A major difference in the way that dance was regarded and practised in Paris and London during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries derives from the differing ways in which the subject was regulated. In France, Louis XIV’s creation of royal academies was part of an effective grand design intended to present an image of the king as the centre of a system of official organisations that developed and controlled nearly every aspect of the arts and sciences. The Académie Royale de Danse had been founded in 1661, avowedly to improve the standard of teaching dance to the nobility who took part in court ballets, for, as the opening clauses of the Academy’s charter complained, “we see few among our courtiers who are capable or adequately trained to dance in our Ballets”, their tuition having been left for too long to “so many ignorant and clumsy persons…astonishingly few capable of teaching…” and so on. But it was part of a wider cultural picture too, and within a few years painting, sculpture, literature, the sciences, architecture, and music were also represented by their own royal academies, all very clear in their objectives and loyalties. The overall effect in the dance world was to codify dance steps, regulate the training and employment of professional dancing-masters in Paris, and (under the control of Lully’s Académie Royale de Musique, which ran the Paris Opéra) shape much of the place of dance within French opera for the next several decades.
In England, the situation could not have been more different. The late Stuart and early Hanoverian monarchy took very little direct interest in theatrical dance and none at all in the supervision of the dance profession or the furtherance of dance as a central part of English culture. By 1700 commercial enterprise was the order of the day in England, and French dancers who came to perform in the London theatres found themselves in a strangely ambivalent situation of being simultaneously admired and despised, sometimes paid huge salaries (unlike their English counterparts) but otherwise ignored by officialdom unless they broke the law or became troublesome in some way. The only clue we have, for example, that the great French dancer-choreographer Guillaume-Louis Pecour visited London as a young man is a series of curt entries in the Lord Chamberlain’s records for May 1674 recording that Pecour and other dancers from the Paris Opéra, who had come to London to dance in Louis Grabu’s opera Ariadne at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane had made a separate agreement with Thomas Killigrew to dance some other work, but after two months of rehearsal, quibbles concerning pay, and the provision of new costumes, suddenly refused to perform, saying that they had no contract with anyone except Grabu. No more is heard of Pecour, let alone of his dancing, in London and it seems likely that he returned to Paris as quickly as he could, there to resume his meteoric rise to fame as a dancer in Lully’s tragédies en musique and subsequently as the director of dance at the Opéra.
Dance steps
What makes baroque dance instantly recognisable is its vocabulary of steps (which can be simple or highly ornamented), the technique they require, and the very exact way that they relate to the music. Diagrammatic tables and descriptions of steps, as codified in France by Beauchamp and Feuillet, were also published in England, Germany, Italy and Spain. Further refinements of the “French” style, as described by Pierre Rameau in France, and by John Essex and Kellom Tomlinson in England, also became available to dancing-masters and the general public as published treatises and manuals. They show that most of the dance steps in European dance repertoire of the ‘serious’ or ‘noble’ genre derived from a common step vocabulary based on French models. Particularly between English and French practice, the ways in which the steps were combined into phrases and sections of dance however could differ considerably. Very few baroque dances employed one generic step throughout - there is no universal dance called ‘the rigaudon’, or ‘the bourrée’, or any of the other dance types known in the orchestral and instrumental suites of the time. Many dances shared the same step vocabulary, and the choreographic characteristics of, say, a chaconne or a sarabande are much more complex than just what steps were done; thus another reason for the dances to be written down if they were to survive. Even the formal ballroom minuet, which comes closest to a generic dance in its steps and floor patterns, was full of surprises, variations, and elements of improvisation, as all the dance manuals stress.
|
|
|
|