{Degas Takes The Stage}

'The Dance Lesson', by Edgar Degas, c. 1879.
(National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon)

Poised in front of two large opaque glass doors, ticket collectors scan patrons’ tickets, allowing them entrance into Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement at the Royal Academy of Arts.  The doors swing open, into an octagonal room, where an oversized tufted brown leather ottoman, centred in the room, invites attendees to sit before the stage and watch dancers’ shadows spin in arabesque, high along the back wall.  Per the museum’s docent, this shadow “puppetry” mimics a technique that Degas practiced in his own studio in order to study and understand light, form, and movement.  Displayed on an adjacent wall, a map of the gallery depicts the exhibit’s progression.  Viewers, armed with their gallery guides as playbills, are ushered “backstage”.

Immediately, Edgar Degas, famous for his impressionistic depictions of ballet dancers, greets viewers as a life-sized black and white photographic portrait where he stands looking stoically at the camera – an ironic introduction given that Degas’s strength in imagery lied in his ability to capture what photography could not – moments of dancers in advanced and strenuous positions.

While Degas’s finished paintings and pastels draw crowds to his ‘stages,’ preliminary sketches of the dancers pirouette around them paying tribute to the artist’s special attention to line and form, as well as to his precise artistic process.  Joined with the artist’s works, television screens illuminate throughout the rooms, playing roughly filmed images of dancers.  Degas briefly experimented with photography using the emerging medium to develop his own techniques in displaying movement.

The final room of the exhibition, a dark theatrical space with rows of benches arranged in front of a large screen, plays a looped 30-second black and white film, Ceux de Chez Nous (c. 1914-15) by the documentary director Sacha Guitry, of Edgar Degas as an old man walking down the street in Paris.  Here, the artist becomes (moving) art – another ironic note.

Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement proves to be more than an exhibition about an artist and his subject, but rather an exhibition of evolution, full of clever curatorial jokes.  As viewers walk through the exhibition space, from the ‘stage’ to the ‘cinema’, this impressionistic exhibition becomes one of postmodernism, using the audience to reinforce the idea that motion is inherent in all of Degas’s works, as well as in art as a whole.  And with that, the curators wink.

Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement, on until 11 December 2011, has been curated by Richard Kendall, Curator at Large, The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, USA; Jill DeVonyar, independent curator; and Ann Dumas, Exhibition Curator, Royal Academy of Arts.

'Two Dancers on the Stage', by Edgar Degas, c. 1874.
(The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London)