Where highbrow taste meets itinerant dance in eighteenth-century scandinavia: the dance entrepreneur Martin Nürenbach

Abstract

Our spectacles smack of the most ugly barbarism that can be imagined for human beings by a human being. A boy from the western lands performs Holberg’s The Invisible. A whore from Drammen acts as Prima Donna. A Swede and German, who neither speak Danish, German, nor Swedish, but a lingua franca that contaminates all the actors, perform Harlequin, and a wigmaker-boy acts as Leander. O! Imagine before Your eyes these scenes performed at the city council salon for people of bon Sens, who know the Dramatics. (Anonymous memorandum of October 1771)