Little Dancer (6) Artist Inspiring Artist

I love the whole thing about art: the work itself, the creativity and creative process to it, and the story that inspired it.  Sometimes the inspiration is another art work.  So it is with Little Dancer, a new musical ballet, performing at The Kennedy Center in Washington, DC through end of November.

So who is La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans?

Marie Geneviève van Goethem and Tiler Peck, as the Little Dancer

Marie was a young Belgian student at the Paris Opera Ballet dance school, and apparently she was talented and stubborn.  The nature of her relationship with Edgar Degas is up for debate, but it was common for young women to seek the protection of wealthy patrons of the art.  Clearly, too, Marie inspired Degas through many sketches, paintings and sculptures.

Some of the critics of the piece, when Degas introduced it, were positively beastly (rf. Little Dancer of Fourteen Years).  But Director and Choreographer Susan Stroman, like scores of others, fashioned an inspiring character of Marie:

When Stroman, [Book Writer and Lyricist Lynn] Ahrens, and [Composer Stephen] Flaherty began to shape their new musical, they were immediately confronted by the fact that their real life subject’s story ended abruptly. Van Goethem, disappeared shortly after Degas’s sculpture was finished. She was dismissed from the Paris Opera Ballet in 1882 for being late to a rehearsal, and poof—c’est fini. Offsetting Marie’s untraceable later life, the new musical depicts a Van Goethem that is part fact, part fiction. To tell Marie’s story—“to bring her back to life,” as Stroman explained to me—the musical has invented an older Marie who narrates the story of her life as a young girl. Stroman “wanted to believe that she was different and had character,” that her life on the street had made her a fighter—an attitude that resonates in the way Degas’ Little Dancer holds her body in confidant repose.

Reference: The True Story of the Little Ballerina Who Influenced Degas' Little Dancer.

Even though Degas compensated Marie for posing, I doubt that she ever came close to becoming wealthy.  Indeed she, her mother and sister lived an impoverished life, especially her father died:

Marie was the daughter of a laundress and a tailor, who came to Paris in the early 1860s from Belgium. She was born in 1865 in the diverse 9th arrondissement of Paris. Marie's oldest sister, Antoinette, was born in Brussels in 1861. A second older sister, also named Marie, died eighteen days after her birth in 1864. Marie's younger sister, Louise Joséphine, born in Paris in 1870, adopted the name of Charlotte and died there in 1945. Her father died at some point between 1870 and 1880, leaving Madame van Goethem to fend for her three daughters on a laundress's income.

In 1865, the year Marie was born, the family moved to a stone apartment building on 'Rue Notre-Dame de Lorette' called 'Place Bréda' near Degas's studio on 'Rue Saint-Georges'. The Bréda district was one of the city's poorest and most squalid areas for prostitution. In 1880, after frequently changing their place of residence (an indicator of an inability to pay the rent on time) the family settled on 'Rue de Douai' on the lower slopes of Montmartre, a few blocks from Degas's studio, then located on 'Rue Fontaine'.

In 1878, Marie and Charlotte were accepted into the dance school of the Paris Opéra, where Antoinette was employed as an extra. In 1880 Marie passed the examination admitting her to the corps de ballet of the Paris Opera Ballet and made her debut on the stage in La Korrigane.

Marie was 15 years old on her admission to the Paris Opera Ballet, and was thus clearly an artist in her own right.  It is a little troubling that there is no record of her whereabouts, after she was dismissed in 1882, but I hope she lived a reasonably pleasant life.  Perhaps she could not have imagined how art has immortalized her in the 132 years since.