From the Page to the Stage: A First Critical Edition for Dance

The paper proposes to enucleate the methodological issues involved in the reconstruction on paper of a ballet from the past, using as an example a specific case study: the critical choreographic edition of Le Réveil de Flore, a one-act ballet by Marius Petipa, set to music by Riccardo Drigo and first performed in 1894 in Peterhof, near St Petersburg.
More specifically, the paper aims to illustrate the phases of conception, creation and refinement of the architecture of the critical edition, whose main purpose is to transcribe and translate the choreography of Petipa’s ballet, relating it to Drigo’s music and restoring it in a version as close as possible to that of the premiere, as it appears in the manuscript choreographic score of Le Réveil de Flore, written in Stepanov notation (a system of dance “writing” known today to very few specialists) and preserved in the Sergeev Collection of the Houghton Library at Harvard University.
The paper will focus on the main problems encountered during the production of the critical edition and their resolution.