The public complains, with great reason, that dances are frequently void of action, which is the fault of the performers not giving themselves the trouble to study just ones: satisfied with the more mechanical part of dancing, they never think of connecting the part of the actor with it, which however is indispensably necessary
to give to their performance, spirit, and animation.
A dance without meaning is a very insipid botch. The subject of the composition should always be strictly connected to the dances, so as that they should be in equal correspondence to one another. And, where a dance is expletively introduced in the intervals of the acts, the subject of it should have, at least, some affinity to the piece. A long custom has made the want of this attention pass unnoticed. It is surely an absurd and an unnatural patchwork, between the acts of a deep tragedy, to bring on, abruptly by way of diversion, a comic dance. By this contrast both entertainments are hurt; the abruptness of the transition is intolerable to the audience; and the thread, especially
of the tragic fable, is unpleasingly broken. The spectators cannot bear to be so suddenly tossed from the serious to the mirthful, and from the mirthful to the serious. In short, such an heterogeneous adulteration has all the absurdity reproached to the motley mixture in tragi-comedy, without any thing of that connection which is preserved in that kind of justly exploded dramatic composition. How easy too to avoid this defect, by adapting the subjects of the dances to the different exigences of the different dramas, whether serious, comic, or farcical!
One great source of this disorder, is probably the managers considering dances in nothing better than in the light of merely a mechanical execution for the amusement of the eye,
and incapable of speaking to the mind. And in this mistake they are certainly justifiable by the great degeneracy of this art, from the pitch of perfection to which it was antiently carried, and to which the encouragement of the public could not fail to restore it. The managers would then see their interest too clearly in consulting the greater pleasure of the public, not to afford to this art, the requisite cultivation and means of improvement.
The composer, who must even have something of the poet in him; the musician, the painter, the mechanic, are essentially necessary to the contribution of their respective arts, towards the harmony and perfection of composition, in a fine dramatic dance; even the dresses are no inconsiderable part of
the entertainment. The costume, or in a more general term, propriety, should have the direction of them. It is not magnificence, that is the great point, but their being well assorted to character and circumstances. The French are notoriously faulty in over-dressing their characters, and in making them fine and showy, where their simplicity would be their greatest ornament. I do not mean a simplicity that should have any thing mean, low or indifferent in it; but, for example, in rural characters, the simplicity of nature, if I may use the expression, in her holy-day-cloaths.
As to the decorations and machines especially, I know of no place where there is less excuse for their being deficient in them than in London, where they are too manifestly, to bear
any suspicion of flattery in the attributing it to them, executed to a perfection that is not known in any other part of Europe. The quickness with which the shifts and deceptions in the pantomime entertainments are performed here, have been attempted in many other parts; but the persons there employed, not having the same skill and depth in mechanics as the artists here, cannot come up to them in this point. And it is in this point precisely that a composer of dances may be furnished with great assistence in the effects from the theatrical illusion. And in an entertainment, where by an established tacit agreement between the audience and performers, there is such a latitude of introducing superhuman personages, either of the heathen deities, or of fairy-hood, inchanters, and the like, those transformations and deceptions