ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN 152

ACTRESSES AND THE MISE EN SCÈNE ballet at Drury Lane, the process of reduction of the danseur to a porteur and the reassignment of focus to the ballerina was initiated.47 Lifts made pas de deux more athletic but also more erotic, if their presence on five of the first thirty issues of the pornographic weekly The Exquisite (published in London between 1840–42) is a reliable indicator It seems likely that acrobatic teams could borrow the erotic encodings of the pas de deux, though three quarters of a century after Zéphyr et Flore the sight of an upside down man and a flying woman clasping each other’s body, faces buried in torsos, may have been ‘neutralized’ by frequent repetition In an eye witness account of an act at the Oxford Music Hall in 1870, the ambulations of a female acrobat are admired for athletic and erotic reasons Because of the nature of the gymnastic performance, acrobats were wise to wear close fitting garments Mlle de Glorion’s obliviousness to performing in such a costume along with a male partner horrified and fascinated the audience: The fair acrobat went down from the stage among the audience, alone, and walked, half nude as she was, through the crowd, to the other end of the long hall…and climbed the rope ladder that led up from the gallery to a small platform…which was suspended high up under the ceiling There she stood, in sight of all the people; intent on preparing for her nightly peril, and taking no thought (nor did they, I think, just then) of the fact that she was almost utterly unclothed… And she had to swing herself, high over the heads of the crowd, across that great space of eighty feet or so, and leap through the two discs and alight in his [her male partner’s] inverted arms, which she could not even see… She did it, of course; she leaped into the air, and in leaping, left the ropes that swung her, and dashed through the two hoops, and then was seen hanging in the arms of her mate, grasping his body, her face against his breast… And, though it is not well to see a nude man fling a nude girl about as she is flung, or to see her grip his body in mid air between her seemingly bare thighs, I think that an unreflecting audience takes no note of these things and looks on him and her only as two performers Still, the familiar interlacing of male and female bodies in sight of the public is gross and corrupting.48 In the course of the narration, Mlle de Glorion is successively denuded, from ‘half nude’ to ‘barely clothed’ to ‘nude’ to ‘bare’, 123