Cancan vs. the State: archival traces of the battle for Parisian bodies

Parfitt-Brown, C. (2014) Cancan vs. the State: archival traces of the battle for Parisian bodies. In: Writing Dancing/Dancing Writing, 13-16 November 2014, University of Iowa, Iowa.

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Abstract

The surveillance of the early cancan by the Parisian police in the 1820s and 1830s left a range of archival traces, including instructions, ordinances and memos, as well as journalistic accounts of the trials of arrested cancan dancers in legal newspapers. In such sources, the cancan and associated dances emerge as physical battlegrounds for negotiating the terms of liberalism and in/decency on which the new post-Revolutionary social order would rest. This paper argues that each of these sources preserves a different narrative of this danced dispute, all of which are necessary to understand its
polysemic complexity.

Publication Type: Conference or Workshop Items (Paper)
Uncontrolled Keywords: cancan dance popular dance archival sources archival traces liberalism post-Revolutionary
Subjects: D History General and Old World > DC France, Andorra, and Monaco
N Fine Arts > NX Arts in general
Divisions: Academic Areas > Department of Dance
Event Title: Writing Dancing/Dancing Writing
Event Location: University of Iowa, Iowa
Event Dates: 13-16 November 2014
Depositing User: Clare Parfitt
Date Deposited: 03 Oct 2016 15:50
Last Modified: 06 Oct 2016 08:26
URI: https://eprints.chi.ac.uk/id/eprint/2010

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