I also tried to show how the carnaval into which the more successful of these plays dissolve is the result of that very fusion. In what might be considered a belated postscript, I would like to focus today on a very specifie aspect of that fusion, that of two seemingly opposite elements, dance and slapstick, and to facilitate this exposition, I would like to draw ail my examples from the best known of these plays, Le bourgeois gentilhomme.
Dance is one of the most elemental, if not the most elemental mode of expression, common in the animal world as such. It "takes on a new function with the ascent of human beings—that of expressing abstract ideas" Lange Dance thus takes on an additional function, that of implying more than what it mimes or mimics, becoming a vehicle for a metaphor without the clutter and artifice of words and their externalised codes.
What man also adds to this primeval and biological ritual is flow, or at least the understanding of flow as a tool of representation in and of itself. As Roderyk Lange says, the phenomenon of dance is evoked by its continuity. Therefore a dance only exists as long as the dancer is actually dancing. This does not mean that he has to travel constantly--even when holding a pose the dancer is able to maintain the attitude of continuity—but if this is dropped he will immediately be eliminated from the context of dance" Dance, and specifically that most stylized of dances, ballet--the development of which was given special care by the King and his favorite choreographer, Beauchamps, in the Royal Academy of Music—thus becomes a fitting complement to ail the arts "useful" in the task of glorifying the State and its royal incarnation.
Whatever allegorical tales and figures are evoked, they, like their counterparts in marble or on canvas, are representations of the elements of an entire social order, but here it is a flowing representation, one which uses time as well as space to better manifest the relationships governing that order. There is no doubt that Louis XIV loved ballet—indeed ail forms of dance--and that this love contributed to his including that art in those which were to be codified by and taught in the Royal Academy of Music, but I am convinced that the main reason for this inclusion—and for the very creation of this academy and its sisters—was the King's vision, and his understanding of the potential of these arts as representations and surrogations of the power and the glory of the State.
So defined in its conception and its role, ballet could easily be seen as the very antithesis of slapstick which, after ail, is violently boisterous horseplay detrimental to flow and to decorum. In Le bourgeois gentilhomme, for instance, there is no question that dances such as Jourdain's massacre of the minuet or the entire "turquerie" represent social functions or relationships.
