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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 an act of signification: Do we interpret action as classic rhetoric's “actio,” the illustrative gesture accompanying discourse, or as its Greek synonym “drama”? Nye clearly argues for the latter, characterizing ballet d'action as a hybrid of dance and drama. Therefore, the theatricality of ballet d'action is ultimately best understood when we consider the principle of character, or the actor's coherent interpretation of the role based on the expression of passion and gesture, as a replacement for oratorical principles. Indeed, the emotional interpretation of a dramatic role by dancers clearly differs from the use of oratorical devices to persuade the audience. Character, replacing old oratorical principles in the new poetic, establishes the nature of ballet d'action as a theatrical genre. Pursuing the question of how characters in ballet interact, recognized by critics of the time as their dialogue, Nye traces how the new poetic behind ballet d'action attempts to expand the narrative potential for theatrical dancing. The new ballet masters of the epoch had a tangible desire, says Nye, to pit their craft against spoken theater.

In Chapter 7: “Choreography Is Painterly Drama,” Nye takes on the notion that throughout the eighteenth century, dance notation still referred to Raoul Auger Feuillet's system of Choréographie, which he published in 1700. This was a difficult question for the ballet masters of the epoch, who, like Noverre, considered the system a dull and obsolete tool that severely limited innovative creativity, or who, like Gasparo Angiolini, never made good on their threats to reform the system. This brings Nye to a very important phenomenon for ballet d'action: the quarrels between Noverre and Angiolini in the Milanese theater world of 1774. Nye mostly refers to Angiolini's critique of Noverre's Agamemnon Vengé from the famous Lettere a Monsieur Noverre sopra i balli pantomimi in his rather succinct treatment of this polemic. A more thorough contextualization would have been helpful at this point in the book: Angiolini's critique hinges on the French master's abandonment of the three unities of classical theater—the famous unities of time, place, and action—for it is precisely at this moment that the rules of classical theater were becoming subject to broad public interrogation. Nevertheless, Angiolini affirmed in the introduction of the performance program of Le festin de Pierre of 1761Footnote ³ that dance as representation could not be confined to the three unities. Consequently, we can assume that the question of how and how much to make work conform to the rules of classical theater was a difficult question for artists of this era.

The penultimate and perhaps most interesting chapter, “The Admirable Consent Between Music and Action,” is a valuable contribution to the existing scholarship on ballet d'action. As early on as in his Introduction, Nye was already hinting that musical accompaniment and performance programs could be vitally important tools for understanding the composition of ballet d'action, counterbalancing the lacunary character of dance's iconography at the time. In this chapter, Nye hones in specifically on the score of Noverre's Jason and Medea, which was adopted by Gaëtan Vestris for his 1770 version in Paris. Paying close attention to the score, Nye and his reader see that music plays a very distinct set of dramatic roles in performance. For instance, different characters are often associated with the sounds made by specific instruments, and the interweaving of these diverse character-specific sounds functions as a form of narrative sketch. Annotations in the score are not limited to detailing technical staging instructions, such as entrances and exits, but also address dramatic elements such as the expression of passions and the internal world of individual characters. The existence of the annotated score demonstrates the existence of a synchronous relationship between mime and music that seems to be an essential part of ballet d'action.

The final chapter of the book deals with the issue of performance programs: the booklets distributed before a performance provided the audience with a plot synopsis explaining the narrative that was about to unfold on stage through ballet. Ballet masters employed these “performance programs” to various ends. While Angolini used them to disseminate his notes on theory, Noverre used them to respond to colleagues' critiques of his work. Edward Nye holds that these must be taken as crucial “paratexts,” or historical accounts that stand “on the fringe of the main work and [form] a bridge between it and the public” (216). He indicates three main paratextual functions of performance programs. The first section, the captatio benevolentiae, served to draw the audience in. They went on to provide contextual information about characters, setting, and the like that was necessary for understanding the action. Finally, they ensured that the performance was “properly interpreted,” meaning according to the ballet master's own interpretation. Responses surrounding these performance programs are very important, as these are the most important and numerous sources available to us for the study of ballet d'action. Because of the clear influence these texts had on the reception of pieces, we cannot think about programs as formulaic documents. Different ballet masters wrote their programs differently and had different conceptions of the role that the program played in relation to the performance. With this in mind, one would have to go even further in order to characterize the various approaches and various ways in which these artists construed the relation between text in the program and movement on stage.

Although traditional historical discourse has always taken note of the groundbreaking effect Noverre's aesthetic had on the evolution of ballet techniques, the eighteenth century remains the least studied era in dance history. When we begin to look closely at this period, however, we notice that this evolution does not follow an uninterrupted line from Noverre's particular innovation, but is rather the result of a collective European project at work on an international scale. Ballet d'action had a clear objective: to elevate the artistic status of dance. The strategy was to make dance into an imitative art mimetic of nature, with the same aptitude for representing the real as poetry—a notion engulfing all of theater at the time—and painting. This redefining of the art of dance thus went hand-in-hand with a new social standing for the ballet master as artist. Inasmuch as they augmented “prestige,” the reforms that ballet d'action and its project brought about acted to valorize the art and profession of the ballet master.

Unable to reconstruct ballet d'action pieces at this point in history with the extant sources, Nye opts not just to compile a history of ballet d'action as an artistic phenomenon, but also as an intellectual one: he chooses to write a history of ideas of ballet d'action. This is without a doubt a necessary process, and Nye's book is an invaluable addition to it. Dance history can no longer be seen simply as an investigation into the development of technique and the reconstruction of old works. It is crucial that we be able to talk about the ideas behind dance, the way they conceive of the dancing body, its socio-cultural relevance, and the social position of its practitioners (dancers, dance masters, and ballet masters).

However, Nye's history of the ideas of ballet d'action could be subject to the very critique that Roger Chartier and other cultural historians have directed at the history of ideas itself.Footnote ⁴ History of ideas offers a rather abstract analysis of these if we keep to its methodology. Even if ideas exist and circulate as printed material, they are often taken out of the context of the world of books and of the society that produced them. Cultural history thus proposes studying text as material, the circumstances surrounding a book's emergence and its circulation in a given historical moment. This involves studying each author with regard to the discourse that they know, use, and interpret, while not assuming that any of these historical figures necessarily has a complete knowledge of any philosophical tradition. Ballet d'action as a cultural phenomenon is linked to a precise social actor: the ballet master. Hence, his ascension in the hierarchy of arts in the eighteenth century is noteworthy. The figure itself of the ballet master is in actuality a point of entry for cultural analysis, which warrants further investigation. With this in mind, Nye could have kept to a more precise chronology throughout the book; the regard for ballet d'action among intellectuals changed appreciably between 1760 and 1790.

The development of ballet d'action imparted to its generation an image of the ballet master as a public figure engaged with practices that could be understood as philosophical. The various publications that ballet masters turned out during the second half of the eighteenth century attest to their specialized knowledge and a mastery of the language of belles lettres. Jean-Georges Noverre undoubtedly embodies the “dancer philosopher” archetype that comes out of ballet d'action. The 1803 text of Noverre's Letters, recently published in a volume along with new material by Flavia Pappacena, begins with a two-part introduction. Pappacena's approach seems diametrically opposed to Nye's. While Nye's claim that Noverre's book is an “over-used” (5) text serves to symbolically discount it, Pappacena takes on the phenomenon of ballet d'action by defining it as “Noverre's Reform.” Both authors nevertheless converge in the history of ideas since both practice its methodology. In the first part of her Introduction, Pappacena contextualizes Noverre's ideas within the latter half of the eighteenth century, while the second half breaks down his theory and discusses the constitutive elements thereof. Pappacena's synthesis of Noverre's key concepts sets them in conversation with several philosophers and aims to track the evolution of Noverre's thinking with special attention to potential sources of inspiration. Noverre in fact cites Diderot and Cahusac in his book and appeals to them to defend his own points of view. Pappacena also pays attention to other theater scholars such as Marmontel and Rémond de Sainte-Albine, in addition to the well-known writers of the era, such as l'abbé Dubos, who constitute the major philosophical influences behind Noverre's work. Pappacena is also able to draw parallels with the paintings of Carle Vanloo, François Boucher, David Teniers (Jr.), and even Rubens and Raphael. All in all, Pappacena's work stands as a definitive introduction to Noverre. In the second portion, “Fundamental theories of Noverre's Reform,” Pappacena succinctly summarizes each of the points key to understanding Noverre, such as dance as imitative art, the connection between dance and painting, the rejection of Aristotelian unities, the conception and construction of a ballet d'action, the connection between dance and pantomime, and the representation of passions. As Pappacena points out, the 1803 Letters enables us to track the evolution of Noverre's thought following his experimental years between the first edition of the letters and this one.

It is of course equally important to keep in mind that the cultural and historical contexts of this new edition are radically different from those surrounding the 1760 version. The recompilation of the Letters, completed only seven years before the death of its author, invites us to consider its use and reception in the early nineteenth century. How is reading Noverre's Letters—an object in print that, serving as a map of his ideas and as a tool in his struggle to obtain professional positions (at least in its 1760 edition), plays its own unique role in the development of his career—different from reading a standard treatise like those written by Dubos or Condillac? In many ways, the 1803 edition and the ultimate 1807 edition are relevant to the reception of Noverre in the nineteenth century and are connected to his reputation in the romantic period. But with this we enter into a historical dialogue that goes beyond what Pappacena aims to do with this text. In any case, the publication of Edward Nye's book, much like the new edition of Noverre's Letters themselves, shows the vitality surrounding the study of eighteenth-century dance and participates in a much needed reevaluation of historical studies of dance during that era.