You’ll believe a Willi can Fly! – Special Effects in the Romantic Ballet

Special effects and stage trickery have always played a part in the staging of ballets – but in the so-called “Romantic Ballet” (always out of step with the ‘Romantic’ everything else) these technicalities were used more than ever to further those elements of the Gothik and the Faery which made attendance at a ballet such a ‘magical’ experience. It was made very clear to me on my first day at RADA that I would never experience that sort of authentic theatrical experience ever again – the audience would see a character – I would see a performer; the audience would see a room – I would see a set; the audience would feel a chill – I would see a lighting change. But RADA was the real Hogwarts – an ancient school where we learned how to make magic! Heed the warning of Dr. River Song - “Spoilers!” 

Keith Cavers is an independent curator, scholar and consulting iconographer. He studied Stage Management at RADA and History of Drawing and Printmaking at Camberwell. His thesis on James Harvey D’Egville (Surrey) led to a visiting research fellowship at Harvard in 1996 where he returned in both 2015 and 2016. He was Slide Librarian and a Visiting Lecturer at Camberwell for twenty years and Information Officer at the National Gallery London for twelve. During lockdown he assembled a chronological sourcebook of late Georgian published sources (now well over 570,000 words), with a matching Iconography (460+). In 2021 he contributed a chapter on D’Egville to ‘With a Grace Not to Be Captured: Representing the Georgian Theatrical Dancer, 1760-1830’, and on Clarissa Wybrow for the Queen’s University Belfast ‘Dance Biographies’ blog. He is currently working on an historical study: “Ballet in Late Georgian London 1776 – 1836.”