Performing Worlds at the Baroque Court of Christine of France : Tobacco, Purple and Pearls

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

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.