Lucia Cormani was a 19th and early 20th-century Italian

ballet Ballet () is a type of performance dance that originated during the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century and later developed into a concert dance form in France and Russia. It has since become a widespread and highly technical form ...

dancer and one of the founders of the

Royal Academy of Dance "Health and happiness" , predecessor = , successor = , formation = 1920 , extinction = , type = NGO , status = Registered charity , purpose = Examination board – dance education and training , headquarters = 36 Battersea SquareSW11 3 ...

. Lucia's life is not well documented, in part because she never danced in the most famous female roles. She was probably born about 1854 and died shortly after 1934. Her name appears on posters of ballet performances in

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitu ...

Brussels Brussels (french: Bruxelles or ; nl, Brussel ), officially the Brussels-Capital Region (All text and all but one graphic show the English name as Brussels-Capital Region.) (french: link=no, Région de Bruxelles-Capitale; nl, link=no, Bruss ...

St Petersburg Saint Petersburg ( rus, links=no, Санкт-Петербург, a=Ru-Sankt Peterburg Leningrad Petrograd Piter.ogg, r=Sankt-Peterburg, p=ˈsankt pʲɪtʲɪrˈburk), formerly known as Petrograd (1914–1924) and later Leningrad (1924–1991), i ...

Guatemala Guatemala ( ; ), officially the Republic of Guatemala ( es, República de Guatemala, links=no), is a country in Central America. It is bordered to the north and west by Mexico; to the northeast by Belize and the Caribbean; to the east by Hon ...

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

(1883) and

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

(1884). In 1889 she appeared as the Premiere Danseuse Assoluta in ''Cinderella; Or, Ladybird, Ladybird, Fly Away Home'' at Her Majesty's Theatre, Londo

and in 1900 she danced the role of Canio in a Metropolitan Opera production of Pagliacci (Philadelphia

Because of her tall muscular frame, Lucia was several times cast as a "travesty dancer" (a woman dressed as a man) -- for example as a male pirate chief in the ballet "Algeria" in 1887, and as a sorcerer in "Enchantment." Such roles were sometimes added for effect in ballets without being properly integrated into the plot. Lucia's greatest success was as a

choreographer Choreography is the art or practice of designing sequences of movements of physical bodies (or their depictions) in which motion or form or both are specified. ''Choreography'' may also refer to the design itself. A choreographer is one who c ...

from about 1893 to 1911. In 1903 she choreographed a production of ''

Carmen ''Carmen'' () is an opera in four acts by the French composer Georges Bizet. The libretto was written by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, based on the novella of the same title by Prosper Mérimée. The opera was first performed by the ...

'' for the

Alhambra Theatre The Alhambra was a popular theatre and music hall located on the east side of Leicester Square, in the West End theatre, West End of London. It was built originally as the Royal Panopticon of Science and Arts opening on 18 March 1854. It was clo ...

in London. She also taught, using the stage of the Alhambra since she had no studio of her own. In 1920, she collaborated with four other great dancers --

Adeline Genée Dame Adeline Genée DBE (born Anina Kirstina Margarete Petra Jensen; 6 January 1878 – 23 April 1970) was a Danish-British ballet dancer. Early years Anina Kirstina Margarete Petra Jensen was born in Hinnerup north of Aarhus, Denmark. H ...

Tamara Karsavina Tamara Platonovna Karsavina (russian: Тамара Платоновна Карсавина; 10 March 1885 – 26 May 1978) was a Russian prima ballerina, renowned for her beauty, who was a principal artist of the Imperial Russian Ballet and l ...

Edouard Espinosa Edouard Espinosa (1871–1950) was a British ballet dancer and teacher. He was also the co-founder of the Royal Academy of Dancing and established the British Ballet Organization. Personal life Espinosa was born in Moscow in 1872 to Spanish Je ...

, and Phyllis Bedells—to form the Association of Teachers of Operatic Dancing, which was later to become the Royal Academy of Dance. Between them, the five represented the principal dance training methods of the time - Genée the Danish school, Karsavina the Russian school, Cormani the Italian school, Espinosa the French school, and Bedells the English school. In 1923 the Association began a series of Annual Matinées; ten of Cormani's students participated in the premier performance, dancing a tarantella. Her collected letters are in the

London Theatre Museum The Theatre Museum in the Covent Garden district of London, England, was the United Kingdom's national museum of the performing arts. It was a branch of the UK's national museum of applied arts, the Victoria and Albert Museum. It opened in 1 ...

and there are dozens of photographs of Cormani in the National Portrait Gallery.

References

Cinderalla bibliographyOpera in Philadelphia (pdf)
Italian ballerinas Ballet choreographers Italian choreographers 19th-century Italian ballet dancers 1850s births 1930s deaths Year of birth uncertain Year of death uncertain {{Dance-bio-stub