Ballet d'Action to Ballet-Pantomime: Dance, Text, and Narrative in French Ballet, 1734-1841

Communication and the arts;French literature;Ballet;Dance;France;Enlightenment;Revolution;Romantic;Noverre;Jean-Georges;Gautier;Théophile;French

Sabee, Olivia MajAnderson, Wilda ;

Johns Hopkins University

关键词: Communication and the arts;    French literature;    Ballet;    Dance;    France;    Enlightenment;    Revolution;    Romantic;    Noverre;    Jean-Georges;    Gautier;    Théophile;    French;   

Others  :  https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2/60523/SABEE-DISSERTATION-2015.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: JOHNS HOPKINS DSpace Repository

【 摘 要 】

My dissertation, ;;Ballet d’Action to Ballet-Pantomime: Dance, Text, and Narrative in French Ballet, 1734-1841,” examines the relationship between literary text, narrative structure, pantomime, and dance in the context of French ballet from the last decades of the Ancien Régime to the July Monarchy. Early modern ballet was deeply narrative, and thus tied to the concept of action, expressed in ballet through pantomime. This relationship was analyzed at length in articles from Denis Diderot’s and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, especially those written by librettist and historian Louis de Cahusac. Action was then emphasized as an element of ballet by Jean Georges Noverre in his Lettres sur la danse (1760). Following what Théophile Gautier would later aptly call the ballet d’action, Noverre’s most famous works attempted to translate French classical tragedy to the ballet stage, but both his work and that of his student Charles Le Picq showed that ballet was becoming a very specific genre related to, but distinct from, the traditional theater. With the rise of the Romantic ballet, ballet d’action evolved into something more explicitly called ballet-pantomime. In this form of ballet, balletic structure shifted to include long sequences of danced action that alternated with narrative pantomime and expressive dance of the ballet d’action. One of the resulting shifts in understanding these works is due to critics such as Gautier’s promotion of the doctrine of ;;art for art’s sake,” which shifted values toward ballet libretti that promoted pure dance. Despite this shift, however, a wide variety of ballet narratives still continued to exist, a fact that Gautier’s criticism and the historical narrative he created obscures even to this day. My dissertation therefore aims to reevaluate these anachronisms and to demonstrate ballet’s historical complexity as a cultural product within the greater framework of its contemporary theater and performance practices.