Alberto Spadolini's Box: Dance, Silence and the Archive

Abstract

The Italian dancer and painter Alberto Spadolini was rediscovered when a box containing numerous documents relating to his artistic life was recovered in 1978 by his nephew, Marco Travaglini. This box forms the core of the archive assembled by Travaglini since 2004, containing valuable information about his uncle who had been largely-neglected. Spadolini (1907–1972) was born in Ancona, Italy, studied in Rome during the 1920s and moved to France in the 1930s. In 1932, he became a famous music-hall dancer performing in solo numbers and group works with Josephine Baker and Mistinguett, among others. Throughout the decade he came to be known as ‘the nude dancer’, possibly owing to the skimpy costumes he usually wore and his statuesque body. From the 1940s he began painting a series of works featuring ballerinas in tutus. He never spoke to his nephew about his life as dancer, so that when Travaglini found the box, he was amazed at what he discovered. The box constitutes a precious archive, containing photographs, posters, articles, and reviews relating to Spadolini's career as a dancer and painter. I intend to analyse Spadolini's box using methodological tools from archive studies and from dance and cultural history, with particular attention to the concept of cultural hegemony, in order to establish the fundamental importance of such archives to the recovery of neglected figures like Spadolini.