Musicians and Singers Musicians and Singers: Introduction

Dance, Entertainment, and Spectacles

Dance, Entertainment, and Spectacle: Introduction

Dance was a prominent feature of the Sans Pareil productions.  The house acquired a corps de ballet, and full-length ballets were sometimes performed.  (These pieces are indexed under Authors and Titles.)  A variety of pieces was offered such as ballet divertissements, ballet pantomimes, rural ballets, even a ballet of fruits.  The corps de ballet was supplemented by the Giroux family, the Miss Dennetts, the Chekini brothers and the redoubtable Richard Flexmore.  However, the popularity of this genre faded.  There was only one ballet performed in 1829-30.  After that season, no piece was advertised as a ballet.  The corps de ballet is last billed during the 1880-81 season when it supported Mlle. Zanfretta in a "grand ballet."  In fact, it was merely dance following a prologue.  In 1885-86, a jig was performed, and, after that, no dances were announced.

It is known, however, that Frederick John D'Auban was hired as choreographer in the 1892-93 season.  He worked on The Black Domino by George Sims and Robert Buchanan, presumably on "business" and stage movements with the actors as there was certainly no ballet advertised.  D'Auban was closely connected with the dance term "grotesque," indicating an attempt to include incongruous or ludicrous distortion into a dance.  There are numerous permutations of the term grotesque in this index: new grand pas de Chinois à la grotesque, Arabian pas de quatre grotesque and Harlequin's grotesque dance.

Traditional dances were popular in the first half of the century.  The theatre offered hornpipes, Highland reels, Irish jigs and morris dances, but what tended to fill the bills in the heyday of dancing were additions to the French word for dance.  There would be a celebrated allemande pas de trois, a burlesque pas de deux, a comic clog pas de quatre, a grand pas de ever-so-many, a pas des chiens et chats and a grand pas pathétique.

Dances popular in the Romantic Age remained, but embellishments and improvisation were added, presaging the freedoms of the coming century.  The polka, a folk dance from Bohemia, traveled first to France and then to England.  In Europe, the craze ran from the 1840s to the 1880s.  The Adelphi offered Bohemian polkas, an Adelphi polka and one in honor of a popular piece—American Cousin polka, but the dance flourished for only fifteen years—from 1845 to 1860.

A Polish folk dance, the mazurka, originated in the Province of Mazovia and reached England around 1845.  Billed as Mazourka de Varsovie (Warsaw), two were performed in the 1845-46 season.  The dance did not attract and was dropped within three years' time.

The galop (short for gallopade) was a French dance introduced in 1829 at a ball in St. James' Palace as the final form of a quadrille.  One was performed at the Adelphi in 1842 as a galop de fascination, but the fascination lasted barely a decade.

The waltz became the most enduring of couple dances in the Nineteenth Century.  Though originally considered immoral and vulgar, by 1814 it had been accepted by polite society even though, or perhaps because, it was a dance where couples were in close proximity.  Like many dances, it was not particularly adaptable to stage performance.  However, a favorite waltz and a waltz gavotte were performed as early as 1814.  Four years later, there was a waltz "in the true German style" and a "waltz general" in which the whole company appeared.  Apart from some inclusions in the late 1850s, the waltz was not popular except at the end of the century when there were four performances of Andrew J. Levey's "Fidelity."

The cotillion derived from certain contra-dances of the Eighteenth Century.  The name comes from a word for petticoat and involved four couples in a square formation.  It evolved into a series of improvisational dances, which often included party favors, exchanges of partners and musical dance games.  Only two were performed at the Adelphi (in 1845 and 1846).  They were "royal" cotillions and included the whole company.

One popular dance was the Vestris' gavotte, first performed by Marie-Jean-Auguste Vestris in 1785.  The choreographer was Maximilien Gardel who composed it for Vestris to perform in André Grétry’s Panurge dans I'Ile des Lanternes.  It soon became known as the gavotte de Vestris.  In 1831, the English dancer, Edward Theleur, invented a system of notation allowing the dance to be performed in its original form.  It was performed several times until 1826.  After that, it appeared only twice—in 1845 and 1846.  Apparently, Sarah Woolgar enjoyed performing it or the audience enjoyed seeing her perform it.

The kinds of dances are extraordinary, some were deliberately comical and many were travesties.  Standard dances are recorded:  bolero, hornpipe, polka, etc.  There are also serious pieces such as "Danse des Fleurs" from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite.  The scholar will discover material here not often found elsewhere.  Presumably, there was someone who could dance a "Grand Parisian pas: Gitana Cachucha Cracovienne Bolero Tarantella" or, like Richard Flexmore, Jr., safely navigate a "pas de couteaux."

Entertainment and spectacle are sometimes hard to differentiate.  As with dance, the categories are "Description, Creators, Performers, Season and Date." Creators are few and far between, but a reasonable number of performers was located.  Entertainments range from addresses to monologues and from calculating dogs to celebrated Parisian monkeys.  Fireworks, despite the ever-present danger of fire in theatres, were popular as were imitations—Emperor Napoleon III being a favorite subject.  There were several tumblers; some were "real Bedouin Arabs" and slack wire walkers, one of them a monkey.  Gymnastic feats were performed.  The dancer Garbois leapt over ten men in 1806.  In 1838, Etheridge, Hipple and Stafford undertook "Gladiatorial Feats of Strength; or, Classical Tableaux."  Such "feats" were often criticized as a means of titillating the females in the audience and had to be performed with august solemnity, sometimes in the presence of James Pack, a "posture master."  Victorian audiences were fiercely moral and readily made their displeasure known, yet the pose plastique was never successfully banished.  Years later, the Windmill Theatre in London presented something similar and operated under the rule "If it moves, it's rude."

Recitations were featured entertainments.  Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" was popular long after the event.  The great Henry Irving was prevailed upon to recite Eliza Cook’s "Sacrilegious Gamesters" in 1881 (presumably in an abbreviated version).  Just how popular Madame Reichner's German recitation was at the Adelphi can only be imagined.

Spectacle is a very loose division, containing some of what other editors felt to be entertainment.  However, these data are available and are given here.  The spectacle was usually a coup de théâtre.  It was a chance to shock the audience and send them home with something to tell their neighbors, much like the chandelier "fall" in Phantom of the Opera.  Many spectacles were tableaux vivants—living pictures.  The stage would be transformed into a picture where actors froze into carefully designed positions, usually stationary and non-speaking.  On Boxing Day, 1823, the audience was thrilled to view an "Allegorical representation of Neptune presenting the Crown of the Ocean to Britannia.  At the feet of Britannia, the British Lion is seen growling and trampling on turbans, chains, fetters, and other symbols of slavery, while Fame is seen hovering above, sounding her trumpet in praise of this last and glorious act of British Bravery."  With suitable lighting, a dramatic picture was created of great solemnity and patriotic fervor

As always, lurking in the background were more problematical spectacles.  In 1845 and 1846, the audience was assured: "Venus will rise from The Sea and form a variety of novel classical poses plastiques."

There are four indexes.  The first contains the names of individuals and groups listed in the three tabular indexes that follow.  Each name is followed by a symbol seen in the chart below.  The season in which the person appeared is given.