Restoring Dance to Parnassus: The Scholarly Challenges of Eighteenth-Century Dance

Abstract

My dissertation on John Weaver was awarded an Oxford doctorate in 1978, and the associated book will be one of the first exhaustive studies of a single dancer or dancing master in the Pre-Romantic period. Although I can claim only the disordered experience of a pioneer, I feel that an account of the protracted course of my research may have some exemplary value. My problems and frustrations were largely predictable: the lack of special provision for dance history in British universities, libraries and institutions of higher study; the absence of an organised community of British dance scholars and of a scholarly dance journal. The academic neglect of earlier dance history makes for great difficulties; but as a consequence of this neglect, the subject now offers some of the best remaining areas of research to the cultural and intellectual historian. Many major areas await all but the most cursory treatment. Great Britain with its active and tolerant scholarly community and its long tradition of interest in the performing arts has the opportunity to make a vital contribution to the body of reputable scholarly works on dance: lavish expenditure is less vital than enlightened organisation, the establishing of a programme of clear priorities and the furnishing of some excellent work in order to attract outstanding students and scholars. Thus far, American libraries and universities have taken the lead in the collecting and cataloguing of dance material: publishers such as A. J. Pischl have shown enterprise in reprinting important texts and works of reference as well as in commissioning new studies; historians, such as Selma Jeanne Cohen have galvanised their colleagues by convening conferences of scholars and by promoting serious writing on dance history. Eighteenth-century English dance constitutes an unmapped terrain: there is no focus, no clear notion of what is unknown, of the nature and location of evidence, of the place of dance in the eighteenth-century scheme of things; there are few leads, few clues