Flavia Pappacena_Noverre's Lettres sur la Danse - Acting Archives

AAR Acting Archives Essays Supplement 9 – April 2011
But if, as he wrote to Voltaire in 1763, in Garrick’s productions the gestures of
the dancer/actor are eloquent because, rather than being studied in front of the
mirror, they spring from the passions, are moulded by feeling and coloured by
veracity; if the action in dance (as in mime) is the art of conveying sentiments and
passions to spectators by means of the actor’s authentic movements, gestures and
face, how can a gesture, as swift and spontaneous as a dart loosed from the soul, be
subjected to rules? Can rules be imposed on mimicry? Should not gestures issue from
the actor’s being and be the faithful interpreters of his impulses? Like Diderot and
Marmontel before him, in 1760 Noverre ruled out any normative operation which
could suffocate the voice of nature and place restraints on creativity, insisting on the
impossibility of fixing the whole gamut of moods in a limited repertoire of gestures. 43
In these and similar considerations from the first edition of the Lettres, Noverre
tended to be rather generic, giving undue prominence to his sources – from antiquity
(above all Quintilian), Garrick and theoretical writings on art. He apparently did not
yet possess sufficient experience of “danse en action” to tackle the issues more
directly. The first ballet he presented to be organized in terms of exposition, intrigue
and dénouement, with a narrative structure and without masks, was put on in
November 1757, the year he also began preparing his Lettres. Moreover it was only
over the next two years – immediately prior to the publication of his treatise – that
Noverre began to take a serious interest in contemporary discussions of the theatre,
starting to formulate a sort of repertoire of gestures, without however aiming at a
genuine classification. In his peremptory dismissal of any suggestion of rules he was
obviously once again attacking the schematic rigidity of academic dance, as well as
rejecting the language of mimicry which derived from the commedia dell’arte. It was
only after the experience of Médée (1763), Hypermnestre (1764), La Mort d’Agamemnon
(1772) and Les Horaces et les Curiaces (1774) that his position with respect to mime
changed, as both his chosen texts and the structure of the ballets became more
elaborate. The complexity of the individual scenes and the need to anchor the greater
scope and heightened rhythm of the action and give unity to the successive tableaux,
characterising them with coherent gestures and movements, obliged him to structure
a vocabulary of gesture and, as a result, to make a meticulous study of the individual
roles, experimenting with them himself before he could “teach” them to his dancers.
Thus if in 1760 the problems linked to identifying the appropriate gesture, training
novice dancers and entering into a role are simply enumerated, and in Letter IX he
merely alludes to the need for dancers to be trained in expressing feeling, in Letter
XIII (tome II, 1803), Noverre was able to emphasise the responsibilities of the maître
de ballets with respect to the education of the dancer-actor, his style of acting and the
need always to progress in his art.
If the mechanical part of dance gives the maître de ballets such a lot of trouble and
requires so many formulae, does not the art of gesture and expression demand every bit
as much? Will not rehearsing the movements, giving a lively depiction of the passions,
achieving action dictated by the emotions, the general state of agitation and indeed all
these transitions bring him to a state bordering on delirium? If Agamemnon,
Clytemnester, Achilles and Iphygenia are all on stage together there are four roles which
need to be taught. Each of the actors has his or her own end in view, with opposing
sentiments and different views; each of them has to be animated by the right kind of
43 The various considerations referred to are found in Letters II and X (1760).
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