Epic in motion. La Didone by Salvatore Viganò and Virgil’s Aeneid 1-4
2016; Oxford University Press; Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/crj/clw021
ISSN1759-5142
Autores Tópico(s)Theater, Performance, and Music History
ResumoThe story of Dido and Aeneas has been restaged by dancers and choreographers from antiquity to the present day. In September 1821, the Italian master Salvatore Viganò presented his adaptation of Virgil’s episode as a coreodramma, a subgenre of dance drama that reformulated the principles of eighteenth-century ballet d’action. La Didone, as the piece was entitled, combined mimetic acting with narrative and choral dance, but it was also deeply rooted in the conventions and structure of the epic source. In this article, I explore Viganò’s reworking of the Dido episode by reading his libretto in light of the first and fourth books of the Aeneid. I argue that his reconfiguration of the story rescues corporeal and kinaesthetic properties that lurked in the epic poem and reveals the potential of these verses to be restaged as a choreographic work. In the second part of this work, I move back to the Aeneid, stressing how these traces of bodily movement and expressivity were motivated by the overall performance culture in Augustan times, in particular, by the growing trend of pantomime dancing.
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