Michael John Burden

17th Annual Oxford Dance Symposium ‘Dancing for Anniversaries and Occasions: Chamber, Court, Theatre & Assembly’ New College, Oxford, 21 & 22 April 2015 Abstracts Of Papers 1 17th Annual Oxford Dance Symposium ‘Dancing for Anniversaries and Occasions: Chamber, Court, Theatre & Assembly’ New College, Oxford, 21 & 22 April 2015 Olive Baldwin, Thelma Wilson Essex Celebrating and entertaining a new king and his bride George II died on 25 October 1760 and was succeeded by his 22-year-old grandson. After a three week closure of London’s theatres George III’s theatre visits were of a serious kind, for he showed a particular interest in Shakespeare’s history plays. Celebrations were not appropriate for a king’s death, but the new king’s birthday in June 1761, was marked by a sung and danced serenata at the opera house. It was with the arrival of Charlotte of Mecklenburg that September as the chosen bride and consort that festivities really began. This paper will look at the ways in which the wedding and coronation were celebrated with dancing and at the part dance played in the theatrical evenings that the young couple attended in the first few months of their married life. Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson have written extensively on 17th and 18th century singers for musical periodicals and for New Grove. They were Research Associates for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, for which they wrote over 60 articles, and have edited facsimile editions of the complete songs of Richard Leveridge in Music for London Entertainment 1660-1800 (1997) and of The Monthly Mask of Vocal Music, 1702-1711 (2007). ‘The Harmonious Unfortunate; new light on Catherine Tofts’ appeared in the Cambridge Opera Journal, vol. 22 (2011) and ‘The Subscription Musick of 1703-04’ was in the Musical Times for Winter 2012. Their ‘Theatre Dancers at the Court of Queen Anne’ was published in Court Historian in December 2010 and, with Michael Burden, they compiled ‘Images of Dancers on the London Stage, 1699-1800’, published in Music in Art, vol. 36 (2011). [email protected] 2 17th Annual Oxford Dance Symposium ‘Dancing for Anniversaries and Occasions: Chamber, Court, Theatre & Assembly’ New College, Oxford, 21 & 22 April 2015 Iris Julia Bührle Sorbonne-Nouvelle Paris/ Stuttgart University Dancing in Versailles from the Sun King to the French Revolution The path of the French monarchy from the peak of absolutism to its downfall was accompanied by court festivities which often reflected the sovereign’s internal and external policy. In the latter half of the seventeenth century, the garden of Louis XIV’s newly built castle of Versailles became the setting of sumptuous celebrations in which dancing played a crucial role. The first major celebration, which took place in 1664, saw the premier of Molière and Lully’s “Princesse d’Élide”, an early example of the new genre of “comédie-ballet” which later culminated in Molière’s works “Le bourgeois gentilhomme” and “Le Malade imaginaire”. Louis XV and Louis XVI continued to celebrate political successes and family events such as royal marriages and births in Versailles until the eve of the Revolution. In 1770, a new opera was inaugurated in the castle; at the same time, Queen Marie Antoinette gave private “fêtes” in her own Trianon castle which were directed by her protégé Jean-Georges Noverre. The paper will focus on the different settings (the garden and the theatre of the castle, the Trianon), performers (the sovereign, courtiers, professional dancers), genres (ballets, comédie-ballets) and their relation to the political context. Iris Julia Bührle was born in Rome, Italy and studied History of Art, Comparative Literature and International Relations at Stuttgart University, Sorbonne-Nouvelle Paris, Sciences Po Paris and Oxford University. She has written numerous reviews and scholarly papers on ballet, including two Master’s theses on Clavigo by Beaumarchais, Goethe and Roland Petit and Death in Venice by Mann, Britten and John Neumeier. In 2008, she assisted in organizing the Bavarian State Ballet’s festival week, Petipa symposium and John Cranko gala and wrote an article on choreology for the company’s publication ‘John Cranko: the choreographer and his work in Munich’. Her other research interests include UNESCO (articles in Revue d’histoire diplomatique and UNESCO Courrier), an organization she worked with for various projects on history and the arts, including dance. Her doctoral studies focus on choreographic adaptations of literature in France and Germany from the 18th century to the present day. In December 2011, she authored a bilingual biography of the British dancer Robert Tewsley: Robert Tewsley: dancing beyond borders (Wurzburg: Königshausen & Neumann). [email protected] 3 17th Annual Oxford Dance Symposium ‘Dancing for Anniversaries and Occasions: Chamber, Court, Theatre & Assembly’ New College, Oxford, 21 & 22 April 2015 Michael Burden New College, University of Oxford Prospecting before us; an anti-occasion for dancers in London’s opera world One of the most famous theatrical prints of the late 18th century is entitled ‘The prospect before us’. It shows two dancers centre stage at the new Pantheon Opera House, the building and institution that replaced London’s King’s Theatre which burned down in 1789. The angle of the view in the print is unusual in that it is taken from behind the dancers looking through the proscenium into a packed auditorium. The print marked the opening of the new theatre, which was intended to replace the King’s Theatre as London’s premiere venue for elite opera and dance. The King’s Theatre had been in a perpetual crisis since it had been taken over by William Taylor in the early 1780s, and Taylor’s opponents used the fire as an excuse to seize power. However, in the process, the dancers lost out, and an alternative print also entitled ‘The prospect before us’, parodied the original, for the ‘prospect’ before the dancers was ruin and starvation. This detailed print has been little studied and has not been thoroughly decoded, and this paper, in undertaking both, will analyse the nature of the dancers’ protest in the context of London’s theatre history. Michael Burden is Professor in Opera Studies at the University of Oxford, and is Fellow in Music at New College, where he is also Dean. His published research is on the theatre music of Henry Purcell, on the staging of opera and dance in London in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, and the administration of the Pyne-Harrison and English Opera Companies. His study of the soprano Regina Mingotti’s London years was published in 2013. He is Past President of the British Society for 18th-century Studies, a Visitor to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, a trustee of RISM, and director of productions of New Chamber Opera, www.newchamberopera.co.uk. He organises the annual Oxford Dance Symposium with Jennifer Thorp, with whom he co-edited the Ballet de la Nuit in 2009. [email protected] 4 17th Annual Oxford Dance Symposium ‘Dancing for Anniversaries and Occasions: Chamber, Court, Theatre & Assembly’ New College, Oxford, 21 & 22 April 2015 Keith Cavers Independent Scholar The Vanishing Point 1815 – 2015: Two hundred years of Dancing on Pointe? Today, in 2015 there is still no real consensus as to a date for the invention of the technique of dancing on the points of the toes – The ‘usual suspects’ tend to award the crown to Marie Taglioni and the date to 1831 – the year in which she was memorably depicted by Alfred Edward Chalon dancing ‘en pointe’ as Flora in Didelot’s Flore et Zephyr (or is she?). This paper examines Chalon’s original drawing for the print and reviews and interrogates some visual evidence for some of the aspirants to Taglioni’s crown. Keith Cavers is a Consulting Iconographer. He studied Stage Management at RADA and the History of Drawing and Printmaking at Camberwell College of Arts. Subsequently Slide Librarian and visiting lecturer for twenty years at Camberwell. For twelve years Information Officer at the National Gallery, London. He gained an M.Phil at the University of Surrey with “James Harvey D’Egville and the London Ballet 1770-1836.” and a John M Ward visiting research fellowship in music and dance for the theatre to research dance prints at Harvard. He runs Pimpernel Prints (http://www.pimpernelprints.com/), antiquarian print dealers specialising in the iconography and ephemera of the performing arts, and provides lectures and seminars on the examination of prints and drawings. He hopes to produce his catalogue of English dance prints 1667-1836 this year. [email protected] 5 17th Annual Oxford Dance Symposium ‘Dancing for Anniversaries and Occasions: Chamber, Court, Theatre & Assembly’ New College, Oxford, 21 & 22 April 2015 Mary Collins Royal Academy of Music and Royal College of Music The ‘Dublin Gaities’ and ‘a tidy family party’: Dancing at Castletown House The Conollys of Castletown House in Cellbridge, near Dublin, were a typical example of the Protestant Anglo-Irish families who regularly moved between England and Ireland and who formed part of the powerful nucleus of Dublin society. When such wealthy landowners were not abroad attending theatres balls or parties they were entertaining at home. Castletown House was approximately two hours carriage drive outside the city and the Conollys, unlike many of their neighbours, preferred to entertain at their Palladian home whenever possible. Like all landed gentry, they considered the hosting of influential guests and the provision of various ways to divert and entertain them throughout their stay to be a vital requisite for social success. Louisa Conolly, like her mother-in-law Katherine Conolly before her, was acknowledged as one the most hospitable hostesses of her era.

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