Dances for the Royal Festivities in Madrid in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Abstract

The literature, visual arts and music of Early Modern Spain all testify to the importance of dance across all spectrums of society in a variety of religious and secular occasions. Spanish dance and musical forms have also made their contribution to European dance history, as is well known. Nevertheless, little scholarly attention has been paid to dance in Golden Age Spain, with the notable exception of Lynn Matluck Brooks’ works. Thanks to her and other researchers, the dances organised for the annual Corpus Christi festivities are the best known area of Spanish dance history. Secular festivals were also enlivened by dancing, although these have been much less investigated. This article will concentrate on the dances performed during some of the most opulent of secular festivities, the triumphal entries in Madrid, as it has been in the course of research on them that I have come across archival sources unpublished and unstudied till now. They show how the dances for royal festivities closely followed the dominant model of the Corpus Christi festivities, with a similar broad spectrum of themes and forms including dramatic and pantomime elements. During the course of the seventeenth century, however, the main contributors of the dances shifted from the guilds to the villages, with a corresponding standardisation of the subjects for dances. This was paralleled by – and linked to – a growing marginalisation of both dancers and dances in the secular festivities.