Flavia Pappacena_Noverre's Lettres sur la Danse - Acting Archives

AAR Acting Archives Essays Supplement 9 – April 2011
provide a language for the deaf and dumb, had to be very rapid and elaborate, but
above all highly codified, making them accessible only to those who had been
adequately trained. Here there can be no mistaking his criticism of contemporary
Italian pantomime, but Noverre went one step further: if it is plausible to claim that
the gesticulation of the ancient pantomime lived on in modern Italian acting, it
follows that this ancient art form was trivial, ignoble and devoid of finesse, and thus
unsuited to tragedy or the exercise of oratory, which both require dignity and
simplicity. In conclusion, for Noverre the conventional gesture, which is in itself
unacceptable in dance, becomes ‘ridiculously unsightly’ if it is derived from the
Italian style. 47 He ends by asking whether the theatre goers of his day, being neither
deaf nor dumb, could be expected to learn the details of such a complex language
just to be able to go to the ballet.
This question actually conceals a certain bitterness at the on-going disputes with
his rival Gaspero Angiolini and his clique, who on numerous occasions had clashed
with him in the debate on the art of pantomime and on the true nature of the ballet
d’action. At the same time it betrays an awareness of the structural limits of the
language of pantomime. Whereas in 1760 he had alluded to the impossibility of
representing past and future, when it came to the 1803 edition he felt obliged to state
in no uncertain terms: ‘It is quite impossible to express in pantomime the following
lines: “I had, my Lord, an illustrious and generous brother./This you will say to him
who brought you here”’. 48 So ‘Like those intrepid navigators who have brave storm
and tempest to discover unknown lands […] but whom insurmountable obstacles
oppose in the midst of their travels’, he himself, who had done away with a number
of barriers, was now forced to yield in the face of the objective limits of his language
of gesture. 49
Noverre came to this conclusion following decades of experience, but the
conundrum had exercised commentators for a long time, without any prospect of a
solution. 50 In 1822 André Jean-Jacques Deshayes, a perfect exemplar of the style of
l’Opéra, seemed to have accepted the structural paucity of the French language of
gesture, but shortly afterwards, in 1828, in a chapter specifically devoted to
pantomime in The Code of Terpsichore, Carlo Blasis recognised how some French
choreographers had taken the trouble to integrate their gestural language with Italian
47 Joseph Uriot placed on record a significant account of the difference between Noverre’s pantomime
and the one currently in use. See Joseph Uriot, Lettres Virtembergeoises, ou La Verité sans fard opposée à
[…] la Verité telle qu’elle est, Vraibourg, 1766, Letter VI (Stuttgart, July 12, 1766).
48 ‘Il est de toute impossibilité d’éxprimer en pantomime le vers suivants: “J’eûs un frère, Seigneur,
illustre et généreux./Vous direz à celui qui vous a faite venir”’. 1803, t. II, Letter VII, p. 75.
49 1803, Avant-Propos, p. x; Beaumont, p. 6.
50 ‘The more I work the more I become aware of my inadequacy. In making this declaration, where
there can be no question of vanity, I find myself obliged to go on providing Programmes. but in
confessing my shortcomings I must also say, with the same frankness, that Pantomime is of all the
imitative Arts the most wretched and limited’. Programme for Eutimo ed Eucari (Milano, 1775), in J.
Sasportes, ‘La parola contro il corpo ovvero il melodramma nemico del ballo’, La danza italiana, no. 1
(Autumn, 1984), p. 36. The same sentiments are expressed in the Avant-Propos to the ballet Euthyme
et Eucharis in Recueil de Programmes de Ballets de M. Noverre Maître de ballets de la Cour Imperiale et Royale,
Vienne, Joseph Kurzböck, 1776, pp. 3-4.
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