Carlo Blasis Class
The danseur must be familiar with all dance styles. The caractère is the dramatic actor and folk dancer. His physique must be tough and powerful because of the heavy work that is generally his share, and he must have great mimicry.
Highly emotional roles as well as true-to-life representations of characteristic steps and all kinds of folk dances are part of his field of work. Carlo Blasis (1797-1878), the Italian dancer, choreographer and ballet master, whose views on ballet education form the basis of contemporary classical ballet training, narrates in his book "Traité élémentaire, théorique et pratique de l'art de la danse" about the three types of dancers, among other things, the follow.
Those who devote themselves to the serious or heroic style of dancing (danse noble) must distinguish themselves above all by their proud trunk posture, the most harmonious combinations in the movements of their arms and the utmost precision in their performance. They must captivate with the elegance of their lines, the purity of their attitudes and arabesques and the beauty of their grands développés and pirouettes (à lasecond, en attitude, sur le cou-de-pied).
They should be tall and symmetrical in build, perfectly formed legs, feet with high insteps and utmost suppleness in the hips, noble and elegant in bearing, full of dignity and grace, but without any emphatics. The noble line of a serious dancer makes him eminently suitable for adagio work, the "non plus ultra" of our art.
The correct execution of an adagio is the touchstone of a dancer. But also all high and soaring jumps, all entrechats, belong to the field of the serious dancer, who now has to be able to do much more than his predecessors. They were particularly notable for their majestic performance and beautiful design.
Today, the serious style of dancing is neglected, even abandoned altogether. This condition has arisen from the confusion of styles that currently taints the art of dance, from the lack of perseverance and study of most dancers, and from the perverted taste of the majority of the theatre audience.
However, it is, in a sense, the sphere of a consummate artist to reorient public taste to the superb and beautiful, by persisting in acting according to the true rules of art. Blasis was taken of his examines, both the dans and the dance notation of renowned nineteenth century choreography.
In 1837 Carlo Blasis was appointed director of the ballet school at La Scala he Code of Terpsichore in an effort to evaluate how Blasis linked a science of movement to a conception of the body oriented around the prevailing aesthetics informing all the fine arts.
A student of Jean Dauberval, Blasis danced briefly at the Paris Opéra, appeared in Salvatore Viganò’s ballets at La Scala in Milan, and performed and choreographed at the King’s Theatre in London.
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