Mime, Music and Drama on the Eighteenth-Century Stage by Edward Nye, and: Lettres sur la Danse, sur les Ballets et les Arts (1803) by Jean-Georges Noverre (review)

Edward Nye is a dance historian who specializes in the eighteenth century and who is the author of many articles on the genre of ballet d’action, which became known in Europe during the second half of the century. His groundbreaking book, Mime, Music and Drama on the Eighteenth-Century Stage, examines ballet d’action both in its own context and as a broader aesthetic phenomenon. It is an enriching milestone in a body of work that Nye has been developing for a decade.¹ The book, presented in two parts, first contains an analysis of the genre within what the author argues to be its proper intellectual and historical context, and goes on to study its critical relationship to theatrical technique, or—to use a term from its era—the poetics of ballet d’action.

Nye begins his book by drawing a parallel between ballet d’action and sign language, a method of communication for the “deaf and mute,” which was invented in the same era by l’Abbé de L’Épée. This comparison serves to characterize what he takes to be a form of resistance, typical of intellectuals at the time, to the notion that gestural expression is itself a language capable of communicating a high level of abstraction. Nye makes evident that critics of ballet d’action in the eighteenth century perpetrated what he calls a “dogma of the voice” based on contemporary theories of the origin of language. Their conception of theatrical pantomime—the “expressive gesture” that animates ballet d’action—is based on a comparison to speech, which makes ballet appear to be a kind of “sign language.” These new methods of expression on the stage were therefore criticized as failed substitutes for speech. This dogma of the voice (22) instantiated a paradigm that not only justified a ubiquitous critical stance against ballet d’action but also asserted the superiority of verbal theater practices over dance. In the following chapter, Nye interrogates the relationship between ballet d’action and ancient pantomime through the lens of the authors of the eighteenth century. Ballet d’action was originally introduced by ballet masters such as Jean-Georges Noverre as a revival of the Roman pantomime inspired by Lucian of Samosata’s Treatise on the Art of Dancing.² Nevertheless, Nye points out that references to classical theater are part of a larger mechanism for legitimizing the contemporary practice of ballet d’action as opposed to an actual revival. With this in mind, Chapter 3: “No Place for Harlequin” underlines the uniqueness of ballet d’action with respect to other contemporary theatrical practices with which historians often associate it. Nye maintains that styles such as Commedia dell’ arte and the eighteenth-century theater of the French foire should not be considered direct influences. They rather represent a background for its development at the same level as the opera or the marionette theater. Ballet d’action emerges as a result of a combination of practices and principles from a variety of sources. The author finds his thesis in the theoretical friction he generates between Noverre (specifically Les Lettres sur la Danse) and the twentieth-century French mime Etienne Décroux: ballet d’action stands directly on the critical line between dance and mime, and ought to be considered as a pivotal moment for both of those artistic disciplines.

Nye devotes the second part of his book to the theatrical principles behind ballet d’action and provides an interesting reading of the word “action.” The author begins by asking how to treat it as...