Monday, November 13, 2006

500 Years of Italian Ballet: NYC Lincoln Center

The ANNOTICO Report

 

Renaissance Italy was the birthplace of ballet. But even as Paris gradually caught up with and then surpassed Milan, Italians continued to hold their own: Marie Taglioni became the first Sylphide, Carlotta Grisi the first Giselle, and Carlo Blasis raised generations of Italian and foreign dancers to new heights of technical bravura.

The Italian influence permeated even the most radical developments in early 20th-century dance. In St. Petersburg, it was the Italians who often reigned. There, for example, Enrico Cecchetti (1850-1928) -- raised on the Blasis method -- went on to become probably the most influential ballet master in the history of the art; his pupils included Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky, Tamara Karsavina and Michel Fokine. In 1909, Sergei Diaghilev engaged Cecchetti as ballet master and mime for the groundbreaking Ballets Russes.

 

Dancing Italians Pirouette Through 500 Years in NYC Exhibition

Bloomberg News

By Harvey Sachs

November 13 , 2006 

A ballet without its music? The remarkable dance exhibition at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center includes a 1913 silent film of Luigi Manzotti's spectacular ballet ``Excelsior,'' which, in its portentous ridiculousness, could be subtitled ``Giselle and Aida meet Busby Berkeley.'' It's well worth a look -- and so is the rest of the show.

Dance aficionados often hear that although Renaissance Italy was the birthplace of ballet, the art form developed mainly in France, which in turn ceded its leadership to Russia at the end of the 19th century. But while all of this is true, Italy continued to play a fundamental role in dance history through the early 20th century.

``500 Years of Italian Dance: Treasures from the Cia Fornaroli Collection'' pays tribute to the multifaceted history of Italian dance and to one of the library's richest collections. It was assembled over four decades by Walter Toscanini (1898- 1971), son of conductor Arturo Toscanini and husband of Cia Fornaroli (1888-1954). She was prima ballerina at Milan's La Scala during the 1920s, after having been premiere danseuse at the Metropolitan Opera and elsewhere.

Walter Toscanini donated the material -- about 2,000 prints, 3,500 librettos, 850 musical scores, 23,000 letters and manuscripts, and 15,000 photographs, playbills and clippings -- to the library a year after his wife's death.

Arranged along the gallery's ample walls and in display cases, the show contains four main sections: ``Genesis of a Tradition,'' ``Romanticism,'' ``Virtuosity and Spectacle'' and an untitled segment devoted to late 19th- and early 20th-century dance.

Rare Annotations

Among the most fascinating items are a 16th-century manuscript containing descriptions of ballets created by three dancing masters; engravings and drawings of dances and dancers dating as far back as 1615; the score of a 1725 ballet with rare annotations indicating the steps; first editions of 18th-century books on the ballets-pantomimes; and material on the influential Taglioni dance dynasty, the celebrated early 19th-century choreographer Salvatore Vigano, and Vigano's favorite set designer and scene-painter, Alessandro Sanquirico.

Stendhal, the great French novelist, called Sanquirico's sets ``the perfection of an art,'' adding, ``one must have a terrifying imagination to give birth to new sets every three days.''

But even as Paris gradually caught up with and then surpassed Milan, Italians continued to hold their own: Marie Taglioni became the first Sylphide, Carlotta Grisi the first Giselle, and Carlo Blasis raised generations of Italian and foreign dancers to new heights of technical bravura.

Ballets Russes

The Italian influence permeated even the most radical developments in early 20th-century dance. In St. Petersburg, it was the Italians who often reigned. There, for example, Enrico Cecchetti (1850-1928) -- raised on the Blasis method -- went on to become probably the most influential ballet master in the history of the art; his pupils included Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky, Tamara Karsavina and Michel Fokine. In 1909, Sergei Diaghilev engaged Cecchetti as ballet master and mime for the groundbreaking Ballets Russes.

The idea for this exhibition, which displays only a minuscule segment (but what a segment!) of the collection, originated with Italian dance historian Patrizia Veroli and her Portuguese colleague Jose Sasportes. The curator is Lynn Garafola, in collaboration with Veroli. There must have been some nasty fights over what material had to be left out. If so, peace could be restored by scheduling another exhibition soon.

The exhibition ``500 Years of Italian Dance'' is on view at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Information: +1-212-642-0142 or http://www.nypl.org .

(Harvey Sachs is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on this story: Harvey Sachs at harveysachs@bluewin.ch .

 

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