The Ashmolean Museum’s exhibition ‘Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion and Design’ is a thrilling revelation of nineteenth-century Britain’s widely unrecognised visual vibrancy. Jane Pritchard’s DANSOX lecture, attended by the exhibition’s curators, took this one step further, demonstrating that a greater understanding of the use of colour on the Victorian stage also overturns many of our assumptions about contemporaneous English ballet. Taking the Ashmolean exhibition as her starting point, Pritchard argued that by thinking across boundaries and following the archival evidence on the use of colour in theatrical design, we can begin to recover the largely forgotten fifty years of dance in England that lie between the romantic ballet period and the arrival in London of the Ballets Russes.

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