« La Musique est à la Danse ce que les paroles sont à la Musique » : musicalisation et ‹ dansification › à travers les analogies dans le discours esthétique sur la danse du XVIIIe siècle

Abstract

This paper examines the various interrelationships between music, dance and language as artistic systems in the 18th-century French dance theories of Louis de Cahusac and Jean-Georges Noverre from an intermedia perspective. Based on the narratological categories of ‹ telling › and ‹ showing › and within the context of the aesthetics of sensibility we focus on analogies as a crucial literary technique of musicalisation and ‹ dansification ›. The aim of this contribution is to analyze the media transformation required for writing about music and dance and the functions of the analogies drawn by both authors to describe and illustrate the new dance genre.