A Dance Within a Dance: The Presence of the Contredanse Within Staged Productions in 18th-century France

In 1754, Louis de Cahusac remarked that hardly a ballet was staged in France without an accompanying contredanse. Although the phenomenon of dance-within-dance may not have been as ubiquitous as the librettist would suggest, it was certainly not uncommon. As early as 1714, the contredanse, a French derivative of the English Country dance, appeared within a staged production; it would remain a fixture of the theatre throughout the century.

As a social dance—a dance that originated from the world rather than that attempted to imitate it—the contredanse had a particular effect. This ‘pure’ dance form, seemingly unencumbered by signifying gestures, arrested the action of the plot, thereby allowing the characters to represent, or make present, their ‘true’ selves and the spectators to identify even more intimately with the world on stage. At the moment of the contredanse, the comédie or ballet pantomime ceased to parody the real world and instead contested the sufficiency of artistic imitation to represent it. Yet as a foreign dance, the contredanse also questioned the ability of the world to accurately represent itself. By surveying the repertoire of contredanse performances in 18th-century France and analyzing representative examples such as those in Zaïs (1748), La Feste de Mirsa (1781), and Les Rivaux (1784), I propose to demonstrate how social dance on the stage disputed accepted notions of theatrical illusion and performative language yet signified as forcibly as its artistic counterparts.