frenzy and the Clodoche Quadrille."

Senelick, Laurence. "Ballroom Frenzy and the Clodoche Quadrille." New Theatre Quarterly 36, no. 3 (August 2020): 197-213.


Abstract:
For all the lip-service French culture pays to reason and logic, it undergoes periodic eruptions of déraison or unreason. In the wake of Napoleon’s defeat, ballroom dancing began to be infiltrated by such unbridled popular dances as the cancan and the chahut. Exuberant, even
bacchanalian physical display served as a safety-valve in a heavily censored society. In the Second Empire, four working-class amateurs introduced the high-kicking, parodic Clodoche quadrille at the Paris Opéra. A non-verbal equivalent of the Marx Brothers, they became
bywords through the Western hemisphere of zany, comic demonstrations of the hysteric convulsions described by the medical establishment.