From that moment, Weaver tirelessly devoted himself to reforming French ballet and making it a cornerstone of English civic culture. Dancing, he asserted, could help men regulate their passions and behave with civility: it could be a social glue, a way of smoothing over the differences between people and alleviating the tensions that threatened to undermine public life. The point was not—as it was in France—to accentuate social hierarchies, but to quell them. Nor was politeness a mere cosmetic or surface congeniality; comportment, he believed, could actually make men morally upright—on the inside. Better still, it could make them more equal. Giovanni Andrea Gallini, an Italian dancing master who spent his life in London, took the cue. Dancing, he said, “ought to be recommended to all ranks of life … It is certainly not eligible for a nobleman to have the air and port of a mechanic; but it will not be a reproach to a mechanic to have the port and air of a nobleman.” As Steele himself put it, “The Appellation of a Gentleman is never to be affixed to a Man’s Circumstances.”12
But Weaver did not stop with politeness. He also hoped to make dance a respected theatrical art. To this end, he turned away from France and focused instead on antiquity—away from the aristocratic danse noble and toward the classical art of pantomime. It was an astute strategy: the Grand Tour, in which well-to-do youth educated themselves in the classical arts by touring Italian cities, was de rigueur for an educated English elite widely versed in Latin and Greek. The early eighteenth century, moreover, saw a wave of interest in the Ancients, along with a spate of new translations, including The Iliad by Dryden in 1700, and again by Pope in 1715–20. Weaver’s idea was simple: English ballet masters, he felt, were uniquely poised to cut a path between the senseless and immoral displays of the French and the raucous tricks of the Italians. The English could create a new and serious pantomime after the Ancients that would be both tasteful and morally upright without being dry or dull. They could have their own—distinctly English and very polite—kind of ballet.
Thus in 1717 Weaver staged a new show at the Drury Lane Theater entitled The Loves of Mars and Venus, which he described as “A Dramatick Entertainment of Dancing Attempted in Imitation of the Pantomimes of the Ancient Greeks and Romans.” The Drury Lane was not just any theater: it was Richard Steele’s theater. Some years earlier, the critic and cleric Jeremy Collier had touched off a vigorous debate over the morality of London theatrical life, lambasting directors and playwrights for “Their Smuttiness of Expression; Their Swearing, Profainness, and Lewd Application of Scripture; Their Abuse of the Clergy; Their Making their Top Characters Libertines, and giving them Success in their Debauchery.” In light of this and other righteous calls to theatrical reform, King George I had appointed Richard Steele to the governorship of the Drury Lane Theater in 1714. A colleague who shared Steele’s enthusiasm for reform rejoiced at this “happy Revolution,” which might create “a regular and clean Stage … on the side of virtue,” and the playwright John Gay noted that of all people Steele was the one who knew how to “make virtue fashionable.”13
Still, Steele faced a considerable challenge. It was not enough to be virtuous or polite; he had to sell tickets and, as Collier put it, “secure a Majority of the Multitude.” The competition was fierce, from Italian opera and especially from the rival Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theater, run by John Rich. Rich belonged to a theatrical family and had grown up playing Italian pantomimes on the boards of London theaters. Shrewd and savvy, he knew what would sell and deliberately pitched his productions downmarket, drawing large crowds for shows which one critic later castigated as “monstrous Loads of harmonious Rubbish.” Weaver’s The Love of Mars and Venus at the Drury Lane, however, seemed to achieve the impossible: it was both serious and a box office success.14
What did it look like? What we know of the ballet suggests it was an earnest pantomime play set to music by Henry Symonds, though in concession to popular taste it also included a comic Cyclops. It was decent: the role of Venus was performed by the beautiful Hester Santlow, who eschewed the usual seductive poses for a more pristine and elevated “Delicacy.” There was no singing, no placards, no familiar tunes, and the story was conveyed purely through “regulated gesture” and arch facial expressions (like masks) recalling those laid out by physiognomists interested in mapping the physical manifestations of character and emotional states. Thus jealousy was shown as “a particular pointing the middle finger to the Eye,” or anger as “the left Hand struck suddenly with the right; and sometimes against the Breast.” Weaver described the gestures and movements he had in mind in some detail, and buttressed his account of the work with generous quotations from ancient sources.15
Not to be outdone, John Rich lost no time in mounting a reprisal: a burlesque cheekily entitled Mars and Venus; Or, The Mouse Trap, in which all of the serious roles were performed by dancers in the lowest Italian acrobatic style. Weaver and Steele struck back the following year with Orpheus and Eurydice, including a twenty-five-page-long program replete with references to Ovid and Virgil. But this was less successful, and over time Steele was forced to bend deeper and deeper to popular taste—tricks, stunts, lewd comic touches. Sensing defeat, Weaver left the theater in 1721; by then the experiment forged by the two men had all but died out and the Drury Lane was moving inexorably toward the low pantomime entertainments that had made its rival such a success. In 1728, Weaver resurfaced briefly and wrote a bitter and self-important account of his serious pantomime theater, but it fell on deaf ears. The following year Steele died and Weaver retreated increasingly to Shrewsbury and private life. He ran his school, where he taught dance and nostalgically rehearsed pantomimes from the old days at the Drury Lane until his own death in 1760, which passed largely unnoticed.
Had Weaver failed? Commercially, certainly: his pantomime ballet did not last, and in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ballet on the English stage remained a foreign art, largely imported from France and Italy. Pantomime reverted to clowning—although it was also often sharply satirical and relentlessly played on the ways in which politeness itself had become a mannered and hypocritical upper-class snobbery. But if ballet, and its reform, failed to “take” on English soil and politeness never quite translated into a new balletic art, we should not underestimate Weaver and Steele’s accomplishments. Their vision of politeness as an elegant and unostentatious social style contained an instruction for a way of moving—and dancing—which we recognize even today as deeply rooted in English history and experience.
In spite of Weaver’s failure, London remained a vital cultural center, offering freedoms that the French could only imagine. In 1730—not long after Weaver left the Drury Lane—Voltaire wrote to a close friend in London about the iconoclastic French ballerina Marie Sallé, whom he knew and admired. Sallé had run into artistic and administrative difficulties at the Paris Opera and was on her way to the English capital, where she was warmly welcomed and acclaimed. Exasperated, Voltaire bemoaned “the difference between their freedoms and our slavery, between their wise confidence and our crazy superstition, between the encouragement that London gives to the arts and the shameful oppression under which they languish in Paris.” Voltaire’s palpable frustration at the increasingly entrenched interests and stale artistic milieu that had sent Sallé to England became a theme in coming years, and as long as London’s commercial theaters boasted high salaries (exponentially higher than in Paris) and a more freewheeling artistic milieu, they continued to attract French dancers—something that increasingly annoyed officials in Paris, especially at the Opera.16
Indeed, Voltaire might have been describing the Paris Opera itself, for the theater remained a bastion of aristocratic taste and high court etiquette. It was artistically rigid: by royal decree the Opera was only permitted to perform tragédies lyriques and opéras-ballets and thus had none of the intermixing of high and low theatrical fare more typical of English and other European theaters. The works of Lully and his contemporaries (so comfortingly reminiscent of le g
rand siècle) dominated, and would do so well into the 1770s. Even the building, located in the rue Saint-Honoré, recalled this golden age. The theater was rectangular, after the fashion of a large royal ballroom, and was decorated in gold, white, and green, with luxurious satins and the fleur-de-lys prominently displayed on the proscenium. Louis XV (1710–1774) personally controlled seating: the best seats were the six boxes located on the stage itself, where the highest nobles and princes of the blood could array themselves in full view. The king sat in the box to the right of the stage, where he could be seen by all, and the queen’s box was opposite. Other high nobles were arranged like so many jewels set in a crown around the first ring or tier. These boxes did not just provide a place to sit: each was its own personally decorated salon, leased to the holder for as long as two or three years.
The lower orders of society had their place too. The second and third tiers of the Opera accommodated wealthy priests, courtesans, lesser nobles, and demimondaines, and a balcony on the third tier known as “paradise” provided hard benches and tub toilets that let off such a stench that even those who could afford nothing better were often inclined to flee. Below, the standing-room-only parterre was a raucous free-for-all, reserved for men. Servants, dandies, intellectuals, literary hacks, and soldiers—a crowd numbering up to a thousand—were crammed together, and they sang, danced, shouted out, whistled, and even farted their approval or disapproval of the events onstage. Lest things get out of control, the king’s soldiers patrolled, armed with muskets.
Everything was geared to social display. The partitions between the boxes were arranged to make it easier for audiences to see each other than to see the stage; those in the most prestigious boxes had to lean out and crane their necks to watch the show. Opera glasses, de rigueur for men and women of high birth, were used to spy the minutiae of fashion and the behavior of friends and rivals. The lights—large candle chandeliers (which created a smoky haze) and plentiful oil lamps—did not dim when the show began but remained lit throughout the performance, giving the theater the air of a festive party. Aristocrats often arrived fashionably late, left early, and spent their time moving freely between boxes, visiting and gossiping. None of this meant that they did not also watch the performance—and the king’s reaction to it; indeed, many seem to have followed it avidly, and there were extended postperformance discussions in salons, letters, and pamphlets.
As Voltaire rightly indicated, one of the things they were talking about by the mid-eighteenth century was Marie Sallé (c. 1707–1756). Sallé had an unlikely career. She was born to a lowly family of itinerant actors and tumblers—her uncle was a renowned Harlequin—and the family performed on the Parisian fair circuit, mostly in pantomime and tumbling acts. At the time, the fairs were popular gathering places for the lower orders of society, but royalty and the aristocracy also flocked to them, eager to see irreverent parodies of their favorite operas and ballets. It required considerable ingenuity to be a fair performer in the early years of the century, however, since both the Paris Opera and the Comédie Française jealously guarded their privileges and fair performers were variously banned from singing and even from speaking onstage.
In response, they invented clever circumventions: planting people in the audience to sing the words, playing tunes from well-known popular songs with lyrics that the audience could fill in, and placing placards with boldly lettered words onstage. But the greatest weapon the fair performers possessed was pantomime. Virtually impossible to censure or regulate, it flourished and developed into a sophisticated mute theater. Indeed, the fairs were so successful that in 1715 they were finally permitted to make a deal with the Paris Opera: in exchange for a fee, they were allowed to perform plays called opéras comiques, which mixed song, dance, and speech in ways akin to today’s musical theater. Nor were the fairs the only such venue in the city. The following year, the Italian performers of commedia dell’arte returned to Paris and established the Comédie Italienne; the two theaters merged in 1762 as the Opéra-Comique under royal patronage—and became a serious rival to the Paris Opera. Thus Marie Sallé came of age with a major cultural shift in Parisian theatrical life: the Opera was increasingly mired in its own prestige, whereas pantomime, vaudeville, and circus forms were becoming more and more vital. Sallé and her family performed in the popular theaters of Paris, and also traveled, as we have seen, to London to dance at John Rich’s Lincoln’s Inn Theater in the very years when Weaver was performing at Steele’s Drury Lane.
But Sallé was more than a fairground mime. She also studied ballet with Françoise Prévost, an accomplished ballerina at the Paris Opera known for her daring performances in the Duchesse du Maine’s Grandes Nuits at her château in Sceaux. There, Prévost famously performed pantomimes in a self-consciously serious—and highly erotic—style, trading on the popularity of the fairs and artfully offsetting mime with the more elevated artistic manners of the high noble style. In 1714, for example, she moved her audience to tears by enacting a poignant scene from Corneille’s Les Horaces without words and without a mask. Her naked face and expressive gestures apparently brought a shocking intimacy and emotional depth to her otherwise formal presentation.
Sallé was more adventurous still. She made her debut at the Paris Opera in 1727 in the serious style but was no sooner established than she became impatient with the institution’s stringent artistic rules and gossipy intrigues. Shrewdly enlisting the support of Voltaire and Montesquieu, fond admirers of her art (and beauty), she left for London bearing several letters of introduction, including one from Montesquieu to the formidable Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, essayist and daughter of a well-known Whig of the Kit Kat Club.
London’s mix of popular and serious culture, the unrestrained character of commercial theater, and the overwhelming contemporary popularity of pantomime all worked in Sallé’s favor. She performed in John Rich’s theater and worked closely with Handel, especially on his Italian operas such as Alcina. She composed many of her own dances, and in 1734, by “Their Majesties’ Command,” she performed Pygmalion “without hoopskirts, or corps, disheveled and with no ornament in her hair … just draped in chiffons on the model of a Greek statue,” as one journal noted. In another dance, Sallé “expressed the deepest sorrow, despair, anger, and dejection … depicting a woman abandoned by her lover.” Thus in London Sallé set aside her formal training (and masks and corseted dresses) and focused instead on solo dances that mingled pantomime, gesture, and free-form movements to tell a story, and convey its emotions, without words. The renowned English actor David Garrick later recalled that audiences were so taken with Sallé’s performances that they threw gold guineas wrapped in banknotes and tied with colorful ribbons like bonbons.17
When Sallé returned to the Paris Opera in 1735 she worked closely with the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau, himself in conflict with the entrenched Lullists who found his emotionally intense music at odds with the restrained French classical tradition. Sallé’s acting skills made her an ideal interpreter, and she created and performed dances in many of Rameau’s most successful productions, including Les Indes Galantes. These were formal dances, however, with the dancers fully hoopskirted and usually masked, and Sallé’s most innovative days clearly lay behind her. When she tried to dance at the more unrestrained Comédie Italienne, the king, who prized loyalty to the Opera, threatened to have her arrested. She retired in 1741 but continued to perform regularly at court (presumably to support herself) and died in Paris in 1756.
What are we to make of Sallé? In one sense, she was nothing more than a fairground performer who had the luck of great beauty and a considerable discipline: she put herself through rigorous practice sessions daily. But she was also more than this, and deserves our attention because she was one of the first women to intuitively play sex and ballet off each other and to set her talents against convention. Known for her beauty, she was equally famous for her virtuous conduct at a time when actresses and dancers often doubled as courtesans. She ref
used lovers (Voltaire called her “the cruel prude”) and upon her return to Paris lived quietly with an Englishwoman, Rebecca Wick, to whom she left her modest worldly belongings. Her propriety galled contemporaries, but Sallé was unmoved: her restrained behavior only increased her allure. And if the Paris Opera drove her to distraction, she in turn aggravated its administrators by challenging their authority and straying to more popular theaters in Paris and London.18
But Sallé’s real accomplishment lay in the simple fact that she was a woman. The noble style had always been decidedly masculine, grave and weighted. Women performers came to it late or in the shadow of men. Sallé changed all of that: in her hands, it became feminine and erotic. She stripped away its requisite court clothing and dressed in plain (and revealing) Grecian drapery; she moved in disarmingly natural ways and used gestures and pantomime to undercut the artifice and formality of the serious genre. In so doing, she moved the French noble style from the court to the boudoir—and from public to private—giving audiences a sensual and intimate reading of what had traditionally been a quintessentially heroic dance. It was a glimpse of the ways in which ballet could depict inner realms as well as ceremonial forms.
Sallé’s Parisian contemporary and rival Marie-Anne de Cupis de Camargo (1710–1770), known as La Camargo, found a different way out of the staid conventions of her art: technical brilliance. Women did not traditionally perform the jumps, beats, and other virtuosic steps heretofore assigned to men or (in another key) acrobatic Italian dancers. Camargo did. She did not stop there but went so far as to shorten her skirts to the calf so that her brilliant footwork (and sexy feet) might be better appreciated (a move that also led to other kinds of prurient speculation: was she wearing underwear?). Hard as it is for us to imagine, the idea that Camargo would so audaciously exhibit her skill was a marked shift away from modesty and toward a bolder and more openly seductive way of moving. It raised eyebrows, and serves as a reminder of just how provocative women dancers could appear on the stage, especially when they broke from the prescribed manners of the noble style. Not surprisingly, Camargo’s private life was filled with lovers and scandals, and she accumulated considerable wealth and notoriety.
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