Description
Book SynopsisIn Enlightenment Europe, a new form of pantomime ballet emerged, through the dual channels of theorization in print and experimentation onstage. Emphasizing eighteenth-century ballet’s construction through print culture, Theories of Ballet in the Age of the Encyclopédie follows two parallel paths—standalone treatises on ballet and dance and encyclopedias—to 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 d’Yverdon 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 reader’s understanding, and that the Encyclopédie méthodique presented ballet in a way that diverged radically from both the Encyclopédie and Noverre’s Lettres sur la danse.
Trade Review\‘Olivia Sabee provides an important contribution to the study of the circulation of ideas and definitions concerning the art of ballet in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century. Her publication will be welcomed by specialists of the history of the performing arts, as well as scholars or students interested in the bigger picture of how the encyclopaedic spirit shaped the perception of the arts and served to disseminate new ideas during the Enlightenment period.\’
Béatrice Pfister, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies
‘[A] valuable resource for scholars focused on dance, documentation, and communication… Sabee’s book reminds us that encyclopedias are works of art, and as such, they deserve our attention as scholars seek to discover how knowledge travels, or rather dances. Theories of Ballet in the Age of Encyclopédie is compelling because it directs us to consider ballet’s theoretical past as unsettled, and the ongoing circulation of texts as an important part of ballet’s history.’ Michelle LaVigne, Dance Chronicle
