The Italianisation of French Dance: Dauberval at the Teatro Regio at Turin in 1759
(Flavia Papacena, Lorenzo Tozzi)

For the 1759 carnival season, Turin's Teatro Regio invited Jean Dauberval who, albeit just seventeen, was already well-known at the Grand Théâtre of Lyon as a performer and restager of Jean-Georges Noverre's work. For the Turin theatre, Dauberval composed a total of five 'balli' to be performed between the acts of the two operas Eumene (Zeno-Mazzoni) and Adriano in Siria (Metastasio-Borghi). The ballet music, by G.A. Le Messier, was transcribed in an album now kept by the Library of the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome. The ballets were described at the end of the opera libretto, as was customary in Turin since 1756. The second of the three entr'acte 'balli' for Adriano in Siria was La Fontana del Ringiovenimento, still considered as a restaging of Noverre's La Fontaine de Jouvence (Paris, Foire Saint-Laurent, 1754). In actual fact, the subject matter was considerably altered and reconstructed in a style to suit the Turin theatre and observe the limits imposed by Savoy's censors. The deities responsible for the rejuvenation (Hebe, Goddess of Youth, and the God of Love) do not appear in the ballet and the plot slips rapidly into a long coda of grotesque dances in the Italian tradition. These dances comprise three "pas de deux" performed by the Second Grotesque, the First Grotesque and the "Coppia Seria" (Serious Couple), which are actually pantomimed scenes intermixed with dance, performed by the conventional grotesque 'characters' of the period: the Hunter, the Gardener and the Wild Animal Tamer. The pas de deux of the "Coppia Seria" (i.e. French) of a Faun with a Villanelle is also based on a mixture of dance and pantomime, its style being presumably similar to that of the first forms of French narrative ballet which started to appear in the middle of the century in several French and Italian cities and in Central Europe.
This adaptation of a ballet by Noverre for the Turin stage is not unique, since in Italy, in the 'fifties and 'sixties, pantomimes of the grotesque genre were often included in ballets with a mythological theme, and many Italian theatres requested French choreographers (such as Pietro Alovar, Vincent Saunier, etc.) to adapt their ballets and even to compose in Italian style. The first of Dauberval's two 1759 ballets for the opera Eumene, Disposizioni per l'assalto di una città assediata, has clearly Italian features.

Flavia Pappacena, Rom, Italien:

Flavia Pappacena, professor at the Accademia Nazionale di Danza in Rome and at Rome University "La Sapienza". Since 1993 editor of the journal Chorégraphie and since 1984 of the dance collection by the publishers Gremese. She is the author of many research papers on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Excelsior. Documents and Essays (1998), Carlo Blasis' Treatise on Dance 1820-1830 (2005), The Language of Classical Ballet. Guide to the Interpretation of Iconographic Sources (2012).

Lorenzo Tozzi, Rom, Italien:

Lorenzo Tozzi, professor at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome and at the Universities of Fermo and Lecce. Since 1994 he is the artistic director of the Romabarocca Ensemble and Chairman of the Cultural Association "Romabarocca". He is the author of many studies on Italian eighteenth-century dance.