Baroque Dance Research Articles

Wendy Hilton: A Life in Baroque Dance (review)

Wendy Hilton: A Life in Baroque Dance. By Wendy Hilton and Susan Bindig. (Wendy Hilton Dance & Music Series, no. 14.) Hillsdale, NY: Pen - dragon Press, 2010. [xvii, 295 p. ISBN 9781576471333. $65.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Wendy Hilton (1931-2002), a British historical dancer, teacher, choreographer, and scholar, was a pivotal figure in the development of baroque dance performance and scholarship. This book, described the back cover as a memoir, is the first account of her life and work, and as such is a very welcome addition to the slim historiography of the historical dance revival. Any - one who has been involved in the field would inevitably be drawn to a book that offers insight into Hilton's role in its genesis: i.e., her dance education, the sources of her skills and knowledge, the extent of her work, the development of her teaching style, her creative process in dance reconstruction and choreography, and her intellectual growth during the course of her career. (Disclosure: I took classes with Hilton at the International Early Dance Institute, Montclair State University, and Universite Laval). Started on the recommendation of (p. 270), only the three first chapters of Hilton's book were near completion at the time of her death. Susan Bindig, her former student, colleague, and friend, edited and completed Hilton's work, linking what had been written for later chapters with memoirs and correspondence of colleagues and friends, as well as information from Hilton's personal papers and other sources. The book is divided into three parts. The first part (chaps. 1-6) contains Hilton's reminiscences of formative events that marked her early years in England from 1931 until 1959. She writes about her family, experience growing up during World War II, initial interests in dance and music, dance training, early career as a dancer working for dance companies and movies and television productions (and supplementing her income by modeling for artists), and her first meeting with the dance specialist Belinda Quirey. This section presents fascinating anecdotes not only of well-known twentieth-century dance figures such as Marie Rambert and Audrey de Vos, but also of famous movie personalities such as Audrey Hepburn, Clark Gable, and Peter Sellers. In the second part (chaps. 7-11), Hilton discusses her work in historical dance in England from 1956 until 1971. She talks (at times quite waspishly) about learning from and collaborating with Quirey, meeting other dance historians such as Melusine Wood, Cyril Beaumont, and Karl Heinz Taubert, and forming the Domenico Dance Ensemble, an early-dance company. A research grant from the Arts Council of Great Britain allowed her to travel to France, Germany, and Sweden. Meeting with pianist and Bach specialist Rosalyn Tureck led her to visit the United States in 1968 and emigrate there in 1971. The third part (chaps. 12-18) focuses Hilton's career in America from 1971 until her death in 2002. This part begins chronologically but deliberately backtracks at two points: chapters 13 to 15 cover the years 1971 to 1994 and mostly explore Hilton's work the East Coast, at the Juilliard School, Rutgers University, and SUNY Purchase, along with her problems with torticollis that eventually ended her performing career; chapters 16-17 concentrate her work the West Coast from 1968 to 2001, in particular the summer workshop she directed at Stanford University from 1974 to 2001; and chapter 18 returns to 1994 to give an account of Hilton's last years: her work as editor of the Pendragon Dance and Music series (later renamed after her), her memoirs, her cancer, death in 2002, and commemoration. In the third part, the narrative changes from first person to third, incorporating fragments written by Hilton as quotations. The problem of doing so is that the emotional connection established between the reader and the original writer (Hilton) is unfortunately lost. …

Dance, spectacle, and the body politick, 1250-1750

Acknowledgements Editorial Note List of FiguresI. Introduction and OverviewIntroduction 1. Dance in Europe 1250-1750 / Jennifer NevileII. Dance at Court and in the City2. Dance in Late Thirteenth-Century Paris / Karen Silen 3. Dance and Society in Quattrocento Italy / Jennifer Nevile 4. Dance in Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth-Century France / Margaret M. McGowanIII. Dance and the Public Theater5. Pierre Beauchamps and the Public Theater / John S. Powell 6. Dance in London Theaters c. 1700-1750 / Jennifer ThorpIV. Choreographic Structure and Music7. The Relationship Between Dance and Music in Fifteenth-Century Italian Dance Practice / Jennifer Nevile 8. The Basse Dance c. 1445 - c. 1545 / David R. Wilson 9. Choreographic Structure in Baroque Dance / Ken PierceV. Dance and the State10. Your Most Humble Subject, Cesare Negri Milanese / Katherine T. McGinnis 11. The Politics of Ballet at the Court of Louis XIV / Julia Prest 12. Mr. Isaac's The Pastorall and Issues of Party / Linda J. TomkoVI: Dance, Society and the Cosmos13. Plato's Philosophy of Dance / Graham Pont 14. Moral Views on Dance / Alessandro Arcangeli 15. Order, Proportion, and Geometric Forms: The Cosmic Structure of Dance, Grand Gardens, and Architecture during the Renaissance / Jennifer NevileList of Dance Treatises, Manuscripts, Modern Editions and Translations Glossary Notes Bibliography Contributors Index

The Keyboard in Baroque Europe (review)

The Keyboard in Baroque Europe. Edited by Christopher Hogwood. (Musical Performance and Reception.) New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. [xvii, 245 p. ISBN 0-521-81055-8. $75.] Music examples, analysis charts, facsimiles, index.

Leone de'Sommi and the Performing Arts (review)

Reviewed by: Leone de’ Sommi and the Performing Arts Madeleine Schechter Leone de’ Sommi and the Performing Arts. Edited by Ahuva Belkin. Assaph Book Series vol. 1. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1997; pp. xviii + 245. $12.00 paper. Leone de’ Sommi and the Performing Arts is the first anthology dedicated to Leone de’ Sommi (1527–1592), a playwright, theatre director, and poet who lived and created at the Gonzaga court in Mantua, at the time a flourishing cultural and artistic center. Despite his artistic achievements and innovative ideas, de’ Sommi remained outside the focus of scholarly interest for many centuries, with perhaps the felicitous exception of his theoretical discussions on theatre, the Dialogues, which have enjoyed several critical editions. The first English translation was by Allardyce Nicoll, who established de’ Sommi’s authorship of this work. Later on, it was analyzed by Ferruccio Marotti, who published the complete Italian edition. In the last decade, a new French translation edited and published by A. Strihan in the Revue d’histoire du théâtre has enhanced the growing academic recognition of this document’s humanistic erudition and artistic sensitivity. It is widely acknowledged that de’ Sommi’s life and artistic activity aimed at a synthesis between Jewish culture and religion and Italian Renaissance humanistic and artistic ideals. However, it is the blend of his skills as a playwright, theatre theorist, and theatre director that makes de’ Sommi especially relevant to modern developments in theatre research. He was what we would now consider an interdisciplinary artist, endowed with a modern artistic awareness of theatre’s importance as a performative art. In order to appreciate how innovative such a preoccupation was, it should be remembered that the theatrical performance was almost completely neglected by Renaissance learned circles and entirely forbidden by Jewish religion. This anthology highlights de’ Sommi’s approach to theatre as physical place, not merely as a rhetorical locus. The book articulates two key concerns: de’ Sommi’s performance-oriented conception of theatre and the place of this activity in the context of his time, offering valuable access to the artistic world and forms of Renaissance artistic expression contemporary to de’ Sommi. Its critical essays are preceded by a prologue by Shlomo Simonsohn, which presents the life of the Jewish community of Mantua within its contemporary Christian environment. He observes that the Jews of Mantua, confined to a ghetto during the time of Leone de’ Sommi, lived under “atrocious” circumstances: “These conditions, the result of anti-Jewish policies adopted by the Church in the Middle Ages, were perfected in Italy to a degree hitherto unheard of anywhere else” (23). The epilogue by Dunbar H. Ogden further expresses the need for historic and critical context in evaluating “the de’ Sommi moment contribution then and now” (238). Ogden, writing from a more postmodern perspective, advances an intriguing analogy between de’ Sommi’s court spectacles and the Tel Aviv conference, with regard to the shifting historical strategies in the theatricalization of cultural power. Ahuva Belkin introduces the body of the anthology with a comprehensive historiographical essay offering a general account of de’ Sommi’s life and work and a framework for the specialized topics which follow. The book is divided into three sections: the relationship between theatre, music, and dance; textual and pre-scenic aspects; and a portrait of de’ Sommi as a theatre director. [End Page 546] In the first section, Don Harrán discusses the common aspirations of Hebrew dramatists and musicians working in different media. Iain A. Fenlon considers the potential contributions of Guarini and de’ Sommi to the development of baroque dance spectacle, focusing on the pre-history of this entertainment in Italian culture. Enrico Fubini enquires whether there is “such a thing as Jewish polyphony” (67) in considering possible musical interchanges between Christian and Jewish culture. A. William Smith lists various aspects of the gestural “international language” (94) that widely permeated the Renaissance culture. Most of the articles in the second section deal with the scenic potential of his plays and their staging, with the exception of Cristina dal Molin’s account of the recovery of some unedited manuscripts at the National Library of Turin. Hanna Scolnicov’s “Staging...

Dance notation systems in late 17th-century France

Journal Article Dance notation systems in late 17th-century France Get access Ken Pierce Ken Pierce Ken Pierce is a performer, choreographer, and teacher. He directs the Ken Pierce Baroque Dance Company, and teaches early dance at the Longy School of Music, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Early Music, Volume XXVI, Issue 2, May 1998, Pages 286–299, https://doi.org/10.1093/earlyj/XXVI.2.286 Published: 01 May 1998

Terpsichore at Louis-le-Grand: Baroque Dance on the Jesuit Stage in Paris by Judith Rock

354BOOK REVIEWS Terpsichore at Louis-le-Grand:Baroque Dance on thefesuit Stage in Paris. By Judith Rock. [Original Studies Composed in English, Number 13, Series 3] (St. Louis: Institute ofJesuit Sources. 1996. Pp. viii, 212. $22.95 paperback.) Judith Rock merits praise for this fascinating case study of the interaction of theater arts, reUgion, and politics in the reign of Louis XTV Using previously ignored printed and manuscript sources, Rock shows how drama and ballet at the Jesuit coUege in Paris played an integral, major part in French culture and society of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Seeking to make learning enjoyable, French Jesuits encouraged their students to act and to dance. Yet performances at the Jesuit college in the French capital were not merely amateurish, in-house exercises. Students performers were joined by professionals hired from the Paris Opera; Charpentier and other leading composers of the day composed for theJesuits; Louis XIV himself, whose name the coUege bore, frequently attended performances, as did the Parisian elite of nobiUty, bourgeois, and clergy. Using Hercules, Jupiter, Mars, or Charlemagne as aUegories for the reigning king, these performances celebrated the achievements ofthe French monarchy. Drama and dance on theJesuit stage also served to glorify the Catholic faith, the virtuous life, the beauty and harmony of creation. Not everyone was pleased.Jansenists, ever-ready to criticize theJesuits, never tired of lambasting theater at Louis-le-Grand and elsewhere. According to these austere disciples of Cornelius Jansen, theater and ballet encouraged self-love and bad morals. So much delight and enjoyment could not be condoned! In a Jansenist perspective, acting and dancing were sinful;Angélique Arnauld broadened this condemnation even further, asserting that art was nothing but lies and vanity. With the same kind of reasoning (or lack of it), the University of Paris joined the Jansenist excoriation of theater, whether such theater was Jesuitsponsored or not. In 1685, putting an end to a centuries-long tradition, the University suppressed all stage performances in its precincts. It was precisely as a school for teaching virtue that the French Jesuits envisioned the arts of drama and dance. To pirouette, to preach, to paint: audiences could be taught moral lessons as they viewed a performance on stage,just as audiences were edified by pulpit oratory and by reUgious painting. Teach, delight, and move hearts from vice to virtue: the Jesuits believed that the actor or dancer could do this just as well as the orator or painter. More speculative, and thus most intriguing, is Rock's discussion of gender and the Jesuit stage. Noting that female characters and personifications were played by boys, Rock asks if any of the dancers borrowed from the Opera were women. Some of the best Opera dancers of that era were women; if masks and voluminous costumes permitted male students to play female roles, did they also aUow women to play male roles? Examining the moral messages conveyed at Louis-le-Grand performances, Rock also asserts that audiences were not presented with a "misogynist" theater, but rather with one that conveyed "a certain respect for women as decision makers and independent thinkers, capable of challenging the assumptions of men" (p. 176). If Rock is correct on this last BOOK REVIEWS355 point, historians inclined to classify the Catholic Reformation as "patriarchal" may need to revise such a label. Thomas Worcester, SJ. College ofthe Holy Cross An Irish Theologian in Enlightenment France: LukeJoseph Hooke 1714-96. By Thomas O'Connor. (Portland, Oregon: Four Courts Press. 1995. Pp. 218. $39.50.) Readers of R. R. Palmer's Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth Century France wiU recognize the name. Luke Joseph Hooke, a Parisian doctor, professor at the Sorbonne,was directly associated with the two major confrontations between the Faculty of Theology of Paris and the French Enlightenment: the theses ofAbbé de Prades and the censure ofJ. J. Rousseau's Emile. He wrote influential theological treatises that had him catalogued as a CathoUc apologist. In this work, that appears to be adapted from a doctoral dissertation, Thomas O'Connor attempts to reconsider this judgment by looking at the context as weU as the content ofHooke's theological vision. The book could be...

Derra de Moroda's Collection of Baroque dance sources

It was in London that she started collecting dance sources of all kinds, and it was here that she started to realize the importance of dance history after having visited the British libraries, as we can learn from the above quotation. Thus it was it in England that her deep interest in dance research originated. As a dance historian she had started as a competent translator of Gregorio Lambranzi's Neue und curieuse theatralische TantzSchul, published by Cyril W. Beaumont for the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing in 1928. Later on in 1936 she was lucky enough to discover in the Bavarian State library in Munich the original manuscript designs for Johann Georg Puschner's plates, that served as iconographic demonstrations for Lambranzi's instructions in this most precious dance book, published in Nuremberg in 1716. The last sentence of her introduction to the facsimile of this manuscript, edited by her New York friend and publisher Al Pischl,2 characterises her attitude as a scholar most adequately:

Breaking down barriers in the study of Renaissance and Baroque dance

Starting in the nineteenth century, the terms Renaissance and Baroque became used to indicate two distinct and distinguishable periods with characteristic artistic and cultural features.* The terms, however, have different connotations in different fields-art, literature, and music-and, obviously, different meanings in different countries. Because of these and other ambiguities, the designations Renaissance and

Steps through Time: Selected Dance Vocabulary of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Bourriee, chaconne, courante, gavotte, menuet, passacaille, rigaudon all are familiar terms used by musicians and dancers to designate characteristic dance types in the period usually referred to as the Baroque. The same terms are also found in Baroque dance vocabulary to designate particular steps or groupings of steps. While the manner of performing these steps has been widely debated among dance historians and musicologists in the second half of this century, the usage of that dance vocabulary and technique in the post-Baroque/pre-Romantic ballet period (that is, during the second half of the eighteenth century and the first three decades of the nineteenth century) has received less attention. This discussion will centre on the development of the dance step vocabulary and technique in that period, delineating the changes and constants that can be discerned from one dance era to the next. In other words, what are the technical connections linking 'Baroque' dance and 'Romantic' ballet that can be discovered from studying the development of these selected steps and step-units?1 Certain items in the Baroque dance step vocabulary take their names from dance types, but, with two major exceptions, those same dance step-units can be found in several different dance types. Thus, for example, the following steps are not exclusively performed in the correspondingly named dance type:

Dance Notations Published in England c. 1700-1740 and Related Manuscript Material

Work is in progress on a bibliographical study of notations for court and theatre dances published in England between c. 1700 and c. 1740. The aim of this research is to provide a secure documentary basis for the study of baroque court and theatre dance, by means of a systematic record and analysis of the extant notations. Such background is essential to any attempt to place baroque dance in its proper historical context and also provides a valuable starting point for modern reconstruction and performance of the dances concerned, as well as throwing light on developments in theatre dance after the early 18th century. We have excluded country dances (published or manuscript) from the project, since they form a source extensive enough to demand study in their own right, and because they illustrate an aesthetic and cultural aspect of early-18th-century life which may be regarded as quite distinct from that represented by court and theatre dance.

Court, Church, and Province: Dancing in the Netherlands, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

While considerable scholarly attention has begun to turn to Baroque dance, researchers have most frequently investigated French or English sources. The Netherlands, strongly influenced by both of these nations, has perhaps been overlooked because of its small size, its seemingly minor role relative to larger powers in world affairs in this period, and the difficulty of non-Dutch scholars with the language. Nevertheless, the flourishing Dutch court, the nation's extensive commercial activity, and the cultural wealth of the Netherlands make research into the theatre and dance of this period rewarding and enlightening. Further, the excellent research facilities available in the Netherlands make research in that country a scholar's delight. The intention of this study is to document the dancing activities of the Dutch court, to contrast these with dancing in a distant province of the land, and to explore the effects of religious attitudes on both of these situations.

The projection of affect in Baroque dance music

was undeniably one of the most important aspects of musical composition and performance in the Baroque, discussions of affect in sources from the period are few, and those that do occur are frustratingly vague and of little help in shedding light on a confusing issue.' In this article I shall attempt to illuminate to some extent the Baroque musician's concept of affect and the means used in the composition and performance of one musical genre for projecting affect. Perhaps the general failure of musicians of the period to come to grips with the concept of affect and passions should come as no surprise to us. After all, the human emotions and their workings are highly abstract and intangible and hence elusive, and were especially so for the rational Baroque mind. Furthermore, it is clear from the early sources that their authors assumed in their musically literate readers a grasp of the essentials of affective practice gained through musical training or some innate sensitivity. However, two commentators of the period stand out for their comprehensive treatment of the subject, and it is upon them that I wish to concentrate here.

The minuet: An elegant phoenix

Of all the dances popular from the accession of Louis XIV to the throne of France in 1661 until the French Revolution in 1789, the minuet is surely the most universally associated with that elegant period, not only because of its great popularity in its heyday, but because it was the only baroque and rococo dance of that dancing time to be incorporated into the classical symphony and sonata, thereby remaining to the present day in the public ear (though not its eye), as a delightful reminder of an earlier time. Because of its currency, then, amateurs today are just as curious

Impressions of Aston Magna'S School of Baroque Music and Dance

Impressions of Aston Magna'S School of Baroque Music and Dance