The dance drain: who will save ballet in Italy?

Itali­ans are great dan­cers, but they don’t get much oppor­tun­ity to demon­strate that in their homeland.

The his­tory of bal­let is adorned with Italian tal­ent: Giusep­pina Bozza­c­chi was the first Swan­hilda in Cop­pélia;  three dazzling stars, Car­lotta Grisi, Fanny Cer­rito, and Marie Tagli­oni (also the first Sylphide) were cel­eb­rated by Per­rot in his Pas de Quattre; Pier­ina Leg­nani was named Prima Baller­ina Assol­uta by Petipa at the Mari­in­sky and was the first baller­ina to per­form 32 fou­ettés; Petipa cre­ated La Esmer­alda pas de six for Vir­ginia Zuc­chi,  and so on.

Although they didn’t come as thick and fast in the 20th cen­tury, Italia’s liv­ing legend Carla Fracci cer­tainly made her mark inter­na­tion­ally, as did Elisa­betta Ter­ra­bust and Lili­ana Cosi, and London’s Royal Bal­let is surely grate­ful for the pres­ence of Aless­andra Ferri, Vivi­ana Dur­ante and Mara Galeazzi.

Enrico Cec­chetti, more fam­ous now for his method, was a great vir­tu­oso dan­cer, and became a prin­cipal at the Mari­in­sky in 1887. Paolo Bor­to­lu­zzi was a prin­cipal with the Amer­ican Bal­let Theatre until 1981, and Roberto Bolle is cur­rently a prin­cipal with the com­pany. Massimo Murru and Giuseppe Picone are on the inter­na­tional cir­cuit, and Fed­erico Bon­elli is yet another Italian to join the ranks of the Royal Bal­let. In the Paris Opera Bal­let we find Alessio Car­bone and Ele­onora Abbag­nato, and young whip­per­snap­per Vito Mazzeo has recently become a prin­cipal at San Fran­cisco Ballet.

So all’s well then. Well no. Bal­let seems to be slowly dying in Italy.

Italian bal­letomanes envi­ously flick through the pro­grammes of The Royal Bal­let, Paris Opera Bal­let, and the Mari­in­sky and Bolshoi Bal­lets with their high-octane star dan­cers, or gaze long­ingly at the mouth-watering guest rosters in New York. Not that the guests don’t arrive in Italy: Svet­lana Zakhar­ova has just danced in Rome and is a reg­u­lar at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, who have also signed up Nat­alia Osipova for three bal­lets next sea­son. Paris Opera’s Dorothèe Gil­bert, and Stut­tgart Ballet’s Mar­ijn Rade­maker will guest in Rome for Romeo and Juliet after the sum­mer, and Stuttgart’s Friedemann Vogel and the Mariinsky’s Olesia Novikova will return to La Scala for La Ray­monda. The key issue isn’t who is dan­cing, but how many oppor­tun­it­ies there are to dance. Per­form­ance num­bers are miserly, and quant­ity is clearly linked to qual­ity in the clas­sical rep­er­tory: the Bay­adère can’t hope to have 32 per­fect shad­ows if the corps dances it only six times in a season.

Here’s an idea of num­bers. Rome Opera Bal­let gave 45 per­form­ances dur­ing the 2011–2012 sea­son, and that includes the open air sum­mer per­form­ances; La Scala has 48 per­form­ances in Milan this sea­son, plus 6 in Moscow and 14 in Brazil. The Royal Bal­let gave 26 per­form­ances in Decem­ber 2011 alone, and the Amer­ican Bal­let Theatre gives 56 per­form­ances dur­ing its annual 2-month res­id­ency at the Met­ro­pol­itan Opera House.

Italy’s chequered his­tory (it is a coun­try younger than the United States) has lead to it being divided into many small ‘king­doms’ with many mid-sized cit­ies — Ver­ona, Venice, Palermo etc — but only Rome and Milan have more than 1 mil­lion inhab­it­ants. Rome’s 2½ mil­lion is dwarfed by New York and London’s 8 mil­lion. Less people, less per­form­ances right? Well look at Cuba! Ok, it’s a com­plic­ated equa­tion, yet it is pos­sible to get these com­pan­ies dan­cing more.

When Carla Fracci was dir­ector of the Rome troupe they per­formed 67 times in Rome dur­ing the 2008 sea­son, and there was also a small tour­ing sched­ule. I don’t have the fig­ures to say whether these per­form­ances were packed or not, but the dan­cers were cer­tainly dan­cing. In that sea­son the rep­er­tory bal­lets, Ray­monda and Le Cor­saire were given 9 per­form­ances each; this sea­son Cop­pélia and Gis­elle had only 5, though it’s true that the up-coming Romeo and Juliet will be presen­ted 15 times.

Now things can only get worse as city coun­cils start tight­en­ing their belts and gov­ern­ment grants are cut. Vari­ous dance fest­ivals and minor com­pan­ies have already fallen by the way­side, and corps num­bers in Florence, Ver­ona and Naples reduced. That leaves only the Rome and Milan com­pan­ies cap­able of present­ing a rep­er­toire bal­let. It would need a flick of  Pres­id­ent Gior­gio Napol­it­ano’s magic fairy wand to resolve the situ­ation in an Italy fight­ing des­per­ately for its eco­nomic life, but maybe only Lilac Fair­ies have those.

So the dance drain will con­tinue as dan­cers who want to spend their short career actu­ally on-stage escape abroad. And the poor Italian bal­let fan will be left dream­ing of the oft-told tales from far-off shores of bal­let cal­en­dars as long as the Bayadère’s scarf, full of dan­cing stars who glit­ter like Aurora’s crown.

Pho­tos:
top from left, Aless­andra Ferri; Carla Fracci; Car­lotta Grisi, Fanny Cer­rito, and Marie Tagli­oni with  Lucille Grahn in the Pas de quattre; Vivi­ana Dur­ante.
bot­tom from left, Enrico Cec­chetti coach­ing Anna Pavlova; Paolo Bor­to­lu­zzi, Roberto Bolle, Vito Mazzeo.

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