by Anna Alberati
This Elementary, theoretical-practical treatise on the art of dance is the first Italian translation (made in 1830 by Pietro Campilli and printed in Forlì by Tipografia Bordandini) of the Traité élémentaire, théorique et pratique de l’art de la danse (Milan, 1820), the first theoretical-didactic treatise on ballet written by the dancer, choreographer, teacher and treatise writer Carlo de Blasis.
The author, born in Naples on 4 November 1795, had received an excellent and broad education from his father Francesco, a well-known composer of music, especially of operas and ballets.
After fleeing with his family from his hometown due to the advent of the new Neapolitan Republic, in 1807 Carlo made his debut with great success in Marseille, to then continue his brilliant career as a dancer in Bordeaux and other cities, including those that were the main dance centers at the time: Paris, Milan and London. He was a danseur noble, interpreter of noble and heroic characters; but in addition to the qualities of dignity and moderation, typical of the role, it seems that he also had a very special gift of grace and elegance.
In 1828 he married Annunziata Ramaccini, a dancer and mime, with whom he began an important collaboration both in dance and choreography, but above all in that activity as a theoretician and teacher of dance that was to make him very famous, and which he continued until his death, which occurred in Cernobbio on Lake Como on January 15, 1878. Blasis undertook this activity between 1817 and 1829, already during his career as a dancer, which slowly declined after 1825 due to an accident to his foot. Together with his wife he worked in several prestigious European schools, starting with the school of La Scala in Milan, then in Paris, Warsaw, Lisbon, and the Bolshoi in Moscow. He also opened a private school.
Particularly important were the period spent as a master of perfection in Milan, from 1837 to 1850, and the two years spent in Moscow, from 1861 to 1863: the students who received the teaching of the Blasis spouses all became great dancers. The greatest stars of Russian ballet of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries all came from their school or from that of their student Giovanni Lepri and Enrico Cecchetti (1850-1928) – in turn a student of Lepri – who was one of the most famous dance teachers in existence.
In the history of classical dance (or ballet) there are three great schools: the French, the Russian and in particular the Italian, which, after the inauguration of the Imperial Academy of Dance connected to the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 1812, had its true beginning in 1837, precisely with the arrival of Blasis as director. The Italian school became famous for its characteristics of strength and for the virtuosity of its dancers, who amazed the audience with their incredible technique based on the five positions of the feet, on the work of the toes, on the beats, on the different types of rotations, elevations and extensions.
The Traité had already laid the theoretical and didactic foundations of academic classical dance which were subsequently developed by Blasis in his second work, the fundamental Code of Terpsichore, translated by Barton from the original French text (London, 1828 and 1830), which then enjoyed maximum diffusion in the French translation by Paul Vergnaud, entitled Manuel complet de la danse (Paris, 1830).
The dominant part of this agile but dense Treatise (of which the Casanatense Library possesses one of the very few copies still in existence) is the one which contains a series of very detailed instructions relating to the five positions of academic dance and the correct use of the arms and legs by the dancers.
The text is completed and enriched by 14 plates engraved by Luigi Rados based on a drawing by Casartelli, in which the dancers are represented in the various positions of the ballet. The model for the dancers in the illustrations was Blasis himself.
The first quarter of the 19th century saw the birth of increasingly advanced teaching methods, aimed above all at developing the role of the ballerina (as the male dancer had been degraded to a simple premier porteur, forced to serve and support the ballerina, waiting in the shadow of her glory to grab her and lift her from one grand jeté to another).
With the ambition of improving the quality, but above all of broadening the technique, several masters and theorists tried to find the right balance between the nobility of tradition and the audacity of innovation in the field of academic dance.
One of them was Carlo de Blasis, who, with his writings, laid the foundations of dance teaching: as the critic André Levinson expressed it, his historical function was to “guide the boat of classical dance of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the shore of romantic ballet”.
Blasis introduced a code for what later became pantomimic gestures, which for him was “the very soul and support of ballet”: his method facilitated the floating lightness, the aerial quality of dance. He could not ignore the demands of virtuosity of his time, but at the same time he considered excess, which in those years was the unbridled flair typical of the Romantics, as the great enemy of the art of ballet.
He always sought the elegance and nobility of inner grace, even when he approved the pirouette, which he described in great detail, as a multiple spiral performed as high as possible on demi-pointe, and praised its plastic beauty.
From the observation of sculpture and painting of antiquity and the Renaissance he introduced the attitude, one of the basic poses of dance: the inspiration came to him from the statue of Mercury by Giambologna, and so in this attitude the dancer stands on one leg and brings the other leg, with the knee bent, behind him at an angle of ninety degrees, a pose that is the pure joy of virtuosity, and which anticipates the many variations of the pas jeté. Blasi had a creative personality and was a figure of high intellectual level: of his many choreographies only a few titles remain, the typical subjects of his time, such as Faust and Manfred by Byron. He was the only one to have, in an era of romantic excesses, a conservative attitude, which led him to follow the rule of the three genders of dancers in an era in which this notion was radically losing ground and reason to exist.
The three genres were: the danseur noble, the typical hero, the serious dancer and master of the adagio, the slow and sustained movement; the demi-caractère, generally a man of medium height, lively and brilliant, mostly suited to a mixture of all styles; and the dancer of the genre comique, danced by small and vigorous men of robust and short build. Definitively accepting the theories of Jean-Georges Noverre, in order to make the interpretation of the roles credible, the dancers were directed to one genre rather than another also on the basis of physical qualities or temperament. Thus Blasis, also inspired by the neoclassical concept of the “ideal beauty”, took sculpture as a particular reference to highlight the characteristics of the “serious” dancer, of the “mezzo carattere” dancer and of the “comic” dancer.
In romantic ballet, however, in addition to losing the pure connotation of danseur noble, the male dancer gave way to the ballerina, who assumed a leading role, thanks also to the introduction of the white and floating tutu (“the multilayered tarlatan skirt”) that replaced the court costume (and which has since then always been the symbol of the ballerina) and the shoes with chalk toes. Both of these technical innovations contributed to the construction of the image of an ethereal being, soaring upwards, who moves in space with infinite lightness and grace.
Of particular interest is the portrait of Carlo de Blasis made by the dance historian Vittoria Ottolenghi in the entry in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, of which some passages are reported below:
“C.B. emerges as the greatest and most complete codifier of academic dance: the one who explained and ordered the problem of dancing on pointe, who was able to coordinate the use of terre-à-terre dance with that of aérienne, in other words the one who operated in theory and practice the transition from the classical dance of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the romantic dance of the nineteenth century. But B. is much more than a simple bridge between classical and romantic ballet. And his value is not only as a great academic, exponent of brilliant and rigorous teaching, even if his merits in this field are fundamental […] and even if academic dance as B. left it has substantially remained so up to today, integrated and refined by his direct students.
B. has shown himself to be a step ahead – perhaps many steps ahead – of the great theorists who preceded him, Angiolini and Noverre. If they in fact gave dance an artistic value identical and parallel to that of all the other arts, B. with all his work seems to tell us something extremely modern and that perhaps only today, after the experiences of this century, we are actually beginning to understand: dance is not an art in itself, an autonomous world, detached from immediate problems of communication. Dance is theatre and its purpose is primarily theatrical. With dance one can express, say, tell everything, and to do this the choreographer and performers must be profoundly aware of the problems of their time, as well as technically perfect. For B., technical perfection is of equal importance to the moral or artistic value of the theme, the music and the staging. […].
This is the great value of B.[ …]: the virtuosity and perfection of execution felt – or perhaps intuited – as a fundamental expressive spring. And this in accordance with what will be the contemporary theoretical principles, which precisely in the use of virtuosity in expressive functions have reached the highest peaks […]”.
The words of Carlo de Blasis
Preamble: “The very small number of works that have been written on Dance, and the little merit of some of them, have encouraged me to publish this Treatise. Most of the writers I speak of are, to tell the truth, very good men of letters, but have never been dancers. …
To better understand what I have proposed regarding the formation of a good dancer, I add to the precepts contained in my Treatise, some figures that I have had drawn on myself: they present the positions of the body, of the arms, of the legs; the different stops, the attitudes and the arabesques.
The students, having these examples before their eyes, will easily understand the theoretical principles that I teach them. …
The figures are designed by Mr. Casartelli, and sculpted by Mr. Rados”.
“The dancer must be able to serve as a model for painters and sculptors at any moment.”
“The position that dancers call particularly attitude, is the most beautiful of those that exist in dance, and is the most difficult to execute; it is in my opinion a kind of imitation of that which can be seen in the famous Mercury by G. Bologna”.
Attitude: Mercury by Giambologna: plate IX, fig. 1
Attitude: tav. VIII, fig. 1
Attitude profile view: plate VIII, fig. 2
Different ways of putting oneself in attitude: table VIII, fig. 3 and 4
Arabesque: tav. X, XI, XII
“It is to the marvelous progress of modern dancing that we owe pirouettes; our ancient dancers did not know them … The current execution of the different pirouettes is truly extraordinary, since one has succeeded in preserving the perpendicular as much as possible, and in keeping the body in the most perfect balance. One could perhaps consider Messrs. Gardel and Vestris as the inventors of pirouettes; the latter is the one who, by perfecting them, multiplied them, and made them more fashionable. … In dancing there is nothing that surpasses this difficulty”.
“The positions, the attitudes of the dancer, the most known, and the most used in pirouettes are:
to the second (plate VI, fig. 1), in attitude (plate VIII, fig. 1), and above the instep (plate IX, fig. 4)
“The dancer can turn in all sorts of attitudes and arabesques, provided that the design of his body, his arms, and his legs is graceful and easy, and that the movement of his arms is natural, and free from painful and unpleasant affectation. At the end, the pirouettes can be stopped in all the stops, attitudes, and arabesques”.
Blasis, Carlo de Elementary, theoretical-practical treatise on the art of dancing containing the developments and demonstrations of the general and specific principles that must guide the dancer by Carlo Blasis, first dancer, translated from French by the first dancer and composer of dances Pietro Campilli. In Forlì, Tipografia Bordandini, 1830 89 p., 14th c. of plates, 22 cm – coll. Misc. 551.18