Perhaps all of the controversy and thought-provoking aspects of the ballet d’action fundamentally derive from two questions which it persistently poses: what is dance, and what is mime? Either one of these questions has been enough to preoccupy the minds of spectators and scholars alike at many different periods of history, but the ballet d’action is doubly provocative for asking both.

What is dance? Ballet d’action choreographers would have been sceptical about a formalist answer. They would not have disagreed with the idea that certain lines, shapes, and contours of movement can be beautiful in their own right, but they thought that this view could cause us to overvalue technique. In their estimation, the formalism at the heart of Baroque dance had degenerated in exactly this way. They criticised the way Baroque dance had developed, not the principles of Baroque dance in themselves. To do otherwise would have been to bite off the hand that fed the ballet d’action, since choreographers and performers were all trained in Baroque dance.