AN INTERTEXTUAL MODEL FOR THE INTERACTION OF DANCER AND SPECTATOR IN THE RENAISSANCE

Renaissance dance treatises claim that the dance is a language but do not explain how or what dancing communicates. Since the body is the instrument of this hypothetical language, we problematize the absence of the dancing body in treatises in order to reconstruct it through a series of intertextual readings triggered by Thoinot Arbeau's definition of the dance as a mute rhetoric in Orchesographie. We show that the oratorical model for Arbeau's definition of the dance is epideictic and that although one cannot equate dance and oratorical action, the ends of oratorical action are those of the dance: persuasion through charm and emotion. The link is a theoretical one, supplied by two forms of proof according to Aristotle: putting the audience in a favorable frame of mind and convincing them of the orator's moral character. Quintilian reiterates the two Aristotelian proofs under the term "ethos," thereby shifting both charm and emotion into the realm of urbanity or, in Renaissance terms, civility. The analysis of the rhetorical intertext opens the way to a sociological one for if rhetoric was, in the words of Curtius, "the integrating factor of education in the Renaissance," urbanity was its chief preoccupation. Through a reading of courtesy books as well as a chapter of Tuccaro's L'Art de Sauter et Voltiger en L'air we demonstrate that dance and social behavior were not discontinuous in the Renaissance. The institutionalization of social dance was, indeed, legalized in the sociolect with reference to good manners or "bienseance." Furthermore, the body is the vehicle of "bienseance" in courtesy books and precepts of externum corporis decorum may be read simultaneously as instructions for dancing. Instructions for the body can be divided into the categories of the pose and movement. We examine them as a model for the most important and widely practiced dance of the Renaissance: the basse danse, showing that the characteristic motion of this dance resides in an opposition as well as an interpenetration of stillness and mobility which we confirm and elaborate through a reading of fifteenth century dance theorists' concept of "misura" and "fantasmata." In our last chapter Stefano Guazzo's La Civil Conversazione is used as a textual interpretant to ascertain the strategy of movement and the pose in the interaction between dancer and spectator. The effects of the voice in conversation are the model for this interaction. The functions of speech and silence are linked to movement and the pose through two subsidiary codes: a financial and a medical one. Our analysis permits us to situate Aristotle's two forms of extralinguistic rhetorical proofs as functions of movement and the pose in dancing through their pertinence to speech and silence in conversation: the role of silence and the pose is to dispose others favorably to us; the role of speech and movement is to furnish proof of moral character. However, neither of these proofs can be related to a specific sequence of movements or poses since in conversation they are not related to words and because the signified/goodness/vacillates between an absolute and a fiduciary concept of value.