DANCE IN OPERA

By Alastair Macaulay

Dance isn’t an art exclusive to trained dancers, not even on stage. And if you love dance, you can find many eloquent examples of it away from dance performances. Actors and singers dance too, sometimes beautifully.

One of the great sequences in film occurs in Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (Il Gattopardo, 1963) when Burt Lancaster waltzes with Claudia Cardinale. The white fabric of Cardinale’s crinoline billows out around her and her shoulders glow expansively as they circuit the ballroom; she tells Lancaster (playing the Sicilian prince Don Fabrizio) that he is “un ballerino delizioso” – a delightful dancer. She’s right: with him leading, they make you feel how many different accentuations the waltz can make from 3/4 tempo, and how much small and large spatial variation. Within The Leopard, which has become recognised as one of the greatest films of the twentieth century, Lancaster and Cardinale play characters of different generations, different social classes, different politics – but for the period of the Waltz they’re in eloquent harmony. Their waltz changes the whole dynamics of the drama.

Richard Jones’s production of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Festen, The Royal Opera © Marc Brenner

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