Dancing 'a La Grecque' at the King's Theatre 1781-1830 - from Simonet's Medea to Taglioni's Flore. Part I; The Heroic

In the late Georgian Theatre, there were two main modes of expressing the classical - the Heroic and the Anacreontic. The Heroic depicted the Gods of the Greek Pantheon and the Mythological Heroes of the Homeric era - and very often the interaction between the two. the Anacreontic the nymphs and shepherds of the Grecian Arcadia. But how authentic were the settings and costumes seen on the stage of the King's Theatre? And did the dancers' costume owe more to contemporary fashion than to the archaeological evidence available at the time. 

Keith Cavers is an independent curator, scholar and consulting iconographer. He studied Stage Management at RADA and History of Drawing and Printmaking at Camberwell. His thesis on James Harvey D'Egville (Surrey) led to a visiting research fellowship at Harvard in 1996 where he returned in both 2015 and 2016. He was Slide Librarian and a Visiting Lecturer at Camberwell for twenty years and Information Officer at the National Gallery London for twelve. During lockdown he assembled a chronological sourcebook of late Georgian published sources (now 500,000+ words), with a matching Iconography (460+). In 2021 he contributed a chapter on D'Egville to With a Grace Not to Be Captured: Representing the Georgian Theatrical Dancer, 1760-1830, and on Clarissa Wybrow for the Queen's University Belfast Dance Biographies blog. He is currently working on an historical study: "Ballet in Late Georgian London 1776-1836".