Indeed, in his Lettres Noverre acknowledged his debt to Diderot, who had written at length about the lamentable state of French theater, which he found depressingly “wooden” and overly formal. He hated the way actors postured and preened at the front of the stage (where the light was best) and performed set bravura speeches, only to then fall disconcertingly out of character and wander aimlessly about the stage. Diderot wanted to develop a new kind of theater rooted in sustained action, dramatic tableaux, and vigorous pantomime. Actors, he insisted, should take off their masks and look and speak to each other (not to the audience) and, like Garrick, free themselves from the stylized and antiquated conventions of traditional declamation. Diderot was not alone in his views, and he and others also noted that costuming should be more realistic and depict character rather than social status: peasants, it was pointed out, don’t wear silk. And indeed, in the 1750s these ideas began to take hold in theatrical circles. In 1753 Madame Favart at the Comédie Italienne removed her finery and depicted a village girl in simple peasant dress, while two years later the tragic actress Mademoiselle Clairon tempered her delivery and performed without hoopskirts.
If the problem with theater was that its performers did not say things realistically, the problem with dance, it was widely agreed, was that it did not say anything at all. The librettist and writer Louis de Cahusac (who worked with Rameau) lamented that ballet had hit a glass ceiling: Sallé had been expressive, but her successors were dull technicians whose meaningless tricks debased the art. Diderot had no patience for ballets: “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.” And Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who himself had composed operas and ballets in Paris in the 1740s and early 1750s, later turned vehemently on the art, which seemed to him to exemplify the ways in which society “enchained” individuals, destroying their natural goodness with spurious 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 emulator of a goat rather than of a dancer at the Opéra.26
Moreover, Rousseau had little patience for the custom of performing ballets in operas. They interrupted the story, he complained, and ruined its dramatic effect. Echoing the sentiment, Baron Grimm worried that in fact, 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.” Worse, the dances were “insipid” and void of ideas, little more than a series of “academic” exercises. With characteristic force, Rousseau drew the inevitable conclusion: “All dances that depict only themselves, and all ballet which is just dancing, should be banished from lyric theater.”27
Something had happened: by the late eighteenth century, classical ballet—which had once been a respected and even venerated art form, imbued with the prestige of the monarchy and le grand siècle—had come to seem empty and meaningless, a kind of dance that few believed in and many rejected out of hand. It was in this context that Noverre wrote his Lettres. He wanted to turn the compass of ballet: away from a trivial and pleasure-seeking aristocracy and toward tragedy, moral dilemmas, and the study of man. It was not enough, he chastised, to perform beautiful movements against lavish sets and costumes that appealed to the eyes. Dancers must also “speak” to the soul and bring audiences to tears. Ballet must become a “portrait of humanity,” which took mankind and truth as its subject. As the German critic and dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (who admired Noverre) put it in another context, “If pomp and etiquette make machines out of men, it is the task of the poet to make men again out of these machines.”28
There was only one way to do this. Dance, Noverre said, had to tell a story—not with the help of words or arias or recitative but by itself, with movement alone. And by “story” he did not just mean comic tales or light and entertaining interludes; he wanted to make dark and serious ballets about incest, murder, and betrayal—and indeed he would later compose ballets about Jason and Medea, about the deaths of Hercules and Agamemnon, and about Alceste, Iphigenie, and the battle of the Horaces and Curiaces. The idea was not to change—or even challenge—the elegant steps and poses of the noble style. These were to remain fully intact. The work of reforming ballet was to be done elsewhere: with pantomime. Noverre aimed to build a new kind of ballet that would mix pantomime, dance, and music—but not spoken word or song—into a taut and coherent drama: the ballet d’action.29
Like Weaver, Noverre was careful to point out that by pantomime he did not mean the “low and trivial” gestures typical of the Italian bouffons or the “false and lying” gestures of society, which were perfected in front of a mirror. The pantomime he was talking about would cut past the artifice of court forms and strike directly to the human core. His pantomime would be like a “second organ,” a primitive and passionate “cry of nature” that revealed a man’s deepest and most secret feelings. Words, he said, often failed, or else they served as a cover, masking a man’s true feelings. The body, by contrast, could not dissimulate: faced with an anguishing dilemma, the muscles instinctively reacted, twisting the body into positions that conveyed inner torment with greater accuracy and pathos than words could ever muster.30
There was, however, a problem. Pantomime could not tell a complicated story. It had no way, for example, of expressing the past or the future—how could a dancer gesture that last year his mother had murdered his father? And so, echoing the seventeenth-century “Moderns,” Noverre argued that ballets should not be like plays at all: they should be like paintings. The only way to tell a story was to construct a series of “living tableaux” that followed sequentially, on the same principle as a triptych. Thus, Noverre assiduously studied art and architecture and applied the laws of perspective, proportion, and light to his ballets. He arranged his dancers by height from short to tall, moving from the stage apron back to a distant horizon, and he meticulously plotted patterns of chiaroscuro onstage. Moreover, he insisted that the dancers in these tableaux should be flesh-and-blood individuals, not pretty ornaments lined up in symmetrical rows. Each should have a distinct role, gestures, and poses, and realistically enact a moment of action. In these painterly tableaux the dancers often froze in a snapshot image before moving on, and Noverre even thought to introduce pauses into his ballets to focus attention on “all the details” of these “pictures.”31
It was not an original idea: tableaux figured prominently in Diderot’s ideas for a new dramatic theater, and Parisian lawyers had also taken to using dramatic poses and tableaux as rhetorical tools to strengthen the presentation of an argument. Nor did the persuasive power of these techniques go unnoticed in high circles: when the dauphin married Marie Antoinette in 1770, the celebrations featured set pieces in which actors froze in prearranged painterly scenes, each marking an important symbolic moment in the festivities. Fashion followed suit, and staging “live paintings” became a popular salon activity in the late eighteenth century from Paris to Naples, especially for women.
Noverre’s ideas nonetheless marked a stunning reconceptualization of how a ballet should be put together. In French opera, as we have seen, dances were typically divertissements or “numbers” arranged around an overarching theme; symmetry, hierarchy, and pleasing Feuillet-like patterns imposed order on the dancers and the stage. By contrast, Noverre envisaged a series of static tableaux and irregularly posed groups with limbs plunged at angles and bodies fixed in ex
pressive postures. The performance was not a string of pearl-like dances but a series of discrete though related narrative pictures projected one after another—like a slide show of paintings—onto the stage.
If this were not enough, Noverre also wanted to change the look of dancers. Working himself into a state of high drama, he lashed out:
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 the 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.32
Masks, wigs, hoopskirts, fashionable hairstyles—these enduring and distracting symbols of high court etiquette had to go, or at least be reduced to manageable proportions. The point was to get away from magic effects and artifice; Noverre wanted instead to draw people into a psychologically penetrating dramatic world. He thus later also insisted (echoing Garrick) that the theater should be dark and quiet and that audiences should sit at exactly the right distance from the stage to best enter the visual composition. The backstage area, moreover, should be carefully hidden from view and set changes made smooth and invisible—no doubt a reference to the practice (common in Paris right up to the last decades of the century) of the stage manager blowing a loud whistle to announce set changes, which the crew noisily prepared and executed with the curtain fully raised.
Like Diderot and others, Noverre thus hoped to strip away centuries of social veneer and rediscover the natural man hidden beneath. He yearned to unveil and unmask, to liberate man from antiquated social and artistic constraints. Indeed, the ballet d’action had much in common with the utopian desire to return to a presocial world and to rediscover a primitive and universal language that would speak directly to all human beings, from the lowliest peasants to kings. Deeply suspicious of what they perceived to be the corrupt and deceptive character of the French language—“a perfidious language” in the words of one critic—many of the philosophes looked to pantomime as a clear and completely transparent form of communication. As Louis-Sébastien Mercier later put it, gesture “is clear, never equivocal; it does not lie.”33
The idea was not only to reinvigorate art: it was to create a virtuous polity in which the artifice and lies of a spent court culture would give way to more direct and honest social life. Pantomime thus became a touchstone for an array of social and political questions, and in the second half of the eighteenth century it was the subject of a passionate and wide-ranging debate—a firm reminder that at the time ballet was not cordoned off from intellectual life (as it is today) but part of a larger discussion about the future of art and society.
Consider Rousseau. We have seen that he had little patience for ballet, but pantomime was a different matter altogether. Gesture and mime seemed to him worthy forms of expression that captured something essential about human existence in a pure and virtuous state, before men had been corrupted by society. It was the “cry of nature” that Noverre was so invested in. But as much as Rousseau longed to return to these blissful origins, he too was sanguine about the limits of what was (to him) a patently primitive form of communication. Pantomime, he said, corresponded to a childlike state of need in which people conveyed their most basic desires for food and shelter. But without words, men could never fully express their emotions or become morally self-aware.
With this in mind, Rousseau imagined a golden stage in the development of human culture in which people had enough language to communicate but not enough to engage in wily deceptions and hypocrisy. In this utopian world, people would live amid music, dance, and poetry; suspended between a savage existence and a decadent high civilization, they would be both good and ethically aware. Indeed, Rousseau was interested enough in pantomime to create his own in 1763: a one-act version of Pygmalion (not performed until 1770) with pantomime, speech, and music, in which the actors resorted to gesture at emotionally heightened moments when they had been otherwise reduced to silence.
Diderot was less certain. In spite of his self-assured prescriptions for a new genre of drama and actors trained to cut to the emotional quick with forthright gestures and speech, there was also a side of him that was deeply troubled by pantomime. Indeed, in the chorus of people who saw pantomime as a transparent and masculine “cry of nature,” Diderot stood—at least in his most private thoughts—uneasily apart. In his poignant Le Neveu de Rameau, written in 1761 but not read or published until after his death, Diderot staged a dialogue between himself and the great composer Jean-Philippe Rameau’s nephew, who was in fact a real person and a failed composer given to irrational outbursts and penetrating insights. Diderot portrays the nephew as a desperate and defeated man, crushed by his inability to follow in his uncle’s footsteps and revitalize French music with a “cry of animal passion.” The nephew lives in a state of dissolute scorn and makes his way in the world through his astonishing skill in pantomime, which he readily demonstrates for Diderot. Slipping deftly into a dream-like state, he mimes scenes from operas and from his own life: he wheedles and connives, he is obsequious, vain, and manipulative, and he skillfully contorts his body and face into the “positions” it takes to win the luxuries he craves.
Diderot tries to convince him to give up these false poses and trade them in for truth. But the nephew will not: society, he says, is unrelenting, and social species devour each other at a fantastic rate, as when ballerina-courtesans such as Mademoiselle Deschamps take revenge on financiers. He too must join the fray or sink into oblivion. And so “he leaps, he climbs, he twists, he drags: he spends his life taking and performing positions,” boasting such expertise that “even Noverre” cannot compete. Diderot is angered and lashes out: “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 thus represents the worst of the corrupt, climbing classes who are morally ruined by social posturing; he is the dark depths to which Molière’s bourgeois gentilhomme can sink, a kind of drunken, dissolute, and pitifully self-serving social animal. He has given up on everything that matters. Yet his honesty in saying so gives him an integrity that lifts him above Diderot’s more surefooted philosophe and man of high principles. By the end of the story, it is not clear who is teaching whom a lesson: the contrived pantomimes, he suggests, may be all we’ve got.34
Diderot thought of Le Neveu de Rameau as one of his “mad” works, but it showed that behind the sometimes strident and self-assured tones of the writing about pantomime and “natural man” there was also a feeling of despair and a depressing awareness of just how pervasive and inescapable social convention could be. Indeed, in Diderot’s imagination, pantomime, the failures of French music, and a gnawing social corruption were all tied up in a tight knot. It seemed impossible to separate the tangled strands, much less extricate oneself from them. His Neveu de Rameau was a complicated rumination on a society rotting from within and on a generation of men and artists trapped in cynicism: the nephew would never revitalize French music, much less dig his way out of the “pantomimes” that governed his life.35
The most extreme feelings about pantomime, however, came from those who distrusted and opposed it most. In a long article published in the Encyclopédie, Jean-François Marmontel, a protégé of Voltaire’s and a prominent librettist, argued that pantomime was a morally dangerous form of pure passion, seducing audiences and pulling them into a state of high emotion impermeable to reason and critical thinking. The Romans, he pointedly noted, had succumbed to pantomime; a rough and insensitive people, they preferred sensational theatrical forms over those that fostered moderation, reason, and wisdom.
Manners and comportment civilized men; pantomime made beasts of them. Its raw gesticulations, another observer angrily asserted, were crass and an insult to the restrained and formal manners of the French elite.
The ballet d’action, all of this made clear, was more than a new kind of theatrical art. By focusing on pantomime, Noverre had tapped into one of the most fundamental ideas of the French Enlightenment—and tied the future of ballet to it. It was a bold ambition: if pantomime could cut through the thickly laid and stifling social conventions dragging French society down, then the ballet d’action could become the preeminent art of a newly modern man.
Yet for all of Noverre’s enthusiasm about pantomime, there was one glaring contradiction he had studiously avoided: ballet was a court art, and its forms had everything to do with the etiquette he otherwise eschewed. Indeed, the single most striking fact about Noverre’s writing—and later his ballets—was his passionate denunciation of the false and empty conventions of ballet and his simultaneous unswerving loyalty to them. In his choreography Noverre used the steps and poses of ballet, and he assiduously defended the high noble style in which he had been trained. Pantomime was an escape hatch: with gesture Noverre could reform ballet without getting into the knotty question of how to take “the court” out of steps and poses that had been created in the image of kings.
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