To mark the tercentenary of the death of Dancourt - a key figure in the Comédie-Française at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries - a colloquium-festival will be held between Paris and Versailles (CMBV) on 4, 5 and 6 December 2025. It invites various types of papers and original proposals or methodologies. The call for papers is open until 15 June 2025.
Colloquium "Le cas Dancourt (1661-1725)"
Florent Carton Dancourt was a central figure in the nascent Comédie-Française troupe and the author of some sixty plays, more than a third of which were highly successful on the stage. Nevertheless, the man who was a major professional in the world of theatre is a striking example of the relegation suffered by many of his playwright contemporaries at the end of the reign of Louis XIV. His plays, like those of Fatouville, Regnard, Dufresny and Lesage, have been virtually absent from theatres, school curricula and university syllabuses for almost two centuries. Dancourt has become a minor author, although he was a pre-eminent artist in terms of the extreme fertility of his work, his career ambitions, his ambivalent reputation, and his visibility and responsibilities within the Comédie-Française.
In 2025, the actor-author will have been dead for 300 years. We are seizing this opportunity to dedicate a symposium-festival to him. The aim of this event is not to carve out a place for Dancourt in a late pantheon, but rather to question the centrality of his position as actor and playwright at a time when the renewal of the comic scene coincided with the emergence of an institutional theatrical policy and the blossoming of an urban public sensitive to the arts and worldly entertainment. At a time when theatre professionals had to deal with the demands of the public as well as those of the nascent institution, Dancourt emerged as a key figure. His socio-professional background within the troupe at Le Français can help us understand the dynamics and tensions that animated the fledgling company. His dramatic works, in which music and dance play a central role, were written in collaboration with major composers of the time, such as Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Michel-Richard de Lalande and Jean-Claude Gillier, and dance masters such as Pierre de La Montagne and Pierre Beauchamps. Diversely adapted to the zeitgeist of his time and marked by a daring and fertile capacity for invention, his theatre requires us to look again at the forms and issues of the comic genre, as it is reshaped in the wake of the work of Molière, a predecessor as important as he was cumbersome, and in favour of the ‘modern turn’ that runs from the end of classicism to the dawn of the Enlightenment. Committed to painting a picture of manners that was as gaudy as it was corrosive, his theatre was also the object of scorn from certain contemporaries, who coined the term dancourade to disparage these new one-act turlupinades, which opted for ‘laughable, even ridiculous and buffoonish comedy’ (René-Louis d'Argenson). Dancourt's work is an example of a comedy scene undergoing change, and provides a clearer picture of the place of comedy in the Théâtre-Français's programming and in relation to that of other Parisian theatres.
Thinking about the Dancourt case also means placing it within a literary and theatrical history that is concerned to take account of its margins and to move away from a logic of canonisation to take an interest in the conditions of production and reception of the performing arts, by focusing on the professional careers of the men and women involved. The contrast between Dancourt's invisibility today and the centrality of his status in his own time raises the question of the value of much of the early theatrical repertoire, the circumstances of its performance and publication, and what a reputation for topicality can mean over time. In this way, we are pursuing an approach to history that is more documentary than monumental, sensitive to what might resonate with the present, particularly through the experience of the stage. Because our conference-festival also intends to use this commemorative period to give body and voice to the protean art of the playwright, and to measure the emotions that can still be mobilised by a work that celebrates imagination, daring and innovation.
DANCOURT AND THE COMIC STAGE
To what extent is Dancourt's work exemplary of a process of exchange and circulation between the different Parisian theatrical scenes (Comédie-Française, Théâtre-Italien, Foires, Académie royale de musique), which contributed to the development of a diversified comic production, sensitive to the circumstances and immediate effects of the performance rather than indebted to a unified and fixed poetic model (original use of metatheatrical and parodic forms, renewal of satire, invention of entertainment with music and dance, etc.)? What role, in particular, does opera parody play in this work, and how does it help to forge the specificity of Dancourt's repertoire? What does it tell us about the playwright's relationship with the Académie royale de musique? How did Dancourt's links with the court, and in particular with the Dauphin, who commissioned several works, influence his dramatic output?
How should we view the place given by Dancourt to political, military, social and cultural news, which opens the stage to anecdote and news items? How can we approach the media vocation specific to theatre of this period? How does Dancourt's theatre offer a unique vision of the world and society, of love relationships, the status of women, relations between social groups and contemporary institutional upheavals?
How do the sung and danced parts, interludes and entertainments fit into the theatrical performance? What is their dramatic role and their musical and choreographic style? How does spoken comedy fit in with the comic entertainment of vaudeville, with its songs and dances, its verses and choruses? To what extent did these entertainments, through their tonality, take on an original form that set them apart from competing scenes and determined singing and dancing practices specific to the Comédie-Française?
How can we envisage the place and role of invention when a playwright is inspired by the successes of rival theatres, seems to work collaboratively at times, and may be content to update old plays, to distinguish someone else's creation, or even to appropriate it? What do these practices of co-writing, rewriting, updating, imitating and even plagiarising reveal about the ways in which drama was created between the two centuries?
THE THEATRICAL INSTITUTION AND THE MAKING OF THE SHOW
In what way did the dual programming, with the economic function attributed to the ‘small play’, influence Dancourt's theatrical production? To what extent could programming strategies, which followed both economic and political logic, determine careers? How does Dancourt's dramatic activity shed light on the condition of actor-dramatists (their activities as writers, their role as purveyors of novelties in the service of their theatre, sometimes at the expense of their own auctorial aims)?
Is there a ‘Dancourt paradox’, a central playwright at the Comédie-Française but, at the same time, a secondary playwright because he was a comic, a creator of ‘small plays’ and often confined to the summer season? Could this be a reflection of the very situation of the Théâtre-Français, a royal and privileged institution, but in debt and facing competition from all sides, struggling to enter a century of liberalisation of theatrical life?
How can we understand Dancourt's work as an actor, his acting specialisations, his role as the troupe's orator, the part he played in settling various administrative problems, and the clan he formed within the theatre with his wife and two daughters, for whom he wrote roles?
What do we know about the concrete aspects of producing shows? their cost? the material resources mobilised? the financial, administrative and even legal issues that sometimes govern creation? the nature of the musical and choreographic staff? the relationships between the playwrights and the artists: actors, singers, dancers, instrumentalists, set designers, lighting technicians and stagehands? To what extent does the writing of the plays take account of each of them? How can we understand Dancourt's work as an actor, his acting specialisations, his role as the troupe's speaker, the part he played in settling various administrative problems, and the clan he formed within the theatre with his wife and two daughters, for whom he wrote roles?
RECEPTION ISSUES
What can we learn from an in-depth analysis of takings, programming strategies according to the day and the season, press reports, and the judgements of theatre lovers and historians in the 18th century?
What can be learnt from an in-depth analysis of takings, programming strategies according to days and seasons, press reports and the judgements of theatre lovers and historians in the 18th century? To what extent and in what way did Dancourt invest in the distribution of his work in printed form? Did he take part in the creation of Pierre Ribou's 7-volume edition of the Œuvres de Monsieur d'Ancourt in 1711 (selection and arrangement of the plays, choice of frontispieces and illustrations, publication of the music)? What can we learn from the paratexts of the various editions (dedicatory epistles, poems of praise) about the networks of protectors he tried to build up and the way he constructed an authorial ethos?
How did his repertoire evolve after his death? What editorial choices governed the various posthumous collective editions? A look at these editions, the translations, the iconography, the stage revivals and the assessments made by the critical historiography (La Harpe, Lanson, later Lancaster and Adam) should make it possible to distinguish Dancourt's fortunes. Was he quickly and radically dismissed as a ‘second-rate playwright’? To what extent is his fate on the stage comparable to that of his contemporaries Baron, Regnard and Dufresny?
Why revive and perform Dancourt and his contemporaries today? What are the difficulties? What are the issues? Doesn't the close link between this theatre and the immediate events of its time make it radically incompatible with a process of reappropriation or updating through staging several centuries later? How can creative research approach this repertoire? To what extent can digital humanities, the digitisation and publishing programmes they support, and the educational and artistic projects they develop help to revive Dancourt's repertoire and shed new light on it?
Call for papers
With a festival format, this symposium is open to different types of papers and original proposals or methodologies: round tables, feedback on research-creation experiences, workshops, participatory presentations, lecture-performances, etc.
Proposals of 300 to 500 words to be sent before 15 June 2025 to the email address colloquedancourt@gmail.com.
In partnership with the Comédie-Française and the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles / With the support of the Association pour un Centre de recherche sur les Arts du Spectacle aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles.
