Ballet Between Theatrical Reform and Autonomy

Dance Within the New Italian Idea of Theatre

In the second half of the eighteenth century, Italian theatre was swept by a reforming wave. Dramatic truth, narrative coherence, and unity among the arts were sought in order to overcome Baroque formalism. Ballet could no longer remain mere decoration; it had to adapt to the coherent language of the new theatre. Within this fervent climate — nourished by Italian Enlightenment intellectuals such as the Milanese Pietro Verri and Cesare Beccaria — the true revolution took shape. Theoretical reflections on expressive, psychological, and dramaturgical dance found in Italy their most significant precursors and practical architects. The Milanese Gasparo Angiolini even engaged in a famous and heated literary controversy — the Lettere a Monsieur Noverre — against the French choreographer Jean-Georges Noverre, proudly asserting the Italo-Viennese primacy in the invention of the “ballet pantomime.”

Vienna and the Reformed Ballet of Italian Inspiration

In Vienna, the cultural capital of the Habsburg Empire, ballet became integrated into the reformed theatre conceived and theorized by the Italian intellectual Ranieri de’ Calzabigi. It was Calzabigi who provided the theoretical framework for the transformation of opera seria and musical drama. Figures such as Gasparo Angiolini developed the ballet pantomime, insisting on narrative coherence, expressive continuity, and the subordination of technique to dramaturgy. The manifesto of this revolution was the ballet Il convitato di pietra (Don Juan, 1761), choreographed by Angiolini on a subject prepared by Calzabigi himself. For the Italian choreographer, the dancer was no longer an ornamental element but a silent actor.

Pantomime and Sentiment: The Liberation of the Body

The Enlightenment valued the expression of passions. Dance inserted within operatic performances in the major Italian centers had to render visible the most interior and intimate aspects of the human condition. This implied the reduction of rigid masks (a legacy of the Commedia dell’Arte) and the adoption of lighter, more functional costumes that allowed greater freedom of movement in face and arms. For Angiolini and for his Italian disciples scattered across Europe — such as the Florentine Vincenzo Galeotti, who exported the ballet d’action as far as Denmark — the focus was entirely on natural gesture, in which the body became a readable vehicle of emotion. Ballet progressively detached itself from opera, performing a double movement: on the one hand, integrating more deeply into the reformed opera of Calzabigi and the Apulian composer Niccolò Piccinni; on the other, preparing for complete spectacular autonomy.

From Divertissement to Autonomous Dramaturgy

Theatrical evenings in major Italian centers increasingly included independent ballets, not merely operatic intermezzi. In the great theatres of the peninsula — such as the Teatro Regio of Turin or the newly inaugurated Teatro alla Scala in Milan (1778) — the “balli” inserted between acts grew monumental and central, sometimes lasting almost as long as the opera itself and attracting audiences for their visual and narrative power alone. Dance could now sustain a complete plot without recourse to singing. This was the decisive turning point: ballet could exist independently as an autonomous art form.

Toward Romanticism

By the end of the eighteenth century, ballet had acquired narrative autonomy, expressive centrality, and a fully developed theatrical structure. The Romantic nineteenth century would introduce the supremacy of the ballerina, the systematic use of pointe technique, and the supernatural as choreographic space. Yet the entire dramaturgical and conceptual grammar had already been written in Italy during the Age of Enlightenment.