The Transition Toward Grace

Lightness, virtuosity, and galant measure

Rococo is a subtle yet decisive phase — less “revolutionary” than the Enlightenment, less geometric than the Baroque, yet fundamental for the transformation of bodily style. Here ballet changes the quality of movement itself. Rococo means lightness, grace, virtuosity — the passage from Baroque solemnity to galanterie. Between the early and mid-eighteenth century, within the Italian Rococo climate, taste shifted from monumentality to refinement. Musically, this was the age of the “galant style,” cultivated by composers such as the Campanians Giovanni Battista Pergolesi and Domenico Cimarosa, or the Venetian Baldassare Galuppi, whose brilliant and transparent scores required a new type of physicality. If the Baroque was symmetry — sign of power and representation — Rococo was elegance, intimacy, grace, and subtle play. Italian ballet reflected this shift. Grand collective geometric figures gave way to more fluid, ornamental, and less monumental movement.

The Lightened Body

The dancer reduced weight and refined speed, privileging agility and brilliance. Italian dance became more sparkling than solemn; virtuosity increased, though without reaching the later excesses of certain Romantic spectacles. For the moment, it was elegant skill and galant measure. The perfect embodiment of this new lightness was the Parmese Barbara Campanini, known throughout Europe as “La Barbarina.” Admired for her astonishing speed and for executing complex airborne jumps (entrechats) until then largely reserved for male dancers, Campanini amazed audiences by bringing onto the stage a distinctly Italian verve and playful sensuality.

Between Court and Public Theatre

During the Rococo period in Italy, ballet moved between aristocratic festivities and increasingly frequented public theatres — particularly in Venice, where impresarial theatres such as San Samuele or San Cassiano competed to secure the best dancers for their “balli” between the acts of operas. The audience expanded. Ballet was no longer confined to court, and this changed the perception of the dancer, who became increasingly a professional rather than a noble amateur. It was during this period that the figure of the mezzo carattere dancer consolidated — a distinctly Italian type blending the technique of noble dance with the liveliness of popular forms and theatrical mimicry.

Sensibility and Gesture

In Italian choreographies, Rococo taste privileged curved lines and undulating movement. Just as the frescoed ceilings of the Venetian Giambattista Tiepolo abandoned heavy perspectives in favor of luminous skies and asymmetrical figures, so too the dancer’s body sought graceful torsion, delicate wrists, and dynamic contrapposto. Italian masters and performers such as the Neapolitan Antonio Rinaldi, known as “Il Fossano,” triumphed at home and abroad by combining the grace of the new style with irresistible expressive vitality. Dance became increasingly expressive in the arms and torso, anticipating the attention to sentiment that would fully emerge in the Enlightenment reforms. It was not yet fully narrative ballet, but it had already moved beyond a certain rational rigidity characteristic of early reform aesthetics.

Transition Toward Reform

Rococo prepared the ground for the growth of technical virtuosity and the search for greater expressive naturalness. It did not invent the ballet d’action, but it rendered the body capable of sustaining it.