La Scala-style Notation on the London Music Hall Stage: Luigi Albertieri and Katti Lanner’s Cécile

A hand-written volume recording the full production details of Katti Lanner’s 1890 ballet Cécile recently re-emerged from a private collection. Bound in bright blue leather, the volume is embossed: “‘Cecile’ / ballo di Madame Katti Lanner / riproduzione per Albertieri Luigi”. The contents include props lists, lighting instructions, images of stage sets, elaborate color-coded charts of dancers’ movements, and long-hand descriptions of choreography: everything needed to stage a full reproduction. The visually striking and comprehensive system of staging notation used in this book is closely associated in scholarship with Italian choreographer Luigi Manzotti. Flavia Pappacena (1998) explains how this system allowed Manzotti to reliably reproduce his 1881 spectacle Excelsior across multiple continents and touring productions for almost a decade. It also let him to maintain strict ownership of the work under nascent international copyright laws. Luigi Albertieri, author of the Cécile reproduction, the hand-picked student and mentee of Enrico Cecchetti, and both men performed in Manzotti’s Excelsior. It was Cecchetti, in fact, who gained Albertieri employment dancing for the famous Lanner. This paper will provide a walk-through of Albertieri’s Manzotti-style documentation of Lanner’s Cécile and discuss the significance of this thread connecting London’s Empire Theatre to Italy’s La Scala.

Claudia Bauer is a dance journalist and critic, archivist, and independent scholar of nineteenth-century ballet history. Her writing about dance has appeared in the New York Times, the San Francsico Chronicle, Playbill, the Speaking of Dance Substack, Pointe Magazine, and Dance Magazine, where she is a contributing writer and the former interim editor in chief.

Amanda Whitehead is an independent scholar of nineteenth-century ballet pedagogy and an ABT Certified Teacher with a master’s degree in dance education from New York University. She trained in the Washington School of Ballet and has performed with The Washington Ballet, FACT/SF, and modern dance companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her research explores ways to make ballet history accessible and embodied for even the youngest ballet students.