Noverre has left an indelible mark on theatre history, not only because he was the first choreographer to write a monograph on the aesthetic principles of dance, but because he provoked so much discussion and controversy among his contemporaries that modern scholars are left with a wealth of evidence concerning the reception of his works. This, combined with extant musical scores, performance programmes and costume illustrations, provided for a rich and thought-provoking conference. Organized by Michael Burden, Maggie Davies and Jennifer Thorp, this was the Twelfth Oxford Dance Symposium.

The opening keynote address, given by Kathleen Kuzmick Hansell (University of Chicago Press), was entitled ‘Noverre in Milan: A Turning Point’. Although Noverre's period of employment as choreographer at the Teatro Regio Ducal in Milan was short (eighteen months), it was probably the most controversial of his career, because Noverre tried to impose his own style of ballets d'action on a Milanese audience already used to a native Italian tradition. His productions were bigger and more spectacular, and pleased the Milanese to a certain extent in this regard. But his almost exclusive use of French noble dancers rather than the ‘grotteschi’ which the Italians were more used to was not popular. Nor was his use of performance programmes in which he seems to have wanted to prime the spectator to understand the plot of his narrative ballets in certain specific ways. Hansell concluded, as the title of her paper suggests, that the criticism and barriers that Noverre faced in Milan had a decisive effect on his career. He was neither as prolific nor as creative in his subsequent periods in Paris and London.

Nevertheless, his ambitions were not diminished, as Anna Karin Ståhle (Dans och Cirkushögskolan (University of Dance and Circus), Stockholm) described in ‘The Job Application of J. G. Noverre to Gustav III in Sweden’. Noverre sent a collection of costume designs by Louis Boquet and plot synopses, now housed in the Royal Library in Stockhom, to Gustav III of Sweden in the hope of securing the position of ballet master in Stockholm. The circumstances were promising. Not only was Gustav III a noted patron of the arts (and sometimes called by his contemporaries ‘the theatre king’), but Noverre's former pupil, Antoine Bournonville, was the premier dancer and ballet instructor at the Stockholm opera at the time. Noverre's ‘job application’ failed, but the promotional material he sent is arguably the most important set of costume designs for Noverre's ballets after a similar but larger set he sent to the King of Poland (now housed at the National Library of Warsaw). The Stockholm manuscripts' costume designs pose a variety of important questions. Were they intended entirely for the purpose of stage productions, or were Boquet's designs, highly sought after by nineteenth-century fine-art collectors, intended to appeal to Gustav's aesthetic sensibilities? Assuming they were at least partly meant for the stage, they show important (yet also conservative) aspects of the reform of contemporary costumes for stage dance: a limited use of corsets, whale-bone panniers, wigs and masks, which Noverre criticizes in his Lettres sur la danse, et sur les ballets (Lyon, 1760), and a discreet display of bare flesh (mostly bare feet or shoulders), confined to the less noble roles.

One kind of promotional or production material Noverre did not send to Gustav III was musical scores, the subject of the following paper by Bruce Alan Brown (University of Southern California). Curiously, eighteenth-century critics hardly comment on the music to ballets d'action in general, nor in particular to Noverre's Viennese productions, for which the scores are extant in the Schwarzenberg Family Archive at Český Krumlov. Perhaps this has something to do with the dramatic nature of the music intended to support the stage action rather than constitute independent concert music. The scores in this archive are unusual in that they are complete sets of partbooks. They were produced in Viennese copying workshops and probably collected for musical enjoyment, since very few show signs of use. Since they are numbered, they may help in establishing the chronology of Noverre's ballets, something that can be difficult to establish otherwise. They are probably as close as we can get to the music performed for Noverre's productions at the Burgtheater in Vienna.

The importance of dance to the financial interests of theatres was emphasized by Michael Burden (University of Oxford) in his paper on the ballets of François-Hippolyte Barthélemon, the Bordeaux-born violinist who led the ballet orchestra at the King's Theatre in the 1780s, including the period when Noverre was ballet master. Very little is known of Barthélemon's music, but the fact that one of the most eminent violinists of the period was employed to lead the ballet orchestra suggests the importance of stage dance to the theatre. His role in adapting as well as composing music is an indication of the need to refresh productions that could then be billed as ‘new’ ballets. The significance of stage dance at the King's Theatre is also suggested by the long forestage, essential for narrative dance, which was maintained until the 1860s, despite the fact that it was entirely unnecessary for operatic productions.

The importance of Noverre's ballets d'action in the socio-political sphere was explored by Lito Tsitsou (University of Glasgow). In ‘The Aesthetic and Political Premises of Noverre's Action Ballet’ she argued that the ballet d'action was a culmination of the evolution of stage dance away from the court and, more importantly, away from the institutionalized framework of the French Académie de la Danse founded by Louis XIV. The ballet d'action was performed at the greatest and most respected theatres of Europe, but it was to a large extent independent of the institutional framework in which other forms of serious stage dance had developed. As a consequence of its relative political autonomy, it contributed to the emancipation of civil society and emphasized the novel aesthetic values of individualism, naturalism and the expression of emotion. Thus the ‘action’ of these ballets constituted a kind of freedom.

Exactly what dance steps constituted Noverre's ‘action’ on stage is unknown, since he left no choreographic transcriptions. Catherine Turocy (New York Baroque Dance Company) therefore ‘reimagined’ one of his works, Les petits riens, and treated the conference to a screening of her stage production during her paper. Using the extant music by Mozart and Barthélemon, the choreographic vocabulary of contemporary dance instruction books and contemporary reviews, as well as principles from Noverre's Lettres sur la danse, Turocy constructed the performance around three episodes in which Cupid teases his two chosen victims, is captured and caged, but then escapes to fire his fateful arrow. It demonstrated the combination of grace and narrative appeal of one of the lighter and more charming of Noverre's works. Beneath the playful ‘trifles’ of Les petits riens, however, are far-reaching aesthetic principles, which Marianna Monteiro (Universidade Estadual Paulista, São Paulo) brought out in her paper ‘Nature and Artifice in Jean-Georges Noverre's Letters on Dance’. The ambition of Noverre and other contemporary ballet d'action choreographers was to make stage dance a genuine ‘imitation of nature’, and thus to bring it into the fold of the high arts. The notion of imitation is, and was, notoriously difficult to define, but Noverre's understanding of it relied a great deal on making stage dance a dramatic art. Other dance forms, such as seventeenth-century ballet de cour, had been dramatic, but probably relied much more than Noverre did on non-somatic means such as costume, scenery and music. The imitative quality of the ballet d'action derived, for Noverre, from the ‘action’ (or pantomime) sequences. In this he shared the aesthetic ideals of the likes of Rousseau and Diderot, whose concept of artistic imitation had more to do with imitation of the nature of man than it did with imitation of the nature of things.

Noverre seems to have developed such principles over time, however, since his early works from the 1750s contained less narrative and were more like spectacles for the delectation of the eye – less Kurt Jooss and more Busby Berkeley. Jennifer Thorp (University of Oxford) put into sharp focus Noverre's most famous, and infamous, visual feast in her paper ‘“Better To Be a True Pierrot than a False Pyrrhus”: Ange Goudar and the Ballets of Jean-Georges Noverre'. The cardsharp, pimp and general libertine Goudar penned some of the most extensive, acerbic and revealing writings on the ballet d'action as it was performed in Paris, Vienna and Italy. In 1755 he witnessed the ‘Noverre riots’ in London, when anti-French feeling caused Garrick to withdraw Noverre's Les fêtes chinoises from performance. Goudar reveals that the riot was sparked by a solo dancer whose Chinese costume ‘could not conceal her French identity’. Garrick publicly cancelled the following night's performance, but privately instructed the dancers to prepare for it nonetheless. A repeated riot the following night before the curtain was to rise caused dancers to run from the theatre.

My paper (Edward Nye, University of Oxford) concerned the ways in which Noverre and all other choreographers of the ballet d'action are almost never understood by modern scholars as part of the history of mime. They are almost invariably studied by dance historians interested in the history of stage dance. I argued that there is less affinity with the commedia dell'arte, the contemporary form of physical theatre that many scholars tend to relate to the ballet d'action, and more with the modern, twentieth-century mime of Étienne Decroux. The commedia was as much in a state of rapid evolution and reform in the eighteenth century as the ballet d'action was, and it would be more accurate to think of both as products of growing contemporary interest in dramatic principles of narrative, character, sensibility and social realism. In contrast, there is more relation between the ballet d'action and twentieth-century mime than scholars acknowledge, principally in terms of their attitude to the way mime should relate on the one hand to language and on the other to dance.

The conference ended fittingly with Alain Borderie (Saint-Germain-en-Laye) and his paper ‘Jean-Georges Noverre, the Closing Years in Saint-Germain-en-Laye (1795–1810)’. Noverre returned to France a year after the fall of Robespierre, and after fifteen years of living in England. He may have chosen this small, rather dull town because of professional and personal ties: the family of eminent dancers, the Malters, lived there, as did the educationalist Mme Campan. He lived in a relatively prosperous street alongside doctors and lawyers and later moved to a larger mansion, the Hotel de la Surintendance. He had close enough ties with the mayor of the town for his son Antoine to be chosen as a member of the garde nationale at the celebrations marking the anniversary of Napoleon's coronation. When Noverre died, he left a small legacy, totalling in value 3, 800 francs, to his son and daughter.