Performing Worlds at the Baroque Court of Christine of FranceTobacco, Purple and Pearls

Reframes Baroque performance as a critical laboratory where bodies, materials and environments negotiated global circulation, political legitimacy and ecological imagination

• Construes the Baroque spectacle as a critical laboratory for thinking through the complexities of early modern global forces, the economic circulation they incited and the repercussions on the environments they impacted.
• Explores how the interaction among bodily animation, poetic text and stagecraft represented contemporary dynamics of production, management and consumption of natural resources, and their conversion to commodities.
• Brings forward the early modern histories of three resources in particular: tobacco, the colour gris-de-lin, and pearls – their production, supply and exchange; their reception, gendered aspects and transformative potential on people and social and cultural structures.
• Draws on 17th-century visual and textual sources ranging from the drawings documenting the Savoy spectacles to records of festival practices in Colonial America, from travel and trade reports to tax records, from dyeing recipes to medical treatises.
• Brings together art history, economic history, performance and literary studies to yield insights and a timely framework for transcultural studies of visual and material culture, gender, and the histories of science and environment.

Performing Worlds considers the natural resources, landscapes and stagecraft that viewers might have seen in ballets for Christine of France (1606-63), daughter of Marie de Médicis and regent of the Duchy of Savoy, at her court in Turin. It focuses on large commemorative drawings that reanimate the dancers’ movements and the transformations of materials and environments—local and global—staged to promote Savoy’s trading interests to European audiences. Imagine dancers from Venezuela coiling tobacco ropes as they twirl, women from Savoy spinning purple linen before miniature Alpine flax fields, and divers from Sri Lanka retrieving pearls with stones and ropes in a room turned into a majestic seascape. By focusing on three ballets and the resources performed therein – tobacco, the colour gris-de-lin and pearls – the volume probes the transformative potential of these performances: how they transmuted environments into resources and desirable goods, and unruly historical dynamics into ideal landscapes and graceful dance steps.