7
Dancing the Body Politic
Manner and Mimesis in Eighteenth-Century Ballet
Susan Leigh Foster
Poised in her statuelike pose on the pedestal, choreographer and dancer Marie Sallé may well have glimpsed the swooning melancholy of her partner as he danced the role of the sculptor Pygmalion. Out of the corner of her eye, she may have followed his mimetic gestures as he prayed to Venus to bring her, a stone that he had carved and now the object of his desire, to life. She certainly heard the chordal changes indicating Venus's favorable response and announcing that she, as Galathea, was about to stir to life and participate in her own choreographic rendition of Ovid's story of Pygmalion. Did she realize, however, that the steps she was about to execute would create a scandal of international proportions, that a letter published in the Mercure de France describing her production would be reprinted in newspapers across Europe,[1] and that her choreography would inspire numerous plagiarized productions such as the one presented at the Comédie Italienne in Paris two months later?[2] Could she have foreseen that her approach to choreographic experimentation would eventually result in the separation of ballet from opera and the establishment of dance as an independent and autonomous art form?
According to the anonymous author of the Mercure de France letter,
[1] M , Mercure de France , April 1734, 770–772.
[2] Renée Viollier's study of the composer Mouret, Mouret, le musicien des grâces (Geneva: Minkoff, 1976), provides a detailed account of the Paris performance whose scenario by Panard and l'Affichart was danced by Mlle Roland and Sr. Riccoboni to music by Mouret, who, according to Viollier, may also have composed the music for Sallé's Pygmalion (145).
Sallé's Pygmalion merited special acclaim for two kinds of radically innovative choreographic decisions: first, she chose to appear uncorseted and without wig or mask, and second, she interpolated movements from the vocabulary of pantomime to enable the dancing to tell a story without the aid of spoken or sung lyrics. What everyone who read the letter would also have known is that to implement her new choreographic concept she risked her reputation as première danseuse at the Paris Opéra and jeopardized her status as an employee of the king representing the most prestigious institutionalization of the arts of music and dance in all Europe.[3] They would also have noted that she presented her choreographic experimentation in a prestigious public, not private, venue, fusing in an unprecedented way the elite values of ballet with the populist medium of pantomime.[4] Pantomime, a familiar staple at fair theaters and street productions, was a medium that subverted, satirized, or circumvented narrative, but it had seldom been invoked as the principal means for sustaining a coherent and sentiment-filled exchange of thoughts and feelings among all those onstage, especially the sanctioned stage of the king.[5] Subsequent productions at the Paris Opéra for which Sallé served as choreographer incorporated pantomime, experimented with costume, and extended the danced dialogue among characters so as to create danced narratives. These pantomime ballets, occurring as single acts within the five-act opera-ballets Les Indes galantes (1735), L'Europe galante (1736), and Les Fêtes d'Hébé (1739), received enormous acclaim and were cited by subsequent generations of aestheticians and dance historians as pivotal works that prefigured in danced form the arguments for choreographic reform made by Denis Diderot and Jean Georges Noverre in the 1750s and 1760s.[6]
[3] As an employee at the Opéra, Sallé's career was strictly controlled. Her Pygmalion was presented in London during one of the leaves granted her from the Opéra. She was never allowed to perform it at the Paris Opéra, nor was she permitted to dance on other Parisian stages. For details of her life and career, see Emile Dacier, Une Danseuse de l'Opéra sous Louis XV: Mlle Sallé, 1707–1756 (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1909).
[4] As early as 1715, the duchesse du Maine organized a highly publicized experiment with pantomime dance at her summer home, but this genre of entertainment had not yet reached patented house stages in France. In London, where pantomime played a more prominent role in many kinds of productions, ballet had never been cultivated to the extent it had in France. Sallé's appearances there exemplified the most refined dancing in all Europe.
[5] Robert Isherwood, in Farce and Fantasy: Popular Entertainment in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), describes the fair theater performances in great detail and sets them in the context of other types of entertainment available to citizens of Paris during the period.
[6] See, for example, Jean Georges Noverre's Lettres sur la danse et les ballets (Stuttgart and Lyon, 1760), published in English as Letters on Dancing and Ballets, trans. Cyril W. Beaumont (New York: Dance Horizons, 1966); and Denis Diderot's Entretiens sur "Le Fils naturel" and his Discours sur la poésie dramatique , both conveniently collected in the volume Diderot's Writings on the Theatre , ed. F. C. Green (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936). See also Diderot's "Lettre sur les sourds et muets" (1751), in Oeuvres Complètes de Diderot , ed. J. Assézat (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1875).
Audiences found in Sallé's dances a more compelling expressivity and a clearer and more lively interaction among characters. Yet these dances did not simply evidence a new generation's tastes and sensibilities coming to embodiment. Rather, they gestured toward an aesthetic rupture of enormous proportions. Sallé's choreography for Galathea, the work of art that comes to life, embraced two distinct aesthetic traditions—the baroque opera-ballet and the parodic pantomime—and from them bodied forth a third, the action or story ballet (ballet d'action ). In so doing, Sallé forecast the dissolution of the opera-ballet and with it the demise of courtly codes of comportment that had informed aristocratic conduct and identity for generations. In its place, newly composed bodies, autonomous, self-propelling, and self-narrating, would take center stage, providing palpable justification for Enlightenment theories of the subject and of citizenship.
This essay examines the overhaul of choreographic conventions that Sallé helped to initiate, finding in them a theorization of the relationship between the individual and the state as eloquent as any articulated by the philosophes. The ballet performed in tandem with the vast array of cultural endeavors that accomplished the sweeping political changes of the eighteenth century. More vividly than most of these endeavors, however, the ballet exemplifies the changing conceptions of body and self on which the reformulation of the body politic would depend. Focus on the ballet and its development, particularly during the period of Sallé's career, yields new perspectives on Enlightenment thought and on the centrality of the body as a primary concern for those who aspired to reimagine the state. The example of the ballet also encourages a new acknowledgment of the persuasive political content of aesthetic form.
By the time of Sallé's productions, the evocative impact of the baroque opera-ballet, with its alternation between characters who sang the story and dancers who displayed the pomp, gaiety, or somberness of the situation, had begun to play itself out.[7] The haunting quality of these elegant danc-
[7] Rousseau's famous critique against the ballet's nonrealistic and antinarrative function can be found in Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse: Lettres de deux amants habitants d'une petite ville au pied des Alpes , pt. 2, letter 23, pp. 265–66. But disenchantment with the opera ballets can be found much earlier in the writings of Toussaint de Rénard de Saint-Mard, Réflexions sur l'opéra (The Hague: Jean Neaulme, 1741); Francesco Algarotti, Essai sur l'opéra (1755), trans. into French by [F. J. de Chastellux] (Paris: Chez Rualt, 1773); Gaspare Angiolini, Dissertation sur les ballets pantomimes des anciens, pour servir de programme de "Semiramis" (Vienna, 1765); Louis de Cahusac in his article "Danse" for the Encyclopédie and also in La Danse ancienne et moderne, ou traité historique de la danse , 3 vols. (The Hague, 1754); and Diderot in his Entretiens sur "Le Fils naturel."
ing figures by now seemed vacant rather than suggestive. The symmetrical use of the dancers in their placement onstage, the floor patterns wherein two dancers mirrored each other throughout a duet, the just and regulated exchange of bodies in space—all were found boring rather than ennobling. The meaning of the lines they traced in space—a clear reference to noble conduct in former times—was no longer intelligible. An increasingly secularized and bourgeois viewer, searching for relevance in the dancers' abstract allusions, found only stifling references to an obscure gallantry.
The paintings of Antoine Watteau, especially as analyzed by Norman Bryson, provide an elegant account of what was in the process of becoming indecipherable.[8] Bryson argues that Watteau's emphasis on the eyes of his characters lent a passionate quality to the face, whereas the body was always depicted in a more stately and formal posture. The conflicting messages encouraged viewers to engage in endless reverie about the characters' state of being. Conversely, in those paintings by Watteau where figures were pictured at a far distance, the face remained ambiguous and the body became more eloquent. Bryson explains:
Watteau's strategy is to release enough discourse for the viewer to begin to verbalize the image, but not enough in quantity or in specificity for the image to be exhausted.... With Watteau, discourse provides a way of triggering a powerful subjective reaction in the viewer—he hears unplayed music ... describes the absence of explicit meaning as "melancholy" and "depth," and tries to fill the semantic vacuum set up by the painting with an inrush of verbal reverie.[9]
Through the insufficiency of discursive messages or through the collision of distinct messaging systems, therefore, the figures in Watteau's paintings contoured a plenitude which they always stopped short of filling.
[89] In Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), Norman Bryson contrasts the figural nonspecificity of meaning in Watteau's work with the discursive clarity of LeBrun, his predecessor, and Greuze, who followed a generation after. I find significant correspondences between Bryson's analysis of painting and the development of eighteenth-century ballet, as the following argument suggests. For his summary of Watteau's work, see 70–91.
[9] Bryson, Word and Image , 74.
Choreography for the baroque opera-ballets operated in similar ways. In their relation to narrative, in the spatial configurations and dispositions of dancers in space, in the costuming, these ballets developed a nondiscursive space that allowed viewers the kind of sensuous reverie summoned up in Watteau's work. In baroque operas, characters who engaged in sung dialogues established identities and motivations and created the narrative action. Danced interludes, situated at key moments in the plot's development, suspended narrative action in order to expand on individual and group feelings. Whether joyful, mournful, nostalgic, or troubled, characters' states of being were elaborated through collections of dances whose movements resembled those feelings. Light, quick movements; measured, somber steps; meandering or buoyant phrases—each connected to the characters' identity at that moment in the story. The articulation of physicality presented in these dances never aspired to demonstrate the development through time of the characters' attitudes or feelings, nor was it necessary for dance to function in a narrational capacity. Instead, the dances proliferated the possible resonances of feelings in all their variation and nuance.
Take, for example, the choreographic rendition of an emotion such as melancholy. To elaborate on a character's melancholic reverie, dancers might well perform a slow sarabande in which the poignant suspensions and the stately, slow pacing of steps imparted a sense of restraint from full-blown physical exertion. Dancers seemed to hold back from any invigorating athleticism, and they also indulged in a weighty and languorous phrasing of steps.[10] The following description of a solo sarabande performance, although performed at court rather than onstage, gives a sense of the hesitations and shifts in mood through which melancholy would be constructed:
Sometimes he would cast languid and passionate glances throughout a slow and languid rhythmic unit [cadence]; and then, as though weary of being obliging, he would avert his eyes, as if he wished to hide his passion; and, with a more precipitous motion, would snatch away the gift he had tendered.
Now and then he would express anger and spite with an impetuous and turbulent rhythmic unit; and then, evoking a sweeter passion by more moderated motions, he would sigh, swoon, let his eyes wander languidly; and certain sinuous movements of the arms and body, nonchalant, disjointed, and passionate, made him appear so admirable and so charming that throughout this enchanting dance he won as many hearts as he attracted spectators.[11]
[10] I am grateful to Linda Tomko whose historical and analytical understanding of the sarabande informed this section of the essay.
[11] This description of a sarabande performance, translated by Patricia M. Ranum, appears in Father François Pomey's Dictionnaire royal augmenté (Lyon, 1671), 22 (copy now in Bibliotèque Municipale Rodez). The passage is quoted in full in Meredith Little and Natalie Jenne's book Dance and the Music of J. S. Bach (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1991), 93–94.
The sudden changes in tempo and the quick retraction of the eyes and body from any fulsome enactment of sadness evoked melancholy through its allusions to the state of melancholia. The dancer did not look like a melancholic person so much as exemplify melancholy's languid, restless, and swooning qualities.
Whether dancing melancholy or joy, the choreography elaborated qualities shared with those feelings and also the requisite spatial harmony between and among all dancing bodies. Floor paths used to organize dancers' movements through space—symmetrical crossings side to side and upstage to downstage, woven circles, pinwheels, and diagonals—enmeshed dancers in harmonious patterns of spatial inscription. These patterns celebrated the justness of groups of dancers in symmetrical opposition to one another, the magnificent variety of geometrical pathways though space, and the felicitous resolution of asymmetrical configurations into balanced groupings. These dispositions for dancers emphasized the connections among bodies and the participation of each body in the ensemble over any individual body's momentum or gestural repertoire. Viewers might focus momentarily on a given dancer, but the choreography consistently reabsorbed the dancer into the overall patterning. This perpetual loss of contact, deliciously arresting, fueled the viewer's desire for further sightings, for more knowledge. Just as the delicate measuring of steps to music evoked innumerable affective associations, so the sweep of all bodies through space drew viewers continually into the affective world of the dance.
Costuming enhanced this inrush of affect, especially when the mask was used. The face, normally the vehicle for a mute form of discursive exchange both among dancers and between dancers and audience, was stilled by the mask. The masked face stared back at the audience, rebuffing spectators' search for familiar forms, transforming the known into the exotic. The absence of such highly specific information as the face would convey imparted a greater articulateness to the gestures of the limbs, the swaying of the torso, and the tiniest inclinations of the head. While the body's movement acquired greater expressivity through the neutrality of the face, the exact nature of the characters' thoughts or feelings remained ambiguous. As a result the character, like Watteau's figures, became a wistful apparition signaling poignantly toward the expressivity of feeling as well as toward feeling itself.
Choreography for the opera-ballets thus constructed for the viewer a desire to supplement the affective space of the performance. The positioning of dance itself within early-eighteenth-century aristocratic society further reinforced the ballet's powerfully evocative impact. Defined as a kind of metadiscipline that prepared one for all activities, dancing referenced values necessary to the proper performance of all physical endeavors. Its mastery assured the aristocrat the ability to achieve a calm, moderated easefulness—neither too erect nor too floppy, always agile, always cool—in fencing, tennis, and all the martial arts. It equally ensured a defectless body—agreeably proportioned, with each part exercising a relaxed, cordial aplomb. Noble identity depended not only on one's knowledge and proper execution of the correct actions, but also on the body's image in a given position. Undesirable attributes with which anyone might be born, such as knock-knees, a thrusting chin, or sunken chest, impeded the realization of a successful aristocratic identity. As dancing master Pierre Rameau observed, no better remedy than dancing existed for enhancing one's bodily position and consequently one's social position: "Dancing adds grace to the gifts which nature has bestowed upon us, by regulating the movements of the body and setting it in its proper positions. And if it does not completely eradicate the defects with which we are born, it mitigates or conceals them."[12]
Louis XIV had reinforced the body's role in conveying social status from the earliest years of his reign. He pursued a defectless body through his own dancing, and he consolidated rubrics of etiquette and comportment as part of his strategic plan to enhance royal authority. All nobility necessarily danced, and in day-to-day life they comported themselves in the gracefully moderate manner cultivated in dancing. Louis XIV had commemorated this metadisciplinary role for dance in his founding charter for the Académie de la Danse in 1762.[13] The original twelve members of
[12] Pierre Rameau, The Dancing Master (1725), trans. Cyril W. Beaumont. (New York: Dance Horizons Press, 1970), 2.
[13] The charter begins by asserting the centrality of dance's role in providing a base for all other physical activities including the bearing of arms: " ... the Art of Dance has always been recognized as the most honest and most necessary at forming the body, at providing the most basic and natural foundation for all sorts of exercises, among others the bearing of arms, and consequently, one of the most advantageous and useful to our nobility, and to others who have the honor of approaching us, not only in times of war in our armies, but also in times of peace in the entertainment of our ballets" ( ... l'Art de la Danse ait toujours été reconnu l'un des plus honnêtes & plus nécessaires à former le corps, & lui donner les premières & plus naturelles dispositions à toutes sortes d'Exercices, & entr'autres à ceux des armes, & par conséquent l'un des plus avantageux & plus utiles à notre Noblesse, & autres qui ont l'honneur de Nous approcher, non-seulement en tems de Guerre dans nos Armées, mais même en tems de Paix dans le divertissement de nos Ballets) (Lettres patentes du roi pour l'établissement de l'Académie royale de danse en la ville de Paris, in Danseurs et Ballet de l'Opéra de Paris depuis 1671 [Paris: Archives Nationales et Bibliothèque Nationale, 1988], 27).
the academy, and those who replaced or were initiated into the institution by them, were responsible for maintaining standards of excellence in dancing and in choreography, but they were also required to pursue dance as a system of knowledge that would provide its practitioners with an underlying foundation of bodily training useful in all situations.
The professional dancers trained at the academy who appeared onstage throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries exemplified the values of a defectless physical appearance and a mannerly social comportment, and drew extensively from the vocabularies of social dance, their syntactic phrasing, and their rapport with musical structure. Even though the theatrical repertoire included many steps of greater intricacy, with each step fashioned for presentation by a dancer onstage to an audience seated in front and often below, the basis for theatrical invention resided in the social dance repertoire, which in turn referenced correct and gracious aristocratic comportment. Whether they danced the roles of gods and goddesses or shepherds and shepherdesses, dancers were concerned less with an illustration of the proper execution of specific actions than with the manner in which any action might signal propriety. Their nested references to generalized physical articulation celebrated the infrastructure that connected all members of French society, a structure whose origins could be found in the monarchic order of things.
In its references to other realms of physical endeavor, dancing gestured a manner of physical being to which all the king's subjects should and could aspire. Its cultivation of a "nonchalant, disjointed, and passionate physicality" established the guidelines for a moderate and moderated behavior through which social affairs should be conducted. Dancers' deliciously ambiguous desirability, their nuanced negotiations of space, glorified what opportunities were available within the highly scripted codes of social protocol. Their command of emotionality and corporeality ennobled the systems of control under which all the king's subjects necessarily operated.
Choreography for the opera-ballets thus elaborated an idealized version of the absolutist body politic. Through their gracefully calibrated distances from one another and the perpetual restraint maintained by all bodies from any expression too fulsome, dancers celebrated the reticulated
social space within which the king and his subjects were variously positioned. Identity within that space, established as much by how one moved as by what one said, never existed apart from the patterns of all bodies in regulated motion together. Each body, held carefully in its place and carefully holding its place, depended on the moderated movements of all bodies for its identity and significance. Desire traveled among these bodies, fueled by their restraint and by the ingenious variations on standardized positions and steps they performed. Yet the static quality of the danced interludes belied the choreography of power that authorized all dancing bodies.
By the 1730s and 1740s, the persuasive eloquence of this system of evocation had begun to erode, and choreographers and aestheticians aspired to replace what they construed as the ornamental silliness of the opera-ballet's spectacle with more realistic, moving images of human nature. Following Sallé, dancers, unmasked and clothed in accurate historical costume, would depict actual human beings embroiled in the issues and conflicts of social life. They would enact the dramas inherent in all human relationships, causing viewers to both see and feel the characters' experiences. As in Sallé's production of Pygmalion , they would forsake the trappings of aristocratic entitlement in search of authentic human conditions.
To accomplish this choreographic agenda, those who followed Sallé's experiments began to utilize facial expressions within and as a part of the choreographic sequences.[14] They likewise replaced the bell-shaped skirts and stiff tunics (tonnelets ) that segmented the body into articulate periphery and composed central body with a more supple dress that emphasized the connection of limbs to torso. Characters' identities were thereby established, not through the location of telling emblems on a generically shaped costume, but through imitative resemblance to the real or imagined life fashion of those characters.
Perhaps most significant, their new ballets relied on few if any lyrics to convey the plot. Instead pantomimed dialogues, woven into the syntax of steps, elucidated the action. Laminated to the meter, intensity, and phrasing of the music, these distilled depictions of the emotions desig-
[14] Choreographers working within the conventions of the new genre include Jean Baptiste François De Hesse, the choreographer for Mme de Pompadour's private theater; Antoine Buonaventure Pitrot, who presented several works at the Comédie Italienne; Jean Lany, who created danced interludes for the Comédie Française; Jean Georges Noverre, who presented ballets at the Opéra Comique before traveling to Stuttgart and Vienna; and principal dancers at the Opéra Jean Dauberval and Marie Allard.
nated exaggerated and stereotypic versions of human interaction. The face engaged in these stereotypic depictions both as a part of the total bodily response and as the final arbiter of the movement's meaning. It presented the most condensed version of the passion—whether pain, anger, shock, adoration, interest, confusion, flirtation, or amazement—being represented in the drama.
Out of these sequences of postural and gestural mimetic movement, choreographers built new kinds of group interactions that moved the plots forward. Where the opera-ballets had offered pleasant exercises in tracing bodies' progress along geometrical pathways, the new action ballets (ballets d'action ) engaged bodies in danced dialogues that created dynamic and asymmetrical configurations. The vocabulary's elaboration of several heights for the body—degrees of plié and relevé —and equally subtle but precise facings for the dancer faded in significance when compared with this vivid use of pantomime. Likewise, the precise location of each body within vertical and horizontal grids mattered far less than the causal logic of each body's response to the unfolding drama onstage. Danced characters began to move in tensile ensembles or froze into tableaux vivants in which each character registered a unique participation.
If the painterly analogue to the opera-ballets could be found in Watteau's work, the approach corresponding to the new action ballets existed in paintings by Jean-Baptiste Greuze. Whereas Watteau's images perpetually solicited further clarification, Greuze's tableaux specified everything. Each character's motivation and situation were fully explicated in the careful display of facial expression, calculated postures, and specified distances among figures. The crucial dramatic moment with all its attendant complexities was fleshed out clearly. Like the tableaux onstage, these paintings constructed organic wholes from the individualized participation of each character.
As in Greuze's paintings, the new action ballets staged a feeling like melancholy very differently from the opera-ballets. Along with anger, joy, fear, angst, or intrigue, melancholy assumed a role as one of the lexical units through which characters portrayed their interactions and the narrative sustained its development. A character manifested melancholy in response to new information or a change in events and eventually evolved out of melancholy—again, as motivated by internal or external changes to the situation. To represent this trope, the performer learned to theatricalize schematized elements from the visual appearance of the melancholy person: a drooping of the head to front or side, the slow concave collapse of the torso, or perhaps the back of the hand pressed lightly against the forehead.
This rubric for representation pried both dance and the dancing body loose from their interstitial situatedness among the discourses of health, comportment, athleticism, sociability, and theatricality. It required a stable and solid physical entity to portray accurately the habits and reactions of other bodies and to house the causally related sequences of feelings that characters would enact. To produce such a body, dance pedagogy slowly shifted from the study of dances to the study of exercises that prepared the body for dancing. It incorporated insights from the developing science of anatomy to enhance the effectiveness of routines that addressed the body's strength and flexibility as well as any individual deficiencies.[15] Through these training regimens and the anatomical language they employed, the body acquired a kind of objecthood. Its central function, rather than to participate in the conduct of social, political, and theatrical affairs, was to carry around and communicate the desires of the individual subject.
Thus the action ballets embodied a new conception of individuality as discrete and bounded by each individuated body. No longer enmeshed within webs of spatial-social protocol, the danced character generated his or her own sequence of feelings or else responded uniquely to the initiatives of others. No longer defined in relation to the flux within those webs of signification, the dancing body now maintained an autonomous identity, moving responsively to enact the character it played. This responsiveness caused the body to lose its capacity to engage directly the sensuous fascination of viewers. The character, rather than the body, became the source of erotic and emotional attraction.
Opera-ballet had presented physicality as simultaneously disciplined and articulate, sensuous and lively. Action ballet redistributed these qualities, leaching them from the cultivated body and investing them in the constructed character. The dancing body shifted from the central subject to a prop by which the subject could be displayed. Its facility in assisting the character, rather than its gracefulness in presenting itself, was what demanded evaluation. Gracefulness continued as an evaluative category during the displays of technical prowess, the celebratory scenes of vigorous virtuoso dancing, that choreographers interjected into the ballets. In
[15] Published writings on dance pedagogy and choreography from the period reflect an extensive understanding of and focus on anatomy. See, for example, Gennaro Magri's Theoretical and Practical Treatise on Dancing (Naples, 1779), trans. Mary Skeaping, Anna Ivanova, and Irmgard E. Betty (London: Dance Books, 1988); Giovanni-Andrea Battista Gallini's Treatise on the Art of Dancing (London: printed for the Author and sold by R. & J. Dodsley, T. Becket, & W. Nicholl, 1762); and Noverre's Letters on Dancing and Ballets .
these scenes, the body performed on its own. However, its detachment from the signifying capacity to reference other realms of physical action left its breathtaking dexterity without the resonances to emotion and to eros that it once enjoyed.
Nevertheless, the choreography for the action ballets placed all bodies on the same footing. It extended to all human beings regardless of class or profession the same capacities to feel and to empathize with another's feelings. No longer suspended within a web of gestures hierarchized by the perfect perspective of the stage as universe and the single, most favorable viewing location of the monarch, these mimetic bodies opened up the spectacle to a wider range of viewing positions from which their discursive messagings could be apprehended. Their group configurations and their evolving sequences of passions could be seen best—but not most perfectly—from the center of the auditorium. The new mimetic bodies, responding logically to events around them, danced out an independence never before available to them. Freed from the relational protocols they had previously been required to perform, they could now initiate and respond all on their own. Well in advance of the seizure of power by the "people" of France, the action ballets provided palpable images of just how the French citizen's body should behave.
Where the vocabulary for the opera-ballets had referenced courtly codes of protocol, the mimetic sequences utilized by these self-sustaining bodies derived from a seemingly universal language of gesture. Choreographers and aestheticians claimed a primal and innate origin for gesture in the responsiveness of each individual to his or her own feelings.[16] The
[16] Librettist, dance historian, and author of several entries for Diderot's Encyclopédie , Louis de Cahusac, in La Danse ancienne et moderne, ou traité historique de la danse (The Hague, 1754), 1:13, proposed this origin for dance, in a statement highly typical of the period:
Man experienced sensations from the first moment that he breathed; and the sounds of the voice, the play of features across his face, the movements of his body, were simply expressions of what he felt.
There are naturally in the voice sounds of pleasure and of sorrow, of anger and of tenderness, of distress and of joy. There are similarly in the movements of the face and of the body gestures of all these traits; the ones were the primitive sources of song, and the others of dance.
This was the universal language understood by all nations and even by animals, because it is anterior to all conventions and natural to all the creatures that breathe on the earth.
L'Homme a eu des sensations au premier moment qu'il a respiré, et les sons de la voix, le jeu des traits du visage, les mouvemens du corps ont été seuls les expressions de ce qu'il a senti.
Il y a naturellement dans la voix des sons de plaisir et de douleur, de colere et cle ten-dresse, d'affliction et de joie. Il y a de même dans les mouvemens du visage et du corps, des gestes de tous ces caractères les uns ont été les sources primitives du Chant, et les autres de la Danse.
C'est-là ce langage universel entendu par toutes les Nations et par les animaux même; parce qu'il est antérieur à toutes les conventions, et naturel à tous les etres qui respirent sur la terre.
motivation and facility for communication thereby originated within each body and not in a socially constructed and politically imposed codification of conduct. Nature and not culture served as inspiration for the new ballet, as Noverre observed in his definition of the genre:
A well-composed ballet is a living picture of the passions, manners, customs, ceremonies and customs of all nations of the globe, consequently, it must be expressive in all its details and speak to the soul through the eyes; if it be devoid of expression, of striking pictures, of strong situations, it becomes a cold and dreary spectacle. This form of art will not admit of mediocrity; like the art of painting, it exacts a perfection the more difficult to acquire in that it is dependent on the faithful imitation of nature.[17]
The universal language of gesture, plainly evident to any who would study nature carefully, provided the means for uniting and communicating with all nations of the globe.
By locating dance's origins in a naturalized, ahistorical time and place, and by representing more realistic characters and events onstage, choreographers removed themselves from their role as direct emissaries of the king's taste. Yet their new choreographic approach contained a tacit ideological argument of its own. Because dancing developed from human and not godly predispositions, it operated with absolute validity outside the purview of the church. Because, moreover, its prehistorical originators dwelled in a classless community, dancing could be seen as an endeavor of a diverse urban society rather than the project of a hierarchically organized court. These Enlightenment goals of decentering church and monarchy were complemented by a third line of argumentation, imperialist in its objectives, that used the presumption of movement as a universal language to rationalize the continuation of expansionist foreign policies. Because dance productions claimed universal accessibility to and significance for the portraits of life they presented onstage, they helped to justify the exportation of French culture just as they provided reassurance that Paris, sited at the center of the world, spoke to and represented all the rest of the earth.
Sallé, poised at the brink of this transformation in representation, may well have chosen the myth of the sculptor whose creation is brought to
[17] Noverre, Letters on Dancing and Ballets , 16.
life to reflect on the impending changes in choreographic conventions. The reflexive ingenuity of her choice resulted, I argue, from her awareness of the aesthetic possibilities of yet a third choreographic approach. Neither mannerly nor mimetic, but rather deeply ironic, this approach to the representation of human feeling was already circulating in the unofficial London and Paris theater productions of the early eighteenth century.[18] It developed a use of pantomime radically distinct from that used in the action ballets.
In both cities, but in Paris especially, an intense and prolonged rivalry sprang up at the beginning of the eighteenth century between the fair theaters and the three authorized theatrical establishments: the Opéra, the Comédic Française, and the Comédie Italienne. As the popularity of the scandalous, irreverent fair productions began to affect audience size and consequently profits at the official theaters, administrative staff at the main houses marshaled government support to harass their cultural and legal inferiors. Based on charters received from Louis XIV that defined their exclusive rights to perform opera, drama, and musical comedy respectively, the three houses began to extract royalty fees from the fair theaters and also to prohibit them from presenting works in any of their genres. Censors, suddenly empowered with new responsibilities, exercised unpredictable, despotic control over texts submitted for their approval. New regulations not only enjoined the fair theaters from presenting comedies, tragedies, or entire operas, but also restricted their use of dialogue and even sung lyrics. Between 1745 and 1751, for example, spoken or sung dialogue was banned entirely.[19]
Capitalizing on an inconsistent and slow-moving bureaucracy, the fair theaters responded with a riotous profusion of strategies for altering presentational formats.[20] Dialogues might be presented with one actor at a time onstage; players appeared speaking nonsense syllables in perfect alexandrines while pantomiming the action; an offstage actor would deliver lines as an onstage actor mouthed them; child actors were used in place of adults; actors might carry their lines on signs around their necks; or verse would be displayed on huge placards that the audience would
[18] Artur Michel emphasizes the influence that the English mime tradition had on the French fair theaters by citing the number of English mimes who were imported to perform in Paris, especially between the years 1720 and 1729; see "The Ballet d'Action Before Noverre," Dance Index 6, no. 3 (1947): 55.
[19] Ibid., 67.
[20] For a detailed discussion of these subversive conventions, see Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 49–67.
then sing to popular tunes while the actors mimed the action. Because prohibitions usually denied producers the right to present extended sequences of spoken or sung dialogue, gesture was frequently substituted to convey part or all of the drama.
The demand placed on bodily movement to carry the narrative along inspired substantial changes in the vocabulary inherited from the bawdy, acrobatic, interventionist style of the commedia dell'arte tradition. Players took an increasing interest in the representation of the passions through facial and bodily gestures that indexed a full range of emotional experience, fashioning sequences of such gestures that delineated the narrative structure implied in the music. They adapted the intricate spatial relations developed in acrobatic routines to illustrate relationships among different types of characters. And they began to extend the length and scope of coherent narrative that could be rendered by movement and music alone.
Although the pressure on the fair theaters to avoid classical theatrical genres forced an exploration of pantomime as a medium capable of telling a story, the thrust of the performances remained resolutely antinarrative. Fair theater thrived on the parodic, iconoclastic, and spectacular display rather than the coherent, sentimental tale, using pantomime to mimic in such a way as to deflate power. Many of the productions relied on the audience's familiarity with a classic plot. As they mercilessly satirized, for example, Lully's famous operas and Corneille's dramas, the unorthodox sequences or juxtapositions of events in different mediums unraveled any sense of narrative logic.
Under these conditions, the representation of emotional life acquired a very different modality of presentation. Mimetic renditions of emotional states, for example, would be interrupted by parodic and satirizing gestures that undercut their sincerity. These gestures shifted any empathic connection away from the character and toward the playfully bitter irony on which the entire performance was based. Feelings still coalesced and communicated themselves. Characters evoked pity, erotic fascination, or a sense of outraged injustice, but the parodic gestures intruded on the action so as to force a double perspective on both the characters and their feelings. Viewers felt a character's melancholy but at the same time necessarily sensed the way in which that feeling was constructed—the conventions giving it existence and its transitory identity. Some of the time, this ironic reflexivity coexisted with the feelings represented in a way that permitted a critical yet profound sense of the character's state of being. Other times, the parodic intervention dissolved any connection to feel-
ing through its presumptuous extravagance. Regardless of the degree of its outrageousness, the parodic presence never permitted characters' feelings to develop in long, unbroken sequences or characters themselves to attain enduring, stable identities.
The combination of humor, shock, and eros served up in these productions appealed not only to the working classes for whom they were a familiar staple but also to the aristocracy whose values they openly satirized.[21] Whereas the working classes relished the opportunity to appropriate and then violate the ennobling myths of the period, the aristocracy delighted in the sexy affront to elevated values. By providing a kind of entertainment to which both classes could enthusiastically respond, the fair theaters complicated and compromised a policy designed to maintain distinct kinds of art for distinct classes of people. Police and other city authorities expressed ambivalence about the fair theaters, at once feeling the pressure to uphold the high standards of the king's authorized artistic tradition as exemplified by the Opéra and Comédie Française, but also subscribing to the prevalent belief that a populace, diverted by entertainment, would be more controllable and less given over to discussions of flagrant social injustice.
Still, the subversive impact of the productions may have extended further than authorities could anticipate by involving viewers from disparate social classes in a commentary on social class itself. The productions must have simultaneously assaulted and involved all viewers with their unpredictable sequencing of events 'in different mediums, enhanced by the viewers' physical proximity to the stage. For not only did the small size of the theaters, as compared to the main houses at the Opéra or Comédie Française, situate viewers close to the explosive barrage of sensations on-stage, but it also required them to rub shoulders with one another. Although boxes were available for aristocratic spectators, all classes interacted at close range. Tidy boundaries between populations dissolved in such an intimate space, where theatrical lighting and makeshift architecture destabilized clear indications of rank—whether in terms of dress, comportment, or companions. The fact that in these theatrical productions actors were representing identities other than their own further problematized the grounds on which social identity was determined. Could one assume the rank of an aristocrat simply by acting like one?
[21] One of Isherwood's main theses in Farce and Fantasy is that popular entertainment in Paris consistently appealed to and was viewed by all classes of people, and that at such entertainment the rich and poor brushed shoulders constantly.
One anonymous description, apparently by a lady of high birth, elaborated on the disquieting confusion generated by these productions in a vivid account of pre-performance "entertainments" by actors and audience members. Having entered the well-known fair theater Opéra Comique early because of the cold, she was confronted by a number of players gearing up for the performance:
A young Musketeer, one knee on the floor, declaimed tragicomically at the feet of a fairly pretty actress and kissed the hand that she indifferently allowed him to hold; another actress feebly fought without any difficulty against the advances of a dull councillor who desired to return to its place the garter she had removed so as to show him its fine workmanship; a third dallied with an impudent fop whose hand caressed her bosom.
Un jeune Mousquetaire un genou en terre déclamoit tragicomiquement aux pleds d'une assez jolie Actrice, & lui baisolt une main qu'on lui abandonnoit sans façon; une autre Actrice combattoit foiblement avec un fade Conseiller, qui vouloit absolument lui remettre sa jarretière, qu'elle avoit détachée pour lui faire admirer la beauté de Pouvrage; une troisième badinoit avec un Petitmaître impudent, qui lui passoit la main sur la gorge.
A duke with whom she was acquainted arrived and escorted her to her seat, but the performers continued to regard her with such effrontery "that I changed appearance twenty times from embarrassment, which in turn served as the subject of a vast number of nasty jokes which they delivered loudly enough to be heard" (que je changeai vingt fois de visage, mon embarras leur fournit quantité de mauvaises plaisanteries, qu'ils débitèrent assez haut pour être entendue). Arriving at her seat, a new series of impertinences assaulted her as twenty sets of opera glasses turned toward her and she overheard loud inquiries as to her identity and comments on her appearance. Soon she was rescued from this scrutiny by the arrival in an adjacent box of another young woman who seemed to relish the opportunity to perform for the audience:
[She] made faces, took some snuff, whispered to some kind of servant who had accompanied her, took from her embroidered purse a small gold box which she handled so as to assure its visibility to the spectators below, and returned it to the purse, ostentatiously tying its knot; then, to dispel the fatigue that this pitiful exercise had caused, but also to be able to display a portrait ringed with diamonds that she wore as a bracelet, she leaned her head on her elbow and tried out for a fairly long time an interesting pose. Unfortunately for her, the actors then appeared, stealing from her the better part of the viewers' attention.
[Elle] fit des mines, prit du tabac, parla bas à une espèce de Suivante qu'elle avoit avec elle, tira d'un sac brode une navette d'or qu'elle fit briller aux yeux des Spectateurs, la remit dans son sac après avoir fait un noeud; & pour se délasser de la fatigue que lui avoit causé ce pénible exercice, & montrer un portrait enrichi de diamans qu'elle portoit en forme de bracelet, elle appuya sa tête sur son coude, & essaya assez long-tems une attitude intéressante. Mal-heureusement pour elle, les Acteurs parurent, & lui enlevèrent la plus grande partie des Spectateurs.[22]
This description cast audience members and actors in a series of scenes performed in the lobby, and it likewise described audience members performing for one another—all prior to the commencement of the production. It even intimated the continuation of audience performances throughout the performance onstage. The snide irreverence of the actors and the hyperbolic gestures of the young woman who could afford a box seat derived their meaning from a class-conscious critique of aristocratic privilege. If this anonymous account is at all accurate, then the performances encouraged audience members along with actors to demonstrate their knowledge of the codes of class-based comportment both on and off the stage.
In their transgressive experimentation with bodily movement and gesture, the fair theaters constructed a critique of absolutism. By satirizing the very conventions through which aristocratic identity was maintained, performances intimated the existence of a more egalitarian site from which to exercise the state's power. This ironic egalitarianism differed from the humanistic conception of citizenship subsequently elaborated in the action ballets choreographed by Noverre and others. In those ballets the body, as the vehicle for individuated expression, functioned as a territory controlled by the individual to ensure adherence to the state's prescribed behavior. No bodies behaved outrageously; all bodies faithfully portrayed the characters assigned them. The ironic pantomime, in contrast, cultivated a protean body capable of conformance and then excess, docility followed by grotesquerie. Any consistency in its satiric stance resided in its relentless critique of absolutist values and not in the body through which such a critique was manifested.
This ironic stance toward dance and world, however, was not to prevail as the choreographic model for ballet's subsequent development out of opera and into an autonomous art form. Instead the action ballet, with
[22] Anon., Lettre de Madame à une de ses amies sur les spectacles, et principalement sur l'Opéra Comique, 9–11, 15–16; Bibliothèque de l'Opéra.
its humanistic characterization of people and circumstances, came to define late-eighteenth-century theatrical dance. Where fair theater productions elaborated a collective and contingent responsiveness to situations, the action ballet focused on the logical reactions of individual characters. These characters manifested qualities of good samaritanism, domestic loyalty, and the work ethic, as well as empathic sensitivity to others, the sensibilité so championed by Diderot and others. And unlike the fair theaters, in which bodies reacted unpredictably, maintaining their allegiance only to social critique, action ballet developed docile bodies, bodies loyal to the subjects whose thoughts and desires they portrayed.
Sallé's parents had both performed in the fair theaters, and her uncle was a famous harlequin.[23] Her own first performances took place on fair theater stages. Her career as première danseuse at the Opéra also brought her into contact with London theater producer John Rich, whose various projects included the development of pantomime theater in that city. Although she was not alone in undertaking the kind of choreographic experimentation with ballet and pantomime that marks her choreographic oeuvre, her mastery of two distinct movement repertoires and her prestigious position at the Opéra endowed her pioneering explorations with special distinction.
Historians of dance have seldom credited Sallé with any influence over the shape of choreographic change, preferring instead to focus on her great skill as a dancer.[24] Credit for the choreographic breakthroughs that led to the development of the story ballet has typically gone not to Sallé, but to Jean Georges Noverre, who may well have been a young audience member at her performances.[25] Noverre not only choreographed but also wrote
[23] See Pierre Aubry and Emile Dacier, "Les Caractères de la Danse": Histoire d'un divertissement pendant la première moitié du XVIIIe siecle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1905), 17.
[24] Many eighteenth-century authors identify Sallé's work as the direct source and inspiration for the reforms in dance advocated by mid-eighteenth-century choreographers. Algarotti, for example, cites her ballets Pygmalion and Les Ballets de la rose as the ones choreographers should emulate (Essai sur l'opéra , 66); and Charles Compan describes her as the innovator of the genre of ballet d'action (Dictionnaire de Danse [Paris: Chez Cailleau, 1787], 4). Twentieth-century scholars, however, have largely ignored her central influence on the establishment of narrative in dance, with two notable exceptions: Peter Brinson, in Background to European Ballet (New York: Arno Press, 1980), 164–66; and Artur Michel, "Ballet d'Action," 68. Michel (65) traces her influences through Hilverding, who saw her in Paris in 1735, and through her partner Lany, who produced a version of her Pygmalion in Berlin in 1745, which Noverre saw.
[25] Deryck Lynham presumes an association between Noverre and Sallé during the early 1740s though their alliances with the director of the Opéra Comique, Jean Monnet; see Le Chepalier Noverre (1950; London: Dance Books, 1972), 13–15.
about the choreographic reforms that would enable dance to narrate.[26] His books and scenarios for his productions made history where her dances did not. Dance histories have also failed to acknowledge the experimental ingenuity of fair theater performers who pioneered in the use of gestural narration. Even though Noverre, like Sallé, began his career in the fair theaters, histories have typically established distinct paths of development for aristocratic and popular entertainment traditions, delineating for theatrical dance an exclusively aristocratic heritage.
This text's body has moved against canonical dance histories by advocating interest in the resistive ingenuity of popular culture. It also chose to dance with Sallé rather than Noverre in an attempt to problematize not only his fame but also the preference for the written over the danced, which his place in dance history represents. By the time of Noverre's notoriety the ballet's sensible body had established a clear image of egalitarian premises, which the Revolution further attempted to realize. Yet this vision of liberation from absolutism entailed the subjugation of the body to both anatomy and narrativity. Only two generations earlier, Sallé had performed her vision of dance's future at a time when the body, still a powerful medium for articulating and not merely enhancing identity, could also begin to narrate its circumstances. Dancing in the midst of epistemic motion, she could coalesce at the site of her body a physicalized sociability, an individuated sensibility, and an ironic critique.
This text's politics worked to complicate traditional accounts of the political mobilization that led to the French Revolution by focusing on changes in the conception of the dancing body across that period. In an effort to dismantle the exoskeletal structure of absolutism that kept all bodies in their proper places, choreographers constructed new techniques of performance and of representation that imbued each dancing body with an endoskeletal system of control. As partner to this new system, a polarized opposition between aesthetics and politics replaced the subtle yet persuasive politicking of which the baroque dancer was capable. Sallé, whose choreography theorized these relationships between body and identity, stands for and at a moment when the aesthetic and the political might still dance together on the same stage.
[26] Noverre's Lettres sur la danse et les ballets was published in 1760 and expanded and revised as the two-volume Lettres sur les arts imitateurs en général, et sur la danse en particulier (Paris: Léopold Collin, 1807).