The mid 19th century period of Romantic ballet was the beginning of dancers on pointe, ballerina superstars, new lighting technology, and those gauzy knee-length tutus you see in Degas paintings.
It was also a time when ballerinas were consumed by fire with shocking regularity.
Gaslights were everywhere in the theatre - footlights on stage, near mirrors in dressing rooms - everywhere you turn, an open flame. One graceful movement too close and a long layer of that diaphanous skirt moth-ing its way too close to the open flame, and suddenly, she was engulfed, terrified, running - the other dancers who rushed to her aid were immediately set alight in a terrible chain reaction. Those dreamy light layers of fabric ignited fast and burned hot.
Like the time on one Saturday 1861, during a performance of The Tempest at the Continental Theater fire in Philadelphia. A dancer’s costume came too close to one of the open flames that lit the dressing room, one ballerina after another caught light - a couple of them flung themselves from windows into the street; one threw herself from the rafters onto the stage, 50 feet below. Over the next four days, all nine members of the troupe (including the four Gale Sisters, direct from England) died horribly.
Newspapers carried detailed engravings and descriptions of the gruesome scene, depicting a sanitized and prettied-up version of what must have been an absolute horror show. Those women did not die pretty.
But gore has always sold papers - and tickets: the theatre reopened for business 48 hours later.
I had never heard of this phenomenon before, and was shocked there haven’t been scores of films and novels and songs memorializing these graphic and gothic scenes. Women’s pain is usually big business. And this was such a common occurance - like, it was a THING, and people totally knew that you had a pretty good chance of seeing something go horribly wrong if you went to the ballet. It happened with SUCH FREQUENCY that there was new slang for purchasing seats to see a ballet: you bought “tickets to the tomb.”
There’s even a dark little Victorian poem about it:
There are perils dire
Which oft beset the Ballet Girl,
And worst of all is Fire!
Most deadly of the deadly foes that threatened player folk,
An enemy who never sleeps, whose power is ne’er broke,
While of the groups Theatrical, the greatest risk who run
Are lightly costumed ballerinas - Escape for them is none.
A spark upon the muslin dry, then instantly it lights into a flame,
Like lightning’s flash, at sea, on summer nights,
A blazing mass of agony, all maddened, quick they fly,
Yet fly not from the enemy who dooms them thus to die
That shrivels up the glowing limbs, and face and form, alas!
Leaving of female loveliness a charred and calcined mass.
Ah, happy if they die at once, and from Life’s stage retire,
Than linger on in torment from the all-remorseless fire.
That last line? About hoping they die immediately? That’s probably in reference to one of the most famous victims of the flame, Emma Livry.
Emma’s mother Celestine Emarot had been a ballerina - but it’s important to remember that in the mid Nineteenth century, ballet was very different.
Ballerinas usually came to be in the company because their families were destitute. The vast majority of the corps de ballet was composed of your basic consumptive Dickensian street urchins - in fact, they were commonly known as “petit rats”.
Part of their job was to encourage and engage the “attention” of the wealthy patrons of the art form. Access to the dancers was granted to rich donors, who used their rehearsal space almost like a showroom - where they could observe and choose which young bodies they liked the best. Rich dirtbags would waltz into dressing rooms and private spaces, wielding their power over the girls who had no agency, no option but to hope the amorous advances would lift them from poverty. Plus ça change.
This is how Celestine Emarot came to be a mediocre dancer, but a top notch stage mother.
Celestine bore a daughter by one of her wealthy suitors, and that child, Emma Livry, was blessed with a natural gift for the new, light form of ballet that was favored in the Romantic period. Emma became the disciple of Marie Taglioni. Taglioni was the very symbol of the era, and is credited with being the first dancer en pointe.
Historically, ballet had been a man’s world, and was more like a collection of traditional songs with some dancing - the idea of a whole story, complete with character arcs, sets, lighting, and costumes, was brand new. Taglioni ushered in a world of ballet starring women.
And not just any women, but idealized, perfect creatures of myth. They wore gossamer costumes and leapt with grace, floating above the stage below, as if their wispy purity could not be grounded by gravity. Taglioni’s protégé Emma excelled, and was a rising star.
By that time, the dangers of open flame and delicate fabrics were well-known, and dancers were offered an option of flame resistant costumes. They were unpopular, however, as the coatings and fabrics necessary for safety were also stiff and dingy. 20 year olds are often vain creatures who feel invincible, so Emma refused to wear the safer costumes, favoring the pure white, diaphanous tutus that enhanced the otherworldly, dreamlike quality of movement.
On November 15, 1862, during a dress rehearsal, open flames from a gaslight caught her costume, and she was suddenly engulfed in fire that soared to three times her height. She ran across the stage and clutched her flaming bodice to her chest, some strange bit of modesty piercing the panic. When she was finally tackled and put out by stagehands, over 40% of her body had been burned. The stays from the bodice fused into her flesh by the heat.
Oh, IT GETS WORSE. You know how some people put butter on a burn? Because of some old wives tale about the fat somehow helping the burn to heal? When they carted Emma backstage, the well-meaning Mme Taglioni grabbed a jar of greasepaint and began smearing it to her seared flesh. Not only is the application of fat to a burn a very bad idea, but that greasepaint pot would have been communal makeup. The filthy fingers of all of those Dickensian urchins had dragged through it, and now it was becoming embedded in the blistered flesh of the star.
They kept her in the dressing room for days, until she could be moved to a hospital, and eventually to her home. She died after months of agony, flesh healing partially then bursting open again and again. Eventually, sepsis from the infections took her life, almost a year later, at the ripe age of 21.
Even in death she was unrepentant about her choice. In one of her final interviews, she said she’d have done it again because the flameproof versions of tutus were so ugly she could not bear to wear them, her vanity overshadowing agony.
Beauty knows all pain.