What happened to the real Little Dancer who inspired Degas

Times

3 days ago

You know her. She's one of the most famous sculptures in the world. And the only one that the French artist Edgar Degas ever exhibited in public. Although the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen was denounced at the sixth impressionist exhibition of 1881 — too ugly, the critics said — she is now recognised as a groundbreaking work of modernist art.
But what about the little dancer herself? Unlike the sculpture she inspired, Marie van Goethem has been lost to history. A student at the Paris Opera Ballet School, she came from a poor background. Her Belgian father was a tailor and her mother a laundress who was soon left widowed with three daughters to support. Marie earned a bit of money posing for Degas — she was one of his favourite models. But not long after that controversial exhibition, Marie, who by then was in her late teens, was fired by the Paris Opera for missing classes and being late for rehearsals. What happened to her next, no one knows.
It's a mystery that has long fascinated the Broadway director and choreographer Susan Stroman. And it's why she has spent more than a decade nurturing a new musical about the life of Van Goethem. Little Dancer, with music by Stephen Flaherty and book and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens (the team behind Ragtime), is coming to London for a single concert performance on July 27. And if Stroman has her way, at some point a full West End staging will follow.
'The story of our musical doesn't end with Marie's dismissal,' Stroman says. 'Degas chose to sculpt her rather than a beautiful ballerina because she had grit and real life in her. We see her as a bit of an artful dodger who had street smarts and talked back to him. So we wanted to believe that Marie survived. In the show we have her as an older, wiser woman who has worked, although we don't say what work she did as that didn't seem right. But she comes back to see the sculpture that changed her life. She wanted to become a famous dancer and because of it she became the most famous dancer of all.'
After the artist's death, about two dozen bronze replicas of The Little Dancer were made — now scattered throughout museums around the world — but the original sculpture, a mixed-media artwork made of beeswax and adorned with cotton tutu, linen ballet slippers and a wig of human hair, is on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where Stroman's show had its premiere at the Kennedy Center in 2014. It was revived for a successful run in Seattle five years later, and was headed for New York when the pandemic struck. 'Theatres were closed for almost two years in New York and when they reopened we had other commitments,' the director says. The offer of a concert staging at Theatre Royal Drury Lane came as a lifeline.
I find Stroman in a south London dance studio, rehearsing her large cast. She may be 70, but she looks so fit and energetic that she could be one of her own dancers. This is the woman who directed and choreographed The Music Man, The Producers and Young Frankenstein on Broadway, directed and choreographed a sensational staging of Crazy for You in the West End two years ago and has won five Tony awards and two Oliviers. I especially admired her innovative productions of The Scottsboro Boys and Contact, both of which had successful runs in London and New York, and her engaging full-length ballet Double Feature for New York City Ballet.
Stroman sees a growing disconnect between London and New York theatre. 'Since the pandemic everything in New York is three times the cost and it's now very difficult to mount a show there. This year 14 musicals opened on Broadway and nine have closed already. One would say Broadway is broken. But here in London one can still feel creative and be nurtured in crafting a new piece. You don't have over your heads the terrible economics of New York City.'
Her production of New York, New York, inspired by Martin Scorsese's 1977 film, became a victim of the new reality on Broadway when it closed in 2023 after just a few months. This year her staging of Smash, based on the American TV series set on Broadway, followed suit. 'Just because it's a financial flop doesn't mean it's an artistic flop,' Stroman says. 'Smash got the best New York Times review of all the musicals that opened this year, but the producers looked forward into September and could see no ticket sales. I can understand how that panics them.
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'Another thing that's changed since the pandemic, along with the costs, is that people don't necessarily book that far ahead any more,' she says. 'It makes everyone nervous and really hurts the theatre. These days the shows that run are Wicked, The Lion King, Aladdin and Hamilton, of course. But for anything coming up now I think big Broadway musicals might be over.'
So is it time, as the British producer Sonia Friedman says, for theatre to think smaller? 'We are being forced to make it smaller,' Stroman says, 'but I don't think that's bad. In fact anything I'm doing in the future is quite small. That seems to be the way to go.'
That's certainly the mantra for Little Dancer, which has been substantially cut back for the one-off London performance. 'The original production was two hours and 20 minutes, but for the concert version it's down to one hour and 40 minutes. Yet having done that I now feel the show should be done in one act.'
There will be no sets — it's a concert after all, with the orchestra on stage — but the audience will be getting all of Stroman's vibrant classical choreography. Unusually for a musical, the ensemble, who have all been recruited locally, have to sing and act while also dancing on pointe. The cast is led by the extraordinary American ballerina Tiler Peck, a star of New York City Ballet, as Young Marie, with Laura Pitt-Pulford as Adult Marie and Julian Ovenden as Degas.
'Little Dancer is about the life of a dancer and how difficult it is to be an artist,' Stroman says. 'But it's also about choices, which Marie didn't have. Poor women in her day could be prostitutes, they could be laundresses or ballerinas.' Indeed, Marie's elder sister became a prostitute, although her younger sibling did go on to become a dancer and well-respected teacher at the Paris Opera Ballet.
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Even so, life in the ballet carried its own risks for impoverished young female dancers, who could be sexually exploited by the abonnés, wealthy male patrons who paid money for the privilege of their company. 'Degas painted these men in their black top hats peering in from the side of the frames of his dance canvases, almost as a warning,' Stroman says.
And what did happen to that infamous sculpture of 1881? Its detractors said it had the face of a monkey and complained that Marie's pose, standing in ballet's fourth position with chin thrust forward and arms awkwardly behind her back, wasn't chocolate-box pretty. 'Degas was really heading into modernism with the Little Dancer and it made the critics crazy,' Stroman says. 'So he took it out of the exhibition and put it in his closet. It didn't come out until 40 years later, until after he died. And now it's hailed as one of the world's great sculptures.'
Little Dancer is at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London, Jul 27; littledancer.co.uk