Dante's Performance: Music, Dance, and Drama in the "Commedia" (2025)

“Authorship and Performance in Dante’s Vita nova”, in Aspects of the Performative in Medieval Culture, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati and Almut Suerbaum. Berlin-New York: de Gruyter, 2010, pp. 123-40.

“Dentro a La Danza De Le Quattro Belle” (Purg. 31.104): Dance in Dante’s ‘Commedia’

2018

Missing from standard reference works on Dante's Commedia are separate entries devoted exclusively to dance or dancing. Primary sources for the history of dance in the Italian Trecento derive from tablatures (musical notations), scattered iconographic images, and literary works, such as Boccaccio's Decameron and Dante's Commedia. Representations of dancing in these works invariably double as a symbolic language or meta-commentary on the surrounding narrative. The interpretation of dance's role in late medieval art and literature depends not only on the context but also on the type of dance depicted. This article focuses on the allegorical roles that dance plays in Dante the Pilgrim's salvific otherworldly experience in Purgatory and Paradise, including not only circular dance movements but also the position of the Pilgrim as the center point within a circle in three distinct episodes: Purgatorio 31.104 (with the four nymphs or cardinal virtues) and 31.132 (with the three nymphs or theological virtues) and in Paradiso 13.20-21 (with the twenty-four sapienti or wise men).

Antonella Braida and Luisa Calè, eds. Dante on View: The Reception of Dante in the Visual and Performing Arts.

Caa.reviews, 2008

CIABATTONI 2021 Italian Quarterly MUSIC AND DANTE'S EARLY POETRY

Italian Quarterly, LVIII, 229/230, Special Issue, pp.5-20, 2021

This essay discusses the problem of whether some of Dante’s early rhymes might havebeen set to music or destined to oral performance. The author takes his steps from thenotion of a divorce between poetry and music, as presented by Aurelio Roncaglia in1978, and reassesses the topic, through a close reading and comparative analysis ofDante’s Rime. Grounding the argument in musicological and philological scholarship, theauthor argues that a very few lyrics composed by a young Dante were indeed destinedto be performed musically.

Relaying the Arts in Seventeenth-Century Italian Performance and Eighteenth-Century French Theory

TanzScripte, 2009

Dante's Tears: The Poetics of Weeping from “Vita nuova” to the “Commedia.” Rossana Fenu Barbera. Biblioteca dell'“Archivum Romanicum,” Serie 1: Storia, Letteratura, Paleografia 468.Florence: Olschki, 2017. xviii + 218 pp. €34

Renaissance Quarterly, 2020

‘Performative Desires: Sereni’s Re-staging of Dante and Petrarch’

Performativity and Performance in Baroque Rome. Edited by Peter Gillgren and Mårten Snickare. Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2012; pp. xi+257, 68 illustrations. $119.95 cloth

Theatre Survey, 2014

From Heinrich Wölfflin's epochal Renaissance und Barock (1888) onward, the baroque style has been linked to notions of becoming, dynamism, and change, as well as to a sense of theatricality. Thus, an edited volume on the relationship between performance and the arts of baroque Rome may seem a rather predictable prospect. The foregrounding of performativity in the title of Peter Gillgren and Mårten Snickare's collection, however, immediately suggests that their project has ambitions beyond the affirmation of scholarly consensus. Though David Carrier remarks in his postscript that "John Austin's ordinary language philosophy is the most unlikely source imaginable for a theory of Baroque visual art" (220), Gillgren and Snickare's volume strives to apply Austin's concepts and those of his followers not only to visual art narrowly defined, but also to theatre, architecture, music, and sacred and secular ritual. As much for its ability to bring together such a wide range of material as for the new light it sheds on the baroque, the volume's emphasis on performativity proves highly productive. The attractive resulting publication, inspired by a 2006 workshop at the Swedish Institute in Rome, should appeal to scholars and teachers in a range of fields as diverse as those it covers. In their introduction, Gillgren and Snickare note that they "have deliberately chosen not to fix the meaning of [their] conceptual tools, performance and performativity" (10, original emphasis), hoping that their book will instead explore the "fruitful plurality of the concepts" (10). The volume's contributors appeal to many definitions of the terms; Peter Burke treats them almost as synonyms, whereas Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf distinguishes sharply between performance, which she associates with "[t]he spectacle of a drama actualized on stage" (185), and performativity, which she understands in terms of speech-acts that cause "real changes (of behaviour, state of affairs and belief)" (186). All the selected essays, however, view baroque performativity as a process in which the artwork or performer shapes a viewer's identity and is reshaped in turn by the viewer's gaze. The collection begins with a series of essays that examine the broad social implications of such performative exchanges. Burke sets the scene for the contributions that follow by considering the power of performance both as tool and as metaphor in baroque Rome. The "'performative turn'" (15) in contemporary

Dante and the "Art of Singing in Verse"

Lectio in Musica Dantis: Dante e la musica del suo tempo. Filologia e Musicologia a confronto.

Taking as a point of departure Dante’s reference in the De vulgari eloquentia to an "ars cantandi poetice, this article explores Dante's conception of the relationship between poetry and music along three lines: his writings on the subject in the De vulgari eloquentia (esp. the terms actio/passio, proferere, and modulatio/oda), his interactions with other poets and musicians, and the Trecento musical reception of the Commedia.

Scoring the ballo fantastico: supernatural characters and their music in Italy’s ballets during the Risorgimento

2016

Ballets with the designation fantastico first appeared in Italy’s theaters during the Risorgimento period. Ultramontane romanticism and fantastic topics were a minority within a diverse repertoire, reflecting the Italian revolution for independence. While some of these ballets were imports (often greatly adapted) of successful French romantic ballets, many were Italian choreographers’ own brand of theater. The fantastic could even appear in the guise of allegorical characters within ballet genres more common to the Italian stage. This article situates the fantastic in Italy's theatrical scene and offers an investigation of the musical manifestation of supernatural characters in Italy's ballets through the case studies of four works that span six decades of performance—Il Noce di Benevento (1812), Fausto (1849),Bianchi e Negri (1853), and Gretchen (1868). This topical music is an important part of Italy's musical-theatrical participation in romanticism. While musicologist...