Theories of Ballet in the Age of the Encyclopédie

In Enlightenment Europe, a new form of pantomime ballet emerged, through the dual channels of theorization in print and experimentation onstage. Emphasizing eighteenth-century ballets construction through print culture, Theories of Ballet in the Age of the Encyclopédie follows two parallel pathsstandalone treatises on ballet and dance and encyclopediasto examine the shifting definition of ballet over the second half of the eighteenth century.

Bringing together the Encyclopédie and its Supplément, the Encyclopédie méthodique, and the Encyclopédie dYverdon with the works of Jean-Georges Noverre, Louis de Cahusac, and Charles Compan, it traces how the recycling and recombining of discourses about dance, theatre, and movement arts directly affected the process of defining ballet. At the same time, it emphasizes the role of textual borrowing and compilation in disseminating knowledge during the Enlightenment, examining the differences between placing borrowed texts into encyclopedias of various types as well as into journal format, arguing that context has the potential to play a role equally important to content in shaping a readers understanding, and that the Encyclopédie méthodique presented ballet in a way that diverged radically from both the Encyclopédie and Noverres Lettres sur la danse.