La Querelle des pantomimes: danse, culture et société dans l’Europe des Lumières par Arianna Beatrice Fabbricatore (review)

Some dance scholarship suffers from two weaknesses, which this book helps to resolve. The first and most important is a lack of artistic context: studies are sometimes focused so narrowly on dance that they fail to take into account the movement of ideas of the period concerned, or else they do so with insufficient scholarly apparatus. The second is more specific: Jean-Georges Noverre is often assumed to be the inventor of modern ballet, as if teleology were at all desirable, and as if France were the only important site of innovation. Arianna Beatrice Fabbricatore takes as her main subject (and final chapter) the querelle between the two most famous choreographers of the eighteenth century: the Italian Gasparo Angiolini and the French (part Swiss by parentage) Noverre. It is, in itself, an important and fascinating debate, being the first querelle provoked by dance in the early modern period. The essence of the dispute concerned the nature and practice of stage dance (and more specifically, the ballet d’action or ballo pantomima) as well as its relation to other stage arts and the arts in general. Before getting to her final chapter on the querelle, however, Fabbricatore devotes the three first chapters to investigating the contemporary and historical context of the querelle itself, exploring widely the domains of spoken and musical theatre, of painting, of oratory, and of artistic aesthetics. Her fourth chapter is more specific: she makes a detailed study of two representative and highly successful works by Angiolini and Noverre, comparing and contrasting them, relying partly on the perspectives she has developed in her first three chapters, but also pushing further by, for example, making effective use of annotated musical scores. Her fifth chapter is a study of the theatres, actors, spectators, and critics in eighteenth-century Milan (where the querelle took place). By the time we reach her sixth and last chapter on the querelle proper, we have learnt a great deal and are well prepared to appreciate fully the nature and importance of the ideas and conflicts involved. We have also understood how important Angiolini in particular and Italy in general were to the history of stage dance; a significant strength of this book is its contribution to study of the formation of national identities. Fabbricatore includes a short appendix of four texts written during the querelle, two of which are particularly fascinating because they were thought not to be extant. A weakness of the book is that it does not sufficiently take into account modern scholarly debate about, for example, the quality of the music Angiolini wrote for his choreographies, the relevance of oratory to the ballet d’action, or the nature of performance programmes (see Bruce Alan Brown, Gluck and the French Theatre in Vienna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), Edward Nye, Mime, Music and Drama on the Eighteenth-Century Stage : The ‘ballet d’action’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Kathleen Kuzmick Hansell, ‘Theatrical Ballet and Italian Opera’, in The History of Italian Opera, Part II, vol. v: Opera on Stage, ed. by Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 177–308). This is ironic, given that the book is about precisely this: debate. The book remains, however, a significant contribution to our knowledge of dance history and its methodology.