From Pantomime to Voluptuousness: Female Dancers and Male Spectators of 18th-century Pantomime Ballets

With the rise of pantomime ballet in the 18th century, the audience was no longer supposed to admire dancers only for their beautiful body movements but also for their acting and their capacity to imitate emotions. For female dancers, who were commonly praised for their natural attractiveness along with their choreographic grace, one would think that such a revolution could have brought about less biased assessments of their performances by men; but the result was that voluptuousness was even more brought to the fore. This paper will look into a number of ballet programmes, accounts and moral criticisms by French and Italian male spectators about female dancers in the second half of the 18th century in order to highlight the fact that pantomime ballets tended to present the ballerinas in a more erotic light than ever. The importance of love as the main theme of most ballets and the influence of libertine literature are not the only elements to account for this evolution: the very addition of pantomime was perceived as an opportunity for ballerinas to be more seductive, even slightly provocative, by representing passionate love stories or by playing touching and ingenuous young women. 

About the author

Béatrice Pfister defended in 2020 her PhD thesis on 'Dance Trying to Conquer the Status of Art: Apology and Theory of Ballet in French and Italian Texts from the End of the Sixteenth Century to the End of the Eighteenth Century'. She carried out this research in comparative literature at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris. She is particularly interested in the way ballet aesthetics were shaped by a desire of increasing the prestige of dance as an art. Her interdisciplinary approach is at the intersection of literature, dance studies, history and philosophy. She currently teaches theatre studies at the University of Lille in France.