| This historical study seeks to understand how social contest and social celebration, warfare and dance, were mutually influential praxes in the politics of revolution at the end of the long 18th century. Paying particular attention to how the waltz and its predecessors impacted the lives of women intellectuals and women with aspirations of leadership in a period when censure of women's expression and voice in the public sphere was increasingly exclusionary, this dissertation takes as its object of study the earliest phase of the waltz's appearance in northern Europe on the eve of the French Revolution.;The Revolution was an epoch of dance-mania. In the ballroom—a dedicated space for physical negotiation among individuals—the performance of social leadership was enveloped by the new ambiguities of intimacy that the waltzing couple choreographed. For those who had traditionally held sway, this ambiguity was dangerous. For those traditionally disempowered, this ambiguity was a space of promise, hope and investment. Romanticism liberated people from the formalism of the Minuet, giving credence to the rebirth of the closed-couple dances, namely the invention of the waltz. The tantalizing new promise of romantic intimacy and the imagined possibilities for women contemplating how to manage an ascent towards “equal opportunity” in the new Republic were embodied in the egalitarian waltz. A dance that was at once impulsive, spirited, joyful and accessible, the waltz signaled a sea change in social choreography and inaugurated a political ideology that accepted the role of the romantic couple as a positivist moral and cultural force in society.;The structure of this historical writing is informed by the scholarship of the new dance studies movement in the U.S. academy, the moment theory of Remi Hess and Henri Lefebvre, the philosophy of rapture of Catherine Clément, and the performance theories of revolution of Ngugi wa Thiong'o. |
