Clay Culture: Ballet des Porcelaines Lisa McDonald

Appears in the June/July/August 2023 issue of Ceramics Monthly.

A reimagining of “Ballet des Porcelaines” probes the complex cultural work behind the making of porcelain.

Many of us either have or know someone who has a set of fine china that sits on display throughout the year only to be used for holiday meals. Whether the porcelain dishes are being arranged on the table or simply viewed through a cabinet window, few likely think of the contentious history that brought this material to the Western world.

Porcelain was invented in China over a centuries-long development period. The first primitive form emerged during the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE), while the form best known in the West appeared during the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368 CE).

When the Portuguese and Dutch established commercial trade routes to the Far East during the 16th century, there emerged a robust market of export ware, with porcelain objects made exclusively for Europe.

Europeans became obsessed with the translucent ceramic. However, they could not create the material themselves because the recipe was closely guarded by Chinese potters. It was not until the early 18th century that some German alchemists successfully produced the first continental European hard-paste porcelain.

Meredith Martin is well versed in this history. Martin is an associate professor of art history at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University (NYU). She specializes in French art and architecture from the 17th to 19th centuries, as well as French interactions with Asia during that period. With this background, Martin was immediately intrigued when her friend Esther Bell, previously chief curator and now deputy director of the Clark Art Institute, told her about a lost libretto in the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. (A libretto is a text used in an extended musical work, such as an opera, operetta, masque, oratorio, cantata, or musical. It includes the lyrics to be sung and sometimes interpolated spoken passages.)

Called the “Ballet des Porcelaines” or “The Teapot Prince,” this early-18th-century libretto, with a runtime of only 15 minutes, tells the story of a prince and princess who must shatter the spell of a magician who transformed the inhabitants of a faraway island into porcelain.

Martin recognized how this story could read as an allegory for Europe’s pursuit of porcelain. However, she also knew pursuing a historically accurate reconstruction of the ballet would risk reinforcing harmful racial stereotypes and exoticization of Asian cultures—but a creative reimagining could critique and connect the present and the past.

Martin applied for a fellowship at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, and there she met choreographer and activist Phil Chan. 

“The instant I met him and heard about his work through Final Bow, it became immediately apparent that this is the partnership, the collaboration I want to have. This is the person I want to work with to try to bring this work to life,” she says in a presentation on reimagining the ballet.

Together they conceived of a restaging of the ballet that would center Asian American experience within this history and challenge the racial typecasting of the original performance. For example, instead of having the evil magician identified as Chinese, as in the original ballet, the magician is portrayed as a European collector haunted by his obsession with porcelain.

Their reimagined “Ballet des Porcelaines” premiered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2021. The ballet has since traveled to leading cultural institutions in the US and Europe, with a September 2022 staging occurring at the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology.

For more details on the reimagining of “Ballet des Porcelaines” and 18th-century porcelain history, use the QR code below to view a presentation hosted by the Center for Ballet and the Arts before the 2021 premier. The second video provides a look at some of the reimagined choreography.

A video presentation by the Center for Ballet and the Arts: 

A video about the reimagined choreography:

the author Lisa McDonald is associate managing editor and science writer at The American Ceramic Society. Prior to this position, McDonald worked at the American Institute of Physics: FYI and the ATLAS Experiment at CERN. She has a master’s degree in science communication and specializes in communicating science to non-specialist audiences.