DVD Review: La Petite Danseuse de Degas

The ballet La Petite Danseuse de Degas takes as its subject the model that Edgar Degas used for his famous statuette of a 14-year-old ballet dancer, now in the Musée d'Orsay. In the late 1990s, the museum asked the Paris Opera Ballet costume shop to restore the statuette's fabric tutu. Inquiries and research led to the discovery of the model's identity and her somewhat bleak history and fate: Her name was Marie van Goethem, and her Belgian family lived in a poor suburb of Paris. After the death of their father, Goethem's mother enrolled her three daughters at the Paris Opera Ballet's school and hired them out as artist's models; both professions in the 19th century were tainted with seedy implications, and the girls did eventually drift into a life of petty crime and prostitution.

Commerce and art, sex and dance, desperation and success, youth and age, society and the body, it doesn't take much to see why the Paris Opera Ballet's dance director Birgitte Lefévre recognized the potential for a ballet based on the story. The new DVD from Arthaus Musik offers a filmed version of the company's 2003 production. It's a self-reflexive work—the Paris Opera Ballet depicting the goings-on at the Paris Opera Ballet— and will be most interesting to Francophiles and balletomanes who have a fascination with the Paris Opera Ballet, Degas and French and dance history. But as a whole, the work lacks narrative pull and urgency.