«Elementi di drammaturgia: il Ballo della Didone e la riforma razionale della danza di Gasparo Angiolini», in Rivista di Letteratura Teatrale, Fabrizio Serra editore, 2015, p. 42-60. (original) (raw)

On December 26th, 1772 to the theatre S. Benedetto in Venice, the Venetian audience attends the performance of a ballet pantomime considered one of the masterpieces of Gasparo Angiolini, La partenza di Enea o Didone Abbandonata (The departure of Aeneas or Dido abandoned). The short description of the ballet, inserted in the opera’s libretto, specifies the type, the structure and the source: it is about a «tragic pantomime ballet, divided in five acts and taken from the first four books of Virgil and from the opera of Dido of the famous Mr. abbot Metastasio». The music of the ballet, composed by Angiolini himself, was published by Marescalchi in a small volume of nine scores, the following year in Naples. Rare sample of the relation between music and dance, the first violin musical score shows the traces of synchronization between notes and gesture: it is a series of short captions inserted in the stave that, thanks to a system of cross references, detailing the action and specifying the musical moment in which it occurs. Based on literary and musical sources and with a special attention to strategies of intersemiotic transposition and to the modalities of the pantomime expression, this article develops a dramaturgic analysis that highlights the pragmatic value of the Angiolinian creation in the context of the cultural rivalry between Italy and France. This ballet that, on the whole, reveals the theoretical discourse of its inventor and expresses its dramaturgic choices, conveys a specifically Italian poetics, situated in the Arcadia's reform plan between Metastasio and Goldoni, and defends the idea of an Italian reform of the art of the dance. Animated by the desire to act in the cultural environment in which it moves, to show and to demonstrate the classical principles of a new poetics of dance, Angiolini advocates, in fact, with its Dance of Dido, the rational re-foundation of the Italian pantomime-ballet.