Italian Public Theatres and State Formation: A Contested History through Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Dance Librettos

Between 1769 and 1873, ballets based on the story of Armida and Rinaldo, from the Renaissance poem Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso, found great success in public theatres across the territory now known as Italy. This popular episode narrates the story of love and war between an Arab sorceress and a Christian crusader, divided by political duty, power hierarchies, and a conflicted sense of belonging. The Italian dance librettos of Armida and Rinaldo that I examine intersect with crucial phases of the formation of a national and never fully achieved “Italian consciousness”, a centuries-long political project that found momentum between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through the analysis of variations in emplotment and choreographic choices, I will show how choreographers (“dance composers”) and theatre institutions participated in the oft-inflamed public debates around ethnic, cultural, social conflicts through the state-formation process. More specifically, I will highlight how public theatres, through their hiring and production practices, actively took a stance in relation to major political events –– from the Habsburg and Napoleonic dominion through the Restauration and civil wars, up to the process of unification, the exacerbation of the north-south divide, and the emergence of Italian colonialism. 

Melissa Melpignano, PhD, is an Assistant Professor and Director of Dance at The University of Texas at El Paso. She received her PhD in Culture & Performance from UCLA and an MA in European and Italian Studies from the University of Lugano. Her scholarly research focuses on how dance and choreographic practices theorize conflict. Her forthcoming book, Variations of Presence: The Biopolitics of Ballet in 18th and 19th Century Italy, offers an original insight onto the formation of an institutionalized idea of “Italian population” through dance librettos. She also researches conflict in Israel/Palestine and other contested and border sites. Her work appears in The Drama Review, The Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance, and The Body, the Dance, and the Text, among others. She is a recipient of the Selma Jeanne Cohen Award from the Society for Dance History Scholars/Dance Studies Association, where she currently serves as an Awards Committee member.