Dancing Tambourines: or, Why does Nora Dance a Tarantella?
My 鈥渄ancing object鈥 is a tambourine and my paper focuses on its appearance in a specific dance: the tarantella performed by Nora in Ibsen鈥檚 A Doll鈥檚 House (1879, first public unadapted London performance 1889). Ibsen may have added the tarantella when he found that the first Nora, Betty Hennings, had been a dancer in the Royal Danish Ballet. She would have known the tarantella in Bournonville鈥檚 Napoli. But what is the function within the play of Nora鈥檚 tarantella and the tambourine that accompanies it? And how might the dance have been received by British audiences familiar with representations of the tarantella in other contexts? I approach these questions by tracing some earlier representations of the tarantella, and/or uses of the tambourine, on the nineteenth-century British stage, from Fanny Elssler鈥檚 performance in La Tarentule (1839, London 1840) and Madame Celeste鈥檚 dance with a tambourine in the melodrama The Flowers of the Forest (1847), to tarantellas on London stages in the 1880s. Contextualising the dance in this way not only generates a nuanced reading of the scene in which it occurs, but also offers a model for recognising the potential of theatre dance to act, not simply as decoration, but as an important element of the theatrical mise-en-sc猫ne and as a vehicle capable of carrying narrative, thematic and emotional significance.
Amanda Hodgson is an independent scholar working on Victorian theatre dance. She taught theatre studies and Victorian literature in various universities, including for 13 years in the Department of English at the University of Nottingham. Later she developed a second career as a librarian. Now retired, she is pursuing research that combines her long-standing passion for dance with her academic specialism. She is interested particularly in the function of dance in Victorian theatre pieces, not only as an important component of melodrama and burlesque but also when embedded in more naturalistic plays. Her current focus is on dance and dancers in late nineteenth-century drama, including in works by Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones and Ibsen. Her recent papers on theatre dance have appeared in Dance Research, Dancing Times and Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film.