Staging Ballets at the Empire 1889-1904

The paper takes a closer look at the creating and staging of ballets at the Empire, Leicester Square, London, between 1889 and 1904 during the fifteen years in which choreographer Katti Lanner, designer Wilhelm, composer Leopold Wenzel and theatre manager George Edwardes collaborated on 22 productions! Credits reveal that different individuals initiated the scenarios, and correspondence, interviews and reviews give an insight into the roles each played. Lanner and Wilhelm had regularly collaborated before taking over the Empire ballet, with Lanner having built up her own company of dancers and performers before she took over as ballet mistress there. In many respects the composer, Wenzel was the junior member of the team as correspondence shows him responding to request made by Lanner and Wilhelm, but it is his musical scores that are picked up and reused by other choreographers. The illustrated paper draws on material in the collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, in private collections and, significantly, in the Leopold Wenzel Archive at the Bibliothèque-musée de l’Opéra, Paris. 

Jane Pritchard MBE is curator of dance at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London where she has developed the dance collections and mounted several exhibitions and displays including Serge Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes. She has established dance collections and archives for several British companies, most notably the now 100-year-old Rambert. She contributes to several dance journals, books, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and lectures widely on nineteenth and twentieth century dance. Her primary research interest is ballet and dance in late nineteenth century Britain.