Giannandrea Poesio
Dance critic who became an expert on the contribution to classical ballet of Italian theatre
GIANNANDREA POESIO, who has died aged 57, was The Spectator’s ballet critic and a leading scholar in the colourful past of Italian theatrical dance and its forgotten contribution to classical ballet, especially in Britain.
A Florentine of immense charm and joie de vivre, Poesio took enormous pleasure in hunting down abstruse corners of dance history in Italian libraries. He found his niche in Britain, becoming an outstanding expert on his nation’s well-known but underresearched contribution to world ballet, the “English school” above all. “A lot of my research goes against a lot of widely thought beliefs; but my aim is to demystify a few things,” he said, describing ballet as “the most misunderstood and disparaged of the theatre arts”.
One of Poesio’s earliest articles in the British academic press was about the “fighting dancers” of Italy – gymnastic athletes who wore armour and provided rough physical entertainment in late 19th-century Italian opera stagings. This quirky subject was typical of the rich pickings that he was to uncover in ballet’s Italian back-history, finding unexpected references in the work of today’s choreographers, such as Matthew Bourne and Mats Ek.
As an Italian and a former actordancer, Poesio knew a great deal firsthand about his native gesture language, and through historical investigation could show how Italy’s vivid theatrical mime tradition fed into the French-derived classical ballet lexicon. This, he showed, had enriched the artistry of the 20th century’s early ballet stars such as Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky and Alicia Markova, and, significantly for Britain, the choreographer Frederick Ashton.
British dance historians warmly embraced Poesio’s discoveries and England became his intellectual home, though he remained floridly Italian in his manners and speech.
When Frank Johnson, The Spectator’s balletomane editor, hired him as the magazine’s dance critic in 1994, the Italian’s poetic name left many unsure whether he was male or female – or even actually existed. Sir Jeremy Isaacs spread a rumour in a Spectator column that Frank Johnson had invented the name as a nom de plume for himself.
Born on March 25 1959, Giannandrea Poesio was the son of the leading Florentine theatre critic Paolo Emilio Poesio, and danced from childhood. After 13 years of schooling at Florence’s Collegio alla Querce, he had a brief performing career before taking degrees in dance history at Florence University and the University of Surrey, where he earned his PhD.
He made a major historical contribution by giving due recognition to Enrico Cecchetti, the Italian teacher who was central in the establishment of British ballet by Ninette de Valois, founder of the Royal Ballet. As a historian, Poesio was able to argue that the Italian’s aesthetic approach had fathered the world-renowned subtlety and grace of Royal Ballet dancing at its peak in the mid-20th century. As a critic, he would protest that this expressive subtlety was being overwhelmed by later globalised teaching trends emphasising athletic impact.
In 1999 Poesio had a substantial hand in restoring some of these lost expressive arts when he was asked by Russia’s Kirov Ballet to be its period consultant on the ambitious “original” reconstruction of The Sleeping Beauty. The recreation of the classic’s extensive 19th-century mime generated worldwide discussion about a future for “period” authenticity in ballet. From then on Poesio was a sought-after adviser on period detail in productions at the Royal Opera House, the Kirov Ballet, La Scala Milan, US companies, and the leading ballet academies in Paris, Rome and London.
His column ran in The Spectator for 20 years, helping to persuade many readers that ballet was a seriously interesting branch of world theatre tradition, just as his capacity to entertain persuaded budding dance historians that research should be fun.
At the time of his death, alongside positions as dance critic with Dance Europe and Danza e Danza, Giannandrea Poesio was Reader in Dance and Director of the Research Institute for Media, Arts and Performance at the University of Bedfordshire, where he had worked since 2011. His academic career included dance lectureships and management of arts and performance degrees at London Metropolitan University, the University of Surrey and Roehampton Institute. He had been chairman of the European Association of Dance Historians since 2005.
He is survived by his civil partner, Gianfranco Morandi.