Marie Camargo
Marie Camargo (born April 15, 1710 in Brussels , † April 28, 1770 in Paris ; actually Marie Anne Cupis de Camargo ) was a French dancer. Among other things, she introduced the heelless dance shoe and the technique of entrechat quatre in ballet .
Life
She was the daughter of Ferdinand-Joseph Cupis de Camargo, who came from Spanish nobility, and his wife Marie-Anne de Smet. Her father worked for several years as a violin and dance teacher in Brussels and moved to Paris in 1720. There, at the age of 10, she was given the opportunity to take dance lessons from the French ballerina Mlle Françoise Prévost, who was born in 1680 and was famous at the time. It made its debut in Paris in 1726 and immediately attracted the attention of experts. Even if her expressiveness was initially described by critics as immature due to her youth, she was soon regarded as one of the best dancers of her time, with the potential to match, if not exceed, the brilliance of her teacher. After a dispute, Camargo moved from the Prévost - she had excluded Camargo from solo roles, presumably out of envy - to the likewise highly respected ballet master Michel Blondy (1675–1739). In 1730 she was appointed first solo dancer at the Paris Opera through Blondy.
Although her jump height was limited by the shoe heels that were still common at the time, she is said to have been able to perform the entrechat quatre , a jump into the fifth position in which the dancer crosses the straight legs several times in quick succession ( twice in the case of the entrechat quatre ). By shortening her costume (which at that time traditionally consisted of ankle-length opulent petticoats and a hoop skirt) and wearing dance shoes without heels (as they subsequently became common in ballet), she expanded her technical possibilities considerably.
Marie Camargo was a fierce rival of three years older Marie Sallé , another student of Prévost. Sallé also influenced the change in ballet clothing at the time and went even further than Camargo, for example by dancing in Pygmalion with a Greek tunic made of translucent thin fabric.
In 1736 Marie Camargo temporarily retired from the ballet scene as the Comte de Clermont's lover , but returned to the stage in 1741 and danced with undiminished success until 1751. Then she finally retired with a pension from the French state.
Appreciation
The disputes between the ballerinas Sallé and Camargo were well known and were also narrated by Voltaire . Even Casanova mentioned Camargo in the third volume of his memoirs . Marius Petipa and Léon Minkus created the ballet Camargo , which premiered on December 17, 1872 in Saint Petersburg and describes their lives in three acts. Enrico de Leva and Charles Lecocq wrote operas about them. The Camargo Society was founded in London in 1930.
family
Her brother Jean-Baptiste Cupis de Camargo (1711–1788) was one of the most famous violinists in 18th century Paris and a composer. The youngest member of the family, François Cupis de Renoussard (1732–1808), was a cellist and composer.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Antonius Lux (ed.): Great women of world history. A thousand biographies in words and pictures . Sebastian Lux Verlag , Munich 1963, p. 92.
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Camargo, Marie |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Cupis de Camargo, Marie Anne (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | french dancer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 15, 1710 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Brussels |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 28, 1770 |
| Place of death | Paris |