ACTRESSES AND THE MISE EN SCÈNE Let the graces be stark naked, or vest them only with flowing drapery, and they may be as chaste as Susannah Put them in drawers or tights and they become prostitutes.79 It is doubtful that science could verify tights’ stimulating effect on those who wore them, but the excerpt clearly demonstrates the centrality of tights in fetishists’ fantasies of pleasure Aside from their fetishistic effect, the skirts and tights of the ballet had an aesthetic function to simulate nudity Tights were always worn, so there was no pretence in performance of actual flesh being exposed, yet while the optical trick provided steady encouragement to enjoy the pretended nudity, the possibility that the taut silken leggings might give way to their bulging contents provided steady titillation in hopeful anticipation of real nudity The tendency to illustrate danseuses barefooted, as with Taglioni in La Sylphide (by Deveria) and the Three Graces (Taglioni, Elssler, and Cerrito, by Chalon) suggests that the artist’s eye (and probably some spectators’) routinely removed the ballet shoe and tights to reveal the foot and the leg as actually nude It follows that if the foot and leg are ‘read’ as nude then the genitals must also be bare, since the missing garment—as erotic texts so often stress—would have extended all the way from toe to waist This convention of ‘clothed nudity’ in ballet was adopted wholesale into extravaganza, pantomime, opera bouffe, burlesque, and music hall acrobatics The female leg, naked in tights, became synonymous with the female performer, with enjoyment, and with the theatre itself In the 1870s, London’s Oxford, Alhambra, Gaiety, Princess’s, Canterbury, and Olympic all used leg motifs on the covers of programmes; in the 80s the Folly and Drury Lane adopted the same convention, and in the 90s the Empire continued what must, by then, have been a tradition Provincial theatres followed suit The theme of clothed nudity giving way to actual nudity was articulated in music hall lyrics.80 In 1896, Lady Mansel sang in the music halls about a dancer whose tights burst; the popular refrain ‘and what I saw I mustn’t tell you now’ was presented as evidence against the Oxford when its licence came up for renewal before the LCC.81 Erotica did not obscure the ‘seen’ with such coy double entendres, but described the consequence of bursting tights explicitly In Memoirs of a Russian Ballet Girl, a sado-masochistic novel of 1901, the corps de ballet of a Grand Duke’s dancing academy are deliberately fitted out with tights that will split at the rear when the dancers bend These revealing, self-destructing costumes are 135