Lecture by Alexis Stanley
Chaired by Eleanor Johnson

Eighteenth-century Europe witnessed an ambitious yet contested effort to redefine theatrical dance as a language capable of representing human action, emotion, and moral character. While the emergence of danse en action in France and ballo pantomimo in Italy is often presented as ballet’s emancipation from court spectacle, this talk argues that theories of “imitative” theatrical dance faced significant conceptual challenges inherited from classical poetics, Renaissance aesthetics, and the epistemology of embodied performance. Unlike poetry or painting, dance lacked a stable vocabulary through which mimesis could be theorized without collapsing into either decorative movement or mute gesture. The central problem was therefore philosophical as much as choreographic: how could movement without words communicate intelligible narrative while preserving dance’s expressive autonomy?

By examining French and Italian treatises alongside broader aesthetic discourse, this talk situates the development of European theatrical dance within Enlightenment debates over representation, perception, and the hierarchy of the arts. It also exposes the extent to which eighteenth-century theatrical dance occupied an uncertain position between rhetoric, painting, theater, and embodied philosophy. Lastly, it suggests that the concept of “ut saltatio pictura” provided a crucial framework for legitimizing dance as a representational art, while simultaneously revealing the conceptual limits of imitation in an ephemeral performative medium.

Fall Thursday Lecture Series events are open to Columbia-affiliated faculty, students, and invited guests. All others interested in attending, please email the SOF/Heyman at [email protected].

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