Semiotic elements of the grotesque “Italian” practice

Throughout the eighteenth century, Europe saw a progressive identification among the words "grotesque", "virtuosity", "comic", "Italian", which directly associates, downgrading, the grotesque style and Italy. In his Letters on Dancing (1760), Jean-Georges Noverre is careful to distance his own practice of pantomime from that of the Italians; simultaneously, it links the Italian practice with a reference model: the Italian actor Antonio Rinaldi Fossano. The dancer and choreographer Gasparo Angiolini and the librettist Ranieri Calzabigi, both active at the court of Vienna, claim the belonging of the grotesque dance to Italy in order to keep them aside, while Louis Cahusac urges the French to transfer to the noble register, what it is "beyond the mountains, to the bottom." [Louis de Cahusac, La Danse ancienne et moderne ou Traité historique de la danse, (La Haye, chez Jean Neaulme, 1754), éd. Nathalie Lecomte, Laura Naudeix, Jean-Noël Laurenti, Paris, Desjonquères CND, 2004, p. 230].The association of the "grotesque" style and Italy and its negative connotation seem to be the result of a series of concomitant factors related also to the actors all’improvviso and of the Commedia dell’arte. This work aims to look into the reality of the Italian comic dance: in particular it should define what a "grotesque" dancer in opposition to the serious style illustrated by the French, and to emphasize the factors and challenges of this negative connotation for the Italians