DANCE

DANCE. Between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, European dance existed widely within different social contexts and groups. Admittedly, religious dance no longer existed, save for rare local examples such as "The Dance of the Six" (El baile de los seises) in the Seville cathedral, since the Roman Catholic Church had refused to integrate such practices into its rituals. But secular dance, done as much as a ball as within the theater, underwent a deep renewal during this time, occupying a privileged place in court society. While the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder suggest popular forms of dancing in the 1560s, there is no evidence of this style of dance in technical or aesthetic treatises. What has been studied in the history of Western dance have been those dances reserved for social elites, from which blossomed what became known as belle danse based on noble style.

Western dance originated first and foremost in the Renaissance of fifteenth-century Italy and subsequently was favored by the leadership of the Council of Trent (1545–1563) and the Counter-Reformation. It became associated both with music and with poetry, becoming an indispensable element within sumptuous feasts organized to lionize princely patrons, and it developed its own masters and traditions of apprenticeship. These masters not only taught the rules of their art, but also shaped acclaimed styles of choreography to which monarchs and courtiers themselves danced. The most renowned masters circulated chiefly between the great families in Mantua, Ferrara, Milan, and Florence, establishing a highly elaborated, refined, and stylized art that was a pleasure to dance and to see. These men wrote the first treatises on dance, books designed to serve both practice and theory. In the second half of the sixteenth century their work spread all over Europe, as their methods, styles, and terminology were adapted in new places, most prominently of all in France.

Dance crossed the Alps thanks to the Italian wars of Francis I after 1525 and the marriage of Henry II to Catherine de Médicis in 1533. Though the Valois had been accustomed to a more spontaneous form of dance, the court appropriated Italian practices in its own fashion. In the course of the seventeenth century, French masters established a new style of dance that made noble carriage and deportment, elegance, and ease the standard for all people of quality. Moreover, with its emphasis on suppleness and agility, dance was closely linked with fencing, horsemanship, and indeed with military training in general. It thereby became a necessary part of the education of the proper gentleman, the honnête homme, as much in Jesuit as in military academies. In a world where social success depended upon knowing how to comport oneself, the dance master was expected to teach his students appropriate attitude and gesture and thereby how to function on the highest levels of society. Under Louis XIII (ruled 1610–1643) and Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715), it was indispensable for a man of quality to know how to dance, in order to participate in dignified fashion in the company of the king and his courtiers in the balls and the ballets.

Born at the end of the Valois reign in the 1580s, ballet de cour became central to Bourbon cultural leadership. Louis XIII used it as a seat of authority; Richelieu manipulated it as part of his new style of glorifying the monarch; and Louis XIV made it a centerpiece of his search for Europe-wide cultural prominence. Indeed, ballet de cour spread in related forms to Savoy, England, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Russia.

A transformation began in the dance when in 1670 Louis XIV withdrew from participating in it. The creation of the Académie Royale de Danse (Royal Dance Academy) in 1661 generated a movement of new thinking in both theory and practice among the French masters. Raoul-Auger Feuillet founded a system of notating dance movement, published in his Chorégraphie in 1700, that rapidly became standard practice Europe-wide for belle danse. Seventeenth-century choreographers applied the classicist outlook dominant in the court to notions of dancing with symmetry, equilibrium, clarity, and measure. Moreover, the academy led to a professional order of dance, in fact the first institutionalized ballet troupe, in the Académie Royale de Musique (Royal Music Academy), which was founded in 1669. The original restriction to men was dropped with the addition of women in 1681. During the second half of the seventeenth century, dance was integrated into the performance of all operatic genres, as well as some dramatic ones, and the Académie Royale de Musique, also called the Opéra (with the protection of Louis XIV and the dauphin and under the direction of Jean-Baptiste Lully), became the most prestigious hall of entertainment in Paris.

French theatrical dance proceeded to spread all over Europe in the early eighteenth century as artists started dance companies and schools. Dance styles—heroic or serious, half-serious (demicaractère), comic or grotesque—and performers became specialized, just as standards of virtuosity and expressiveness expanded for both male and female dancers. In England in the 1710s there arose a new kind of theatrical dance called ballet d'action, or ballet pantomime, that would tell a story without words or singing. Such shows became diffused throughout the main theaters in Germany, Austria, Italy, Russia, and France during the second half of the eighteenth century. Theatrical dance raised vigorous theoretical debates over claims that it rendered mimesis as an art of imitation in Aristotelian terms, as an interpretation of the totality of human experience. In the 1760s ballet began to gain independence from opera. In London, Paris, and Vienna a ballet pantomime was given on its own after an opera, though usually it was on a related theme. In Paris the practice first occurred at the highly innovative Opéra Comique in the 1760s and then at the Opéra in the 1780s. Owing to the mingling of pantomime and dance in this period, performers were required to be both mimes and dancers.

From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, dance was not simply a distraction. Created by masters, who were almost always musicians as well as dancers, it was closely linked to the musical idioms for which it was designed—dance genres such as the pavane, galliard, branle, courante, minuet, sara-band, chaconne, rigadoon, or contredanse. Musicologists have in fact discovered that these idioms influenced many aspects of what went on in operatic and instrumental music of the eighteenth century. That is why when spectators entered the Opéra, they brought with them deep knowledge of complex interpretive aspects of dance and music, all of which was the fruit of an ancient European cultural tradition.

DANCE

BIBLIOGRAPHY