Elisa Uffreduzzi, La Danza Nel Cinema Muto Italiano

Opera Quarterly, 2018

Scholars have long sought to trace the ancestry of film music in the music-theatrical genres that preceded the cinematic medium. Two lineages of influence predominate. On the one hand, opera served as an aesthetic ideal to which filmmakers and critics aspired, in cinema’s early decades. On the other, pantomime and melodrama provided practical models of musical accompaniment that guaranteed quintessentially filmic forms of audio-visual synchronization. Yet at the level of individual scores, the distinctions between these two genealogies become blurred; and the notion of film evolving from preceding genres remains unquestioned. This article re-examines this historiographical tendency, making a case study of Carlo Graziani-Walter’s specially-composed score for _Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei_ (1913), a major historical epic from the “Golden Years” of Italian cinema. Graziani-Walter’s score, I argue, is clearly influenced by Italian opera—especially in three key scenes, which were to be accompanied by live singing. Operatic aesthetics are notably absent, however, in the two published extracts from the score, both of which draw on popular idioms. The juxtaposition and tension between opposing styles—between the operatic and the popular—in the score to _Gli ultimi giorni_ suggests that a new, distinctly filmic form of music was already emerging.

2016

Ballets with the designation fantastico first appeared in Italy’s theaters during the Risorgimento period. Ultramontane romanticism and fantastic topics were a minority within a diverse repertoire, reflecting the Italian revolution for independence. While some of these ballets were imports (often greatly adapted) of successful French romantic ballets, many were Italian choreographers’ own brand of theater. The fantastic could even appear in the guise of allegorical characters within ballet genres more common to the Italian stage. This article situates the fantastic in Italy's theatrical scene and offers an investigation of the musical manifestation of supernatural characters in Italy's ballets through the case studies of four works that span six decades of performance—Il Noce di Benevento (1812), Fausto (1849),Bianchi e Negri (1853), and Gretchen (1868). This topical music is an important part of Italy's musical-theatrical participation in romanticism. While musicologist...

The practice of grotesque dancing occupied an important place in the panorama of theatrical dance during the 18th century; its undeniable success served to make it the object of critical attacks and polemics in the European cultural world. Very few studies, however, exist about this practice 1. The only work entirely dedicated to grotesque dancing, which remains an essential reference, is The Grotesque Dancer on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Gennaro Magri and His World, published in 2004 2. In this volume, enriched by important appendices, Rebecca Harris-Warrick and Bruce Alan Brown bring together studies that explore the trans-European world of the grotteschi, with a particular focus on Gennaro Magri and his Trattato teorico pratico del ballo (1779) 3. The Neapolitan grotesque dancer published his Trattato at the very moment at which his rival Charles Lepicq, a " serious " dancer and pupil of Jean-Georges Noverre, definitively replaced him at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. Among descriptions of the dance steps contained in Magri's work-which is of immense value for what it tells us about dance practice at the time-we also find various references to polemics that highlight the contrast between two styles of dance, Italian and French, and between two genres considered to occupy two different levels of the theatrical hierarchy: serious dance and grotesque dance. Such oppositions played a significant role in the cultural competition of the day, which opposed Italy and France: the noble style, identified with the French, was regarded as higher, while the practices of grotesque dancing and pantomime were stigmatized as " Italian ". But what in fact was a grotesque dancer? What techniques did he or she employ? And why were such dancers always called " Italian " ? Using the writings of the ballet masters and surviving testimonies regarding the reception of different styles of dancing, I aim to shed light on this practice in order to better understand the complex dimensions of the " grotesque " in dance.

AVANCA | CINEMA, 2019

To the often-studied relationship between dance and cinema, kindred arts of the moving body-moving image, I propose to add an original analysis of the relationship between the sub-genres of historical dance (in particular the social and theatrical dances of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and period cinema. To that end, it is not only important to question the extent to which dance is merely illustrative, or serves as a narrative instrument in this type of films, but also how period cinema contributes to the construction of a historical memory of dance. There are several contexts that justify the introduction of a staged dance on film and they depend on a number of choices on the part of the artistic team. In period cinema these choices are particularly delicate, especially when the "world of the play" is relatively unconcerned with historical accuracy.

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My article provides a better understanding of commedia dell'arte's transformation from an indecorous form of popular entertainment, performed in public spaces (piazze) and accused of teaching lust and corruption, into a legitimate and respected art form, performed in aristocratic and royal court theatres before refined and educated audiences. I show how relevant performances by such actresses as

Within fteenth-century Italian texts on court dancing we encounter the fairly elusive expression «danzare per fantasmata». It has been connected with the powers of the imagination and the techniques of memory, in relation to both the per- formers and their audiences. It seems suggestive of some ghost-like experience. It is introduced in the key source, Domenico da Piacenza, with extraordinary images, suggestive of a moment of absolute stillness, soon followed by a swift ight. The relevance of this stylistic category on Renaissance dance aesthetics has undergone recent re-evaluation; so would deserve its implications for the time and space per- ceptions of dancers and onlookers alike.

2013

Women and Screen Cultures is a series of experimental digital books aimed to promote research and knowledge on the contribution of women to the cultural history of screen media. Published by the Department of the Arts at the University of Bologna, it is issued under the conditions of both open publishing and blind peer review. It will host collections, monographs, translations of open source archive materials, illustrated volumes, transcripts of conferences, and more. Proposals are welcomed for both disciplinary and multi-disciplinary contributions in the fields of film history and theory, television and media studies, visual studies, photography and new media. Edited by: Monica Dall'Asta, Victoria Duckett, Lucia Tralli ISBN 9788898010103 2013. Published by the Department of Arts, University of Bologna in association with the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne and Women and Film History International Graphic design: Lucia Tralli