Féerie
Féerie (French pronunciation:
Style
Féeries used a fairy-tale aesthetic to combine theatre with music, dances, mime, acrobatics, and especially spectacular visual effects created by innovative stage machinery,
These elements, especially the spectacle and stage effects, were far more prominent than the plot. The critic
Nothing is more rare than a féerie which is not an absurd mixture of ridiculous adventures and burlesque inventions and which consists otherwise only as an exhibition of tricks, costumes and decors … Nevertheless what resources are offered by the féerie to the poetic imagination![11]
The plots of féeries were usually borrowed from fairy tales in the French tradition, such as those by Charles Perrault and Madame d'Aulnoy; other féeries borrowed from outside sources such as the One Thousand and One Nights, or created original plots.[9] Like melodramas, the form féeries involved a stirring battle between forces of good and evil. However, where melodrama merely suggested the existence of these extremes, féeries made them unabashedly literal by embodying them as witches, gnomes, and other supernatural creatures.[12] The clear moral tone was heightened by the dialogue, which often included maxims about love, duty, virtue, and similar topics.[13] A full-length féerie often ran for several hours.[9]
Four human characters reliably appeared among the supernatural forces: two young lovers (an
Origins
The féerie can trace its origins to the
The
Early successes
The féerie in the full 19th-century sense of the word was born on 6 December 1806, with the premiere at the Théâtre de la Gaîté of Le Pied de mouton[3] ("The Mutton Foot").[5] The play, written by Alphonse Martainville in collaboration with the actor César Ribié, follows the quest of a lovesick hero, Guzman, to save his lover Leonora from the hands of a villainous rival. With the help of a magic talisman (the mutton foot of the title) and under the watch of a fairy who espouses the value of virtue and duty, Guzman braves his way through a series of spectacular trials, spiced with music, ballet, and duels. Thanks to stage machinery, magical events flow freely through the play: portraits move, people fly, chaperones transform into guitarists, food disappears. In the end, love conquers all, and the fairy intervenes once more to ensure the triumph of good over evil.[5]
Le Pied de mouton was widely successful and frequently revived.[2] It codified the standard form of féeries for the next hundred years: a narrative in which the hero or heroes undergo a series of adventures through spectacular scenes, with the sets often "magically" transforming in view of the audience.[3] Scholars continue to cite it as a quintessential example of the genre.[5]
The féerie, once established, quickly flourished; between 1800 and 1820 alone, some sixty féeries were produced.
The first great hit to match the success of Le Pied de mouton was the Cirque Olympique's Les Pilules du diable (1839),[2] from a script by the vaudeville writer Auguste Anicet-Bourgeois and two writers for circus productions, Laloue and Laurent. While the stage effects had gotten more spectacular since the initial féeries, the plots remained familiar; in this play, the rich hidalgo Sottinez, madly in love with the ingenue Isabelle, pursues her and her lover Albert through bizarre and spectacular adventures.[16] Les Pilules du diable was widely revived and imitated,[16] and was possibly the most celebrated féerie of all.[4]
Later successful féeries included La Biche au bois, La Chatte Blanche, and Peau d'Âne, all of which borrowed heavily from
Because of the large scale of the spectacle, the biggest and most technically equipped Parisian stages became the most in-demand venues for the shows. The Cirque Olympique, formerly an arena used for political and equestrian spectacles, took advantage of its deep stage to present expensively mounted féeries; it was eventually replaced by a new auditorium built specifically for spectacle, the Théâtre du Châtelet.[19] The Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin, originally designed for opera productions, had a stage and machinery well suited to the demands of the féerie,[7] and flourished with the genre under the direction of Marc Fournier.[2]
Evolution of the term
The term féerie began as an adjective, used together with more established descriptive terms to advertise a production's genre. Many of the first féeries were advertised as mélodrame-féeries ("fairy melodrama"; half of all féeries presented between 1800 and 1810 were so described), a description which fell out of favor during the 1810s. Pantomime-féeries, developed by the mime Deburau, became highly popular in the 1840s. Other popular descriptors included folie-féeries and comédie-féeries.
International variants
In Spain, the comedia de magia , a genre very similar to the féerie,[5] began a rise to prominence in 1715 with the works of Juan Salvo y Vela .[24] The form was well-established there by the time Juan Grimaldi adapted Le Pied de mouton for the Spanish stage in 1829. Grimaldi's version, La Pata de Cabra, was a pronounced popular success and was widely imitated.[5]
In Russia, the concept of fairy-tale spectacle merged with
Popularity
By the mid-nineteenth century, féeries had become one of the foremost venues for fairy-tale storytelling in popular culture,[9] and had gained the fascination and respect of some of the foremost writers of the day.[12] Théophile Gautier often reviewed them in his capacity as a writer on the theatre,[12] comparing the shifting scenes and magical occurrences of the féerie to a dream:[8]
What a charming summer spectacle is a féerie! That which doesn't demand any attention and unravels without logic, like a dream that we make wide awake … [It is] a symphony of forms, of colours and of lights … The characters, brilliantly clothed, wander through a perpetually changing series of tableaux, panic-stricken, stunned, running after each other, searching to reclaim the action which goes who knows where; but what does it matter! The dazzling of the eyes is enough to make for an agreeable evening.[27]
The popularity of the féerie had its first peak in the 1850s;[28] by the end of the decade, around the time of Les Bibelots du diable, the focus had shifted from the fairy-tale plot to extravaganza on its own terms. Siraudin and Delacour's 1856 satire La Queue de la poêle parodied the conventions of the genre, much as Frédérick Lemaître had done to melodrama in his version of L'Auberge des Adrets.[29]
Though seen as somewhat old-fashioned during the 1860s, the genre saw a second surge in popularity from 1871 through the 1890s, in which ever more lavish versions of the genre's classics were mounted.[7] In his 1885 dictionary of theatre arts, Arthur Pougin noted that "audiences always show up in great numbers to any [féerie] on offer, because they adore this truly magical entertainment", and praised the féerie as "surely a delightful entertainment when it is in the hands of a true poet. It freely enters the whimsy of his imagination and can both delight the viewer's mind and enchant their eyes."[30]
One of the poems in Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, "L'Irreparable," was inspired by a féerie he had seen, La Belle aux Cheveaux d'Or, starring Marie Daubrun, an actress with whom he was smitten. Gustave Flaubert even wrote a full-length féerie, Le Château des cœurs, in 1863, though it was never performed.[12] Jules Verne made his own contribution to the genre in 1881 with Journey Through the Impossible, written in collaboration with Adolphe d'Ennery and featuring themes and characters from Verne's well-known novels.[31] Maurice Maeterlinck's 1908 play The Blue Bird was likewise described by contemporary observers as a féerie, though critics noted that it was a more overtly poetic and intellectual example of the genre than the classic Châtelet productions.[11]
Later years
From 1875's La Voyage dans la lune onward, some féeries began to show a trend for incorporating scientific and technological themes into their plots,
The féerie fell out of popularity by the end of the 19th century, by which time it was largely seen as entertainment for children.[4] It disappeared from French stages just as another medium, the cinema, was beginning to supplant it as a form of storytelling spectacle.[3]
Legacy
With his 1899 film version of Cinderella, Georges Méliès brought the féerie into the newly developing world of motion pictures. The féerie quickly became one of film's most popular and lavishly mounted genres in the early years of the twentieth century, with such pioneers as Edwin S. Porter, Cecil Hepworth, Ferdinand Zecca, and Albert Capellani contributing fairy-tale adaptations in the féerie style or filming versions of popular stage féeries like Le Pied de mouton, Les Sept Châteaux du diable, and La Biche au bois. The leader in the genre, however, remained Méliès,[37] who designed many of his major films as féeries and whose work as a whole is intensely suffused with the genre's influence.[38] Jacques Demy's 1970 film Peau d'Âne also shows a strong féerie influence, using elements of the féerie of the same name by Emile Vanderburch, Evrard Laurencin, and Charles Clairville.[39]
With its explorations into ways of integrating spectacle, comedy, and music in the theatre, the féerie also influenced the development of
Notes
Footnotes
- ^ In a review of L'Etoile du berger, an 1846 féerie at the Théâtre de l'Ambigu-Comique, Gauthier joked that the playbill should have included the line "the play has been done away with, as it detracted from the scenery".[10]
References
- ^ Gaudreault 2011, p. 171.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j Senelick 2000.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k BnF 2001.
- ^ a b c d Williams 2010.
- ^ a b c d e f Zipes 2010, p. 37.
- ^ a b c Kovács 1976, p. 4.
- ^ a b c d e McCormick 1993, p. 149.
- ^ a b c Kovács 1976, p. 2.
- ^ a b c d e Moen 2012, p. 2.
- ^ a b c d e f McCormick 1993, p. 148.
- ^ a b c Moen 2012, p. 94
- ^ a b c d e Kovács 1976, p. 1
- ^ a b c Kovács 1976, p. 3.
- ^ Ginisty 1910, p. 12.
- ^ a b McCormick 1993, p. 153.
- ^ a b Kovács 1976, p. 5
- ^ McCormick 1993, pp. 154–55.
- ^ McCormick 1993, p. 155.
- ^ McCormick 1993, pp. 149–50.
- ^ a b Kovács 1976, pp. 3–4.
- ^ Zipes 2010, pp. 37–38.
- ^ Kessler 2012, pp. 76–77.
- ^ Zipes 2010, p. 38.
- ^ Gies 1988, p. 219.
- ^ Greskovic 2005, p. 190.
- ^ a b Scholl 2004, pp. 22–23.
- ^ Moen 2012, p. 1
- ^ Kovács 1976, p. 5.
- ^ McCormick 1993, pp. 155–56.
- ^ Gaudreault 2011, pp. 42–43.
- ^ Ginisty 1910, pp. 214–215.
- ^ Kovács 1976, p. 12.
- ^ Margot 2005, p. 154.
- ^ Margot 2004, p. 58 ("la plus somptueuse, la plus originale de toutes les féeries").
- ^ Margot 2004, p. 168 ("en locomotive").
- ^ Ginisty 1910, p. 215.
- ^ Moen 2012, pp. 39–40.
- ^ Kovács 1976, p. 8.
- ^ Duggan 2014.
- ^ Moen 2012, p. 40.
Sources
- BnF (2001), "La féerie sur scène: les variantes formelles du conte de fées", Il était une fois...les contes de fées, Bibliothèque nationale de France, retrieved 21 March 2014
- Duggan, Anne E. (28 July 2014), "Donkey Skin: Demy's Fairy-Tale Worlds", The Current, The Criterion Collection, retrieved 2 August 2018
- Gaudreault, André (2011), Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, p. 171
- Gies, David Thatcher (1988), Theatre and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Spain: Juan De Grimaldi as Impresario and Government Agent, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
- Ginisty, Paul (1910), La Féerie, Paris: Louis-Michaud, retrieved 11 March 2014
- Greskovic, Robert (2005), Ballet 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving the Ballet, Pompton Plains, N.J.: Limelight Editions
- Kessler, Frank (2012), "The Féerie between Stage and Screen", in Gaudreault, André; Dulac, Nicolas; Hidalgo, Santiago (eds.), A Companion to Early Cinema, New York: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 64–79
- Kovács, Katherine Singer (Autumn 1976), "Georges Méliès and the Féerie", Cinema Journal, 16 (1): 1–13, JSTOR 1225446
- Margot, Jean-Michel (2004), Jules Verne en son temps: vu par ses contemporains francophones (1863-1905), Amiens: Encrage
- Margot, Jean-Michel (March 2005), "Jules Verne, playwright", Science Fiction Studies, 1, XXXII (95): 150–162, archived from the original on 20 August 2020, retrieved 11 February 2013
- McCormick, John (1993), Popular Theatres of Nineteenth-Century France, London: Routledge
- Moen, Kristian (2012), Film and Fairy Tales: The Birth of Modern Fantasy, London: I.B. Tauris & Co
- Senelick, Laurence (2000), "Féerie", The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, Credo Reference, retrieved 11 March 2014
- Scholl, Tim (2004), "Sleeping Beauty," a Legend in Progress, New Haven: Yale University Press
- Williams, Simon (2010), "Féerie", The Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance, Oxford Reference, retrieved 23 March 2014
- Zipes, Jack (2010), The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films, New York: Routledge
Further reading
- Roxane Martin, La féerie romantique sur les scènes parisiennes (1791-1864), Honoré Champion, Paris, 2007