Ballet, Italian style Researching the choreography in 17th-century Venetian operas Archived article from Dec 15, 2000 By Alice Roche Cody   Irene Alm was a Fulbright Scholar in Venice in the early 1990s. She often returned to Italy to comb libraries for clues to 17th-century Venetian dance performances. Editor's note: Focus began preparing this profile of Associate Professor Irene Alm last summer just as one of her essays was being published in a catalog on the stage designs of Giacomo Torelli. Originally, the profile was scheduled to run in September, but Alm became ill, and we decided to wait until she returned to campus. Tragically and unexpectedly, she died Oct. 25. Focus rarely runs posthumous pieces, but Alm had given so generously of her time and energy to complete the article, we decided to make an exception here. Opera is first and foremost about music and the human voice, but it is also filled with another, somewhat more elusive art form -- dance. Irene Alm, a musicologist, was fascinated by the dance pieces found in 17th-century Venetian operas, some of which have not been performed since they were first produced more than 300 years ago. She set out to study these lost dances, a task requiring all her skills as a performer, a dancer, a scholar and a sleuth. While music can be transcribed for future generations, dance performances are harder to preserve. "There are not many documents or notations -- dance tends to be more ephemeral," said Alm, who was an associate professor of music and graduate director of the musicology and composition program at the Mason Gross School of the Arts. "The detective work is what I enjoy. It's exciting to put together the different ideas of how dance productions developed." Alm often returned to Italy to search for clues. Most of her research was performed in libraries, where she pored through the handwritten opera scores to find stage-direction notations. Sometimes she would find hints within the published librettos or pull evidence from reviews. In some cases, engravings of set designs were available. One such set of engravings depicts the 1645 Parisian production of the opera "La finta pazza," composed by Francesco Sacrati and choreographed by Giovanni Battista Balbi, one of the major figures responsible for the new directions seen in 17th-century theatrical dance. The sets are attributed to Giacomo Torelli, who is credited with advancing stage design from the Renaissance to the Baroque. The engravings depicting "La finta pazza," Alm said, offer tantalizing hints of the dance pieces inserted in the opera. Three ballets were performed during the opera, and there are six engravings of each ballet done by Valerio Spada. Last summer, a Torelli exhibit was mounted in Fano, Italy, and Alm provided an essay for the catalog exploring the role Balbi's choreography played in operatic productions. "There's a great sense of movement, unlike the court dances of France," she said of Balbi's dances. While the French style was considered more refined and graceful, the Italian style was thought to be more vigorous. The Italian productions were more acrobatic and athletic, with performers executing leaps, leg extensions and somersaults, she observed. Each engraving illustrates how the ballet unfolded with different props and details, and how the dance patterns and movements evolved. The first set of engravings for "La finta pazza" depicts four Turkish dancers who leap about and pound drums. The dancers appear with various exotic animals. This was not unusual, said Alm, noting that Venetian productions often featured live animals, such as monkeys. The second set shows six dancers dressed as ostriches, while the last set depicts eight South American Indians wearing feather headdresses and dancing with parrots. "The engravings really show the kind of movement Italian dances had," she said. "There's a sense of liveliness with wonderful gestures and leaps." Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in 17th-century Venetian opera, with theaters such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, N.Y., producing shows. Although her own work focused primarily on scholarly research, rather than current performance, it was a development Alm greatly appreciated. "We're starting to see and hear the music," she said. "It's exciting to see how the work I've done fits into the actual production." Recent performances have begun to challenge beliefs about European opera's history, such as the assumption that ballet comes from the French court while Italian opera focused on singing. Both assertions are true, said Alm, but the lines are not clear-cut. "Italian opera was interested in spectacle, a tradition that goes back to a time when the Italian republic held spectacles for public occasions and large parades that involved music and dance," she explained. "The French criticized Italy for being grotesque -- it's hard to know what was meant by that 300 years ago. The subjects were comic, the dancers portrayed animals and the moves weren't necessarily graceful." But, she added, dance and movement were always important elements in Italian productions. Alm, the daughter of immigrants born in the Dutch East Indies, began her career in music with childhood piano lessons. Although she dreamed of dance lessons, her parents could not afford classes in both piano and dance. At Syracuse University, she majored in piano and -- even though it was too late to become a professional dancer -- bartered piano playing for modern-dance instruction. "Doing dance changed how I thought about music and how I played," she recalled. Alm then studied piano at the University of California-Los Angeles, but she soon realized that she didn't have the temperament to be a soloist or play in a conservatory. Instead, she found herself increasingly attracted to music and art history. "People who are drawn to music like to perform, but I also had a strong interest in the humanities, language and literature," she said. "After a year in the performing program, I transferred to musicology. I continued to perform -- I wouldn't give that up for anything. But I found a perfect way to combine all the things I enjoy." Her background lent itself nicely to the graduate program at Rutgers, where Alm taught both performers and musicologists. "It's a way to bring me back to my primary focus," said Alm, who received the 1999 Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence. "To understand music history, it's not just in the books. It's about the performance and the music. The performance originates with the music." Engravings such as this one for the 1645 production of "La finta pazza" provide a tantalizing glimpse of the dance pieces incorporated into Italian operas of the time.

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