Dance, Food and Politics: Choreography at/of Banquets in Early Modern Italy
(Petra Zeller-Dotlačilová)

In the early modern period, banquets, or sumptuous dinners, were much more than convivial moments around a table. They were both ritual and entertainment, representational events of the rulers, a total artwork of art where culinary art intertwined with visual and performing arts. Scenography and decoration, music and dance, meals and drinks were conceived and organised as a complete performance, with its own meticulously designed dramaturgy.

This paper will investigate various forms and roles of dance at banquets, as well as their general “choreography”, in various courts of northern Italy from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. More concretely, the case studies include the spectacular “cene” at the Ferrara court of the d’Este family, dancing banquets of the Savoia in Turin, and Milanese events influenced by Spanish and Austrian rulers. Who danced and why? How does the choreography relate to the occasion of the event? Did the dance correlate with the food and drinks served, and if so, how?

Comparing events from various periods and places will allow us to observe the transformations, as well as similarities, in the use of dance for aesthetic and political purposes at the banquets.

 

Petra Zeller-Dotlačilová, Basel, Schweiz

Petra Zeller Dotlačilová holds PhDs in Dance and Theatre Studies (Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, 2016, Stockholm University, 2020). In her research, she specializes in European dance history and theatrical costume from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. She participated in the research projects ‘Performing Premodernity’ at Stockholm University (2014-2019) and ‘Ritual Design for the Ballet Stage (1650–1760)’ at Leipzig University (2015–2017). In 2021, she was awarded a scholarship by the Swedish Research Council for her three-year research project ‘The Fabrication of Performance: Processes and Politics of Costume-Making in the 18th Century’, conducted in collaboration with the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles. From 2024, she is a postdoc in the SNSF research project ‘The Night Side of Music: Towards a New Historiography of Musicking in Europe, 1500-1800’ at the University of Basel. Her monograph Performance Costume in Eighteenth-Century France will be published with Bloomsbury in 2025.