Signs of Vulnerability and Power. Staging Female Characters in Italian Pantomime Ballet, from Juliet to Marguerite

In the large selection of subjects that pantomime ballet employed to stage complex “dance dramas”, it is possible to trace a multitude of female characters belonging to diverse diegetic worlds and theatrical genres: rebellious girls like Juliet or Hypermnestra, powerful queens like Semiramis, national heroines like Joan of Arc, young courtesan like Marguerite Gautier. Considering a time span from the emergence of narrative ballet in the 1770s to its gradual decline around 1860s, the paper aims to map the female characters, to analyse their typologies, and to verify whether this marked variety corresponds to an equally varied mode of representation. Secondly, the discussion will focus – through sources such as librettos, iconography, and treatises – on the performative modalities with which the characters’ feelings and actions are represented through pantomime, especially in the most iconic scenes of the Italian narrative ballet, such as that of despair and death. Signs of vulnerability and/or power, were the gestures of female characters different from those of male ones? Is it possible to trace a vocabulary of these gestures and find some correspondence with those staged today in repertory ballets? 

Annamaria Corea is a Researcher at the University of Rome La Sapienza, where she is currently teaching Dance History and Dramaturgy of Narrative Ballet. Among her favourite research areas: the ballo pantomimo in Italy between 18th and 19th centuries; narrative ballet in 20th century, especially in England; the dance in Rome from the 1950s to 1970s. She has published two books: Louis Henry e il balletto a Napoli in età napoleonica (Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2021) and Raccontar danzando. Forme del balletto inglese nel Novecento (Sapienza University Press, 2017), as well as several essays such as “Donne compositrici di balli pantomimi in Italia fra Sette e Ottocento” (Italica Wratislaviensia, 2019), “Le inedite stagioni della danza al Teatro Club di Anne d’Arbeloff e Gerardo Guerrieri” (Biblioteca Teatrale, 2018), “Il ballo pantomimo, precursore dei soggetti shakespeariani in Italia fra Sette e Ottocento” (2017). She is a member of the Dance Philology Research Group.