#it works well as an overarching theme and it does it without reducing her down to just a 'mom' character

[spacedlexi]

are there any narrative decisions/themes in twdg (the entirety of the series) that you really disliked/thought could be handled better?

*gestures vaguely at seasons 2 and 3* i dont think i really have anything new or groundbreaking to say about the ways those seasons were handled

honestly for the most part though even when i find the narrative decisions to be lacking or disappointing theyre able to at least stick to their themes and emotionally come to satisfying conclusions. clems personal running narrative throughout the series i think holds up pretty well. and her journey is like... the whole point of it all. so other characters or aspects of the series falling through the cracks is unfortunate but acceptable for me if its still working towards developing clementine as a character. seasons 2 and 3 might be messy and contentious among fans but like.. regardless of the issues i have with them i like where they push clem emotionally

leads to the kind of situation where i might not agree with the decisions that got us here, but i can at least appreciate what the Intended goal was narratively and thematically

but since im talking about clem the ONE thing i will say is: they pushed the "mother" shit especially in s3 way too hard. she got called a big sister Once and then they promptly moved on. other characters telling clem how motherly she is? sick ew yucky nasty. clementine herself choosing to raise aj because hes all she has left in this world and wants whats best for him? yes and also im crying. at least if you take the alone endings you dont hear that dialogue from kenny or jane so its less in your face but ugh 🙄 i actually liked in s2 that after aj is born clem can be uncomfortable with him or completely uninterested, but by the end of the season (especially if shes left all alone and its partially why i like the alone endings so much) clem decides to look out for him regardless, because theyre all each other has. hed die without her. and she needs something to fight for, to remind her that theres still good out there, because the toll this world has taken on her only continues to rise. they need each other equally. in a normal world they could have just been normal siblings. but in this one? shes ajs everything. and hes hers. and we can see All of that without characters telling clem what a "natural mother" she is 😒

[snorlaxlovesme]

full thoughts on the chaos walking movie? I want to hear more about it lol I haven’t seen it yet

it just...it felt like TKONLG but without EVERY GOOD PART, you know?

scene-wise, the closest individual scene we had to anything in the book was maybe the scene where Viola read Todd’s mother’s book to him? (even that wasn’t the same bc that was also the scene where we find out he’s illiterate, and he lets her read it right away, so there was no deep-rooted embarrassment about not being able to read). also it happened in Farbranch. BUT, like it captured the emotion of the OG scene a little, where Viola is reading to Todd and he’s hearing his ma’s words and getting emotional about it.

but all the stand-out scenes from the book, i.e. saying goodbye to Ben and Cillian, meeting the girl and getting hit in the head with a branch and bandaging her anyway, ALL of the Aaron fights, the bridge, the massacre of Farbranch, the song of Here, the Spackle, Todd’s illness, the waterfall scene, Haven, NONE of that was in the movie. so imagine all the really important and powerful moments gone

also all the overarching themes? those are gone too. todd becoming a man is  HUGE deal in the books. even in his horrible awful town he just wants to feel like he BELONGS and he’s the one person in the entire town being ostracized. two of the biggest secrets in Todd’s whole world are kept from him for the majority of the book because he’s “not yet a man”. it’s important to him. and once todd realizes the connection between Prentisstown maturity and murder, he spends the rest of that book WISHING he could be a killer. wishing he could have that kind of strength and seeing himself weak for not being able to kill. 

all of that?? gone. movie!Todd often chants the familiar “I am Todd Hewitt” (and sometimes “be a man”) when he’s nervous or trying to cover something in his Noise, and has a little tiff with Ben and Cillian at the beginning of the movie bc the Mayor sees Todd as a man while Ben and Cillian do not. (that’s a weird little bit though bc the movie never really explains why the Mayor had such an interest in Todd). but that’s about it in terms of coming-of-age material in the movie. and about murder. seeing as he doesn’t. kill. the. Spackle. let that sink in.

also like. the Noise is shown as a CONCEPT but not as a theme. the THEME of Noise is that, and I quote

“In this world of information overload, the ability to feel, my boy, is a rare gift indeed.”

or perhaps

“Knowing a man’s thoughts ain’t knowing a man.”

or even

“Knowledge is dangerous and men lie and the world changes, whether I want it to or not.”

in this movie, Noise would be described as like. a nuisance at worst and a superpower at best. you can hear most of every man’s thoughts in the movie, though not a constant, never ending stream. just just bits sporadically at either plot-convenient or comedic times. the Mayor (and at one point Ben, and at one point Todd) uses his Noise to construct illusions around people kind of similar to that Jake Gyllenhaal villain in Spiderman: Far From Home. 

but neither of these two main examples really SHOW the themes that Patrick Ness showed us in the books. that Noise is powerfully ANNOYING; that it can quickly break down relationships between groups of people; that it can be manipulated making large lies still possible.

like, remember when in the books, Todd and Viola get to Farbranch and poor Todd is absolutely GOBSMACKED that 1. the women are ALIVE and 2. the men and women are living together?? in harmony?? what the eff?? and you see Hildy in Tam’s Noise and just how much they genuinely love each other and Todd is like “damn we ain’t in Prentisstown anymore Manchee”. and you can just see based on the contrast that Prentisstown people are a whole different breed compared to the kindness of Farbranch?

in the movie Todd has a few moments of inner dialogue where he’s like “oh man that’s a woman. that’s nuts” and then we move on. his world should be turned upside down here and its not. and the difference between the two towns is that they kinda just made it seem like, yeah, Noise is annoying so we have the men sleep separately from the women so we all get a little peace, and it’s fine. that’s how Farbranch deals with it. it all just feels very blasé 

(i can’t remember specifically where this happens, probably either in Farbranch or cutting back to the Prentisstown men getting ready to march, but at some point a leader ends up saying something to a crowd of people and you can see how just one sentence spreads through an entire group of men and how they all start amplifying it and getting more and more panicked and i did think the mob mentality was cool. it reminded me of the beginning of The Ask and the Answer were the Mayor is addressing the citizens of Haven and you get that moment where the whole crowd flinches over the words of one man.)

and in all of this I’ve barely mentioned Viola. my wonderful girl. how they’ve massacred her story. god.

all of Viola’s development for the first half of the book is tanked from the start bc you SEE the crash, you see her stealing food from Ben and Cillian’s house (that’s the inciting incident of the movie), she talks to the Mayor in Prentisstown almost immediately after Todd finds her and his Noise helps everyone locate her, she talks to Todd a lot before getting to Farbranch after they escape Prentissown. the book does a LOT of work for Viola by having her mute and scared for the beginning and slowly showing how she comes to trust Todd. and how even after their incessent bickering in Farbranch they still choose to escape together because they know the army is after them specifically and they’re all the other has. that progression is really important in the book, as well as afterwards when we see how snarky Viola can actually be when speaking, how she thinks this entire planet is BACKWARDS and she can’t wait til her ship comes and shows them a thing or two about how to live.

movie Viola, well. she wants to find a way to communicate with her ship. she’s under the impression that since her scout ship crashed they’re gonna assume she’s dead and leave her behind. even though the Mayor brings up the settlers a lot after he learns about them, Viola curiously never really brings them up in any other context besides they need to come and get her. like it really made it sound like she planned on calling them, having them scoop her, and then they’d all just fucking leave, i guess. i don’t know what her end goal was besides CALLING HER PEOPLE which became the main point of the movie. the Mayor trying to find Todd and Viola so he could....use her to contact the ship?? that was also kind of unclear. and Viola trying to get to a communicator possibly so she could get the hell out of dodge. idk if that was her actual plan, but it was certainly what Todd was thinking, enough to where I was wondering if he was going to sabotage her mission in order to force her to stay (yeah. yeah. he had that energy about him and it was grosss)

and quickly, since all the animals couldn’t talk the way they do in the book, Manchee was more of a cute prop than anything. i could have gotten over it if he was useful in any way, but he never even like attacked a dude to save Todd or anything like that. so when he died it was sad on a dog-level but not a character level, since besides sitting next to Viola like twice while she cried he really added nothing to the story. also the shock of animal death was greatly reduced already since Todd’s horse that he used to escape Prentisstown from got a broken leg after he rode him off a cliff, so Todd used the knife (off-screen, thank god) to put him down. so Manchee getting killed was kind of lessened a little since my man Whiskey got nixed like 40 min earlier in the film.

this is getting long so I’ll cut it here since I’m gonna probably post about this a thousand more times. but yeah. if you watched it completely divorced from the books you would probably think “that was a cool concept but also what was the point of any of that” which is basically what most people thought based on the review headlines i’ve read. and if you are an avid book fan you’re gonna think you’re watching something else entirely.

[dannygals]

Good day, Ms. Reschell An D. Bayo!

Reading Record (English-APP 1st Session)

Unit 1: The Nature of Academic Texts

A paragraph is a group of sentences that deal with a single topic or idea. It is the first structure found in academic texts. The paragraph's components are as follows: topic sentence, supporting sentences, and conclusion and/or transitional sentence. The topic sentence's purpose is to present the primary idea of the paragraph's theme. The supporting sentences, on the other hand, expand on the major notion of the topic sentence. The ending sentence brings the major notion to a close by summarizing the full concept and ensuring that the paragraph concludes with a complete idea. A transitional sentence prepares the reader for the next concept in the following paragraph.

One method of composing an essay is a three-part essay. This structure is divided into three sections: introduction, body, and conclusion. The introduction introduces topics that will be covered in the body of the essay; the body should give evidence to support your thesis statement. Finally, the conclusion restates the thesis statement and concludes the essay. IMRaD is an acronym that stands for Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion, followed by a Conclusion. This structure is commonly employed in academic publications, particularly research papers. IMRaD intends to discuss the research issue at hand in order to explain the topic and its intended goal.

Non-academic Texts can be produced by anyone, for the general public, and promptly published; the language employed is informal, casual, and may contain slang. Authors may not be provided; nevertheless, they can be discovered in journals such as Time, Newsweek, or Rolling Stone, as well as on Wikipedia and in newspapers. Non-academic texts include religious literature, graphic novels, and magazines. Academic text, on the other hand, can be written by professionals in a particular field, prepared for an academic audience (educational), thoroughly evaluated, and published through an academic source, academic journal, certified publishing firm, or university press.

Academic disciplines are divided into branches. Accounting, economics, finance, management, and marketing are all aspects of business. Art, creative writing, languages, literature, music, philosophy, religion, and theater are examples of humanities. Biology, chemistry, computer science, engineering, geology, mathematics, physics, and medicine are examples of natural and applied sciences. Anthropology, education, geography, history, law, political science, psychology, and sociology are examples of social sciences. Each discipline and its branches have their own communities with their own vocabulary, styles, and means of communication.

Binaries can also be found in a variety of academic disciplines. Business: production-consumption and labor-capital. The humanities include artist-culture and text-context. Empiricism-rationalism and observer-subject in natural and applied sciences. Nature-nurture and free will-determinism are two concepts in the social sciences. These binaries can also migrate freely between fields, and this is often how linkages between academic disciplines can be discovered.

Critical reading is a method of reading more actively. It necessitates that readers employ their critical thinking skills to question both the text and their comprehension of it. Critical reading necessitates the reader performing the following tasks: Form judgments about the text, analyze, interpret, and evaluate it while reading, query what the text does and means, challenge the text's assumptions by questioning its argument and interpreting the meaning in context, and describe, interpret, and evaluate in response to the text. Remember that critical reading necessitates three steps: studying the text, understanding the text, and evaluating the text. Finally, annotate what you read by highlighting relevant facts, stating your queries on the text itself, using the margins for your own notes, and underlining important themes. That was the extent of my knowledge in Unit 1.

Unit 2: Thesis Statement and Outlining

This class taught me that a thesis statement is a single line that normally appears in the first paragraph of a document and states the writer's major idea and stance. A thesis statement has the following characteristics: It demonstrates your position on the subject under discussion. It informs the reader of what to expect from the rest of your paper. It directly answers a question you've been asked, It makes a claim that can be contested, It is a single line towards the beginning of your paper that introduces your argument to the viewers. A good thesis statement is supported by facts and is the result of hours of investigation.

An outline functions similarly to a blueprint or a map, and it ultimately assists the writer in not becoming stuck while writing an essay. A well-written and developed outline includes the following elements: the text's thesis, the main idea developed in each body paragraph, and evidence or supporting details in each paragraph to support the main idea. Outlines are classified into two types: topic outlines and sentence outlines. Only phrases or primary concepts are required for the topic outline. In the aforementioned framework, there is no need for full sentences. A topic outline also makes use of words that is similar to one another. This indicates that for organization, the same format is utilized for headings and subheadings (in terms of word structure or parts of speech). Finally, a heading or subheading should not be separated into only one portion; if there is an idea under “A,” there must also be a concept under “B.” There must be a "2" if there is a "1." Sentence outline, on the other hand, employs sentences. That means that all headings and subheadings must be in the form of sentences. There is less requirement for parallelism between headings and subheadings, but the same divisions per heading notion should still be observed; it cannot be separated into one component solely.

Unit 3: Writing a Summary

Summarizing a text means condensing its main points into a paragraph or two. When conducting research or studying, this is an excellent practice to follow. A summary typically has two goals: to replicate the essential ideas and points of a book, recognizing the broad principles that run throughout the article, and to articulate these concepts and ideas using exact and specific language. There are two methods you might utilize to prepare for writing a summary. These methods are previewing, skimming, and scanning. First, use the previewing technique to better orient yourself to what you need from the content you're about to dive into. You can gain an understanding of a text's overall logical progression by skimming through it. Skimming can also assist you in determining which portions of the text require your undivided attention in order to achieve your goals for reading the content. Finally, scanning is comparable to skimming, but you should have a more specific goal in mind. You're now skimming to look for a specific statistic or figure, or to see if the text discusses a topic you're researching.

One method for summarizing the material is to employ previewing or pre-reading strategies, which can assist you in comprehending the contents even before you begin close reading. Here are some approaches for summarizing a text:

• You can now identify and include the title and author of a text after reading it.

• In the first two phrases, include the author's thesis statement.

• In a text, write one or two sentences for each important notion or idea.

• If necessary, break the book into sections or by primary themes before summarizing the entire thing.

• Remember to leave out unnecessary elements; there is no need to go into minor and supporting details of the content.

• Avoid adding your own thoughts on the material.

• Avoid stealing the author's work. If you are directly quoting the author, include quotations.

The goals of summarizing texts are to recreate the overarching ideas so that the broad notions can be identified, and to express the overarching ideas using precise and specific language. The author's thesis statement should be in the first sentence. Before summarizing the text or research, break it down into its main ideas. Finally, leave out ideas that aren't relevant to the entire text. This is what I gained in Unit 3: Writing a Summary.

Unit 4: Writing from Sources

This unit taught me that paraphrase is a restatement of a text, passage, or work that articulates the meaning in a different way. It is not necessary to cite from the source material. A decent paraphrase demonstrates how well a writer comprehended the reading information. These are examples of paraphrases:

• Change of parts of speech - Parts of speech are classifications that are assigned to words based on their roles in a phrase. Nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections are examples of categories.

• Change of structure - The sentence structure is altered to match the writer's perception of the original text.

• Clause reduction entails reducing or changing clauses to phrases in order to decrease confusion and interruption and simplify sentences.

• Synonym replacement - This is the most basic type of paraphrase. It entails replacing the terms in the phrase with comparable or synonyms.

Plagiarism is the act of pretending to own material that is not your own. Plagiarism can be classified into several forms. Word-for-word or verbatim plagiarism, often known as "copy-paste plagiarism," occurs when a researcher duplicates another person's work word-for-word or verbatim without properly citing the author (s). Word order plagiarism occurs when a writer alters some of the author(s)' words by looking up synonyms in order to make the paragraph appear to be his or her own. Idea plagiarism occurs when a writer paraphrases another's work in his or her own writing but fails to properly cite or attribute the idea to the author (s).

Paraphrasing Techniques Texts are changing the words (changing the part of speech, using synonyms, converting figures and percentages to alternative forms) and the sentence structure (change the word order, use different definition structures, use different attribution signals, and change the sentence structure and use different conjuctions). Quoting is when you take what the author said and repeat it word for word. This approach is typically used for brief phrases or sentences. Plagiarism is commonly defined as verbatim copying of an author's words. To avoid this, when quoting, enclose the copied text in quotation marks (“ “) and credit the words to the original author. When you want to use a quotation in your writing, make sure to introduce, cite, and explain the quotation. This strategy is known as the ICE method for ease of recall.

Unit 5: Citing Sources of Information

A citation acknowledges the writers, scientists, researchers, and others whose creative and intellectual work you used to support or enhance your own research. It is also used to quickly discover specific sources and to help avoid plagiarism. A citation often comprises the author's name, the date of publication, the location of the publishing business, the journal title, and a DOI (Digital Object Identifier). A citation style specifies what information must be included in a citation, how that information should be ordered, what punctuation should be used, and other formatting problems. The following are the three most common citation styles:

• APA (American Psychological Association) is used in education, psychology, and the social sciences.

• MLA (Modern Language Association) is normally used in the humanities.

• Chicago/Turabian style is often used in business, history, and fine arts.

The APA citation style is a set of criteria that a publisher must follow to guarantee that written material is presented clearly and consistently. It is concerned with a variety of elements, including header selection, tone, length, punctuation and abbreviations, citation of references, and many more. The MLA citation style also includes brief parenthetical citations in the text, all of which should be linked to an alphabetical list of works cited at the end of the text. Finally, there are two main documentation systems in the Chicago style: (1) notes and bibliography and (2) author-date. Choosing between the two is usually determined by the topic matter and the character of the sources mentioned, as each system is preferred by different groups of researchers. The Turabian citation style is similar to the Chicago style, with slight changes for student authors.

Citations in the Text in APA Format (7th Edition) For in-text citations, the APA citation uses the author-date method. The last name of the author and the year of publishing should be included in the printed text. Footnotes in APA Style (7th Edition) Footnotes should be used sparingly in research, according to the American Psychological Association. For content and copyright concerns, APA footnotes and endnotes are used. In-Text Citations in MLA Format Parenthetical citations are also used in MLA format. In-text citations are often put at the conclusion of a sentence or paragraph. In most cases, author-page numbers are used. Footnotes and endnotes in MLA should also be kept to a minimum because they can be distracting to the reader. It can be used for bibliographic notes that the reader can turn to for more information. Explanatory or content notes, which give brief extra information, can also be included in footnotes and endnotes. In the Chicago Manual of Style, generally known as CMoS, the author-date style requires the in-text citation to be in parenthetical format. For direct quotations and paraphrases, give the author's name, publication date, and page numbers. There is no punctuation between the author's name and the date of publishing, but there should be a comma between the date of publication and the page numbers. Footnotes, endnotes, and a bibliography are used to reference sources in the NB Style in Chicago format.

A bibliography includes a list of all of the sources you used for your study as well as any additional background reading. This includes works that you did not end up citing in your paper. A reference list, also known as a works cited list, differs from a bibliography in that it only includes the sources that you referenced to, summarized, paraphrased, or quoted in your paper. Aside from that, they fulfill much the same function. For your bibliography or references list, the APA citation style provides a specific formatting guidance. The works cited page is how MLA refers to the reference list. It is also found at the end of a paper and should provide detailed information about any sources used in your paper. The following is the format: Author. Title. Container, Other Contributors, Version, Number, Publisher, Date, Location. Include only the elements pertinent to the source you're quoting. Order the entries in your works cited page alphabetically, beginning with the first author's last name. A bibliography is commonly used in the Chicago/Turabian citation style, which means that all of the materials you utilized in your study must be included, even if they are not expressly credited or discussed in your article.

[autodidact-adventures]

Ballet History (Part 19): The ballet d’action

By now, ballet in Paris had reached a crisis.  Sallé and her generation were gone, and dance was moving towards virtuosic technical feats, but not much more.  Both artists and critics scorned dance for its shallow artifice and insincere deceit.  “Like a dancing master” was a common insult to describe anything that had fallen into a false, decadent state.

This criticism of ballet came from the cultural upheaval of the French Enlightenment.  1600's French classical culture had declined into decorative excess and overindulgence, and the current generation of artists & writers were at odds with the society they lived in. The Enlightenment wasn't just about the ancien régime's underlying principles, but everything – how people dressed, moved and danced. Politics, art, fashion, performing arts – all these were the subject of strong debate.  Many of the articles written about dance were published in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie (compiled 1751-80).

Noverre acknowledged his debt to Diderot in his Lettres.  Diderot had written a lot about the problems in French theatre, which he found “wooden” and far too formal.  The actors postured & preened at the front of the stage (where the light was best) to perform their dramatic speeches.  Then they would drop out of character and wander aimlessly around the stage.

Diderot wanted to develop a new kind of theatre, which would have sustained action, dramatic tableaux, and pantomime as its base.  He wanted actors to remove their masks; look & speak to each other, not the audience; and stop using the traditional declamation techniques (like Garrick). Others had the same ideas.

Diderot & others also wanted to make the costumes more realistic – peasants didn't wear silk!  And in the 1750's, actors began to listen.  In 1753, Madame Favart (Comédie Italienne) wore simple peasant dress when playing the part of a village girl.  In 1755, Mademoiselle Clairon (a tragic actress) performed without hoopskirts and toned down her delivery.

But if the problem with theatre was that it didn't say things realistically, then the problem with dance was that it didn't say anything at all!  Louis de Cahusac was a writer & librettist who worked with Jean-Philippe Rameau, and he complained that ballet had reached its limits – Sallé had been expressive, but ballet-dancers nowadays were nothing more than technicians, and they were debasing their art.

Diderot said: “I would like someone to tell me what all these dances such as the minuet, the passepied, and the rigaudon signify...this man carries himself with an infinite grace; every movement of his conveys ease, charm and nobility: but what is he imitating?  That's not singing, that's solfège.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau had composed operas & ballets in Paris in the 1740's and 50's, but he would later turn against ballet, saying that it was an example of how society “enchained” individuals, destroying their natural goodness with unnecessary social graces:

If I were a dancing master, I would not perform all the monkeyshines of Marcel, good only for that country where he engages in them.  Instead of eternally busying my pupil with leaps, I would take him to the foot of a cliff.  There I would show him what attitude he must take, how he must bear his body and his head, what movements he must make, in what way he must place now his foot, now his hand, so as to follow lightly the steep, rough, uneven paths and to bound from peak to peak in climbing up as well as down.  I would make him the emulation of a goat rather than that of a dancer at the Opéra.

Rousseau believed that performing ballets within operas interrupted the story and wrecked its dramatic effect.  Baron Grimm agreed, worrying that ballet had taken over French opera: “French opera has become a spectacle where everything that is good and evil in the characters is reduced to dances.”  And these dances, he said, were nothing more than academic exercises.

Rousseau's decision was that “all dances that depict only themselves, and all ballet which is just dancing, should be banished from lyric theatre.”

Noverre wrote about these issues in his Lettres.  He wanted to turn ballet away from the shallowness & pleasure-seeking of the aristocracy, and towards the study of man, towards tragedy and moral dilemmas. Performing beautiful movements against beautiful sets with beautiful costumes was not enough – ballet should appeal to the emotions as well as the eyes, becoming a “portrait of humanity” with manking & truth as its subjects.  The German critic & dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (who admired Noverre) said the same thing, in a different way: “If pomp and etiquette make machines out of men, it is the task of the poet to make men again out of these machines.”

So dance had to tell a story without words of any kind – only with movement.  Not just light, entertaining stories – Noverre wanted to choreograph ballets about murder, betrayal and incest, and he went on to do so.

But he had no intention of changing the actual steps & poses of the noble style.  The reformation of ballet would be done with pantomime, not with the  steps.  Noverre would create the ballet d'action – a mixture of pantomime, dance and music.  It would be a new genre.

By “pantomime”, Noverre didn't mean the “low and trivial” gestures of the Italian bouffons, or the “false and lying” gestures of society, which people practised in front of mirrors.  This type of pantomime would cut through the pretense and artifice of court forms, and reach the human core.  It would be a “second organ” and a “cry of nature”, revealing man's deepest & most secret feelings.

Words often failed, Noverre wrote.  Or they could be used to cover up what you truly meant.  But the body couldn't lie – it moved instinctively, the muscles twisting the body into positions that conveyed inner torment far better than words ever could.

But pantomime had its limits – for example, it couldn't express the past or the future.  So Noverre decided that ballets should be like paintings, not plays.  They should be a series of “living tableaux” that followed one after the other, like a triptych.

Noverre studied art & architecture, and then applied the laws of perspective, proportion, and light to his ballets.  He arranged the dancers by height, shortest at the front and tallest at the back, and then worked out patterns of chiaroscuro (light & shade) onstage.

The dancers, he argued, shouldn't be just pretty ornaments lined up in neat rows, but individual people, each given a specific role, with gestures and poses, to realistically show a moment of action.  In his tableaux, the dancers often froze in a photo-like image and then moved on. Noverre even introduced pauses into his ballets, to bring attention to “all the details” of these “pictures”.  [Not sure if that's referring to his regular ballets as opposed to the ballets d'action, or the dancing within the ballets d'action.]

The use of tableaux wasn't an original idea – as mentioned earlier, Diderot wanted to use pantomime for a new form of theatre.  Parisian lawyers had begun using dramatic poses & tableaux to strengthen their arguments, as a rhetorical tool.  The aristocracy used tableaux for art, too – when Louis XVI married Marie Antoinette in 1770, the celebrations included tableaux, with actors freezing in painting-like scenes, each marking an important symbolic moment in the celebrations.  In the late 1700's, staging “live paintings” became a popular salon activity, especially for women.

But Noverre's use of tableaux changed how ballets were structured.  In French opera, ballets were divertissements (numbers), arranged around an overarching theme, for aesthetic purposes.  Symmetry, hierarchy, and patterns gave order to the dancers and the stage.  Instead, Noverre created a series of static tableaux, in which irregularly-posed groups fixed their bodies in expressive postures, limbs at angles.

Noverre also wanted to change how the dancers looked: “Children of Terpsichore...abandon these cold masks, imperfect imitations of nature; they denature your expressions, they eclipse, to put it bluntly, your soul and deprive you of your most necessary resources for expressing yourselves; get rid of these huge wigs and gigantic coifs, which distort the proportions of head and body; do without these tight and fashionable underskirts, which deprive movement of its charms, which disfigure elegant positions and efface the beauty of the upper body in its different poses.”

Like Garrick, Noverre insisted that the theatre should be darkened & quiet during the performance.  The audience members should be seated at exactly the right distance from the stage to best enter the world of the performance.  The backstage area should be hidden from view, and set changes should be invisible and carried out smoothly – in Paris, set changes were usually announced by the stage manager loudly blowing a whistle, and the crew carried them out noisily and in full view of the audience, with curtain raised.  This was the practice until the last decades of the 1700's.

Like Diderot & others, Noverre wanted to strip away the social mask & artistic constraints, to rediscover the natural man beneath it.  The idea of the ballet d'action had a lot in common with the utopian desire to return to a pre-social world, with a primitive & universal language that would speak directly to all people, no matter their social class.  Utopians disliked the French language (one critic called it “a perfidious language”), and many philosophers looked to pantomime as an alternative, one that was clear and completely honest.  Louis-Sébastien Mercier would later say that gesture “is clear, never equivocal; it does not lie.”

These people didn't want to just change art – they wanted to create a new society, one that was honest and direct, and not based on a decadent court culture.  So pantomime was part of a wide array of social/political issues, and thus the subject of a wide-ranging debate.  Ballet was a part of the intellectual life of the time, not separate from it as it is now.

Rousseau was against ballet, but for pantomime.  He felt that it could capture & express essential parts of the human nature, parts that had existed before people had been corrupted by society – the “cry of nature” that Noverre was interested in.

But Rousseau also agreed that pantomime had limitations.  As a form of communication, it was primitive – it could convey basic needs, but nothing complicated.  Humans couldn't fully express their emotions without words, he believed, or become morally self-aware.

So he imagined a golden stage in the development of human culture & society, where people would have enough language to communicate, but not enough to be deceptive & hypocritical.  In this utopian world, people would live among music, dance and poetry.  They would be ethically aware and good.  It was the perfect middle ground between primitivism and decadence.

Rousseau was interested enough in pantomime to write one of his own.  He wrote the one-act Pygmalion in 1763, and it was performed in 1770.  It mixed pantomime, speech and music, and the performers used gesture instead of words at moments of great emotion, when they had been reduced otherwise to silence.

Diderot, on the other hand, wasn't so sure about pantomime.  It is true that he laid out instructions for a new genre of drama, but there was a part of him that was not happy with pantomime.  In 1761, he wrote Le Neveu de Rameau (it wasn't published until after his death).  In it was a dialogue between Diderot and Jean-Philippe Rameau's nephew, who was a real person, a failed composer who had irrational outbursts but did have insightful ideas.

He writes the nephew as a desperate, defeated man, because of his inability to live up to his uncle & revitalize French music with a “cry of animal passion”.  He is scornful, bitter, and self-indulgent, and extremely skilled in the art of pantomime, which he uses to make his way in the world.  He demonstrates it for Diderot, showing how he mimes opera scenes and scenes from his own life.  He is vain, manipulative and ingratiating, and uses his skill to get the luxuries he desperately wants.

Diderot tries to persuade him to give all this up, because it is false.  But the nephew refuses to.  Society is unrelenting, he says and social species devour each other (like Mademoiselle Deschamps against the financiers), so he has to join in, too, or he will be nothing.  And so “he leaps, he climbs, he twists, he drags: he spends his life taking and performing positions.”

Diderot is furious: “The fact is you are a weakling, a gourmand, a coward, a muddied soul...No doubt worldly experiences come at a price; but you don't realize the price of the sacrifice you are making to get them. You are dancing, you have danced and you will continue to dance this vile pantomime.”  The nephew is like Jourdain in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, self-serving and depraved, morally ruined by social posturing, corrupt and fawning.  He's given up on everything that matters – but he is at least honest by admitting it, and this in a way makes him better than Diderot's philosopher & man of high principles.  By the end of the story, it's not clear who's teaching whom a lesson.  The contrived pantomime may be all we have, in the end.

Diderot considered Le Neveu de Rameau to be one of his “mad” works.  But it shows that behind the self-assured tone in his writings of pantomime & the “natural man”, he was aware of just how impossible it was to escape or get rid of social conventions.  For him, pantomime was all tied up with the failures of French music & social corruption.  It seemed impossible to separate them, let alone get out of it all.

There were others who opposed pantomime.  Jean-François Marmontel was a prominent librettist and a protégé of Voltaire, and he wrote a long article for the Encyclopédie, in which he argued that pantomime was morally dangerous & decadent, a form of pure passion which would seduce audiences and put them into a highly emotional state, unable to reason or think critically.  The Romans had yielded to pantomime, and look what had happened to them!  They had preferred sensational theatrical forms over rational forms that encouraged wisdom and moderation.  Manners and comportment civilized man, but pantomime made him a beast.

Another critic argued that the raw gestures of pantomime were an insult to the French elite, and their formal, restrained manners.

So the ballet d'action wasn't just a new ballet/theatre genre.  Noverre was focusing on pantomime, one of the most fundamental ideas of the French Enlightenment, and tying ballet's future to it.  If he succeeded, if pantomime could cut through the social conventions that stifled & dragged humans down, then it could become the foremost new art of a modern man.  It was very ambitious.

But, as mentioned earlier, Noverre didn't go all the way in eschewing the court origins & roots of ballet.  Ballet and its steps were a court art, rooted in the court etiquette that he wanted to get away from.

Most of his ballets were not ballets d'action, but regular ballets, which stuck to the same conventions & techniques he criticized so strongly in his writings.  He continued to use the steps & poses of the noble style.  By focusing on pantomime, Noverre could use gestures to reform ballet, without going as far as to think about the actual steps, and how to take the court out of them.  It was a safer route to take.

Of course, there were practical reasons for this as well: it wasn't just that he shied away from questioning the foundations of the art he'd been trained in & danced himself.  Outside of London, he depended on the aristocracy to survive.  He opposed the etiquette & conventions of the French elite, and was known for his rough manners and impulsive outbursts, but he was also a courtier, and could be charming & smooth when he needed to be.  His portraits show him very well-groomed, as would be expected of him.

Diderot had the same problem.  He was voluble, gobbled at table, and was far too unrestrained & enthusiastic for polite society, who were offended by him.  But when Louis-Michel van Loo painted him at his desk with messy hair, he complained that he had not been depicted with his wig on.  And Rousseau dramatically renounced Parisian society in the 1750's, getting rid of his fancy clothes and accessories, but he was extremely self-conscious about his appearance for the rest of his life.

Foreign courts usually hired Noverre as a French ballet-master, not as a radical. They expected him to stage the usual Parisian ballets that would be performed at the Opéra.  When Noverre travelled to Stuttgart, Vienna & Milan to work there, he brought French dancers with him, and had them keep training in the serious style, even though he was composing his radical pantomime-ballets at the same time.

Throughout his career, Noverre preferred the French costume-designer Louis-René Boquet, who had trained with Boucher.  His costumes were extravagant, following Parisian fashion, and were the exact opposite of what the ballet d'action required.  Noverre represented both the French aristocratic style and the Enlightenment criticism of it (and did very well out of it.)

[carot-dj]

5.0 out of 5 stars A Former Cast Member's Response

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