Apollo’s Angels

by Jennifer Homans

  What astounded audiences about these productions, however, was not only their grand scale and imposing scenic effects: it was that they were composed entirely of pantomime. This was not the familiar mime of the Italian grotteschi; nor did Viganó’s ballets resemble either Noverre’s ballet d’action, with its mix of declamatory gestures and decorative French dances, or Angiolini’s more severe reform operas and ballets. Contemporary descriptions of Viganó’s dances insist on the utter originality of his kind of pantomime, which had a way of drawing the eye across richly detailed panoramic scenes while at the same time focusing in on the personal dilemmas and emotions of his characters. Not long after Viganó’s death his biographer Carlo Ritorni went so far as to coin a new term to describe the genre he had invented: choreodrama.

  Thus in a striking repudiation of his French background and training, Viganó all but eliminated traditional dances—and especially divertissements—from his ballets. His dancers eschewed the steps and poses of ballet, or else folded them seamlessly into their pantomimes. Viganó deliberately avoided music with predictable dance forms and was drawn instead to more demanding instrumental works by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Cimarosa, and Rossini. The point was not to mime a story; instead, Viganó created a kind of gestural dance based on formal patterns of metrically precise rhythmic movements—one gesture, one beat. Movements were designed to express a character’s inner emotions, like danced monologues and mimed soliloquy. In a pas de trois (for three dancers), for example, each individual was assigned his or her own gestures which, performed together, created a striking effect—the visual equivalent of an operatic trio. This technique could also be amplified: applied to a whole chorus of dancers, it created a varied but highly regulated “expressive disorder,” a kaleidoscope of movement held together by a complicated visual and kinetic counterpoint.12

  Yet Viganó’s dances were not quite as sui generis as critics at the time liked to suppose. Accounts of his ballets recall (as the term choreodrama suggests) descriptions of choral dances and pantomimes performed in ancient Greece and Rome—descriptions that would have been familiar to Viganó and were widely discussed and admired in artistic and literary circles at the time. Indeed, Viganó’s deliberate, almost aggressive, rejection of French classical ballet and his self-conscious turn to pantomime were clear signs that he hoped to build a distinctly Italian form of dance based on ancient models: his choreodrama is best understood as an imagined re-creation of these lost Greek and Roman arts.

  In ancient Greece choral dancers competed in festivals and religious rituals where they performed dithyrambic poetry, dancing and singing to the accompaniment of a flute-like wind instrument. These were not professionals but citizens fulfilling a civic duty: their performances were a tribute to the gods and considered an obligation to the polis. We know very little about what these dances actually looked like except that they were often large and highly rhythmic and that they were an important element of civic and ceremonial life. Plato, who worried about a decline in morals after the Athenian defeat in the Peloponnesian War, cautioned that choral dancers must confine themselves to regulated, controlled movements and never indulge in “questionable dancing” or “drunken imitations of nymphs, Pans, sileni, and satyrs … this kind of dancing is unfit for our citizens.” The movements of brave and heroic figures, he insisted, were inherently better than those of cowards: “the one representing the solemn movement of beautiful bodies, the other the ignoble movement of ugly bodies.”13

  Choral dance is not to be confused with pantomime, which was something else entirely: it drew on Greek traditions and sources but was not widely performed until the Roman period. Nor should pantomime be mistaken for mime, which was the province of barefooted and unmasked improvisers who performed jokes, songs, dances, and (often obscene) acrobatics. According to Greek inscriptions, pantomimes were something special: “actors of tragic rhythmic dance.” (In the Greek east their performances were referred to as “Italian dance.”) A pantomime was a one-man show: a player wearing a mask (with a closed, mute mouth) who enacted Greek dramas and myths, playing all of the roles himself to the accompaniment of musicians and a singing chorus. His gestures were imitative but also formalized and conventional, with agreed-upon movements to convey difficult concepts. In a sign of just how elaborate and articulate this silent language could be, one pantomime even enacted the Pythagoran philosophy from Plato’s dialogues. Ancient pantomimes typically performed in flowing silk gowns, often changing costumes and masks several times in the course of a performance. Some achieved celebrity status: they competed in festivals (agones) and had loyal, even fanatic, supporters and fans who routinely rioted on behalf of their favorite—outbursts which were inevitably followed by crackdowns, bans, and (usually) reinstatement. Owing to their physical beauty (and low birth), pantomimes often became companions to emperors or other high authorities and risked being embroiled in racy sex scandals that could result in exile or even death. (Nero, who fancied himself a pantomime dancer, hired claques of up to five thousand to cheer his performances and had his competitor, who was also his lover, executed for his talent.)14

  Such colorful details aside, however, pantomime could also be quite serious. Lucian of Samosata (115–c. 180), a classically educated writer whose works were well known in the early nineteenth century, tells us that pantomime was in fact a supremely cultivated art. A pantomime was no mere entertainer: in his body he held the stories of Homer and Hesiod, the myths of Greece, Rome, and Egypt, and he drew on the skills of rhetoric, music, philosophy, and gymnastics. At a time when written sources were sparse and not easily accessible, pantomimes were living cultural encyclopedia. Indeed, they owed their art to Mnemosyne (memory) and her daughter Polyhymnia (pantomime): “Like Calchas in Homer,” Lucian wrote, “the pantomime must know all ‘that is, that was, that shall be’; nothing must escape his ever ready memory.” This “unfailing memory,” moreover, must be “backed by taste and judgment” and Lucian deplored pantomimes who confused their stories, mixed and matched characters, or failed to observe the rules of accuracy and decorum. To prove the effectiveness of their art, Lucian told the story of a pantomime challenged by the cynic Demetrius, who claimed that the performance had been all fancy costumes and musical effect. The pantomime responded by repeating his performance without music or song. In awe Demetrius relented: “Man, this is not seeing, but hearing and seeing, both: ’tis as if your hands were tongues!” Pantomime was popular and widely performed until well into the Christian era, but the Church, suspicious of theater and any public display of the body, attempted repeatedly to ban it.15

  Viganó’s ballets, of course, were not strictly pantomimes or choral dances in the ancient sense, but the parallels are difficult to overlook. Although he drew on a broad array of literary sources for his dances, his most acclaimed works were on Greek and Roman themes, and his use of large choruses of dancers and solo pantomimes along with his pronounced taste for antique imagery gave his dances a strong classicizing look, even if they also looked toward more expansive Romantic forms. His ballets—“moral spectacles”—were like theatrical memory palaces, designed to recall and record in full detail all “that is, that was, that shall be” in a given myth or story, but also to bring the ideas and practices of Greek and Roman theater into the present. The point was not to go back but to use antiquity to fashion a newly minted “Italian” form of dance.

  Still, we should not forget the irony of Viganó’s accomplishments: this distinctly Italian ballet, after all, was being created by a French-trained Neapolitan ballet master working in Milan under Napoleon and the Austrians. Moreover, although he was widely acclaimed at the time for giving Italian dance a new identity and focus, Viganó also weakened it: by turning his back on pure (French) dance, he narrowed its scope and deprived the art of one of its most appealing attributes. This may explain why the rest of Italy was reluctant to embrace his experiment. Viganó’s pantomimed dances were not well received in Venice, Naples, or Rome, nor were t
hey taken up by dancers or ballet masters in France, Austria, the German states, Denmark, or Russia. Partly the problem was logistical: his sumptuous productions were difficult and expensive to transplant. But they were also lacking what audiences elsewhere most appreciated: divertissements. Viganó’s choreodrama was thus a local taste—Milanese rather than Italian.

  Even in Milan, choreodrama died out in the years following Viganó’s death. The ballet masters who followed lacked his talent, and their productions rarely rose to the high artistic standard he had set. The problem, however, was as much political and economic as it was artistic. When the Austrians returned to Milan in 1815 they banned gambling, and the Austrian state took over the subsidy of La Scala; this meant more predictable funding, but less of it. The revolutionary upheavals of 1820–21 in Naples, Sicily, and neighboring Piedmont and in 1831 across central Italy did not help, nor did the related economic recessions. Feeling the strain of these and other destabilizing events, the Austrian authorities were increasingly reluctant to fund lavish ballets. Above all, however, the balance was tipping away from ballet and toward opera. The tremendous success of Rossini—with Donizetti and Bellini to follow—forced ballet into second place. Yet Stendhal was not entirely right to say that the secret of Viganó’s art died with him. In fact, it went underground: off the stage and into pedagogy and teaching.

  Carlo Blasis (1795—1878) is rightly regarded as the founder of the Italian school of ballet. He owes this reputation to his voluminous writings, which include an influential treatise on ballet technique along with a series of meandering and quasi-philosophical studies of pantomime, dance, and art. Above all, however, his standing rests on his proven teaching skills: Blasis directed the ballet school at La Scala from 1837 to 1850 and produced a generation of extraordinarily accomplished dancers, known for their stunning technique and gracious classical style.

  Blasis began with an advantage: unusually for a dancer, he came from a highly educated Neapolitan family of noble descent. He claimed patrimony reaching back to ancient Rome and liked to boast that Machiavelli knew his ancestors, who were spread from Sicily to Naples and Spain (he gave his full name as Carlo Pasquale Francesco Raffaele Baldassarre De Blasis). It was a church and army family, but Blasis’s father had broken rank and become a musician. Blasis was himself born in Naples, but the family soon moved to Marseille—the story, probably true, was that in transit to an engagement in London his father was captured by a band of pirates (ubiquitous at the time) and ended up on the French coast, where his family joined him. In France, Blasis was educated in music and the humanities, including mathematics, literature, anatomy, drawing, and art. He read widely, from classical and Renaissance texts to eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers, and later acknowledged the profound influence on his own work of Leonardo da Vinci, Voltaire, and Noverre. He developed a serious interest in art and read among others the German art historian Johann Winckelmann, who championed a return to the principles and aesthetics of fifth-century Greece and did much to inspire the classical revival across Europe. Blasis’s father moved in literary and artistic circles, and Blasis met Antonio Canova, whose paintings and sculptures exemplified what he hoped to achieve in his own teaching and dancing.

  Blasis’s ballet training was standard French and of the old school. He studied locally and then moved to Bordeaux, where he performed works by Noverre and Pierre Gardel; in 1817, under Gardel’s auspices, he made his debut at the Paris Opera. Once there, like August Bournonville, Blasis was deeply impressed and affected by the assertively virtuosic and innovative dancing of Auguste Vestris, whom he took as his model. Dissatisfied with the terms of the contract offered him by the Paris Opera, however, Blasis moved to Milan where he worked with Viganó from 1817 to 1823, performing in many of the ballet master’s original productions, including The Titans.

  In the years that followed, Blasis traveled, performing and staging ballets in Turin, Venice, Milan, Cremona, Reggio Emilia, Florence, Mantua, and London. Along the way he married the Florentine dancer Annunciata Ramaccini, who was also French-trained (in Vienna), and in 1833 they had their first child. If that had been it, Blasis’s career would have been unremarkable: by all accounts (except his own) his choreography was dull and old-fashioned and his dancing competent but undistinguished. A critic in Turin pointedly noted, “Good height, middling figure, dances with great artistry, but is too fleshy and corpulent. Would be an excellent teacher for a ballet school.”16

  And so he was. Even as a young performer Blasis was thinking like a teacher. In 1820 he published (in French) his widely acclaimed Traité élémentaire, Théorique et Pratique de l’Art de la Danse, which appeared in Milan, sold well, and made his name. Reworked and retitled editions also appeared in London (in English) in 1828 and 1829 and in Paris (with added revisions by Pierre Gardel) the following year. The treatise was translated and reissued several times in the course of the century, and appeared in various forms in French, English, Italian, and German. Long considered a seminal work in the history of classical ballet, it is a vexing and difficult text. Largely composed of passages gleaned from works by other authors (often unacknowledged) including Lucian, Leonardo da Vinci, and the eighteenth-century ballet masters Pierre Rameau and Jean-Georges Noverre, it reads like a compendium of received eighteenth-century thought conveyed in a studied and scattershot manner.

  Indeed, what we learn from the Traité is that Blasis—founder and pedagogue of the modern Italian school—was unapologetically stuck in the French eighteenth century. He admired the innovations of Vestris, and this was the technique he promoted, but at the same time he also harked back to the old school of Gardel and Noverre, offering no excuse for his conservative tastes. Like Bournonville—though for very different reasons—he had his foot on both the accelerator and the brake: multiple pirouettes and beats were fine, but only if they were performed with the requisite decorum and taste. As we have seen, he later wrote to Bournonville, “I share your views,” referring with distaste to the trend to uncontrolled virtuosity.17

  What made Blasis different from both Bournonville and from the emerging French Romantic ballet, however, was his characteristically Italian obsession with antiquity, and it is here that Blasis can be said to have picked up where Viganó left off. The cover to his Traité featured an engraving of Canova’s statue Terpsichore (1811), and the illustrations in the text depicted Blasis seminude, like a model or statue, in a variety of classical positions; later editions showed him dressed in Grecian tunics dancing with garlands and lyres, or arrayed with other dancers in positions recalling antique arabesques—figures decoratively arrayed, frieze-like, across a flat surface. This was not just a nod to a fashionable goût grec. Blasis closely followed the ongoing excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii and had been to Naples several times to examine artifacts—he even became something of a collector, and his apartment in Milan housed antique and neoclassical sculptures; drawings, carvings, and models; cameos, precious stones, and instruments.18

  Blasis wrote biographical studies of Raphael and of the neoclassical artists Henry Fuseli and Canova; of the composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi and of the English actor David Garrick. In spite of these wide-ranging interests, his interest in classicism was inextricably (and increasingly) tied to Italianità: the idea of Italy. Not long after 1848, he began work on an extended essay, Storia del Genio e della influenza del genio italiano sul monde (The history of genius and the influence of Italian genius on the world), whose title speaks for its content. Later in life, he edited and wrote for theatrical journals including Il Teatro Italiano, founded in the hope that the political Risorgimento might be followed by a cultural Risorgimento inspired by the study of Italian civilization and the arts. This was not just a theoretical proposition: in 1870 he published a long and ambitious History of Dance in Italy and two years later came out with a study of Leonardo da Vinci that attempted to show, none too subtly, that the genius of Leonardo was also the genius of Italy.19

  For Blasis, how
ever, none of this had anything to do with choreodrama: the link to Viganó passed through antiquity, but Blasis was far too French ever to sacrifice pure dance to pantomime. Although Blasis paid formal tribute to Viganó and mouthed standard clichés about balancing pantomime and dance, he also sharply criticized those (unnamed) Italian ballet masters who thought that pantomime alone could carry a show. Their mechanical way of assigning each gesture to a single note, he said, produced the “laughable” effect of dancers furiously gesticulating their way through sensitive emotions at breakneck speed. Indeed, his relationship with Viganó had not always been smooth: while dancing for La Scala, Blasis had shot off an angry letter to a local paper complaining that Viganó had cut his (French-style) dances at the last minute, judging them an extraneous distraction.20

  Thus when Blasis returned to La Scala in 1837 it was certainly not to revive Viganó’s legacy. Indeed, the theater’s school had been founded in 1813 by the French on the model of the Paris Opera, but soon surpassed it. It was a serious eight-year training program for boys and girls, who were expected to fill the ranks of the corps de ballet upon graduation (stars were imported to fill lead roles), and the curriculum was traditional: technique was taught by French (preferably Parisian) trained dancers, with parallel courses in mime taught by Italians. Little changed under the returning Austrians, and Blasis was no doubt brought in on the strength of his Traité and French experience. He taught the “perfection class,” which took place mornings from nine until noon; his wife taught mime, allotted one hour daily.