Nature, Commodities, and Bodies in Baroque Ballets across the Savoy State: Choreographies of Transmutation and Consumption

This paper analyzes four ballets staged across the Savoy Duchy from 1645 to 1660 and lavishly documented by Giovanni Tommaso Borgonio. In these spectacles, the dancing bodies moved in two different environments – domestic mountains (the Alps) and foreign oceans (Atlantic and Indian oceans) – while they interacted choreographically with natural resources such as grain, milk, tobacco, and pearls. This paper explores the potential of these courtly performances and their bodily animation in staging transformative processes and dynamics of mobility. Moreover, taking a cue from Mark Franko’s rumination on the baroque dancing body as a highly charged ideological medium, it also illustrates how the Savoy dancers performed two contrasting forces at play in the geopolitical agenda of the Duchy. This paper has received funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101025547 (Project ANIMATE).