Performing disability in French court ballet

In response to the valuable ongoing work on disability in the field of early modern English theatre, this article advocates for Disability Studies approaches to early modern French theatre. It examines disabled characters from a range of seventeenth-century French court ballets, with a focus on Le Ballet de la nuit (1653). Modern discussions of the lived experience of disability as performance are brought into conversation with the performance by non-disabled dancers, most of them professionals rather than courtiers, of physical and sensorial disabilities in a theatrical genre that emphasized exceptional physical prowess. It is seen that the practice of cripping up (or disability drag) worked against the reality of disability and promoted a heightened ableist aesthetic. However, it is also argued that the bodily experience of performing disability – sometimes with (seemingly) cumbersome props, awkward prosthetics or concealed limbs – will also have granted the dancers new choreographic opportunities and embodied knowledge. This embodied knowledge was not, of course, the same as that of real disabled people. But the creation of ballets featuring disabled characters performed in disability drag unwittingly hinted at what those works sought to deny: the existence of – and skills involved in – authentic disability dance.