Dancing Sirens and Spoiled Seas: The ecogothic mermaid in ballet and opera

European folklore is replete with aquatic women from the Slavic Rusalki, to French Melusine, to classical Greek naiads. Their habits and appearances vary – some benign, some malign – but they are typified as beautiful: a source of strength and vulnerability. The folklore and myths surrounding these young women have influenced other forms of popular culture, such as literature and opera. Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s novella Undine (1811), informed by Paracelsus’ work and Melusine, was adapted into an opera in 1816. It would go on to inspire Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ (1837). Elements of Fouqué and Andersen’s stories re-emerge in Antonín Dvořák’s opera Rusalka (1900-01). These pieces highlight the romance and tragedy of the aquatic women. More recently, adaptations and stagings of these texts have drawn on contemporary environmental tragedy; the vulnerability of nature embodied by the mermaid. Andersen’s fairy tale was first adapted into an animated film by Disney in 1989, before being updated into a live-action film in 2023. The most recent adaptation asserts the damage done by humanity to the oceans. In the same year, the Royal Opera House’s production of Rusalka filled the stage with detritus indicative of the swirling plastic eddies in the seas, and, as part of their Arts and Climate Week, the city of Leeds, UK, hosted a Human Aquarium which featured images of people dressed as mermaids washed up on the beach, victims of ongoing pollution.

This chapter considers aquatic women as ecological entities whose nature is entwined with humanities fear of and desire for the watery depths. As bodies of water becoming increasingly degraded and