#Carlotta Zambelli

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Carlotta Zambelli by Truus, Bob & Jan too! Via Flickr: Vintage French postcard. Photo by Henri Manuel. PA, 14. Opéra. Carlotta Zambelli (4 November 1875 – 28 January 1968) was an Italian prima ballerina and ballet teacher. Apart from one year (1901) in St. Petersburg, she spent her entire career in Paris and for years was the reigning ballerina at the Paris Opera. An early recording of her dance, filmed by photographer Paul Nadar (1896), is visible on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZauHYjrHLQ.

[softrobotcritics]

Ballet criticism as kinetic art

Arbiters of taste: Women, modernism and the making of Paris Ilyana Karthas University of Missouri-Columbia

French Cultural Studies 2020, Vol. 31(2) 97–110

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While some practical training in the art form became required of art, literary and music critics, it was not the case for ballet critics, for whom it was ‘unheard of . . . to participate in a ballet class’ (Ellis, 1995: 27). During the nineteenth century, reviews of ballet appeared in a variety of publica- tions and under a variety of headings.

They were featured most often in theatre, opera and music columns of the feuilleton in newspapers and journals such as the Journal des débats, La Presse: dramatique, musicale et littéraire and Le Moniteur, all of which catered to a bourgeois readership. Ballet reviews were often written by dramatic critics who were literary figures (e.g. Théophile Gautier) who had no technical training in dance. Not being practitioners of ballet, these critics had to confine their critical comments to what they knew best.

The authority and legitimacy of critics of ballet relied on their ability to judge the literary, dramatic or musical aspects of ballets rather than choreographic and technical ones. Reviews included detailed descriptions of plots, costumes, scenery and the erotic charge of bodily display. Often critics were preoccupied in highlighting female dancers’ ‘beauty’, ‘physical voluptuousness’, and ‘revealing costumes’ (Gautier, 1855: 1; Janin, 1844: 1).

Serious considerations of ballet choreography in reviews were scarce. As a result, most nineteenth-century reviews and publications on ballet remained limited either to an over-stressing of the role of the individual dancer or to glamour-slanted publicity. Therefore, unlike that of art and music, the aesthetic judgement of ballet fell almost exclusively into the hands of audiences and amateurs in the art of dance. This raises questions of the extent to which ballet criticism remained masculine and undeveloped, and lay outside ‘specialisation’ in reporting. Clearly, it did not correspond to the shifting criteria for reviewing art, literature and music. This distinction is significant for women as arbiters of taste in the field of dance. It would take much longer for the genre of dance to be recognised for its artistic autonomy and to necessitate trained experts to review it. Once this occurred, dancers managed to insert their own authoritative voices as practitioners into professionalised critical opinion on dance.

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While women’s proficient judgements on music and art were becoming more recognised at the fin-de-siècle, women in theatre and dance had different obstacles to overcome. The situation of women in the nineteenth-century world of opera, theatre and ballet was different, in that training was wholly accessible, but often at the expense of respectability.

Even with the advantage of extensive training, thus far women dancers had seldom been seen as theoretical experts on ballet and were not given the social authority to write on dance. Accordingly, women’s ascendancy as arbiters of taste in the field of dance went through a different process.

Part of this was a result of the diminished status of the art form in the late nineteenth century. A clear example of this can be seen in an exchange between a prima ballerina at the Paris Opéra and a music critic at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1907, the editor-in-chief and critic of Le Monde musical, André Mangeot, openly criti- cised the principal dancer at the Opéra, Carlotta Zambelli, for her sterile, artificial French technical style and for her inability to produce beautiful gestures (Mangeot, 1907: 331). He was so determined to outsmart or as we now say ‘mansplain’ the art of ballet to this highly accomplished practitioner that, to prove his point, he had the audacity to invite the ballerina to pose for a series of photographs to demonstrate the lack of beauty in her postures.

Zambelli was an Italian prima ballerina who would later become head of the Paris Opera Ballet School. Apart from a year in St Petersburg, she spent her entire career in Paris. She was such a perfectionist that she once wrote, ‘dancers know, or should know, that they cannot be mediocre’ – a belief that governed her entire career. With this in mind, it is no surprise that the highly accomplished Zambelli refused to accept Mangeot’s invitation to pose for him. She wrote back and explained in simple terms that her style was fluid and could not be recorded in static photography – at this time, photography was not yet capable of capturing ‘action’ movements (Mangeot, 1907).5

This exchange captures two tensions in the world of art in this period. The first is between the amateur critic and the artistic technician. In his review, Mangeot reiterated the enduring aesthetic debate in ballet: should dance serve as a representation of dramatic expression or stand on its formal qualities? Should dance be about pretty static poses and pantomimic expression or valued for its bodily movement? Mangeot asked, ‘Is dance, as artists have always wished it, BEAUTY EMBODIED IN GESTURE, or as dance professionals and the great majority of the public image, AGILITY EMBODIED IN MOVEMENT?’

His conclusion was that if dance was the latter, it ‘ceased to be an art’ (Mangeot, 1907: 331). He described ballet technique as constituting ‘unnatural movements’ and as ‘a battle against nature’. According to Mangeot, beauty was supposed ‘to capture nature’. He observed that the emphasis on technique at the Opéra produced danseuses with overdeveloped calves that appeared as ‘deformities’ that led to ‘ugliness’. As a result, he noted, ‘it is a sad fact that the choreographic exercises we see at the Opéra are not dance’.

Mangeot’s review is a good example of how some critics resisted placing value on the formal qualities of dance (i.e. technical virtuosity) and insisted on valuing ballet with something outside of the actual dancing. Second, this interaction between Mangeot and Zambelli reveals the battle between male and female authority over aesthetics – here the authority women held in the realm of dance aesthetics as practitioners and the incompetence of an editor-in-chief and music specialist to review dancing, having never set foot in a dance studio. Zambelli was not called on to offer theoretical knowledge on bal- let, only to pose for Mangeot to prove his point.

Thus male amateurs dictated the merits of dance even though they failed to understand ballet technique. Dance criticism only became ‘professionalised’ in the 1920s when Russian émigré André Levinson came on the Paris scene and demonstrated his understanding of dance technique. The criteria for reviewing ballet was transformed from what could be done by the amateur spectator to relying on the mastery of dance technique. It is with these developments that women could emerge as arbiters of taste in the realm of dance.

In the interwar period, women also began to assert their authority in the realm of dance criticism. Celebrity dancers were successful in publishing their autobiographies and dance theories in great numbers. They contributed critical essays on dance in major newspapers, like La Nouvelle Revue française, La Revue musicale, Le Figaro and Comœdia. They founded dance journals, served as foreign correspondents on dance, broadcast on the radio, and participated in the cultural transfer of modern ideas about ballet through invited lectures and master classes around the globe. In other words, as the value attached to the art of dance changed, women, in their capacity as prac- titioners, could assert their authority and arbitrate a taste for dance. Eventually, Zambelli was asked to write articles and books on ballet and she was officially recognised by the state for her expertise in ballet when she was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1956….

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This is a cool one!

It’s a video from right at the turn of the century featuring the famous dancer, Carlotta Zambelli. 

Interesting to note- she’s performing a dance Louis Merante created for Rosita Mauri in 1885- right around when the movie takes place! It’s from the opera, Le Cid.

This is what they would have really danced like during the movie!

Doesn’t look like much at first. It’s really incredible how far ballet has come since a century ago.

 This is pointework done with virtually no support. She’s basically doing this in bare feet! Another point to note is the roles of the man and woman- in this time, the male dancer’s primary role was to support and lift the ballerina.

[galina-ulanova]

Carlotta Zambelli as Gourouli in Les Deux Pigeons (Paris Opera Ballet, 1912)

[danielaandsurroundings-blog]

accadde...oggi: nel 1875 nasce Carlotta Zambelli

accadde…oggi: nel 1875 nasce Carlotta Zambelli

  Allieva della Scuola di Ballo del Teatro alla Scala, nel 1894 Carlotta Zambelli ha debuttato all’Opéra di Parigi nel Faust , succedendo a Rosita Mauri come étoile. Tipica incarnazione dello stile milanese, dotata di punte d’acciaio e di tecnica virtuosistica, è diventata una beniamina del pubblico parigino grazie alle sue interpretazioni di Coppélia, Les deux pigeons, Sylvia; successo che si è…

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Eleonora Abbagnato,Teatro Massimo di Palermo @ Marco Glaviano

There are many, many Italian dancers scattered around companies throughout the world. Some are in the corps de ballet, others are principal dancers, but all continue the tradition that made Italian dancers some of the most famous of all. Even leaving the men aside, we have Pierina Legnani (noted as ‘maybe’ being the first to perform 32 fouetté turns) who was a prima ballerina assoluta at the Mariinsky; Giuseppina Bozzacchi who created the role of Coppélia for the Paris Opera Ballet when she was 16; Fanny Cerrito and Carlotta Grisi (together with Marie Taglioni – herself half Italian – and Lucile Grahn) who created the roles in Perrot’s Pas de Quatre in London; Virginia Zucchi (for whom Petipa created La Esmeralda pas de six), Carlotta Zambelli (the star of the Paris Opera Ballet for three decades), and more recent exports: Fracci, Ferri, Galeazzi, Durante, Savignano, Abbagnato and others who have become principal ballerinas with major international companies.

Eleonora Abbagnato in Puccini by Julien Leste © Rolando Paolo Guerzoni 01

Eleonora Abbagnato in Puccini by Julien Leste © Rolando Paolo Guerzoni

It is Paris Opera Ballet’s Eleonora Abbagnato (also director of the Rome Opera Ballet company) who heads the bill of Daniele Cipriani’s latest starry gala, this time for the 62nd edition of the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, a town which has seen many of the world’s most famous dancers pass through over the last half-century.

The programme, curated by Cipriani, ranges from the great classical repertoire to pieces by important contemporary choreographers, as well as original creations by young Italian dance makers.

Joining Abbagnato in the line-up are Davide Dato, from Biella, who since 2016 has been First Soloist with the Vienna State Ballet (who will dance in George Balanchine’s Tarantella, which the company has in its repertoire); Gabriele Frola, from Aosta, who became principal dancer of the National Ballet of Canada and, at the same time, of the English National Ballet in 2018; and Rachele Buriassi, a soloist at Boston Ballet.

Davide Dato 2017 © Cositore

Rachele Buriassi in Don Quixote © Stuttgarter Ballett

Davide Riccardo

Gabriele Frola © Aleksandar Antonijevic

There is also 18-year-old Davide Riccardo, from Messina, who graduated from the School of American Ballet and, since August 2018, has become the first Italian at the New York City Ballet (and will present Jerome Robbins’s Andantino as a tribute to the NYCB choreographer who also had strong links with Spoleto); as well as six Italian dancers from the Stuttgart Ballet: Fabio Adorisio, Daniele Silingardi, Alessandro Giaquinto, Matteo Miccini, Vittoria Girelli and Elisa Ghisalberti.

Coincidentally, the gala – on Sunday 30 June – coincides exactly with the tenth anniversary of the death of Pina Bausch, and Damiano Ottavio Bigi, who dances with the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch in Germany, will present his own creation dedicated to the great choreographer and interpreter.

Contemporary choreographers are represented by Claudio Cangialosi, from the Vlaanderen Opera Ballet, who will dance a piece by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, and Sasha Riva and Simone Repele, formerly at John Neumeier´s Hamburg Ballet and now at the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève, will perform a work by Marco Goecke.

Sasha Riva and Simone Repele

Claudio Cangialosi

Sasha Riva and Simone Repele

Damiano Ottavio Bigi

Rachele Buriassi in Jiří Kylián’s Wings of Wax © Rosalie O’Connor

There are also national premieres by young Italian authors whose talent has been acknowledged abroad: Alessandro Giaquinto and Fabio Adorisio, of the Stuttgart Ballet, present two creations, especially for the Spoleto Festival, danced by the six Italian dancers from the same company. Tommaso Beneventi from the Royal Swedish Ballet will dance with Buriassi (together with Giacomo Castellana of the Rome Opera Ballet) in a world premiere by Francesco Ventriglia on the music of Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre.

Among the (non-Italian) guest artists who complete the lineup are Nikisha Fogo and Liudmila Konovalova from the Vienna State Opera who will dance the Le Corsaire pas de deux along with the young dancer from La Scala, Mattia Semperboni, who set the stage alight in Milan recently as the slave. There’s also Friedmann Vogel from Stuttgart, Megan LeCrone from the New York City Ballet, Katja Khaniukova from English National Ballet and Nancy Osbaldeston from the Royal Ballet of Flanders.

Not only is there a fancy lineup – and quite unique – but the gala will be performed in the Piazza del Duomo with the stage backdrop being Spoleto’s stunning cathedral.

Nancy Osbaldeston 1

Nancy Osbaldeston 2

Liudmila Konovalova © Fotografia Massimo Danza 01

Liudmila Konovalova © Fotografia Massimo Danza

  Eleonora Abbagnato con le Stelle italiane nel mondo – Sunday 30 June at 21.30.

Some tickets are still available: Festival Di Spoleto – Abbagnato.

Eleonora Abbagnato at Teatro Massimo in Palermo @ Marco Glaviano

Dance in Italy – Spoleto Festival’s Dance Gala with Abbagnato, Vogel, Frola, Dato and many more on 30 June There are many, many Italian dancers scattered around companies throughout the world. Some are in the corps de ballet, others are principal dancers, but all continue the tradition that made Italian dancers some of the most famous of all.

[valeriefolliot]

Le Comité de Danse International (CDI, en relation avec l'UNESCO) instaure la Journée Internationale de la Danse en 1982. La date du 29 avril 2017 a été choisie pour commémorer l’anniversaire de Jean-Georges Noverre (1727-1810), créateur du ballet moderne. La Journée Internationale de la Danse tend à rassembler l’humanité toute entière en amitié et paix autour de la danse, langage universel. En 2018, la Journée Internationale de la Danse aura lieu le lundi 9 avril 2018. Image : Carlotta Zambelli - en savoir plus

[evrydance-blog]

Le Comité de Danse International (CDI, en relation avec l'UNESCO) instaure la Journée Internationale de la Danse en 1982.

La date du 29 avril 2017 a été choisie pour commémorer l’anniversaire de Jean-Georges Noverre (1727-1810), créateur du ballet moderne. La Journée Internationale de la Danse tend à rassembler l’humanité toute entière en amitié et paix autour de la danse, langage universel. En 2018, la Journée Internationale de la Danse aura lieu le lundi 9 avril 2018. Image : Carlotta Zambelli - en savoir plus

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Carlotta Zambelli 1875-1968 Italian Ballerina

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Carlotta Zambelli dans Giselle, ballet de Théophile Gautier et Adolphe Adam, circa 1900, photographe inconnu. BnF.

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Carlotta Zambelli (Imperial Russian Ballet, 1901).

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Postcard of the Italian ballerina Carlotta Zambelli (Paris Opera Ballet, 1906).