Review Essay Mime, Music and Drama on the Eighteenth-Century Stage

VALLEJOS, JUAN IGNACIO

Dance Research Journal

Cambridge University Press

Año: 2013 vol. 45 p. 138 - 142

0149-7677

The purpose of this review essay is to analyse the historiographical methodology behind two of the latest publications on eighteenth century history of ballet. Mime, Music and Drama on the Eighteenth-Century Stage by Edward Nye contains an analysis of the genre within what the author argues to be its proper intellectual and historical context. Unable to reconstruct ballet d'action pieces at this point in history with the extant sources, Nye opts not just to compile a history of ballet d'action as an artistic phenomenon, but also as an intellectual one: he chooses to write a history of ideas of ballet d'action. The 1803 text of Noverre's Letters on dancing and ballet, recently published in a volume along with new material by Flavia Pappacena, seems diametrically opposed to Nye's. While Nye's claim that Noverre's book is an "over-used" text serves to symbolically discount it, Pappacena takes on the phenomenon of ballet d'action by defining it as "Noverre's Reform." Both authors nevertheless converge in the history of ideas since both practices its methodology. However, they could be subject to the very critique that Roger Chartier and other cultural historians have directed at the history of ideas itself. It is necessary to point out that ballet d'action as a cultural phenomenon is linked to a precise social actor: the ballet master. Hence, his ascension in the hierarchy of arts in the eighteenth century is note-worthy. The figure itself of the ballet master is in actuality a point of entry for cultural analysis, which warrants further investigation.