‘The “Ice Ballet” was rapturously applauded’; or, The Uses of a Pair of Roller Skates
While working in Berlin, the choreographer Paul Taglioni created a ballet which required a dance of skaters on ice. To achieve this, he employed roller skates to create the impression of movement on ice. When Taglioni arrived in London to work at Her Majesty’s Theatre, he created a new ballet Les Plaisirs de L’Hiver; ou, Les Patineurs which, with a score by Cesare Pugni, was first staged in London on 5 July 1849. Billed as a picturesque ballet-divertissement, it had décor by Charles Marshall and included the choreography for the Berlin ice scene. My object, of course, is a pair of early roller skates. These were shoes with mounted ‘wheels in a line’ as were those used in Taglioni’s ballet. They were not unknown in England; one of their first recorded uses on stage is that in London in 1743. This paper will trace the history of this particular scene through Berlin, Paris and London, and will end with the projected sale of the ballet’s skates which were still in the theatre in 1853 when the auction catalogue listed them as Lot 95 seventy-eight pairs of skates.
Michael Burden, FAHA, is Professor of Opera Studies at Oxford University; he is also Dean and Fellow in Music at ǿƵ. His published research is on the music of Henry Purcell, and on aspects of dance and theatre in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Publications include the five-volumed London Opera Observed 1711-1843; a study of the London years of the soprano Regina Mingotti; The Works of Monsieur Noverre, edited with Jennifer Thorp, and a jointly edited volume, Staging History 1740-1840. Among his recent articles are those on the Opera House activities of the artists Biagio Rebecca (in The Burlington) and Henry Tresham and others (in The British Art Journal). His on-going research project is the online calendar, . He is currently the Chair of The Society for Theatre Research.