Dancing With Words

Abstract

With its puzzling hypothesis that marionettes dance with more grace than human dancers, Kleist's essay On The Marionette Theatre outlines a mechanistic aesthetics of dance which departs from late eighteenth-century notions of dance as a natural expression of passions, as for instance Noverre had promoted them in his attempt to sever ballet and pantomime from their ties to comedy and commedia del'arte and to reform ballet through recourse to antiquity and English Renaissance drama. Kleist does seem to borrow from such an influ-