The Art of Dancing, Demonstrated by Characters and Figures': French and English Sources for Court and Theatre Dance, 1700-1750

'THE ART OF DANCING, DEMONSTRATED BY CHARACTERS AND FIGURES': FRENCH AND ENGLISH SOURCES FOR COURT AND THEATRE DANCE, 1700-1750 MOIRA GOFF IN 1700 Raoul Auger Feuillet published in Paris Choregraphie ou Part de de'crire la dance,^ and revolutionized the art of dancing. His treatise made available, for the first time, a system of notation whereby dances could be recorded in symbols - allovi^ing them to be recreated at other times and in other places by reference to a written page alone. Dance, the most ephemeral of the arts, had at last achieved a permanence equivalent to that of its sister art music. Feuillet's work did not appear by chance, nor was his system the product of a single stroke of genius. Rather, it was the culmination of a long series of developments in the art of dancing throughout the seventeenth century, inspired in part by the interest of Louis XIII of France and his son Louis XIV in court ballets. These lavish and extremely costly entertainments had a political as well as an artistic purpose: they were meant to enhance the prestige of the monarch at home, and to demonstrate the political and cultural hegemony of France abroad. In pursuit of these aims Louis XIV founded the Academie Royale de Danse in 1661, followed by the Academie Royale de Musique in 1669; the latter became the Paris Opera, providing a public stage for the presentation of works hitherto performed within the confines of the court. One of the earliest of the dancing-masters associated with both academies was Pierre Beauchamp, who taught Louis XIV, and it was to him that Feuillet owed the invention of the system of notation which he published.^ Feuillet was also helped by the increasing use in the late seventeenth century of engraving as a means of printing music; the flexibility of the process, in terms of the quality of the image that could be produced and the freedom with which copies could be revised and reprinted, was of inestimable value to the production of dances recorded in Beauchamp-Feuillet notation. In the early seventeenth century, during the reigns of James I and Charles I, England developed its own court entertainment in the masque - many of them devised by the dramatist and poet Ben Jonson in collaboration with the architect and designer Inigo Jones. Like the court ballets of Louis XIII, the masques were costly and elaborate 202 (dancing was an integral part of the spectacle), and were intended to enhance the glory of the King. The Civil War and Commonwealth put an end to such entertainments, so that when Charles II returned in 1660 there was no native tradition of court ballet upon which to draw. His own tastes, formed during his long exile, were predominantly French, so it is hardly surprising that French dancers were among the foreign artists and performers encouraged to visit London. However, England did manage one export to its French neighbours - English country dancing, which kept its popularity during the Commonwealth. The first collection of country dances. The English Dancing Master, was published by John Playford in London in 1651,^ and several more collections appeared before 1700. French interest in these dances was such that an English dancing-master, Mr Isaac, is recorded as visiting France to teach the court of Louis XIV how to perform them.' As far as modern scholars are concerned, the most important result of Feuillet's publication was the stream of notated dances and works on dancing which followed it, which today allow eighteenth-century dancing to be researched both practically and academically.^ This article is concerned with the dance notations and treatises relating to court and theatre dance which were published, in France and England, between 1700 and 1750.^ The relationship between dancing in France and in England is complex, that between dance publishing in the two countries is scarcely less so. They influenced one another, but they also differed significantly. There are no readily available studies of dance publishing in the eighteenth century, and no comparison between France and England has yet been attempted.' This article represents a first approach to a subject which deserves close and extensive study. A chronological list of dance works published between 1700 and 1750 in the two countries, with details of copies held by the British Library, forms the Appendix to this article. DANCING AND TREATISES ON DANCING BEFORE I7OO There had, of course, been works on dancing before 1700. The earliest treatises dealing specifically with dancing date from the fifteenth century: from about 1420 onwards manuscripts survive which preserve the compositions of such dancing-masters as Domenico da Piacenza, Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro, and Antonio Cornazano. For this period Italian sources predominate, although manuscripts describing French and Burgundian dances also exist. The repertoire of dances which they record were for performance at royal and ducal courts, either for the private entertainment of the courtiers or as part of the lavish public spectacles of the time. Sources from the first half of the sixteenth century are few, but around the end of the century a number of important treatises were published. Best known among these are three works in Italian: // Ballarino by Fabritio Caroso, which was first published in Venice in 1581 and appeared in a second edition under the title of Nobilta di Dame (Venice, 1600); and Le Gratie d'Amore by Cesare Negri, which was published in Milan in 1602.^ French sources for this period include Orchesographie by Thoinot Arbeau, which was published at 203 Chacon,e jpcr F,g. ,. The opening plate of the ' Chacone of Galathee' from Anthony L'Abbe, A New Collection of Dances (London, [1725?]) 204 Lengres in 1588 and remained influential well into the seventeenth century.^ Mention should also be made of the Balet comique de la Royne (Paris, 1582) by Baldassarino de Belgiojoso - the libretto of a court entertainment universally referred to as the first 'ballet de cour'.^'* Despite the French additions to the literature of dance, Italy went on setting the fashions in dancing for the rest of Europe until the early 1600s. All the early dance manuals are similar in content: they give instructions for executing the steps, advise on performance style, and prescribe the correct etiquette for social occasions which include dancing. They also describe a number of dances in detail but, since there was no notation for dancing before the Beauchamp-Feuillet system became widely available in 1700, all the descriptions are verbal (although abbreviations were used, for example to refer to individual steps). Nevertheless, these sources of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries allow the dances of the period to be reconstructed with a fair degree of certainty. During the seventeenth century many changes in dancing took place. The initiative for dance developments passed to France, as her political and cultural dominance increased while that of Italy waned. Dance technique itself underwent fundamental changes. Dancers began to turn their legs out from the hip, which increased the range and variety of movements possible and allowed the step vocabulary of the older Italian dance to develop into a greater number of steps of different types, and the arms began to be used so as to create a total body picture far removed from that of earlier centuries. Pierre Beauchamp is credited with the codification of the five positions of the feet,^^ thereby laying the foundations of a technique which would later develop into the Romantic and Classical ballet of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the same time the composition of individual dances was developing new aesthetic rules, which can be seen (for example) in the complex uses of symmetry found in dances for a couple - the 'danses a deux' which form so great a part of the surviving eighteenth-century repertoire. Despite all this activity, the only manuals which survive from the period are Apologie de la danse by F. de Lauze published (probably in Paris) in 1623, and Discursos sobre el arte del danfado by Juan de Esquivel Navarro dating from 1642.^^ Neither work adequately documents the important developments which were taking place in dancing during this period. Two works published in Paris during the second half of the seventeenth century considered the court ballets of the time, rather than just dances or dance technique. Michel de Pure, in Idee des spectacles anciens et nouveaux (1668), and Claude-Francois Menestrier, in Des ballets anciens et modernes selon les regies du theatre (1682),^^ discussed every aspect of the court ballets - including their subject matter, libretti, choreography, music and design. They attempted a critical evaluation of those ballets they had themselves seen, in order to formulate aesthetic rules for the composition of new ballets. Both referred to ballet's antecedents in the theatre of the classical world - a theme which would be returned to time and again in eighteenth-century works on dance. During this period England added little to the literature of dancing, other than The English Dancing-Master^ its subsequent editions, and other similar collections - the best 205 known of which is probably Thomas Bray's Country Dances published in London in 1699. These collections all contained verbal instructions for the steps and figures, beneath the music for the dances. As a result of the appearance of Feuillet's treatise in 1700, dance publication in England was to change significantly. Indeed, during the early eighteenth century, England's contribution to the art of dancing both theoretically and practically would in many ways surpass that of France. FEUILLET, PECOUR AND FRENCH DANCES IN NOTATION At the same time as he published Choregraphie, Feuillet issued two collections of dances recorded in Beauchamp-Feuillet notation - the three works are usually found bound together, and appear to have been intended to be issued in this way.^^ One was the Recueil de Dances, Compose'es par M.

Load more