Michael John Burden

19th Annual Oxford Dance Symposium ‘Dance and the City’ New College, Oxford, 18 & 19 April 2017 Abstracts Of Papers 19th Annual Oxford Dance Symposium ‘Dance and the City’ New College, Oxford, 18 & 19 April 2017 Olive Baldwin, Thelma Wilson Essex Few and far between: female dancing teachers in eighteenth century British cities The most cursory look at eighteenth-century newspapers reveals a large number of schools in British cities that offered dancing as an extra, taught by ‘proper masters’, ‘able masters’, ‘eminent masters’ and, by the end of the period, ‘professors of dancing’. Many of these masters combined attendance at boarding schools with running their own establishments for the teaching of social dancing to both children and adults. It might be thought that principals of schools for young ladies would have preferred female dance teachers, and that fathers might have seen male dance teachers as a threat to the virtue of their daughters, and so preferred lady teachers, but this was not the case. Indeed female dance teachers were very few and far between. This paper will explore why it was very difficult for women to support themselves by teaching dancing in British cities and towns, and why they managed to do so successfully in both Bath and Edinburgh. It will look in detail at the careers and personalities of the women who worked as teachers of dance in these two centres. 19th Annual Oxford Dance Symposium ‘Dance and the City’ New College, Oxford, 18 & 19 April 2017 Ricardo Barros Royal Academy of Music From the ‘Terreiro’ to the ‘Paço’ – The extraordinary journey of a dance form in colonial Rio de Janeiro The year is 1807. Threatened by Napoleonic invasion, the Portuguese Prince Regent D. João VI flees and settles his court in Rio de Janeiro. As the courtiers mingle with the locals (in surreal ceremonials and liaisons which reflect how unusual the royal family was), we witness how the lascivious ‘Lundú’, formerly prohibited by the church, gradually made its way into the noble salons. This paper will accompany its continuing mutation over the centuries- from the initial absorption of Iberian influences to the later recapturing of its African roots - in a living proof of the melting pot and cultural blending that permeates Brazilian society to this day. The paper will be complemented by a practical workshop on the first conjectural historical reconstruction of the Lundú, by the author. 19th Annual Oxford Dance Symposium ‘Dance and the City’ New College, Oxford, 18 & 19 April 2017 Theresa Buckland University of Roehampton, London Dance, Space and the City in Nineteenth-Century Britain The rapid pace of spatial and architectural changes in Victorian cities impacted upon customary spaces for dancing. Once communally respected spaces such as streets and greens where annual dance festivities took place became subject to new pressures from commerce and the property owning classes. This antagonism against public dancing often resulted in legal restrictions and, in many cases, the eventual decline of the dancing practice. Morris dancers in the Manchester hinterland, for example, were frequently subject to this battle for ownership of the space and literally lost their passage through the city, as new buildings were erected on their traditional route for dancing. On the other hand, some dance practices flourished in urban conditions as entrepreneurs opened up their premises for dancing and, indeed, built new venues to accommodate the rising population’s interest in social dancing. New interest in health and safety measures often continued to exercise constraints on how city spaces were used for the people’s recreational dancing. This paper explores how transformations of space usage in expanding cities such as London, Manchester, Liverpool and Bristol impacted upon the dancing habits of the working people during Victoria’s reign. Source materials include newspapers, diaries, paintings, fiction and music sheets. 19th Annual Oxford Dance Symposium ‘Dance and the City’ New College, Oxford, 18 & 19 April 2017 Iris Julia Bührle Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, New College, University of Oxford Shakespeare ballets from Noverre to Taglioni Shakespeare’s plays have been the principal inspiration for literary ballet plots in the history of dance. Several sources affirm that the first Shakespearean ‘ballet d’action’ was ‘Cleopatra’ by Jean-Georges Noverre (1765). In 1785, his pupil Charles LePicq created a ‘Macbeth’ ballet in London and in the same year, the tradition of the innumerable adaptations of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ began in Venice. In Milan, Salvatore Viganò created several extensive and elaborate ‘coreodrammas’ in the early nineteenth century. The Parisian Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin presented a ‘Hamlet’ ballet with a happy ending in 1816; the Paris Opera followed about two decades later with a highly eclectic version of ‘The Tempest’ (Adolphe Nourrit/ Jean Coralli, 1834), a play that was adapted even more freely four years later by Filippo Taglioni. This paper will look into a number of significant Shakespeare ballets which were created in various dance metropolises (especially London, Paris and several Italian cities) during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. It will examine possible reasons for the choice of sources and for the often significant changes made by the librettists and choreographers. 19th Annual Oxford Dance Symposium ‘Dance and the City’ New College, Oxford, 18 & 19 April 2017 Michael Burden New College, University of Oxford Dancing with the Didelots One of James Gillray’s most striking dance caricatures is ‘Modern Grace; or the Operatical Finale to the Ballet of Alonzo e Caro’. It shows three dancers: Charles-Louis Didelot who had arrived in London in 1796; his young wife Rose, whom he had lured away from the Paris Opera in 1793; and Mademoiselle Parisot, one of the most accomplished dancers of the late 18th century. On their arrival, the Didelots were an instant success, with Rose Didelot’s ‘grace, dignity and ease’ being singled out for praise; she was also praised for ‘the graceful disposition of her body’, and is frequently pictured in a see-through costume. There was clearly a complicated relationship between these three dancers; Rose is shown as a rather sharped-faced women with a long nose, a profile accentuated in a later solo print ‘No Flower that Blows is like this Rose’. And this particular pose appears in the illustration of the second volume of Rudolph Ackermann’s The Microcosm of London, which had illustrations by Thomas Rowlandson (who did the figures), and Auguste Charles Pugin (who provided the architectural details). The ballet supposedly being performed was the 1788 L’Amour et Psiché, revived in 1796, but Rowlandson has re-used Gillray’s image to represent the dancers, and as well as examining the inter-relationships of dancers and images. This paper argues that the watercolour version of Modern Grace by Rowlandson at the Yale Centre for British Art, relates in fact to Rowlandson’s and Pugin’s print. 19th Annual Oxford Dance Symposium ‘Dance and the City’ New College, Oxford, 18 & 19 April 2017 Hillary Burlock ‘What Dukes, what Drapers, what Barbers, and Peers’: Representations of the Election Ball Eighteenth-century elections have been extensively analysed by Frank O’Gorman as instances of civic ritual. However, his analysis only briefly touches on the contributions of election balls to civic identity. The field of dance history often analyses dance forms, styles, and footwork, but relatively little has been written on dance as a political tool. Similarly, political history overlooks dance as an alternative lens for viewing electoral culture. My research seeks to bridge this gap. Caricatures are a rich resource for reconstructing popular attitudes towards election balls. These caricatures form the base of my analysis, with newspapers, novels, and journals filling in the details, demonstrating the importance of dance within the urban environment. Election ball caricatures are key sources, unveiling themes of class, gender, the role of the MP, and how dance played out in the ballroom. Election balls were significant social and political events that brought the community together following an MP’s election. Social dance was a tool that aimed at social cohesion, while politics and social hierarchies were enacted in the ballroom. My paper demonstrates that the ballroom was a politically-charged arena of display in which the intricacies of social behaviour and movement through dance contributed to the political campaign. 19th Annual Oxford Dance Symposium ‘Dance and the City’ New College, Oxford, 18 & 19 April 2017 Keith Cavers Independent Scholar Hanquin & Columbinichee; Dancing, Punch, and Muffins at Poplar Grove and the Dancers of the Juvenile Drama The starting point of this paper is a strange set of prints which have recently come to light and which have clear dance connections – their history connects to the ballet in the London Theatres in the period 1810s and 1820s, a period which is often underrated, falling as it does between the neo-classical ballets of earlier years and the undoubted glories of the ‘Romantic Ballet.’ But do the dances and dancers of this period deserve their relative obscurity? 19th Annual Oxford Dance Symposium ‘Dance and the City’ New College, Oxford, 18 & 19 April 2017 Mary Collins Royal Academy of Music and Royal College of Music ‘I never saw a more beautiful scene… attended by great crowding and confusion’ So writes the Duke of Dorset of both the splendour and chaos at a ball at Dublin Castle during the commemoration of the King’s Coronation in October 1731. In eighteenth-century Ireland Dublin Castle was not only the centre of political power but also the epicentre of the strategic social round which both contained and entertained the Irish beau-monde within a harsh environment of inequality and social division. Amidst the pomp, ceremony, civic and legislative business which comprised the Viceregal court was a need for constant hospitality and entertaining.

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