One Dead at the Paris Opera Ballet

In 1866, when the ballet La Source debuted, the public at the Paris Opera may have been content to dream about its setting in the verdant Caucasus, its exotic Circassians, veiled Georgians, and powerful Khan. Yet the ballet''s botany also played to a public thinking about ethnic and exotic others at the same time-and in the same ways-as they were thinking about plants. Along with these stereotypes...