A Context for Petipa Roland John Wiley

RESUMEN: For a person quite so celebrated, Marius Petipa remains something of a mystery. Most accounts of him suffer deficiencies of fact or context, and provide a salient detail or two amidst the broadest generalisations. Those accounts comprise memoirs, beginning with Petipa's own and reminiscences of dancers; histories and sourcebooks, whose authors sometimes manipulate his image; official documents on which the preceding are based; studies of individual ballets; and published reviews, some of which have been reprinted. Despite their bulk, these sources have been insufficient -because data about his life are scarce- to generate a standard biography. On stage, the much-touted Petipa style of dance is subject to the near-certainty of corruption by a century of physical transmission from one dancer to the next. Modern performances may still convey something of what Petipa made on this artist, but how much and and how accurately are impossible to specify. Nevertheless, the meaning of Petipa's art has been the subject of far-flung interpretive studies.