Chapter 11 Gesture as a Means for Portraying Characters in Viennese Mid-18th-century Ballet
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Abstract
“Devoid of meaning”, “cold”, “empty”—the scorching criticism of the mid-18th-century ballet reformers regarding contemporary stage dance left no doubt about the necessity to reform. Following current developments in contemporary theatre theory and aesthetic philosophy, the Austrian dancer and ballet master Franz Anton Hilverding (1710–1768) presented the first reformative experiments on stage around 1750. With his pupil Gasparo Angiolini’s (1731–1803) more radical approach the Viennese ballet reform, a new stage dance emerged, deeply influenced by the contemporary discussion about nature and the performer’s imitation of nature. Angiolini’s more differentiated characters required new means of transferring the character’s affects to the audience. One of these was a different kind of gesture which was to be developed with recourse to antique pantomime. Jean Georges Noverre (1727–1810) arrived in Vienna with a reformative concept already tested. Their 1770s querelle in form of published treatises is one of the most important sources for today’s understanding of the reformative concepts of both artists. This chapter sheds new light on how Angiolini and Noverre used gesture to stage credible characters, and on how this reformed gesture was integrated in the choreography in order to convey the relations between characters as well as the increasingly complex plots.