Monday,
November 13, 2006
500 Years of Italian Ballet:
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
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
``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
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
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
(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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