Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Noverre has left an indelible mark on theatre history, not only because he was the first choreographer to write a monograph on the aesthetic principles of dance, but because he provoked so much discussion and controversy among his contemporaries that modern scholars are left with a wealth of evidence concerning the reception of his works. This, combined with extant musical scores, performance programmes and costume illustrations, provided for a rich and thought-provoking conference. Organized by Michael Burden, Maggie Davies and Jennifer Thorp, this was the Twelfth Oxford Dance Symposium.
The opening keynote address, given by Kathleen Kuzmick Hansell (University of Chicago Press), was entitled 'Noverre in Milan: A Turning Point'. Although Noverre's period of employment as choreographer at the Teatro Regio Ducal in Milan was short (eighteen months), it was probably the most controversial of his career, because Noverre tried to impose his own style of ballets d'action on a Milanese audience already used to a native Italian tradition. His productions were bigger and more spectacular, and pleased the Milanese to a certain extent in this regard. But his almost exclusive use of French noble dancers rather than the 'grotteschi' which the Italians were more used to was not popular. Nor was his use of performance programmes in which he seems to have wanted to prime the spectator to understand the plot of his narrative ballets in certain specific ways. Hansell concluded, as the title of her paper suggests, that the criticism and barriers that Noverre faced in Milan had a decisive effect on his career. He was neither as prolific nor as creative in his subsequent periods in Paris and London.
Nevertheless, his ambitions were not diminished, as Anna Karin Ståhle (Dans och Cirkushögskolan (University of Dance and Circus), Stockholm) described in 'The Job Application of J. G. Noverre to Gustav III in Sweden'. Noverre sent a collection of costume designs by Louis Boquet and plot synopses, now housed in the Royal Library in Stockhom, to Gustav III of Sweden in the hope of securing the position of ballet master in Stockholm. The circumstances were promising. Not only was Gustav III a noted patron of the arts (and sometimes called by his contemporaries 'the theatre king'), but...