Il Trattato di Danza di Carlo Blasis 1820-1830

Famous for his virtuoso technique and his impeccable style, Carlo Blasis acquired great fame as maestro and director of the Imperial Academy of Dancing at La Scala and as the author of theoretical and historical works on the dance, such as his Traité élémentaire théorique et pratique de l'Art de la Danse, which is here quoted in the English (1828) and Italian (1830) editions. In this study Flavia Pappacena reconstructs the general, theoretical and aesthetic lines that made ip the conceptual backbone of Blasis' work, seeking its origins both in the French dance tradition and in eighteenth-century Neoclassicism, and in the changes of taste and overlapping of fashion that characterised the transition from the ancient regimes to the revolutionary decade and the Napoleonic period.