Dramatis Personae Archive / Programme / Theater and Dance
The oldest book in this archive, La Vie de Scaramouche by Angelo Costantini, documents the life of Tiberio Fiorilli, the comic actor known as Scaramouche. Fiorilli drew from his personality and life experiences to create his onstage persona. His physical postures and grimaces helped to develop a new type of physical comedy, which he passed on as mentor to Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known as Molière. In the commedia dell’arte tradition, actors communicated through gesture and movement. Incorporating this use of the body onstage into comic theater led also to combining dance with another art form, poetry, which created the court ballet.
Many of the accompanying narratives for the court ballets were written by royal poet Isaac de Benserade. The Oeuvres de Monsieur de Bensserade catalogues these ballets and includes poetry that theatrically showcases body parts and character types. These new additions to entertainment, specifically the use of movement in theater and sophisticated choreography in the ballet, played central roles at the court of Louis XIV, where the king himself often danced the lead role. Extravagant and performed on a grand scale, court ballets called for increasingly more complex and spectacular stagecraft. These events were created through the incorporation of special machinery, which facilitated entrances and exits, as well as scene changes.
By the early eighteenth century, choreography and the French masters who developed it were known throughout Europe. John Weaver’s An Essay Towards an History of Dancing is generally regarded as the first history of European dance written in English. Weaver does not intend, however, to create a comprehensive and genealogical history of dance. His “history” is rather an expository essay on Weaver’s own theories of dance, drawn from those of the French masters at Versailles. Viewed against the spiritual mimes, pantomimes and Greek ritual dances of the past, Weaver argues, the current state of dance is deplorable. While choreography advanced the art of dance, allowing dancers to record their steps, it did nothing to recuperate what Weaver considered the lost spirituality in movement. In creating his “history,” he recalls the cultures for which movement was a form of spiritual and intellectual practice.
The first attempts at a fully chronological history of dance appear by the middle of the 18 th century. Both Jacques Bonnet and Louis de Cahusac compile histories of dance from ancient civilizations to their day. Although they represent two generations, they both recognize antiquity and early Christianity for their contributions to the art of dance. Bonnet, whose history appears first, explains to the reader that most ancient civilizations made dance an integral part of their ritualistic ceremonies, leading early Christians to view dance as a pagan practice. He also explores the links between dance, music, painting, and poetry—the fine arts, which, according to Bonnet, best express human emotion and experience. Cahusac borrows a great deal from Bonnet, but his book differs from Bonnet’s in that it offers more than a chronological history. It might also be described as a practical guide to the principal movements of dance.
Later historians would expand and enrich this tradition, many acknowledging their debt to the Histoire générale de la danse sacrée et profane and La Danse ancienne et moderne ou traité historique de la danse , as well as the roles Bonnet and Cahusac played in creating a heritage for the dance. Giovani Gallini and Auguste Alexis Floréal Baron are among the dance writers who enriched this tradition, each in his own unique way.
Gallini explores the decline of ancient dance as ritual, beginning with Confucius through late antiquity and into modern Europe. As Weaver had hoped to do, Galllini reestablishes dance as a necessary art that expresses both the intimate soul and the physical body. Like Weaver and Bonnet, he emphasizes the “air and port of performance” and reaffirms the validity of dance as a way to define character and manners. His work is similar to the Lettres et Entretiens sur la danse by Baron because it is the only book in our collection that contains notations. He provides detailed descriptions and specific steps to 44 cotillions. He uses longhand notations (movement described in word) rather than steno-choreography (symbolic notation) so that even the uninitiated can read this book today be able to replicate and perform the dances.
Baron relies heavily on Cahusac and Bonnet, yet has little investment in writing a new dance history. Instead, he records and compiles for publication what he claims are letters to and interviews with his “friend” Sophie, and two “dancers,” the philosophers Heraclitus and Democrates. They consist primarily of negative judgments of earlier dance histories, which he quotes voluminously. In the course of his diatribe, he defines choreography as a sign system similar to music, whose origins are uncertain. He concludes that this sign system is not really practical because it is too difficult to understand. The choreographies he prints in his text suggest to the modern reader that he is right. While we can only infer from Weaver that the mechanics of choreography stripped dance of its depth, we can see in Baron that choreographic notation made the art feel like a science.