Staging Group Dances in the Theatre, from Noverre to Saint-Léon

The staging of ballet had long included the use of dancers in entrées or ensemble dances, to set the scene in a ballet or opera, forward the dramatic plot, celebrate weddings, or depict competitive events and even battles relevant to the storyline of the work being performed. As the nature of ballet and ballet-pantomime continued to evolve throughout the eighteenth century, so did scope for the use of groups of suitable dancers from the corps de ballet, figurants or minor soloists, to either supplement or provide a context for the appearances of the principal dancers, or to simply present an abstract dance spectacle. Such ensemble dancers had come to represent an important additional category of performers, both in acquiring enhanced status within the hierarchical world of the dance profession, and in their capacity to enrich the visual effectiveness and overall choreographic impact of a ballet. Taking examples from performances in Paris and London between the 1780s and 1850s, this paper considers some of the qualities thought necessary at that time for successful ensemble work on stage, its relationship to the fashion for ‘tableaux’ in stage-dancing, the attempts to record group dances pictorially or in notation, and the comments of critics of the time when seeing good (and bad) ensemble dancing.

Jennifer Thorp has a long-standing interest in court, ballroom and theatrical dance in England between the late-seventeenth and late-eighteenth centuries, and in the sources which document those activities. Her monograph, The Gentleman Dancing- Master; Mr Isaac and the English Royal Court from Charles II to Queen Anne was published by Clemson University Press in 2024, and her article ‘A Lullian divertissement for King William III at Kensington in 1698’ was published in Early Music in May 2025. She is currently working on the teaching career of Anthony L’Abbé at the Hanoverian court in London.