Mannerism and the Expressive Body in Eighteenth-Century French Ballet: Diderot and Noverre

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Abstract: Studies of ballet reforms in eighteenth-century France often focus primarily on the newly introduced component of pantomime into ballet. By focusing on dance rather than pantomime, I complicate the relationship between narrative form and medium in Jean-Georges Noverre’s pantomime ballets and Denis Diderot’s single extant pantomime ballet scenario. Analyzing both writers’ approaches to narrative register, I examine these in context with their and Rousseau’s views on the belle danse , or danse noble , as a medium. Ultimately, I argue that these thinkers’ divergent views reveal the complicated layers at play in theorizing ballet when the era’s emphasis on the representation of nature is considered alongside the acknowledgment of the danse noble being a medium possessing inherent connotations of register.