Napoli and Palermo, Palermo: Cosmopolitanism and Energetic Excess

Abstract

This chapter compares two dance pieces which performatively recreated memories of visiting a Southern Italian city: the 1842 ballet Napoli by the Danish choreographer Auguste Bournonville (1805–1879) and the 1989 dance theatre piece Palermo, Palermo by the German choreographer Pina Bausch (born 1940). These are two very different works, each created in different contexts. In the 1840s both Denmark and the Kingdom of Naples were absolute monarchies and still largely untouched by the Industrial Revolution that was already bringing about rapid social and economic changes in other European countries. In the Ruhr district where Bausch’s company are based, German economics and demographics, during the last 40 years, have necessitated the temporary economic migration of foreign ‘guest workers’ from Mediterranean countries. Putting these two works together brings out significant correlations between them. In each case, the idea of the paradisal otherness of Mediterranean culture exemplified by a hot southern city was created through theatrical staging and movement material that embodied a hot-blooded Utopian dynamism and energetic excess. I shall argue that, in each case, this excess compensated for a sense of loss arising from social and ideological rupture — in Bournonville’s case in relation to Romanticism, and in Bausch’s case, modernism.