221 Years of Tradition.

LA SCUOLA AUTENTICA ITALIANA

On January 12, 1998, the students and teachers of Teatro alia Scala, Milan, sadly abandoned the historic opera house that had been the home of the ballet since its opening night in 1778. Joy and enthusiasm soon replaced the gloom, however, as the La Scala Ballet and its school moved into their own newly renovated, turn-of-the-century building on Via Campo Lodigiano. Anna Maria Prina, director of the school since 1974, remembers entering the school at the age of nine. It was there that she grew up and found her theater family. But she proudly states that the independent move to another building affirms the school's position as one of the foremost ballet schools in the world.

The grand old opera house, however, is showing her age. Behind the plush red auditorium with its crystal chandeliers, there is a labyrinth of deteriorating corridors and staircases. In 2001, after the theater has commemorated the centenary of composer Giuseppe Verdi's death, Scala will be closed for a major renovation.

Prina says that the school's new home, a gracious four-story town house from the mid-nineteenth century built around a central courtyard, will give students "space for calm study in properly adapted surroundings" after decades of jostling for space in the overly crowded theater. The new building has a canteen, lecture theater, gym, video library, infirmary, three vast and airy dance studios, and--most important for the school's ambition to offer accommodations for outside students--space for twenty-five residents.

Prina intends to remain close to the school's classical ballet tradition while expanding the curriculum to include other forms of dance, music, and art. The Vaganova Ballet Academy in St. Petersburg attributes the beginning of ballet to Lorenzo de' Medici's masques in 1469. Prina points out that the purity of Italian romantic ballet was reinforced by her theater's long-standing link with the Russian school and that the Russian school, in return, was strengthened by its early Italian source.

Milan thrived on dance from the sixteenth century, but the task of starting a ballet school, then known as the Royal Imperial Academy, was not begun until 1813. Primo ballerino Salvatore Vigano (1769-1821) performed at La Scala in his imposing choreodramas for a decade. Within its first ten years, the school that started with eight girls and four boys produced Amalia Brugnoli, the future inventor of "tiptoe" dancing. In 1838, with the appointment of the great pedagogue and textbook methodologist Carlo Blasis, the school produced Carlotta Grisi and Fanny Cerrito, ballerinas who would soon contend for romantic stardom with Marie Taglioni and Fanny Elssler. The virtuoso strength of Italian dancers such as Virginia Zucchi, Pierina Legnani, and Carlotta Brianza were recognized in Russia, and their technical virtuosity was incorporated into what is now the Vaganova method. The excellence of the teaching of Enrico Cecchetti, maestro to Pavlova, Nijinsky, and Karsavina in Russia and the Diaghilev and Pavlova companies, is demonstrated by the fact that his methodology has expanded worldwide. In 1925, when Cecchetti was seventy-five, he returned to Italy and taught at La Scala until his death three years later.

As a young dancer in 1963, Prina spent two years in Russia, where she was selected to attend the advanced course at the Bolshoi Ballet School in Moscow and the Vaganova Ballet Academy in St. Petersburg. There, she was greatly impressed by the legendary teacher Agrippina Vaganova. "It was then," she asserts, "that I understood that my life was teaching and doing something for children." After a performing career at La Scala, she returned to Russia in 1974 for technical, organizational, and updated training courses in school management and advanced teaching technique.

For her school, Prina has been selective in uniting the technical strengths of other methods and a characteristic of the contemporary Italian school--expressiveness of face and gesture. Prina explains, "In Italy we have to be careful because our bodies are not the best gifted for dancing. They are often without the slender beauty and thin ankles of the French or the elasticity of the Russians. So we try to make our dancers expressive from the time they are small children." That expressiveness is acknowledged everywhere, and her graduates perform in companies throughout the world. She feels that the La Scala corps de ballet is now second only to that of the Paris Opera Ballet. The recent return to La Scala of ballerina Alessandra Ferri, has heightened the sense that the international stars are once again coming home.

Prina has not always had access to the best young aspirants, since the Italian private schools try to keep their best pupils instead of sending them to Scala. She has, however, gone throughout the country (where there is no Common Market law for the accreditation of teachers) giving seminars on teaching methods to improve the level of all ballet students. In the future, Prina envisions the La Scala school as a center, not just in Italy but as one to which dance experts from the world over may come to attend conferences and give classes in all forms of expression.

When the new school opened, its sponsor, the San Paolo Foundation, distributed a poster showing an airborne ballerina from Swan Lake. It said: "The cygnets have a new nest where they can learn to fly." It seems that they have already taken flight.

Kathryn Hone is a freelance writer living in Italy.