Dancing Master Research Articles

Tibetan sacred dance: a journey into the religious and folk traditions

From the time Buddhism entered the mythical land of the snows, Tibetans have expressed their spiritual devotion and celebrated their culture with dance. Only since the diaspora of the Tibetan people have outsiders witnessed these performances and when they do, no one explains why these dances exist and what they really mean. Ellen Pearlman, who studied with Lobsang Samten, the ritual dance master of the Dalai Lama's Namgyal monastery in India, set out to discover the meaning behind these practices. She found the story of the indigenous shamanistic Bon religion being superseded by Buddhism - a story full of dangerous and illicit liaisons, brilliant visions, secret teachings, betrayals, and unrevealed yogic practices. Pearlman examines the four lineages that developed sacred cham - the secret ritual dances of Tibet's Buddhist monks - and achi lhamo storytelling folk dance and opera. She describes the mental and physical process of preparing for these dances, the meaning of the iconography of the costumes and masks, the spectrum of accompanying music, and the actual dance steps as recorded in a choreography book dating back to the Fifth Dalai Lama in 1647. Beautiful colour photographs from the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts and Pearlman's own images of touring monastic troupes complement the rare historic black-and-white photos from the collections of Sir Charles Bell, chief of the British Mission in Tibet during the life of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. - Lavishly illustrated with colour and rare historic photographs depicting the dances, costumes, and masks. - Looks at both sacred (cham) and folk (achi lhamo) forms and their role in the development, practice, and culture of Tibetan Buddhism.

Hamish Scott Henderson, 1919-2002

Folklorists around the world have been saddened by the death of Hamish Henderson in Edinburgh on 8 March 2002. Those who had the privilege of spending time with him will recall encounters at 27 George Square, or in Sandy Bell's down the road, Padstow on a May morning, at a ceilidh, a folk festival, or in the field. He was equally at home in the lecture hall and in the travellers' gelly. Others will remember how good he was at answering queries that came by mail from all parts of the globe. He was a staunch friend to many who will be grateful for his life, his work, and the encouragement that he gave to Carrying Stream of our tradition. He began to collect in the 1930s, finding folklore enthusiasts and sources while at school, during his Cambridge years, in the context of refugee work for the Society of Friends, and during active wartime service in the Desert and Italian campaigns in the Intelligence Corps. In the late 1940s, work with the Workers' Educational Association took him to Northern Ireland and the travel stipend that accompanied the Somerset Maugham Prize, awarded to his Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica, allowed him a return visit to Italy, which much later bore fruit in the publication of his translations of Antonio Gramsci. It is no exaggeration to declare that Hamish Henderson's passion for Scotland's cultural traditions was literally a life-long one. From his earliest childhood, he heard songs from his mother and grandmother, in his native Blairgowrie and elsewhere, he was a pupil of Dancie Reid, one of Scotland's last itinerant dancing masters, and all this established a ground bass for his extraordinary life, a life that impinged on the lives of so many others. All of its themes--language study, soldiering, writing, collecting, teaching, translating and activism in humanistic causes--came together in his long career in the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh. The catalyst for the creation of the School of Scottish Studies was Angus McIntosh, appointed in 1948 to the Forbes Chair of English Language and General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. With colleagues in the university and encouraged by friends such as the folklorists John Lorne Campbell and his wife Margaret Fay Shaw Campbell, he had a vision of language and folklore collection and study, Gaelic and Scots, going hand in hand in systematic programmes that would create living resources on which the nation could draw. Models of good practice, encouragement, and practical help came from several quarters but most notably from Seamus Delargy, head of the Irish Folklore Commission, and Dag Stromback, director of the Swedish Folklore Archives in Uppsala. They were swift to support McIntosh in lobbying decision-makers, providing materials, and offering training opportunities. The School was handselled with two unique archival gifts. One, from the Irish Folklore Commission, consisted of copies of all the material collected in Scotland by Calum Maclean from Raasay, the School's first full-time collector, while on its staff in the 1940s. The other was twenty-five reels of remarkable recordings, copies of tapes made by the folklorist Alan Lomax, visiting from the United States in 1951 and conducted around Scotland by Hamish Henderson and Calum Maclean at the instigation of Jimmy Miller (Ewan MacColl), to collect Scottish material for a Columbia Records LP series. The wealth to be gathered was evident to Maclean and Henderson. …

A Valentine for the King

Amongst the extensive collection of English country dances available in publications of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, there are four dances only that are recorded by three different authors. Just one of these has been selected for close scrutiny to see what information is available on the manner of performing the dance, and what generalisations might be made about the country dance, particularly as it was practised in England. The dance is called Valentine's Day. It first appeared in the supplement to the Sixth Edition of The Dancing Master published by John Playford in 1679, and continued to be published unaltered in successive editions until 1728.1 The second record of the dance is in the first of two manu-

Bringing It All Back Home: The Influence of Irish Music

Irish music transcends all national boundaries, and yet expresses intensely the spirit of the place - that longing of all exiles for their home country. For the story of Irish music is also the story of centuries-long emigration to, especially, America and England. With a blend of social history, interviews with musicians and analysis of technique, this book attempts to chart some of those journeys, to visit some of the places reached - the Appalachians, Chicago, New York, London - and to provide an account of how Irish music eventually wound its way back home again, enriched, re-invigorated and changed. Way back, Irish traditional music belonged to remote rural communities - the hauntingly beautiful sean nos, unaccompanied songs sung in Irish, the ballads, the jigs, reels, slides and polkas taught by itinerant dancing masters. But it was in America that Irish music re-invented itself, to meet the musical needs of the New World, and 20th-century technology also sent it off in new directions to meld with rock, country, pop, electric folk, blues and the avant-garde. This book chronicles those transformations, from the Clancy Brothers and Bob Dylan, Planxty and Clannad, to the Pogues, Van Morrison, U2, Sinead O'Connor and Christy Moore, and to John Cage's Roaratorio. It aims to show, too, how modern music has been alchemized by the use of traditional Irish techniques and instruments like the bodhran, the harp and the uilleann pipes to form that unique sound that is so unmistakably Irish. The book ties in with a BBC2 television series in March and April 1991.

A Work Book by Kellom Tomlinson: Commonplace Book of an Eighteenth Century English Dancing Master Dance & Music no. 6 A facsimile edition edited by Jennifer Shennan Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1992, x + 102p., ill., some colour, £20, ISBN 0-945193-31-9

<i>A Work Book by Kellom Tomlinson: Commonplace Book of an Eighteenth Century English Dancing Master</i> Dance &amp; Music no. 6 A facsimile edition edited by Jennifer Shennan Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1992, x + 102p., ill., some colour, £20, ISBN 0-945193-31-9

Dancing princes and a newly discovered Tomlinson manuscript

A New Most Excellent Dancing Master: The Journal of Joseph Lowe's Visits to Balmoral and Windsor (1852–1860) to Teach Dance to the Family of Queen Victoria. Edited by Allan Thomas. Illustrated. 135 pp. New York: Pendragon Press, 1992. $32.00. A Work Book by Kellom Tomlinson: Commonplace Book of an Eighteenth‐Century English Dancing Master, A Facsimile Edition. Edited by Jennifer Shennan. Illustrated. 102 pp. New York: Pendragon Press, 1992. $32.00.

A Workbook By Kellom Tomlinson: Commonplace Book of An Eighteenth-Century English Dancing Master, A Facsimile Edition, edited by Jennifer Shennan. Dance &amp; Music no. 6. Stuyvesant, New York: Pendragon Press, 1992. x + 102 pp., illustrations, colored plates, appendix, bibliography. $32.00.

A Workbook By Kellom Tomlinson: Commonplace Book of An Eighteenth-Century English Dancing Master, A Facsimile Edition, edited by Jennifer Shennan. Dance &amp; Music no. 6. Stuyvesant, New York: Pendragon Press, 1992. x + 102 pp., illustrations, colored plates, appendix, bibliography. $32.00.

Mr Kellom Tomlinson, English Dancing Master

Sonnerie, the Wellington-based baroque music and dance ensemble, designed a programme to premiere the dances from the Tomlinson Workbook, in a 1989 Wellington season which was then followed by a North Island tour. The six dances, if performed on their own, would have lasted mere minutes. (The man's solo sarabande was not used but the Tomlinson version of the minuet was included.) Ken Duncum was commissioned to write a play based on the few known facts of Tomlinson's life, incorporating the dances at key points of the script. By separating the dances and providing them with a dramatic context, the play serves to highlight the distinctive quality of each.

Eighteenth Century Dance Instruction: The Course of Study Advocated by Gottfried Taubert

imminent departure of its respected dancing master provided the impetus for the creation of the most voluminous dance treatise of the eighteenth century. Its author, Gottfried Taubert, that most thorough and conscientious German dance master who practised his profession in Leipzig and Danzig, recorded his considerable insight into the history, theory and practice of the dance of his time in his Rechtschaffener Tantzmeister (Leipzig, 1717).' The body of the work consists of three volumes totalling 1176 pages. A preface, a detailed table of contents, and an index further swell the work to 1271 pages. This formidable length is initially discouraging, but a closer examination of Taubert's work is highly informative since he tackled an unusually large array of topics. The vastness of Taubert's work is due in part to his thoroughness but also to the different roles he assumed. He was not only a dance and etiquette instructor, but also saw himself as an historian and moralist. He exercised this latter role to justify the existence and practice of dance, to increase the respectability of his profession, and to save it from destruction at the hand of impostors and zealots alike. Therefore his defence of dance is lengthy and ever present throughout the work.2 Finally he saw himself as a public servant in the guise of an educator presenting his expertise for the benefit of the general public. Therefore he included in his work a translation into German of Feuillet's Choregraphie.3 His reasons for doing so concern the rarity and great cost of the work, the fact that it was inaccessible to those not familiar with the French language, and the fact that the French dance masters had deliberately kept it a secret. Apparently many foreigners studied in France and returned without having heard of the notation system since only a considerable bribe could produce some information. Although the discussion concerning the French style of dance and his translation of Feuillet's Choregraphie form the centrepiece of his work, Taubert's concerns extend to many other areas of the

David Garrick and the Dancing Master's Apprentice

All too little is known about the recruitment and training of dancers for the theatre in eighteenth-century London. A substantial number of the best-publicized dancers were French imports, a vogue for foreign dancers and singers having started as early as 1698.1 Throughout the century dancers continued to come across the Channel, both for short engagements and for fullseason jobs. A few who found conditions to their liking accepted positions as ballet master to Drury Lane or Lincoln's Inn Fields. The French never totally displaced English-born dancers, but their more complex idea of theatrical dancing gave impetus to the separation of dance from acting as a performance speciality. Like native dancing masters, the foreigners offered lessons in both social and theatrical dancing, and their students and imitators gradually increased the number of polished dancers available to the theatres. Many professional dancers belonged to theatrical families, and their careers developed as a matter of course. But not everyone was so lucky in birth. How did an outsider break into the business? Who initiated advanced training, the eager student or the dancing master with an eye for talent? How long did it take to become more than an accomplished social dancer? What did it cost? Did a theatre job come automatically or only by competition? What sort of income might a talented novice hope to make, and how much more money if he or she graduated to the rank of soloist?

Hasta as Discourse on Music: T. Balasaraswati and Her Art

The late T. Balasaraswati (1918–1984) is considered one of the foremost exponents of the south Indian dance form known today as Bharata Nātyam. Her mother (Jayammal) was a well-known singer and her grandmother (Vina Dhanammal) was a great vina artist who was a descendant of a dancer and musician (Papammal) in the Tanjore Court in the eighteenth century. Balasaraswati was trained by Kandappa Pillai, the brilliant dance master of the highly codified Tanjore Court style of Bharata Nāṭyam. A supreme artist who dominated the field for a generation and enriched the tradition, Balasaraswati was particularly noted for her interpretations of themes dealing with human striving for union with the Divine.In the Bharata Nāṭyam concert repertoire the padam has been considered by connoisseurs to be the litmus test for a dancer's artistic range, especially in the Tanjore Court style. This performance item is a rhapsodic song with a poetic text that is used as a medium for the creation of mood through drama, with the dancer using primarily hand gestures, facial expressions, and stylized walking. Critical to this “drama” is the use of hand gestures, known as hastas. Dance gestures are most often referred to as hastas, but are occasionally called mudrās, which is the Sanskrit word used for temple ritual gestures. To eliminate confusion regarding these two words, the hand gestures described here are called hastas. In padams each text line is repeated any number of times with different vocal and dramatic interpretations. The expectation is for the dancer to transcend the given poetic text (sāhitya) and sophisticated music conception of the padam in order to bring life to the hidden meanings and moods.

Carole, Rondeau &amp; Branle in Ireland 1300-1800: Part II Social and Theatrical Residues 1550-1800

In the first part of this article,1 evidences of the use of carole, rondeau and various kinds of branle in some sections of society in Ireland in the 13th, 14th and early 15th centuries were presented. This second part deals with residues and adaptations of some of these, long after the political-cum-cultural influences which brought them to Ireland had become diluted and virtually disappeared. As with other aspects of Irish history, there is a paucity of evidence about dance of any kind in the 15th and early 16th centuries. From the later 16th century on, there are descriptions of various kinds of dancing, mostly in English and none technically explicit; these include ritual rings and processionals in spring and at midsummer, recreational dancing round domestic fires, sword dances and male jigs. As in contemporary England (though not in Scotland) there is little hint of carole; the social circumstances in which that communal, tightly integrated text-plus-tune-pluschoreographic structure could flourish were gone. There was certainly some kind of dance repertory considered in England to be Irish, even if it were, in fact, from the English Pale, with little or no native Irish character. According to Fynes Moryson, in 1602 Queen Elizabeth I was much pleased to watch Country Dances in her privy chamber and 'Irish tunes are at this time much liked'.2 Conversely, there must also have been a repertory of Irish branles which were performable to other than Irish music. In Nicholas Vallet's Secretum Musarum, a collection of current music arranged for lute published in Amsterdam in 161516, the music titled 'Brande Yrlandt' ('Branle d'Irlande' in the later French edition) is an English tune, titled 'Lord Zouches Maske' in Thomas Morley's First booke of Consort lessons (1599) and simply 'Chanson Engelsae' in another Netherlandish lute book.3 There is slightly more explicit evidence from the 17th century. A few tunes with Irish titles, some with dance figures and some in tune-only supplements, were included in several editions of Playford's Dancing Master. 'The Irish Lady or Aniseed-water

Review: Record: Country Dances. John Playford's English Dancing Master, 1651, Harmonia Mundi

Review: Record: Country Dances. John Playford's English Dancing Master, 1651, Harmonia Mundi

Dancing at a Dutch university: The Franeker dancing master, 1682–1796

The bitter struggle to initiate the position of dancing master the second oldest university in the Netherlands, the Franeker Academy, was fought in the winter of 1682-83. The decided victors were the champions of the dance, led by a professor of law, Ulricus Huber. After the rich documentation available about this contest, one would hope for as steady a stream of information about the rest of the dancing masters' history until the post was finally abolished in 1796, fifteen years before the Academy itself was finally closed in 1811. Yet exactly where or when the first dancing master, Jan Baptista Cadillan, gave his earliest lessons the Franeker Academy cannot be established from existing documents. Once the clergymen gave up the fight against dancing the university, the master's activities apparently progressed quietly enough to create no cause for further publication or complaint. As quoted earlier from Friesland's Gedeputeerede Staten (Delegated Council of State), the original charge to Jan Baptista had called for him to give lessons at least three times per week in Franeker.1 His first obligation remained his service to the royal household, and he was expected to continue living in Leeuwarden, traveling by horse, as

The Preferred Pas de Menuet

The recurrence of an uncomplicated step pattern made it possible for 18th-century ladies and gentlemen of varying abilities to perform the Minuet. In 1762, Giovanni-Andrea Gallini, director of dances at the Royal Theatre in the Haymarket, London, said that the success of the Minuet stemmed in part from “the possibility of dancing it to so many different airs, though the steps are invariable.” Thirty-seven years earlier the dancing master Pierre Rameau describes the emergence of a simplified version of the pas de Menuet that replaced a more demanding step. Eighteen-century European dancing masters, such as Charles Pauli, repeatedly describe the Minuet step as natural, plain and unaffected—a step that is “perfect” for performance. Because the Minuet steps were successful and widely performed, dancing masters taught its established steps, not steps based on their own whims or creations. An analysis of a wide range of 18th-century manuals reveals that a preferred version of the Minuet step emerged in the literature and remained relatively unchanged to near the end of the century.

Santiago de Murcia

Santiago de Murcia In her letter in EM Jan 82 p. 125 Monica Hall mentions a large number of com positions by Francois Le Cocq, Francois Campion, Robert de Visee and Fran cesco Corbetta that Santiago de Murcia inserted into his Passacalles y obras (1732). Although I am sure that she arrived at her conclusions independent of my own research, last year these same correspondences were brought to light in my 'Santiago de Murcia: Spanish Theorist and Guitarist of the Early Eighteenth Century', 2 vols. (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1981). Unfortunately, Ms Hall incorporates several errors into her brief letter. She mentions 13 pieces by Le Cocq in Murcia's Passacalles; there are, in fact. 16. In most of these instances Murcia preserves the basic structure of the original, but in a few cases he sig nificantly alters and reshapes the model. He expands several movements bor rowed from Le Cocq's Suite in G minor by inserting recurring motives and harmonic passages that forge the suite into a unified whole. The 11 pieces Richard Pinnell lists as being by Cor betta (a figure that Ms Hall accepts) should be pruned to only six—the remaining five are actually by Campion and Le Cocq. The correspondences between Murcia and his contemporaries do not stop with Le Cocq, Campion, De Visee and Corbetta; I have discovered that all 59 of the contredanses in Murcia's Resumen de acompanar la pane con la guitarra (Antwerp, 1714) are taken from the publications of the French dance master Raoul-Auger Feuillet. Further more, thematic similarities between several preludes hint that Murcia may have been familiar with the music of Henry Grenerin and Antoine Carre. A detailed table of these correspondences can be found in my dissertation and my forthcoming article 'Santiago de Mur cia: the French Connection in Baroque Spain', Journal of the Lute Society of America, 15 (1982).

Ballet Injuries.

In brief Only in the last five years has medical care for ballet injuries received more than perfunctory professional interest, although ballet companies in other countries have long had regular medical attention. Most ballet injuries are to the foot, ankle, knee, thigh, hip, spine, and related muscles. Dance masters emphasize that injuries occur because of faulty technique and that any cure is only temporary unless the fault is corrected. Injured dancers are impatient to return to classes or performance because of intense competition and a short career span. Permitting the dancer to do as many of the ballet exercises as possible without further injury will alleviate anxiety and promote cooperation from the dancer.

Music for the Ballets of John Weaver

FOR STUDYING THE DANCE-DRAMAS of John Weaver, we have the three libretti he published 1 and his comments elsewhere on his work, but one missing element has been the music to which they were danced. Weaver tells us that the music for The Loves of Mars and Venus was by Henry Symonds, who composed the Symphonies, and Mr. Firbank (Charles Fairbank), who wrote the airs for the dancing part.2 But the score wasn't published, and-like most of the theatre music of the time, including the scores for all of Weaver's other ballets-it has vanished, presumably either thrown out or burned. Music was easily come by in the eighteenth-century theatre and as easily discarded, although some tunes were re-used several times in different contexts and some popular songs and dances were eventually published, while other music has survived in manuscript.3 But even when a large-scale score was successful enough to be published, ordinarily only the vocal parts were included. Later collections of dance music, especially the Comic Tunes from the pantomimes, do exist, but as far as one can tell they include nothing from Weaver's ballets. One source for recovering some of the dance music from the theatres, including what may well be some music from Weaver ballets, does exist in the collections of tunes gathered for social dancing. The most famous of these collections is John Playford's The English Dancing Master, first published in 1651, which was so popular that revised editions were put out regularly by Playford and his successors under the title The Dancing Master until the eighteenth edition, c. 1728.4 In about 1713 a second collection was published as The Dancing Master: Vol. the Second, which went through four editions by 1728, while by about 1727 a third volume had been

Research Travel Report

With the aid of a grant from the Ohio State University College of the Arts, I spent July and August of 1975 travelling to various German and Austrian libraries in search of sources for the study of early 18th century German dance style, theatrical as well as social. More specifically my purpose was to locate and scan appropriate works and to obtain the information necessary to order microfilm copies for the Ohio State University Music and Dance Library. Time limitations dictated that the actual working with the materials would have to take place later at Ohio State. Although my research interest had a rather specific focus, I was also on the look-out for any other interesting material dealing with social and theatrical dance, as well as information about the role of dance masters and their teaching methods.

Playford's English Dancing Master, 1651. Margaret Dean-Smith. (Schott &amp; Co., Ltd., London, 1957.) xxxi + 90 pp. 42s.

Playford's English Dancing Master, 1651. Margaret Dean-Smith. (Schott &amp; Co., Ltd., London, 1957.) xxxi + 90 pp. 42s.