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A Review of: “The Poetics ofEighteenth-Century Dance:Vom “Affect” zur “Action”:Quellenstudien zur Poetik derTanzkunst vom späten Ballet deCour bis zum frühen Ballet enAction”Emma Lewis ThomasPublished online: 01 Mar 2007.

To cite this article: Emma Lewis Thomas (2007) A Review of: “The Poetics ofEighteenth-Century Dance: Vom “Affect” zur “Action”: Quellenstudien zur Poetikder Tanzkunst vom späten Ballet de Cour bis zum frühen Ballet en Action”, DanceChronicle, 30:1, 101-105, DOI: 10.1080/01472520601163995

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01472520601163995

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Dance Chronicle, 30:101–105, 2007Copyright C© 2007 Emma Lewis ThomasISSN: 0147-2526 print / 1532-4257 onlineDOI: 10.1080/01472520601163995

BOOK REVIEW

THE POETICS OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DANCE

EMMA LEWIS THOMAS

Vom “Affect” zur “Action”: Quellenstudien zur Poetik der Tanzkunst vomspaten Ballet de Cour bis zum fruhen Ballet en ActionBy Stephanie Schroedter. 444 pp. Illustrated + Macintosh CD-ROM (9.2 or higher, Filemaker 4.0 or higher, Acrobat Reader 4.0or higher).Wurtzburg: Konigshausen und Neumann GmbH, 2003. 44,paper. ISBN 3-8260-2538-5.

The Vorwart [Foreword] to Stephanie Schroedter’s book, whosetitle can be translated as “From ‘Affect’ to ‘Action’: Source Stud-ies of the Poetics of the Art of Dance from the Late Ballet de Courto the Early Ballet en Action,”* reveals to the reader the circum-stances that inspired the writing of this richly detailed tome, andat the same time delineates its research base: working in the Derrade Meroda Archives in Salzburg, which were curated lovingly byProfessor Sibylle Dahms until 2002. Located in the Institute forMusic at the University of Salzburg, this collection led the authorto further research in Paris, London, Cologne, Leipzig, and NewYork. (Interestingly, she omits Wolfenbuttl, the library in CentralGermany where many original documents are housed.) Schroedterthanks her Doktor-Vater, Professor Jurg Stenzl, for helping her raiseher gaze “from time-to-time too preoccupied with details, to thelight on the horizon.” How clearly this viewpoint is illuminateddetermines the value of the book. Publication of the study, com-pleted in 2001, was delayed by unexplained circumstances until2003. The printed text of 444 pages is accompanied by a CD-ROMthat contains a “Databank of dance ca. 1700,” with 14,500 entries

*All translations are my own.

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102 Dance Chronicle

referring to persons (authors, dancers), 3,900 titles of books anddances, all the music for Lambranzi’s New and Curious School of The-atrical Dances with 101 pictures of the dances, and a supplementallist of selected research examples relating to individual thematictopics. An attractive format—on the cover a stunning line-drawingof an eighteenth-century male masked dancer of superhero pro-portions and comic-book flair attired in a tunic with snakeswrithing around his arms, waist, and legs, identified as a Furie fromJ. P. Rameau’s opera Zoroaster—immediately draws the eye. Copi-ous illustrations from the archives illuminate the text, enliveningthe densely detailed prose.

The text is not for the faint of heart, that is, anyone unwill-ing or unequipped linguistically to personally sort out the copiousamount of original source material it contains. Prepare for schol-arly prose and be capable of comprehending the source materialsin French, Italian, and English that are liberally quoted in theGerman text, with the requisite few phrases in Latin to solidifyscholarship. From page one it is clear that the book is based onthe archives at Salzburg, and the table of contents reveals theGerman dissertation style of organization. What does the bookcontain and what does our author tell us? Schroedter intends to“chart the developmental process of late ‘Ballet de Cour’ to early‘Ballet en Action’ from the late seventeenth century to the mid-dle of the eighteenth century by exploring dance-specific sourcematerial” (p. 10). Dance book authors are grouped geographi-cally and linguistically, and then examined by the way their the-ories relate, agreeing or disputing each other’s concepts, as bal-let moves toward increased technical prowess and professional-ism. She begins with de Pure (Paris, 1668) and ends with Cahusac(1764), including all of the major dance publications in the threeabove-mentioned languages during that time period. Each authoris profiled as his name appears, with many cross-references to sup-port the research: Michel de Pure, Claude Francois Menestrier,Samuel Rudolph Behr, the anonymous I. H. P., Johann Pasch, LouisBonin, John Weaver, Gregorio Lambranzi, Gottfried Taubert, Jean-Baptiste Abbe du Bos, Kellom Tomlinson, Pierre Rameau, JacquesBonnet, the antidance Meletaon, and Louis de Cahusac. Earlierreferences abound (i.e., Jean Baptiste Lully’s work is resurrectedin discussing “ballet en action”) and some attempt is made to in-clude the names of all twentieth-century scholars and recreators

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The Poetics of Eighteenth-Century Dance 103

of Baroque dance. Alas, no index provides a way to handily checkthese references.

The author organizes the book by themes and eras. Eachsource book is examined in detail at least three times: first, each au-thor is introduced with a detailed discussion of his life and works;then, his aesthetics are compared with other authors’ publications,including copious footnotes regarding texts both before and afterthe book in question; finally, the author’s ideas are shown to haveadvanced or hindered the development of action ballet. For thereader, this means constant page-turning, leafing back to the ini-tial introduction of, say, Samuel Rudolph Behr (b.1670–?) and hisideas, in relation to those of de Pure (1620–80) and Menestrier(1631–1705); then forward to the philosophical implications ofhis philosophy of dance and how it relates to “Affect” and “Ac-tion.” Reading is slow; it is difficult to “see the forest for the trees.”By the time the reader has finished the book, ideas are swirling,tumbling over one another in the way Wagner’s notes overwhelmthe ear in The Ring, and leaving one to ponder what has beenlearned that is new in the journey from seventeenth-century affectto eighteenth-century action. The book sorely needs an index tohelp the reader locate the relevant page on which to focus interestat any given time, for its strength lies in the details of the author’sresearch. Would that Schroedter had provided us with a thread,like Ariadne’s guide to the Minotaur, so that we were not distractedby a superfluity of detail and could more easily follow her line ofreasoning.

In Part 2 of the Introduction, “Research Limitations,”Schroedter notes that forms of expression used by itinerant artistsand wandering players in the commedia dell’arte tradition con-tribute to the narrative character of ballet en action. This comic mim-ing, typified by English pantomime, enters theatre ballet throughthe Viennese works of Gasparo Angiolini (1731–1803) and FranzA. C. Hilverding (1710–68). Rather than originating in France,the ballet en action was popularized through the writings of Jean-Georges Noverre (1727–1810), beginning with his employment inStuttgart at the court of Karl Eugen von Wurttemberg and con-tinuing during his time in Vienna, where he was working withAngiolini and Hilverding. Schroedter notes that these facts movethe innovations in theatrical dance from being considered as anexclusively French art form to a “clearly internationally developing

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art form.” Is she really saying that the Germans are the essentiallink in developing ballet en action? (This term, she notes, replacesthe more generally used ballet d’action because it occurs more oftenin the literature that she is reviewing.) It is surprising that she doesnot mention Mark Franko’s illuminating study of the burlesqueelements that influenced French dance from the Ballet Comiquethrough the courts of Louis XIII and Louis XIV.*

Although details are nigh impossible to look up inSchroedter’s printed book, the Anhang [Appendix] contained onthe CD-ROM enclosed in a pocket inside the back cover providesmany. The “Databank about dance in 1700” is rich in carefully or-ganized lists of the contents of the books she has researched, pre-sented in an attractive format with many illustrations and abundantcross-referencing (but note that the Macintosh database she cre-ated in 2004 is already obsolete and difficult to access/read andmanipulate). In addition, there are some “selected research ex-amples relating to a few major thematic points.” This informationsupplements the main narrative, giving specific data supportingthe points made in the book so that parallels can be drawn tobetter understand the thrust of Schroedter’s argument.

After printing out and examining a large number of the re-search examples, I still ponder for whom such richly detailedinformation is useful. Why does one want to know how often,and where, dance authors use the word(s) Mouvemens, Motions,Bewegungen or Passiones, Passions, Affects, Affectiones, Leidenschaften,Gemuths-Bewegungen, Complexiones, Mouvemens de l’Ame, Mouvemensau Coeur? This kind of research detail may be useful for somedance theorists, a few philosophers, some dance recreators, and ahandful of scholars with general interest in dance treatises of themid-seventeenth to the early-eighteenth centuries; for the generalreader, who might pick up the book because of its fascinating ti-tle and fine illustrations, the CD-ROM appendix reads like bean-counting—too densely overwritten to yield insights.

In closing, as a prose example, I have translated four impor-tant points made in the book, each in a separate sentence, allow-ing the reader to decide whether, and how, to read and interpret

*Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body (Cambridge and New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1993).

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The Poetics of Eighteenth-Century Dance 105

Schroedter’s words:Important impulses to the development of (dance) pantomime[i.e., of Ballet en Action], that is, to a dancerly gesticulation forthe purpose of relating dramatic content, came from differentdirections: those from “elite” contemporary dance poets orientedtoward discussing dance as art refer primarily to antiquity, admiringthe drama of the Greek theatre and observing particularly in Romanpantomime a similar language of movement, through which dancecan emancipate itself from words and still command a comparableexpressive strength. At the same time, conventions of contemporaryrhetoric are espoused that in the final analysis return to conceptsfrom an antique art of expression. Similarly, tendencies of dramaticart—again, influenced by rhetorical gesture—leave their traces inthe conception of dramatizing theatre dance with a correspond-ing expressive [movement] language. Finally, pantomimic presen-tations from traveling theatre performances [Darbietungen aus demJahrmarktstheater] are mentioned many times in the dance treatises,for which corresponding (side) remarks are the preferred meansof expression. (p. 444)

In Schroedter’s penultimate paragraph she writes, “A char-acteristic of German dance poetics presents the French emphasison the ‘moralizing’ emphasis of the art of dance as a provenanceof city life, simultaneously emphasizing an intensive move fromdance that was formerly reserved for the nobility toward dance asa bourgeois art form.” In her final remarks she notes the staticstate of the French dance theoreticians she has examined, caughtin the seventeenth-century mold of French authors who continueto write in a classical form perfected during the reign of LouisXIV. In so doing, she opens the door a tiny crack toward thethoughts and feelings expressed at the end of the eighteenth cen-tury in Madame de Stael’s De l’Allemagne [About Germany], the bookbanned in Napoleon’s Paris that shocked Europe and opened toit the floodgates of German Romanticism. Acknowledging feel-ings will inundate post-[French]Revolutionary dance as well as allthe arts, changing them forever and becoming the bedrock uponwhich nineteenth-century ballet was founded.

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