Flavia Pappacena_Noverre's Lettres sur la Danse - Acting Archives

AAR Acting Archives Essays Supplement 9 – April 2011
Feuillet (Paris, 1700). Chorégraphie was created with the dual aim of preserving the
choreographic heritage and endowing dance with the same resources as the other arts
(a system of notation and an analytical method). The ease with which Beauchamps’s
system could be used had ensured a considerable diffusion of the method and
publications containing the transcription of parts of ballets dating from the end of
the seventeenth century and a record of the steps codified by the Académie Royale
de Danse. Noverre insisted on the limitations of this method and denounced its
incompatibility both with the technical progress that had been made in the second
half of the century and with the expressive use of gesture that characterised ballets
with a narrative structure. Moreover, Noverre pointed out the incipient danger in
transcription: a senseless limitation of the choreographer’s creativity and an
impediment to improving on and updating the work in question.
This latter consideration is not far removed from the observation that ‘chorégraphie
deadens the imagination’ with which Noverre once again proclaimed his aversion to
the academic tradition and its apologists. 93 If he had been engaged in a lucid and
objective analysis, as André Jean-Jacques Deshayes pointed out in 1822 94 and Arthur
Saint-Léon thirty years later, 95 Noverre would never have confused the creative
process with the transcription a posteriori of the dance steps, which was in fact the
function of chorégraphie. The definition he used of a ‘bird’s eye view’ in dismissing
Beauchamps’s notation as being incapable of respecting the main viewpoints – from
the lowest tiers of boxes and the stalls – because he chose to view the movement
from above is clearly instrumental, serving to strike yet another blow at hidebound
academe. Later in the same letter Noverre drops his polemic tone and proposes a
more comprehensive system featuring not only technical and analytical transcriptions
but also firsthand drawings reproducing the expressive attitudes characterising the
various dances and actions. In his proposal, which is perhaps rather utopian but
undoubtedly very ambitious, he imagines a collaboration between the renowned
François Boucher, for the drawings, and the famous court engraver Charles Nicolas
Cochin le Jeune, to see them into print. This was indeed a rather drastic scheme
which was later to come in once again for fierce criticism from Gaspero Angiolini,
himself the champion, although not in fact the instigator, of graphic systems
designed to conserve the choreographic heritage.
93 1760, Letter XIII, p. 393; Beaumont, p. 141.
94 André Jean-Jacques Deshayes, Idées générales sur l’Académie Royale de Musique, et plus spécialement sur la
Danse, Paris, Mongie, 1822.
95 Arthur Saint-Léon, La Sténochorégraphie ou Art d’écrire promptement la danse, Paris, Brandus, 1852
(republ. ed. by F. Pappacena, Lucca, LIM, 2006).
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