Eighteenth-century spectators found the ballet d'action slightly bizarre. It was a wordless performance, lasting sometimes more than an hour, of some of the greatest works of literature, theatre, and mythology staged, not in the street fairs where the bizarre was cheek-by-jowl with the conventional, but in the most revered theatres of Europe. The musical accompaniment was sometimes complex and unmelodic, and the more conventional dance scenes did not always provide enough relief from the effort of understanding the mimed scenes. And yet spectators and theorists were thrilled that at last dance had become ‘expressive’, that it was more than ‘motion without meaning’, and that it had joined the pantheon of so-called ‘imitative’ arts, those arts which were a reflection of something profound within us and which therefore had something to say about human nature. The ballet d'action was, for the eighteenth century, ‘modern dance’.