In the past scholars of the visual and dramatic arts have seldom worked closely with dance historians and musicologists, thus neglecting in-depth investigations of the relationships between mime, gesture, dance and music. This can certainly not be said of the present collection of thirteen essays by established specialists, brilliantly edited by Jacqueline Waeber. The book discusses many aspects of the musical, choreographical and theatrical practices inside and outside the boundaries of the French kingdom from the reign of Louis XIV to the early years of the nineteenth century, a period encompassing the height of the tragédie en musique, the mélodrame and the very first grands opéras.
The essays are arranged in three parts, of which the first two are introduced by an article presenting some broad concepts followed by several case studies. Part 1, ‘Dramaturgie du geste’, deals mainly with mime and gesture, and how a speechless language – referring to the ancient eloquentia corporis, as Waeber reminds us in her illuminating introduction (4) – was used in performance. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theorists agreed that dance was a mimetic art (14). Jean-Noël Laurenti starts from this point in his essay ‘De l'entrée de ballet à la pantomime et au ballet d'action: une nouvelle représentation de l'homme et de la nature’ (From the Ballet entrée to the pantomime and the ballet d'action: A New Representation of Man and Nature), which attempts to answer two questions: first, what did dance imitate, and second, how did it achieve this imitation without words? In so doing, Laurenti recalls the origins and developments of the ballet d'action (or ballet pantomime) by examining a large range of theoretical writings from Claude-François Ménestrier's Des ballets anciens et modernes (Paris: Guignard, 1682; reprinted Geneva: Minkoff, 1972) and John Weaver's Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures upon Dancing (London, 1721) to Louis de Cahusac's La danse ancienne et moderne (La Haye: Neaulme, 1754) and Jean-Georges Noverre's Lettres sur la danse (Lyon: Delaroche, 1760), as well as the discussions that took place among the Encyclopedists. The three ensuing articles examine particular examples drawn from Médée et Jason by Salomon and Pellegrin (1713), as well as from operas by Lully and Gluck: Anne Piéjus's ‘“Je vois un char brûlant descendre sur la terre”: Médée, de la magie verbale à l'efficacité scénique’ (Médée, from Verbal Magic to Scenic Efficiency), Laura Naudeix's ‘Le jeu du chanteur dans l'esthétique spectaculaire de l'opéra lulliste’ (Acting by Singers in the Spectacular Aesthetic of Lullian Opera) and Hedy Law's ‘From Garrick's Dagger to Gluck's Dagger: The Dual Concept of Pantomime in Gluck's Paris Operas’.
Part 2 (‘Sources, méthodologies’) investigates the literary and musical sources still available to scholars (librettos and scores) and sketches out a methodological approach towards them. It opens with Sylvie Bouissou's illuminating study of baroque opera livrets, which the author convincingly demonstrates remain the wealthiest sources of information for opera and dance historians. They do indeed convey valuable details about gesture and mimie, provide the plots of the ballets figurés as well as the numbers of their performers, and finally supply clues as to the composition of the ballets, for example on the groupings among the female and male dancers and their required numbers. This introductory essay is again illustrated by three others: a revised version of Antonia Banducci's earlier essay from this journal, ‘Staging and Its Dramatic Effect in French Baroque Opera: Evidence from Prompt Notes’ (Eighteenth-Century Music 1/1 (2004), 5–28), is followed by Nathalie Rizzoni's ‘Le geste éloquent: la pantomime en France au xviiie siècle’ (The Eloquent Gesture: Pantomime in France during the Eighteenth Century) and Waeber's own contribution ‘“Le Devin de la Foire”? The Role of Pantomime in Rousseau's Devin du village’.
Part 3 is more loosely organized and clusters the remaining five contributions under the generic topic ‘Du ballet en action à la synthèse des genres’. This section broadens the ideas discussed in the two previous ones. Sarah McCleave constructs an interesting portrait of ‘Marie Sallé and the development of the ballet en action’, reviewing the famous dancer's career which ‘offers several contexts for discussing gesture’ (175). Emilio Sala, Patrick Taïeb and Mark Darlow all show how ‘learned’ and ‘popular’ repertories – those of the Paris Opera and of the Foire – influenced one another, and how they were intermingled for expressive and dramatic purposes. Sala takes Jean-François Mussot's L'Homme au masque de fer (1790) as a case study of musical dramatization in the ‘pantomime-dialogue’, while Patrick Taïeb explores the ouverture pantomime of Nicolas Dalayrac's Azémia (1786/1787), ‘un hommage à “notre grand Rameau”’; Mark Darlow is concerned with ‘L'esthétique du tableau dans les ballets de Tarare, version de 1819’ (The Aesthetic of the tableau in the Ballets of the 1819 Version of Tarare). As for Bruce Alan Brown's ‘Le ballet-pantomime reformé et son nouveau public: Paris, Vienne’ (The Reformed Ballet-Pantomime and Its New Public: Paris, Vienna), he tackles the circulation and internationalization of this wordless art of mute acting within and between the cities of Paris, London and Vienna. The book ends with two librettos by Charles-François Pannard edited by N. Rizzoni.
All in all, the book brilliantly investigates and discusses the role of gesture and mime in the theatrical reforms of the century. One may regret, however, that the subgenre of the théâtre de société – intended for amateur performers and private circles, and particularly illustrated by Beaumarchais's numerous parades – is not given more attention. This is a missed opportunity to study how gesture and music (mainly vaudevilles, and at times original monodies) were brought together in such recreational entertainments, though to be fair to the contributors, such a study would in any case be hampered by the lack of surviving sources. Notwithstanding this, the book remains a welcome and valuable addition to our knowledge of an era in which the French dramatic arts were frequently subject to significant reform.
