#Carlotta Grisi

[mythical-art]

Portrait of Carlotta Grisi in Giselle, 1841 by Theophile Gautier (1841, pastel)

[bones-ivy-breath]

Carlotta Grisi carnevale 1847. From the New York Public Library.

[hystericalgynophobia]

christine emi sawyer, paunika jones, courtney cochran, and miku kawamura photographed performing as carlotta grisi, marie taglioni, lucile grahn, & fanny cerrito in pas de quatre by william miller

[famousinuniverse]

ELIZAVETA KOKOREVA

Born in Moscow into a family of the ballet artists. In 2019, graduated from the Moscow State Academy of Choreography (class of Tatiana Galtseva) and joined the Bolshoi Theatre Ballet Company. At the end of 2021-22 season she was promoted to the leading soloist, in 2023 — to the principal dancer. At first she rehearsed under the supervision of Nadezhda Pavlova. Currently her teacher is Maria Allash.

Bolshoi Theatre • Elizaveta Kokoreva

DANIIL POTAPTSEV

Born in Saint Petersburg. In 2022, graduated from St. Petersburg Boris Eifman Dance Academy (class of Maxim Prokofiev) and joined the Bolshoi Ballet Company. In the 2022/ 23 season he was promoted to the soloist. Rehearses under the supervision of Vitaly Breusenko.

Bolshoi Theatre • Daniil Potaptsev

Giselle

Giselle is a romantic ballet in two acts with music by Adolphe Adam. Considered a masterwork in the classical ballet performance canon, it was first performed by the Ballet du Théâtre de l'Académie Royale de Musique at the Salle Le Peletier in Paris on 28 June 1841, with Italian ballerina Carlotta Grisi as Giselle. It was an unqualified triumph. It became hugely popular and was staged at once across Europe, Russia, and the United States.

Giselle - Wikipedia

Elizaveta Kokoreva and Daniil Potaptsev in Giselle.

[silvernwillow]

Carlotta Grisi as Giselle (1841)

[budjavlebac]

Pierre Gringoire (Jules Perrot) and La Esmeralda (Carlotta Grisi) from the "La Esmeralda" ballet (1844).

[strechanadi]

Marie Taglioni, Carlotta Grisi, Lucile Grahn, Fanny Cerrito

Pas de quatre

[gramilano]

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.

[venicepearl]

Gaspard-Félix Tournachon: Carlotta Grisi

[lasylphidedanslair]

[demotulibrorum]

Madlle Carlotta Grisi... The Peri. [Lithograph designed and drawn on stone by William C. Steer] 1844.  @nypl Digital Collections.

GIFed by Zu.

[adelphe]

Three Centuries of Ballet, 1948

[suetravelblog]

Giselle Ballet Bucharest Romania National Opera

Giselle Ballet Bucharest Romania National Opera

Giselle Act I – northernballet.com Photo Bill Cooper Giselle is one of the world’s most popular romantic tragedies. Since its 1841 Parisian premier – characterized as an “unqualified triumph” – the “universal passion of the ballet’s storyline has stood the test of time”. Many emotions – love, betrayal, jealousy, hurt – are portrayed in this beautiful classical ballet. Carlotta Grisi First Giselle…

[clove-pinks]

Eighteen-Forties Friday: 'Polka is certainly an epidemic'

There was a furore about the Polka; not only in dancing it, but there was an absolute mania for naming articles of dress after it. Ladies wore Polka hats, Polka jackets and Polka boots, and men had Polka ties. Jullien published a new Polka about every fortnight, and the whole people were Polka mad.

— John Ashton, Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign (Internet Archive)

Illustrations of the "The Drawing-Room Polka" in The Illustrated London News, May 11 1844 (HathiTrust). The article begins:

We are much gratified in being enabled to lay before our readers an accurate description of the véritable, or Drawing-room Polka, as danced at Almack's, and at the balls of the nobility and gentry in this country.

Much emphasis is placed on the dance being elegant and quiet: "there is no stamping of heels or toes, or kicking of legs in sharp angles forward." (Well, maybe in Bohemia, but it is "inadmissible into the salons of London or Paris".)

The novelist and Royal Navy officer Captain Marryat wrote to his sister-in-law about the polka craze in 1844:

That polka is certainly an epidemic. I was at Raynham before the girls came down, and the Townshends were dancing it there and gave me a lesson. Since the girls have been here it is polka upstairs and downstairs, in the dining-room before and after dinner, and I am pulled up to dance it every hour. They have commenced it in the kitchen, and one or two of the maids are pretty expert.

— The Life and Letters of Captain Frederick Marryat, edited by Florence Marryat.

Carlotta Grisi and Jules Perrot in La Polka, Her Majesty's Theatre, circa 1845 (Victoria & Albert Museum)

[marzipanandminutiae]

Single mothers might have also been pressured to find a "protector" if they couldn't find a husband. Jobs for women didn't pay well, especially since working women were expected to be maidens, not working moms. (On a sweet note, apparently the guy who commissioned the ballet Giselle commissioned it for his mistress's daughter!)

(focusing on the 1800s, because that's my era of greatest expertise)

Maybe, yes. I think that depended on the background of the woman, though, more than anything else. A single mother in the artistic world, especially the performing arts, might find herself advised to become someone's mistress more than a "respectable" working-class widow, to whom the idea would likely carry some moral anxiety.

Which is not to say it never happened. Survival sex work as a side gig has been a thing for a long time among women who were not what we'd call Career Sex WorkersTM today. But I digress.

As for expectations of which women worked...well, it was a bit more complicated than that. Certainly the 19th century ideal was that, if a woman worked, she would only do so until marriage. Some specific jobs- like teaching, often, in the US -wouldn't hire married women at all. But in practice, as with so many aspects of human life, things were pretty different. Many married women worked outside the home- primarily in family businesses alongside their husbands, but often in any job that would allow the household to make ends meet.

(And that's not even getting into how things differed for working-class white women and women of color. The latter of whom often HAD to work outside the home due to economic inequality, for centuries, even when their white counterparts of similar social class were able to be housewives on their husbands' salaries alone.)

As for the story about Giselle, the ballet having been commissioned at all isn't mentioned on the Wiki page- has anyone a source on that? Not that it couldn't have been; just that I'm not seeing that story around. The ballerina who premiered the title role, Carlotta Grisi, was the choreographer's mistress and bore his daughter- that may be what you're thinking of.

Anyway! The pressure to be a kept mistress could exist on a single mother in the 19th century, but it was highly situational, is my point.