Violence and Buffoonery in Grotesque Dance

In the commedia dell’arte tradition, a large proportion of stage business consists of acts of violence and farcical confrontation, frequently involving characters defined by a narrow range of physical movement. In the early 18th century, many of these routines were imported into grotesque dance, wherein they were gentrified by stylisation and prettified by rhythmical articulation. This transformation did not diminish the signifying power of the comic routines. On the contrary, it endowed their performance with a new aesthetic appeal that enhanced their illocutionary force by redefining their ideological focus. My purpose in this paper is to illustrate the phenomenon by offering a close reading of scenes of buffoonish violence in the grotesque dance repertoire of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, viewed in relation to the contemporary biomechanics of stage movement and interpreted in the context of the waning of baroque aesthetics.