«As long as I am an artist, I will also be an actress». A study of Adelaide Ristori’s stage practice
This dissertation investigates the stage practice of nineteenth-century star actress Adelaide Ristori: it aims at reconstructing both her working method and her acting style and at identifying, as a final and “open” conclusion, those features of her practice as a stock company stage manager that can be considered as signs of a progress towards modern stage direction.
Several sources have been employed; the archival research took place mainly at Museo Biblioteca dell’Attore in Genova, holding a precious and considerable collection devoted to Adelaide Ristori (Fondo Ristori).
Starting from some considerations about the little documented beginnings of Adelaide Ristori’s career in her artistic family, the first part of this dissertation reconstructs the working method the actress accurately practised in the years of her artistic maturity.
Adelaide Ristori was an innovative actress. Every performance of hers was founded on the study of many sources – dramatic, literary, figurative – and on a double approach to the character, i.e. a rational and cognitive and an empathic approach. The artist then built her part upon two scores she worked out from such premises, that is to say a vocal and a physical score. These were the basis of the precise reconstruction of the emotional journey of the character she was to interpret, and of the connection between the actress’ body and the psychological motivation of the character. The actress worked out this complex construction of the part thanks to her constant concentration and the power of her stage presence. Every detail in the performance was carefully selected and built in an actorial work whose cornerstones were verisimilitude, formal restraint, a refined explication of the dialectic relation between the inner and outer self, the respect for the playwright’s intents and the individuation of the core motifs in the play allowing for the communication of ethical and poetical values.
The ethical and educative value of the theatre was of primary importance in Adelaide Ristori’s theatrical history: through her artistic work she meant to embody a model enhancing the cultural and social re-evaluation of the theatre. She also wanted to represent and advertise a new image of the actor and above all of the actress as a virtuous being, an emblem of a profession worthy of being appreciated both on a human and on an artistic level.
To promote these values on the stage, Adelaide Ristori included metatheatrical pieces in her repertoire; the leading characters of these plays are actresses whose parts – true manifestos of her poetics – voice her very idea of the theatre and art. The French plays we analyse in the second part of this dissertation are emblematic examples: Adriana Lecouvreur by Eugène Scribe and Ernest Legouvé and Béatrix ou La Madone de l’Art by Ernest Legouvé. In both cases we delineate the history of the play and we try to reconstruct – as far as possible – Ristori’s performance, mainly referring to the relevant promptbooks and the plentiful articles held in the Ristori Fund.
As a conclusion, we offer some considerations on Ristori’s ensemble work with her company, the Compagnia Drammatica Italiana. An actress who fixed both her individual interpretation and the whole performance that she directed in a definite form, Adelaide Ristori appears as the emblem of an innovative conception of theatrical performance as a consistent and composite artistic event; in such work she played the role of an actress-manager who could guarantee aesthetic and poetical consistency, foreshadowing in some aspects the art of modern stage direction in Italy
