The champagne is still splashing
in Fanny Elssler’s shoes

Paint, Perfume and Champagne

Diane Shooman

Dancers and dances are as ephemeral as perfume. Some, however, leave lasting traces. Fanny Elssler (1810–1844) of Vienna and Eisenstadt was one of those ballerinas. She enchanted on stages all over the world as the Romni Esmeralda, or dancing an impassioned polka, or clicking the castanets in her legendary interpretation of the Spanish Cachucha. In Fanny's wake, balletmania even splashed across the Atlantic to the USA: the U.S. Senate postponed sessions to attend her performances, and drank champagne from her slippers.

Fanny's charm and energy still resonate in laudatory descriptions, artworks, and original stage costumes. For the Tanzpassage Eisenstadt, artist Thomas Weinberger's pearly portrait of Fanny shimmers forth from a fragment of antique wood, and toeshoe-like paint tubes pirouette with paintbrushes as her corps de ballet. Even Fanny's wear-lined dance shoes, sketched onto round wooden stages, still seem brimful of life.