When Bodies Tell a Story: A Theoretical Study on Dance Dramaturgy

In the 18th century, pantomime ballet was based on the idea that dance was an 'art of imitation' and that it could represent a tragedy or a comedy by using the expressive power of the body, without any words. The comparison with drama was a strategy that allowed dance to be recognized as an independent artistic form. However, this comparison raised several questions concerning issues such as the dramaturgical structure of the dance piece, the search for a suitable subject, characters and their roles, or the relationship between dance and pantomime. One of the reasons that Angiolini, Noverre, and their supporters were opposed during the 'Quarrel of the Pantomimes' concerns precisely the dramaturgical rules: if dance can tell a story, how should it do it? 

By analyzing theoretical writings on theatrical dance and by relying on several choreographic scenarios of Angiolini and Noverre's ballets, I propose an in-depth study of the way in which the two ballet masters thought through the main dramaturgical questions - in particular the dramatic structure and the relationship between literary hypertext and dance - using the two very distant models of Aristotle and Shakespeare. My goal is to shed a new light on how ballet masters questioned and built the first Dance Dramaturgy.