Drawing Worlds. Bodies and Smoke in the Courtly Ballet Il Tabacco

The ballet Il Tabacco, staged in Turin in 1650, took the viewers on a journey following in the footsteps of tobacco as it moves through the world, bringing on stage imaginary figures from the Americas to the Middle East caught in the act of preparing and consuming this commodity according to diverse geographical customs. By examining texts and drawings in the ballet's commemorative album by Giovanni Tommaso Borgonio, this chapter pursues how spectators were treated to a view of the many-sided history of this product in the variety of forms it assumed on stage: tobacco appeared as a plant, the nicotiana tabacum, in the form of dried leaves pressed into balls to be burned in rituals, as powder to be inhaled, smoked, and as coiled ropes. Dancers interacted choreographically with each of these forms – performing their making or consumption – while alchemical and humouralism metaphors in the lyrics showcased appropriate uses for the spectacle’s European audience. By bringing Il Tabacco ballet together with Mesoamerican sources (e.g. the Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus), records of festival practices in Colonial America, Italian medical treatises and tax records, this chapter demonstrates how this spectacle told the story of a semantically unstable commodity, a sacred social institution among American natives that became an economic institution, desacralized and alienable, on the other shores of the Atlantic.