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autodidact-adventures · 8 years ago

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Ballet History (Part 19): The ballet d’action

By now, ballet in Paris had reached a crisis. Sallé and her generation were gone, and dance was moving towards virtuosic technical feats, but not much more. Both artists and critics scorned dance for its shallow artifice and insincere deceit. “Like a dancing master” was a common insult to describe anything that had fallen into a false, decadent state.

This criticism of ballet came from the cultural upheaval of the French Enlightenment. 1600's French classical culture had declined into decorative excess and overindulgence, and the current generation of artists & writers were at odds with the society they lived in. The Enlightenment wasn't just about the ancien régime's underlying principles, but everything – how people dressed, moved and danced. Politics, art, fashion, performing arts – all these were the subject of strong debate. Many of the articles written about dance were published in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie (compiled 1751-80).

Noverre acknowledged his debt to Diderot in his Lettres. Diderot had written a lot about the problems in French theatre, which he found “wooden” and far too formal. The actors postured & preened at the front of the stage (where the light was best) to perform their dramatic speeches. Then they would drop out of character and wander aimlessly around the stage.

Diderot wanted to develop a new kind of theatre, which would have sustained action, dramatic tableaux, and pantomime as its base. He wanted actors to remove their masks; look & speak to each other, not the audience; and stop using the traditional declamation techniques (like Garrick). Others had the same ideas.

Diderot & others also wanted to make the costumes more realistic – peasants didn't wear silk! And in the 1750's, actors began to listen. In 1753, Madame Favart (Comédie Italienne) wore simple peasant dress when playing the part of a village girl. In 1755, Mademoiselle Clairon (a tragic actress) performed without hoopskirts and toned down her delivery.

But if the problem with theatre was that it didn't say things realistically, then the problem with dance was that it didn't say anything at all! Louis de Cahusac was a writer & librettist who worked with Jean-Philippe Rameau, and he complained that ballet had reached its limits – Sallé had been expressive, but ballet-dancers nowadays were nothing more than technicians, and they were debasing their art.

Diderot said: “I would like someone to tell me what all these dances such as the minuet, the passepied, and the rigaudon signify...this man carries himself with an infinite grace; every movement of his conveys ease, charm and nobility: but what is he imitating? That's not singing, that's solfège.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau had composed operas & ballets in Paris in the 1740's and 50's, but he would later turn against ballet, saying that it was an example of how society “enchained” individuals, destroying their natural goodness with unnecessary social graces:

If I were a dancing master, I would not perform all the monkeyshines of Marcel, good only for that country where he engages in them. Instead of eternally busying my pupil with leaps, I would take him to the foot of a cliff. There I would show him what attitude he must take, how he must bear his body and his head, what movements he must make, in what way he must place now his foot, now his hand, so as to follow lightly the steep, rough, uneven paths and to bound from peak to peak in climbing up as well as down. I would make him the emulation of a goat rather than that of a dancer at the Opéra.

Rousseau believed that performing ballets within operas interrupted the story and wrecked its dramatic effect. Baron Grimm agreed, worrying that ballet had taken over French opera: “French opera has become a spectacle where everything that is good and evil in the characters is reduced to dances.” And these dances, he said, were nothing more than academic exercises.

Rousseau's decision was that “all dances that depict only themselves, and all ballet which is just dancing, should be banished from lyric theatre.”

Noverre wrote about these issues in his Lettres. He wanted to turn ballet away from the shallowness & pleasure-seeking of the aristocracy, and towards the study of man, towards tragedy and moral dilemmas. Performing beautiful movements against beautiful sets with beautiful costumes was not enough – ballet should appeal to the emotions as well as the eyes, becoming a “portrait of humanity” with manking & truth as its subjects. The German critic & dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (who admired Noverre) said the same thing, in a different way: “If pomp and etiquette make machines out of men, it is the task of the poet to make men again out of these machines.”

So dance had to tell a story without words of any kind – only with movement. Not just light, entertaining stories – Noverre wanted to choreograph ballets about murder, betrayal and incest, and he went on to do so.

But he had no intention of changing the actual steps & poses of the noble style. The reformation of ballet would be done with pantomime, not with the steps. Noverre would create the ballet d'action – a mixture of pantomime, dance and music. It would be a new genre.

By “pantomime”, Noverre didn't mean the “low and trivial” gestures of the Italian bouffons, or the “false and lying” gestures of society, which people practised in front of mirrors. This type of pantomime would cut through the pretense and artifice of court forms, and reach the human core. It would be a “second organ” and a “cry of nature”, revealing man's deepest & most secret feelings.

Words often failed, Noverre wrote. Or they could be used to cover up what you truly meant. But the body couldn't lie – it moved instinctively, the muscles twisting the body into positions that conveyed inner torment far better than words ever could.

But pantomime had its limits – for example, it couldn't express the past or the future. So Noverre decided that ballets should be like paintings, not plays. They should be a series of “living tableaux” that followed one after the other, like a triptych.

Noverre studied art & architecture, and then applied the laws of perspective, proportion, and light to his ballets. He arranged the dancers by height, shortest at the front and tallest at the back, and then worked out patterns of chiaroscuro (light & shade) onstage.

The dancers, he argued, shouldn't be just pretty ornaments lined up in neat rows, but individual people, each given a specific role, with gestures and poses, to realistically show a moment of action. In his tableaux, the dancers often froze in a photo-like image and then moved on. Noverre even introduced pauses into his ballets, to bring attention to “all the details” of these “pictures”. [Not sure if that's referring to his regular ballets as opposed to the ballets d'action, or the dancing within the ballets d'action.]

The use of tableaux wasn't an original idea – as mentioned earlier, Diderot wanted to use pantomime for a new form of theatre. Parisian lawyers had begun using dramatic poses & tableaux to strengthen their arguments, as a rhetorical tool. The aristocracy used tableaux for art, too – when Louis XVI married Marie Antoinette in 1770, the celebrations included tableaux, with actors freezing in painting-like scenes, each marking an important symbolic moment in the celebrations. In the late 1700's, staging “live paintings” became a popular salon activity, especially for women.

But Noverre's use of tableaux changed how ballets were structured. In French opera, ballets were divertissements (numbers), arranged around an overarching theme, for aesthetic purposes. Symmetry, hierarchy, and patterns gave order to the dancers and the stage. Instead, Noverre created a series of static tableaux, in which irregularly-posed groups fixed their bodies in expressive postures, limbs at angles.

Noverre also wanted to change how the dancers looked: “Children of Terpsichore...abandon these cold masks, imperfect imitations of nature; they denature your expressions, they eclipse, to put it bluntly, your soul and deprive you of your most necessary resources for expressing yourselves; get rid of these huge wigs and gigantic coifs, which distort the proportions of head and body; do without these tight and fashionable underskirts, which deprive movement of its charms, which disfigure elegant positions and efface the beauty of the upper body in its different poses.”

Like Garrick, Noverre insisted that the theatre should be darkened & quiet during the performance. The audience members should be seated at exactly the right distance from the stage to best enter the world of the performance. The backstage area should be hidden from view, and set changes should be invisible and carried out smoothly – in Paris, set changes were usually announced by the stage manager loudly blowing a whistle, and the crew carried them out noisily and in full view of the audience, with curtain raised. This was the practice until the last decades of the 1700's.

Like Diderot & others, Noverre wanted to strip away the social mask & artistic constraints, to rediscover the natural man beneath it. The idea of the ballet d'action had a lot in common with the utopian desire to return to a pre-social world, with a primitive & universal language that would speak directly to all people, no matter their social class. Utopians disliked the French language (one critic called it “a perfidious language”), and many philosophers looked to pantomime as an alternative, one that was clear and completely honest. Louis-Sébastien Mercier would later say that gesture “is clear, never equivocal; it does not lie.”

These people didn't want to just change art – they wanted to create a new society, one that was honest and direct, and not based on a decadent court culture. So pantomime was part of a wide array of social/political issues, and thus the subject of a wide-ranging debate. Ballet was a part of the intellectual life of the time, not separate from it as it is now.

Rousseau was against ballet, but for pantomime. He felt that it could capture & express essential parts of the human nature, parts that had existed before people had been corrupted by society – the “cry of nature” that Noverre was interested in.

But Rousseau also agreed that pantomime had limitations. As a form of communication, it was primitive – it could convey basic needs, but nothing complicated. Humans couldn't fully express their emotions without words, he believed, or become morally self-aware.

So he imagined a golden stage in the development of human culture & society, where people would have enough language to communicate, but not enough to be deceptive & hypocritical. In this utopian world, people would live among music, dance and poetry. They would be ethically aware and good. It was the perfect middle ground between primitivism and decadence.

Rousseau was interested enough in pantomime to write one of his own. He wrote the one-act Pygmalion in 1763, and it was performed in 1770. It mixed pantomime, speech and music, and the performers used gesture instead of words at moments of great emotion, when they had been reduced otherwise to silence.

Diderot, on the other hand, wasn't so sure about pantomime. It is true that he laid out instructions for a new genre of drama, but there was a part of him that was not happy with pantomime. In 1761, he wrote Le Neveu de Rameau (it wasn't published until after his death). In it was a dialogue between Diderot and Jean-Philippe Rameau's nephew, who was a real person, a failed composer who had irrational outbursts but did have insightful ideas.

He writes the nephew as a desperate, defeated man, because of his inability to live up to his uncle & revitalize French music with a “cry of animal passion”. He is scornful, bitter, and self-indulgent, and extremely skilled in the art of pantomime, which he uses to make his way in the world. He demonstrates it for Diderot, showing how he mimes opera scenes and scenes from his own life. He is vain, manipulative and ingratiating, and uses his skill to get the luxuries he desperately wants.

Diderot tries to persuade him to give all this up, because it is false. But the nephew refuses to. Society is unrelenting, he says and social species devour each other (like Mademoiselle Deschamps against the financiers), so he has to join in, too, or he will be nothing. And so “he leaps, he climbs, he twists, he drags: he spends his life taking and performing positions.”

Diderot is furious: “The fact is you are a weakling, a gourmand, a coward, a muddied soul...No doubt worldly experiences come at a price; but you don't realize the price of the sacrifice you are making to get them. You are dancing, you have danced and you will continue to dance this vile pantomime.” The nephew is like Jourdain in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, self-serving and depraved, morally ruined by social posturing, corrupt and fawning. He's given up on everything that matters – but he is at least honest by admitting it, and this in a way makes him better than Diderot's philosopher & man of high principles. By the end of the story, it's not clear who's teaching whom a lesson. The contrived pantomime may be all we have, in the end.

Diderot considered Le Neveu de Rameau to be one of his “mad” works. But it shows that behind the self-assured tone in his writings of pantomime & the “natural man”, he was aware of just how impossible it was to escape or get rid of social conventions. For him, pantomime was all tied up with the failures of French music & social corruption. It seemed impossible to separate them, let alone get out of it all.

There were others who opposed pantomime. Jean-François Marmontel was a prominent librettist and a protégé of Voltaire, and he wrote a long article for the Encyclopédie, in which he argued that pantomime was morally dangerous & decadent, a form of pure passion which would seduce audiences and put them into a highly emotional state, unable to reason or think critically. The Romans had yielded to pantomime, and look what had happened to them! They had preferred sensational theatrical forms over rational forms that encouraged wisdom and moderation. Manners and comportment civilized man, but pantomime made him a beast.

Another critic argued that the raw gestures of pantomime were an insult to the French elite, and their formal, restrained manners.

So the ballet d'action wasn't just a new ballet/theatre genre. Noverre was focusing on pantomime, one of the most fundamental ideas of the French Enlightenment, and tying ballet's future to it. If he succeeded, if pantomime could cut through the social conventions that stifled & dragged humans down, then it could become the foremost new art of a modern man. It was very ambitious.

But, as mentioned earlier, Noverre didn't go all the way in eschewing the court origins & roots of ballet. Ballet and its steps were a court art, rooted in the court etiquette that he wanted to get away from.

Most of his ballets were not ballets d'action, but regular ballets, which stuck to the same conventions & techniques he criticized so strongly in his writings. He continued to use the steps & poses of the noble style. By focusing on pantomime, Noverre could use gestures to reform ballet, without going as far as to think about the actual steps, and how to take the court out of them. It was a safer route to take.

Of course, there were practical reasons for this as well: it wasn't just that he shied away from questioning the foundations of the art he'd been trained in & danced himself. Outside of London, he depended on the aristocracy to survive. He opposed the etiquette & conventions of the French elite, and was known for his rough manners and impulsive outbursts, but he was also a courtier, and could be charming & smooth when he needed to be. His portraits show him very well-groomed, as would be expected of him.

Diderot had the same problem. He was voluble, gobbled at table, and was far too unrestrained & enthusiastic for polite society, who were offended by him. But when Louis-Michel van Loo painted him at his desk with messy hair, he complained that he had not been depicted with his wig on. And Rousseau dramatically renounced Parisian society in the 1750's, getting rid of his fancy clothes and accessories, but he was extremely self-conscious about his appearance for the rest of his life.

Foreign courts usually hired Noverre as a French ballet-master, not as a radical. They expected him to stage the usual Parisian ballets that would be performed at the Opéra. When Noverre travelled to Stuttgart, Vienna & Milan to work there, he brought French dancers with him, and had them keep training in the serious style, even though he was composing his radical pantomime-ballets at the same time.

Throughout his career, Noverre preferred the French costume-designer Louis-René Boquet, who had trained with Boucher. His costumes were extravagant, following Parisian fashion, and were the exact opposite of what the ballet d'action required. Noverre represented both the French aristocratic style and the Enlightenment criticism of it (and did very well out of it.)

#book: apollo's angels #ballet #ballet history #history #french enlightenment #marie sallé #denis diderot #jean-georges noverre #david garrick #louis de cahusac #jean-philippe rameau #jean-jacques rousseau #louis xvi #jean-françois marmontel #louis-rené bouquet #françois boucher #ballet d'action #pantomime #theatre

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