The Theatrical Origins of Gennaro Magri's Contraddanze

Dance historians have focused on Magri primarily as a theatrical dancer, but the 39 contraddanze included in the appendix to his 1779 treatise Trattato teorico-prattico di ballo also deserve more scholarly attention. These choreographies, composed for balls at the court of Ferdinand IV of Naples, present a wide array of figures; and Magri’s seemingly limitless imagination offers us a wonderful smorgasbord of ways to move bodies through space in symmetrical patterns. The complexity of many of the dances required practice in advance of court balls, and in this regard they are far removed from the undemanding dances published by the hundreds in England and northern Europe in the last decades of the 18th century.

Magri bases most of his choreographies on the principle of longways progression that was established as the norm in England in the late 17th century. But Magri does not limit himself to the usual two-couple exchange found in the English model: instead he presents eight different starting configurations, and he includes several dances for uneven numbers of men and women, sometimes paired as same-sex couples. I propose that these unusual features reveal a theatrical origin, and that Magri’s contraddanze were adaptations of his group dances choreographed for his ballets at San Carlo. A comparison of Magri’s dances with theatrical contredanse notations from the 1782 Ferrère manuscript supports this theory.