A Dissolution of Meaning

Remarks on libretto as archi-writing and lost pantomime

Stefano Tomassini

Abstract | Versione italiana

Librettos that matter in Italian context (1788-1832)

“we come out from the dark”: this is the first line of Anne Carson’s translation of Sophocles’s Antigone starring Juliette Binoche and directed by Ivo van Hove, in 2005 (Carson 2015, 13). The first letter is intentionally lowercase. The choice, whose effect it incorporates, is not at all insignificant. It sounds like Beckett, but it’s Hegel. Indeed, the Canadian poet considers Hegel’s reading of Sophocles’s tragedy as a reference and a terminus. Such condition of working in the dark is similar to ours, when we investigate the past and (as with Antigone’s actions) always from the side of the corpse. The silence of mute bodies seems to be all that remains.

I divide my essay into two parts: in the first one, I propose a theoretical hypothesis for reading dance librettos as archi-writing; in the second, I propose a reading of the La Scala experience of Viganò’s Prometeo (1813) as the moment when the lost past of pantomime art meets the new present in a fading of meaning that in the future will require the dance steps to have a new logic. That of the romantic ballet.

I must immediately confess that I am not a specialist in eighteenth-nineteenth century dance, but along with my theater and dance studies I have also been fortunate enough to pursue a philological education: for several years, in fact, I have been involved in critically editing Italian seventeenth-century dance librettos, and which are the most emblematic extension of that silence (or aphasia) I just mentioned. A documented extension, I would say, since in their hybridity textuality, in the enigmatic nature of their structure and in their very often slender construction, they might just seem simple relics (Tomassini 2009).

Today, in the light of the numerous existing studies about the relationship between choreographic practice and publishing (and/or self-publishing), we could just hypothesize that the relationship between the creation of dance gestures and the writing of dance librettos corresponds to a leap of species. For instance, Simon Ellis in the essay Jealously, Transmission and Recovery (2015, 95-100) imagines the passage in dance and performance from live staging to written documentation (or vice versa) as a leap between species aimed at survival. Ellis draws the expression from the book Spillover (Quammen [2012] 2014), where the biologist David Quammen calls “species jump” or “inter-species jump”, an event in which an organism is transferred to or accidentally found in an alien environment.

In the past, the documented nature of the librettos — of these documental organisms — was fully underestimated but many studies, which progressively expanded over the last few decades, have overturned the initial assumption that of libretto as a mute relic. For example, in 1960, Gino Tani, in the entry libretto for the Enciclopedia dello Spettacolo, considered the description contained herein to be “a trifling and small, insignificant description” (Tani 1959, 1475-1477). Differently, recent studies address the libretto as more than a text: a testimony to the cultural tensions between society and the live arts (Franko, Chazin-Bennahum e Au, 2004); as an example of the choreographer’s imagination (Pappacena 2009 e 2013), a pretext for the danced action (Cervellati 2011), a paratext without a real correspondence between word and gesture (Nye 2011); and finally a hypertext: that is, a writing that moves in partnership with the bodies that it narrates, belated testimony of what has been present (Melpignano 2019). Furthermore, Roberta Albano analyzes the variations between different editions of the same libretto di ballo as “not insignificant for the reconstruction of the performance” (Albano 2021, 44). More recently, the reading of dance librettos has been found to foster a “certain sensitivity on the part of the spectator towards the scene” (Vallejos 2017, 133). Faced with such distinctive power, it is perhaps worth recalling here the early and protective intuition of Carlo Ritorni, such an important writer for Italian dance studies. In a passage of his book dedicated to the life and the choreodramatic works of Salvatore Viganò (the first of that kind), in regard to the compositional practice of the libretti, Ritorni explains that the tension between dance and literature involves above all opposite directions, but aimed at reaching the same goal:

and running along opposite paths to the same goal, to show what the different nature is, what the different means and strengths of spoken theater and pantomime drama are. (Ritorni 1838, 118)

It is ultimately a dialectical attitude that aims to break the coercive nature of a choice that is impossible to make by its own means. We must keep in mind the need to follow this “opposite path”, with all the analytical tools we have available, because it is in this “equal goal” that all the differences are found: the result, the dance libretto, already contains them. There is therefore a sort of equivalence (certainly not equality) between the path of speech and the path of pantomime, capable of maintaining differences and undermining a singular model of signification, translation and expression. For this reason, it is important to engage these texts with philological rigor, in term of use of sources and rhetorical strategies in their composition, in order to recognize and reclaim all their complexity.

I would like to present the very first stage of this ongoing research of mine on Italian balli dedicated to the myth of Antigone, between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries, starting with a reflection on the materials, the theme that informs them and my contribution to the existing modes of analysis. The Italian librettos I’ve found (but will not cover them all here) are five: (1.) Antigona ed Enone (Naples, 1788) by Sébastien Gallet (1750 or 1753 - Vienna, June 10, 1807); (2.) Antigona (Venice, 1790) by Gaetano Gioja (Naples, 1760 or 1764 - Naples, March 30, 1826); (3.) Antigone (Milan, 1825 and Naples, 1830) by Giovanni Galzerani (Elba Island, 1790 - Porto Longone, 1853 or 1865); and two by (4.) Livio Morosini, I Fratelli Tebani (Rome, 1828), and the almost identical (5.) Eteocle e Polinice (Ancona 1830 and Bologna 1832).

They all concern the myth of Antigone, for the reading of which, first of all, I tried to come to terms with George Steiner’s (1984) encyclopedic critical repertory, which contains some very suggestive theses on the subject:
I. “There is (quoting Steiner) an underlying sense in which ‘initial’ and determinant Greek myths are myths in and of language, and in which, in turn, Greek grammar and rhetoric internalize, formalize, certain mythical configurations.” (135)
II. “the Antigone-and-Creon syntax and the myth in which they are manifest are ‘specific universals’ transformative across the ages;” (138)
III. The survival of Greek myth in the West, according to George Steiner, springs from the interiority of language; it reminds us of its birth and its context of consciousness, precisely because Greek myths seem rooted “just below the surface of our speech acts.” (137). A literature unrepeatable for Steiner except in music, “where the ‘plot’ and ‘form’ are one,” (138) so this necessity and universality of Greek myths is what their reworkings possible postclassical civilization. But in his reflection one point is particularly significant, when Steiner writes: “In a note in the margin of the Schlegel brothers’ Athenaeum, written in 1804, Coleridge, what a great reader, uses a pressing simile. Between us and the text exists ‘a drawbridge of communication.’ The implication is graphic. Such a bridge can be lifted. If it is, the text is made mute.” (202-202).
How not to think, then, of Pino Pascali’s (1935-1968) visual work entitled The Drawbridge (1968, now at the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein in Vaduz). The drawbridge, made of soft and porous material, suspends from a wall-neither closed nor open-over the viewer’s world. The chains are made of steel wool, while the board is a plywood but coated in wide weaves. Pascali reverses the materiality of the sculpture as well as the space in which it is inscribed, to emphasize the softness of an opening/closing that assumes and favors exchange and understanding (Giordano 2012, 77). Even when the drawbridge rises and “becomes mute,” when all communication seems to be interrupted, every access barred and every crossing impeded, every voice and sound silenced, the poor materials with which it is assembled continue to affirm the eloquence of so much silence. That who is silent, is not silent forever.

I have tried to dismantle this thesis that the Greek myth is unrepeatable and rooted in an unattainable past (that of the grammar that generated it) except through interpretations in which plot and form coincide, and I have tried to observe it when the ‘drawbridge’ is raised and the text remains silent, as in the case of dance (the pantomimic dance). I have tried to do so through Jacques Derrida’s (1930-2004) notion of archi-écriture (archi-writing or archewriting) advanced by (Vitale 2012). This is an idea of the writing of space, a mode of spacing that makes room for the event, an irreducible condition of possibility of experience and thus of the elaboration of meaning; the first possibility of the word and the first opening of the living to its other and of an inside to an outside (Vitale 2008). Derrida fully realizes this proposal, started with De la grammatologie (1967), and more in Glas (1974), a book that teaches this ability to give life to an architecture in the very body of writing. Glas is a book written in two columns, one dedicated to the problem of the family in Hegel’s philosophy as crucial to understand the essence of consciousness (it also contains the Hegelian reading of Sophocles’ Antigone contextualized in its Christian and anti-Jewish conception of the family, which Derrida considered essential to understand the Hegelian philhellenism). Glas’s other column of the text, however, which runs concurrently, deals with the work of French writer Jean Genet (1910-1986).

Despite the linear organization of the phonetic-alphabetic writing with which the dance librettos are written, the production of meaning in terms of environment and spatialization, that is, the space of life, of experience, is bound to remain mute unless real graphic visualizations are present. A good example is to be found in the spatialized indication of the Primi Grotteschi a Perfetta Vicenda (“First Grotesques in perfect rotation”) for Onorato Viganò’s perhaps analogous dances to the musical drama Gli Argonauti in Colco o sia la conquista del vello d’oro staged in Venice in 1789 (libretto printed by Modesto Fenzo). A circle appears in the center of the page, alluding to the alternation of the two pairs: a graphic effect that opens up an unseen space and demands attention. It alludes to the rotating movement of the performers whose names make up the entire circumference, as opposed to the straight course of the list of other performers and roles, above and below. But the effect is also to describe the base of a column rising in relief, in a dimension that is no longer that of writing. It is precisely, an archi-writing, that of movement.

More recently, Gloria Giordano identifies the typographical arrangement of certain performers’ names in the Scenari of the Collegio Romano (17th–18th centuries) as intentional, emphasizing a precise relationship with the choreographic structure (Giordano 2025, 125). The choreographers who write librettos always say they are at fault in writing their programs compared to the imagination of those who can, instead, use the living word: the description of the dances often simulates the aural dimension (the sound of speech) because they know that they operate within a logocentric tradition in which it is the concept that makes the language resonate, that detects the signifier in the sound of pronunciation (this consciousness makes their writing the whole desired by the reader). But in doing so, on the one hand, they subtract the writing of libretto from the metaphysics of signification (whose survival is ensured by writing), and on the other hand, they deliver the idea of presence not to the viva voce (which is always in power in logocentered writing) but to the body, that is, to the irreducible condition of experience and of all that is given in the order of presence. In fact putting to work, perhaps inventing, certainly rehabilitating a notion of empirical writing, that is, writing praxis. Hence through the writing of librettos it is possible to detect new conditions of possibility of meaning, namely: the conditions of possibility of experience; the ability to produce effects in the context in which it intervenes, such as in apparatuses as well as in the body of individual texts:

1) the excusatio non petita in the Argomento: alludes to an operation of adaptation, to the necessity of the superiority of imagination and invention, the legitimacy of all integration and transformation as a responsibility for the survival of the text and the myth that informs it;
2) the in-text use of quotations: intended for the performative time of the reading not the time of the event, and alludes to a virtual spatialization of the event, to a possibility of highlighting the text, through precisely the space of the quotation, in a movement that on stage is only of bodies;
3) the spatial, temporal and kinetic markers: alludes to all those decisions that the bodies of the performers are informed of in order to make space for the event;
4) the writing speech simulation: alludes to the subjection of action to the logos of speech intended for voice, not to the space of the body freed from the logos. However, if we perceive it as a staging of the privilege of voice through a silent scene that is thus its most radical revocation, it seems to suggests through these mute yet living bodies —-albeit “out of grammar”— that there is another possible access to the bodies beyond voice;
5) the additions of unrelated characters to the main plot: this is not only a codified rhetorical practice of conscious rewriting, but a sign of the open nature of the text, to an inside of it, the myth for example, which can always be related to the outside: the dance libretto is the widespread part of this openness;
6) the sometimes extreme segmentation of the narrative and its transposition into plot: alludes to a precise reduction of the text to a trace, to an insistent spacing with the repeated use at the orthographic level of the dashed line; a use capable of evading the analogy with the continuity of writing, through the insertion of these spatial intervals that inform changes in the action.

All these planes of composition by the writing of the dance libretto represent an attempt to express the experience that cannot be contained or exhausted in the linear organization of the phonetic-alphabetic writing with which they are composed. These planes of composition are modes of material spatialization that derive from the multidimensional character of what the dance librettos document; they are therefore already a form of knowledge, the choreographic one.

Looking backward to the lost pantomime still forwarding

Henry Prunières, in 1921’s “La Revue Musicale”, peremptorily ruled that: “one of the most curious phenomena in the history of theater is this immediate disappearance, from tradition, of the Viganò style” (quoted in Bottoni 1984, 45). What style are he talking about? Rossini, reasoning with Stendhal, complained that Viganò had “a flaw: too much pantomime and not enough dance” (quoted in Bottoni 1984, 45).

Viganò created in 1801 in Vienna, Gli uomini di Prometeo ossia La forza della musica e della danza (The Men of Prometheus or The Force of Music and Dance), a heroic-allegorical ballet in two acts set to music by Ludwig van Beethoven: beetwen Viganò and Beethoven it wasn’t a match, but for the Italian choreographer the meeting with the composer and his compositional methods were not without consequences (Paolini Merlo 2017, 165-195). My thesis is that Viganò, in the prototype of coreodramma, developed during La Scala years, intensifies and expands the use of pantomime art according to a concertant logic (which anticipates symphonic composing); he creates a multiple movement in the use of the masses (aware of the new expressive autonomy of the Corps de Ballet), and experiments with an architectural dimension of the scenography in collaboration with the set designer Alessandro Sanquirico (Ottani Cavina 1984, 327-345).

This great season inaugurated in 1813 with the great success of the ballo Prometeo (and concluded in 1821 with the death of the choreographer, who left the heroic ballet Didone unfinished: Onesti 2025). I would now like to present here another group of texts, which are found at the end of the chronology established by this conference, and which in some way relaunch the theoretical questions on pantomime dance, starting precisely from the concomitant controversy in the pre-romantic circles of Milan. I have already collected the many writings, critically edited and widely commented in 1999’s book, I edited now a new, updated edition (Viganò 2026). They are texts on the issue, nature and history of pantomime as a typical practice of the Italian dance tradition. It is also a retrospective history, capable of looking back as if at a loss of a tradition which however continues forward, thanks to its recovery and its final perfection in the choreodramatic (and choreotragic) works of Salvatore Viganò. The texts and the most important questions raised are:

The dance libretto of 1813 is defined as “a form of poem signified by the pantomime [in] six large tableaux [and] of a single subject” (Viganò 2026, 39):
1st act: The savage state of man is described (in the previous version of Vienna were statutes then brought to life);
2nd act: The “great theft” of fire, and the consequent fall of Prometeo, is described;
3rd act: It describes “the spectacle of nature” which introduces humanity to the experiences of pleasure and pity;
4th act: The Forge of Vulcan is described, in the “Etna cave”: Cupid’s cravings are followed by Jupiter’s request for revenge;
5th act: The School of the Arts is described and “Hymenaeus” introduced, by Prometeo for the foundations of human society;
6th act: The martyrdom (by the Cyclops and the Vulture) and the resurrection of Prometeo thanks to Hercules, Minerva, Igía (Greek goddess, protector of health because she was the daughter of Aesculapius) is described.

In conjunction with the debut at La Scala, a collection of letters (Lettere critiche) is printed in which Viganò’s work is addressed from many points of view, and the myth of Prometheus, thanks to Viganò, survives the ideological collapse of Napoleonic mythology. Furthermore, the constant process of conjunction/disjunction that regulates Viganò’s compositional logic is discussed: it is a close interaction between musical orchestration and narrative acted out through pantomime art; the interlocutors of this correspondence are equally divided between the most convinced supporter, the professional critic, and the erudite interpreter “of the mystical, allegorical and allusive senses” (Viganò 2026, 63-108).

In 1819, Ermes Visconti publishes a fundamental dialogue against respect for Aristotelian rules in new (romantic) dramas, in a strongly anti-Classicism position. Among the characters in the dialogue who support the new aesthetics is Viganò himself.
– Visconti indicates pantomime dance as the spectacular form par excellence free from Aristotelian rules;
– Visconti annexes Viganò, as one of the characters in the dialogue who support a new aesthetics, to the system of romantic forms, and the coreodramma in the debate around a modern system of the arts;
– in 1819 he cites Viganò as the point of achievement “of sublime perfection of concept of execution, combined with an irresistible expression of music” (Viganò 2026, 111-135).

Carlo Ritorni, in his quoted Commentarii (1838), describes the two versions of the ballo in detail (Vienna and Milan), and:
– he remembers that Viganò died before formalizing a grammar capable of theoretical foundation to pass on his “silent dramas” to posterity;
– for Ritorni, Viganò’s pantomime was created in the mere evidence of the facts, short and telling, and of the passions “with the help of a few simple pantomime elements”;
– and the tendency to become a mass spectacle, as a “machine spectacle” (Viganò 2026, 161-175).

Finally, among these writings, a recovered one is now added, with which I would like to end, it is: The Dance of the Italians and especially of the dance pantomime by Giulio Ferrario (1832 edition, in the volume dedicated to Europe of his monumental popular work Il Costume Antico e Moderno, begun in 1817, and almost certainly the author of the 1813’s Lettere critiche). In this historical examination, what emerges above all is the idea that pantomime is a representative art and must closely resemble the chosen object. With Viganò, Ferrario says, this awareness reaches its peak: pantomime art is able, with the help of music, to go beyond the meaning of the words, totally relying on the expansive and extensive powers of the imagination of the audience, and through a true and own experience of abandonment: “the imagination of those who see and listen, being in a certain way abandoned to themselves, magnify the objects […] according to their greater or lesser sensitivity” (Viganò 2026, 137-159). The lost past of pantomime art with Viganò’s present encounters a dissolution of meaning which in the future will require a new logic for choreographic composition. The logic of the steps of the romantic ballet.

References

• Albano 2021
  R. Albano, Salvatore Viganò e la Clotilde napoletana, in Danza e ballo a Napoli: un dialogo con l’Europa (1806-1861), a cura di P. Maione e M. Venuso, Napoli 2021, 25-52.
• Bottoni 1984
  L. Bottoni, L’ombra allo specchio. Diacronia di una ricezione, in Il sogno del coreodramma. Salvatore Viganò, poeta muto, a c. di E. Raimondi, Bologna 1984, 45-144.
• Carson 2015
  A. Carson, Sophokles,Antigone, translated by Anne Carson, London 2015.
• Cervellati 2011
  E. Cervellati, Il dito di Polimnia. Il libretto per balletto tra parola scritta e corpo danzante, Danza e teatro. Storie, poetiche, pratiche e prospettive di ricerca, Atti del convegno di studi dedicato a Silvana Sinisi ed Eugenia Casini Ropa (Università di Bologna, 24-25 settembre 2009), Acireale-Roma 2011, 125-134.
• Ellis 2015
  S. Ellis, Jealously, Transmission and Recovery, “Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts” 20, no. 6 (2015), 95-100.
• Franko, Chazin-Bennahum e Au, 2004
  M. Franko, J. Chazin-Bennahum e S. Au, Libretti for dance, s.v. in “International Encyclopedia of Dance”, a cura di S.J. Cohen, New York 2004, vol. 4, 172-178.
• Giordano 2025
  G. Giordano, Détails typographiques dans les Scenari du Séminaire Romain (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècle) en relation avec la composition chorégraphique, “European Drama and Performance Studies” 1(25), Paris 2025, 111-138.
• Giordano 2012
  M. Giordano, Trame d’artista. Il tessuto nell’arte contemporanea, Milano 2012.
• Melpignano 2019
  M. Melpignano, Gradations of Presence. Armida in Nineteenth-Century Italian Dance Librettos, in B. Wein Shiovitz (ed.), The Body, the Dance and the Text. Essays on Performance and the Margins of History, Jefferson (NC) 2019, 235-252.
• Nye 2011
  E. Nye, Mime, Music and Drama on the Eighteenth-Century Stage. The Balle d’Action, Cambridge 2011.
• Onesti 2025
  S. Onesti, Salvatore Viganò e la creazione della Didone, La scena coreutica e teatrale italiana fra Sette e Ottocento, a cura di S. Brunetti e S. Onesti, Bari 2025, 145-156.
• Ottani Cavina 1984
  A. Ottani Cavina, I segni dissolti. Frammenti per un’immagine, in Il sogno del coreodramma. Salvatore Viganò, poeta muto, a cura di E. Raimondi, Bologna 1984, 327-345.
• Pappacena 2009
  F. Pappacena, Introduzione a Jean-Georges Noverre, Programmi dei balletti. Selezione di libretti 1751-1776, a cura di F. Pappacena e A. Alberti, Roma 2009.
• Pappacena 2013
  F. Pappacena, Dal libretto di balletto alle note per la messa in scena, in “Acting Archives Review” III, 6, novembre 2013, 1-25.
• Paolini Merlo 2017
  S. Paolini Merlo, Viganò e Beethoven nell’evoluzione del teatro musicale moderno, in Ritorno a Viganò, a cura di J. Sasportes e P. Veroli, Canterano (Roma) 2017.
• Ritorni 1838
  C. Ritorni, Commentarii della vita e delle opere coreodrammatiche di Salvatore Viganò e della coreografia e de’ corepei, Milano 1838.
• Steiner [1984] 1996
  G. Steiner, Antigones, New Haven-London [1984] 1996.
• Tani 1959
  G. Tani, Libretto II. Balletto, s.v. in Enciclopedia dello spettacolo, Roma 1959, 1475-1477.
• Tomassini 2009
  S. Tomassini, Il fiore in rivolta ossia i bicipiti di Adone, in Variazioni su Adone. II Libretti musicali e di ballo, a cura di S. Tomassini, Lucca 2019, 9-19.
• Viganò 2026
  S. Viganò, Prometeo. Libretto del ballo (1813) con tutti i testi della polemica, nuova ed. accresciuta e aumentata, a cura di S. Tomassini, Conegliano (TV) 2026.
• Vallejos 2017
  J. I. Vallejos, La scrittura dei maîtres de ballet. A proposito dei “programmes” del ballet pantomime, in Il libretto di ballo. Riflessioni storiche e teoriche in omaggio a Alberto Testa, a cura di P. Veroli e M. Scarpulla, Roma 2017, 133-146.
• Vitale 2008
  F. Vitale, Spettrografie. Jacques Derrida tra singolarità e scrittura, Genova 2008.
• Vitale 2012
  F. Vitale, Archi-scrittura [Archi-Écriture], in Derridario. Dizionario della decostruzione, a cura di S. Facioni, S. Ragazzoni e F. Vitale, Genova 2012, 15-28.

Abstract

This paper presents a two-part investigation into nineteenth-century Italian dance librettos, examining them both through a theoretical framework and through a historical case study. The first section introduces a textual and philosophical analysis of dance librettos, particularly those centered on the myth of Antigone published between 1788 and 1832. Framing the libretto not as a passive or mute relic, but through the concept of Derridean archi-writing, this part outlines six specific compositional strategies and graphic mechanisms through which spatiality, movement, and physical presence are encoded into written text. The second section focuses on the historical transition of Italian pantomime, taking Salvatore Viganò’s coreodramma—specifically his 1813 La Scala production of Prometeo—as a primary focal point. Through a structural breakdown of the ballet's six tableaux and an overview of contemporary 19th-century critical commentary (including writings by critical commentators, Ermes Visconti, Carlo Ritorni, and Giulio Ferrario), this section traces the evolution, perfection, and ultimate dissolution of meaning within traditional pantomime art, detailing how this shift paved the way for the emerging structural logic of romantic ballet.

keywords | Dance librettos; Archi-writing; Salvatore Viganò.

La Redazione di Engramma è grata ai colleghi – amici e studiosi – che, seguendo la procedura peer review a doppio cieco, hanno sottoposto a lettura, revisione e giudizio questo saggio
(v. Albo dei referee di Engramma)

Per citare questo articolo / To cite this article: Stefano Tomassini, A Dissolution of Meaning. Remarks on libretto as archi-writing and lost pantomime, “La Rivista di Engramma” n. 236, giugno 2026.