Dance treatises represent the first attempt in Western European culture to preserve dances in writing.(The first systematic form of dance notation did not appear until 1700, with Feuillet's Choréégraphie ou l'art de déécrire la dance, par caracreres, figures et signes déémonstratifs .) In general, these treatises appear to serve a dual purpose: 1) As apologies to critics of the practice of social dance, they offer a conception of dance as a political, civil, and moral virtue, and a necessary skill in the socialization and education of any gentleman or lady. 2) To address issues of choreographic practice by means of teaching basic principles, definitions and theories of dance (Franko,1986,p.10-11).
Fifteenth Century Dance Manuals
The prominent texts in fifteenth century Europe were Domenico da Piacenza's, De arte saltandi et choreas ducendi (c.1416), Antonio Cornazano's Libro dell'arte del danzare (1455), Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro's De practica seu arte tripudii (1463),and the undated and unentitled manuscript of Giovanni Ambrosio. Each of these works set forth some basic principles of the dance. For Domenico da Piacenza, these are "measure", "memory", "manner", "division of the terrain", and "air." Guglielmo Ebreo and Ambrosio add "body movement" to the above. Cornazano states the principles as "measure", "manner", "air", "diversity", and "division of the terrain."(Ibid,pp.3-4)
Sixteenth Century Dance Manuals
These later treatises include: Fabritio Caroso's Il Ballarino (1581), Thoinot Arbeau's Orchesographie (1588), and Cesare Negri's Le Gratie d'Amore (1602). The works of Caroso and Arbeau are written in the form of a Socratic dialogue between a dancing master and his pupil (this same dialogue form had been used one hundred years earlier by Guglielmo Ebreo). They begin in the form of an apology, extolling the virtues of dance, and progress into an explanation of particular steps. Of particular interest, is Caroso's and Arbeau's attention to movement quality and to the aesthetic of gesture and step execution.(Ibid)
As apologies for the art and practice of dance, authors stressed the edifying potential of the art form. Treatises argued that dancing imparted grace and moral virtues to those who paid strict attention to the basic principles of practice and to the rules governing proper conduct and comportment. For those authors intent on offering a legitimization for the art of dancing, it was logical to reference the work of classical Greek philosophers.
In De practica, Ebreo writes,
This virtue of the dance is simply an outward manifestation of the movements of the soul, which must accord with the measured and perfect consonances of that harmony which, through our hearing, moves down with delight to our intellect and our affections, where there is then generated certain sweet commotions which, as if pent up unnaturally, struggle mightily to escape and display themselves in action (Sparti,p.89).
The above citation bears testimony that these early dance theorists adhered to, and exploited for their purposes, the Neo-Platonic conceit that the harmonious movements of the parts of the dancing body paralleled the movements of all human bodies in a well-ordered world, and mirrored on the earth the cosmic dance of the heavens (Sutton,p.21).
In Caroso's work, the author states that certain steps (such as the dactylic, spondaic, Sapphic, and dexterous, steps), were actually derived from ancient verse and that the proper execution of these steps can be learned by examining the structure of the metered verse of Ovid and Virgil. The dancing master explains the "Semigrave Stopped Step" to his pupil as follows:
...so that after having taking a step with your left foot, you join your right foot to it. The immortal poet Ovid demonstrated this well in his verse (for one calls that joining of feet caesura ), so that when scanning one of his pentameter lines we find first a dactyl, then a spondee, and finally a caesura, and here we stop a little. Now from this [act of] stopping has come the term stopped steps.
In a later passage (Rule LXVIII), Caroso states that the term Corinthian Step is derived from the fourth order of Classical architecture, and "from the way these graceful movements pull at the heartstings, causing onlookers to become enamoured of them.(Sutton,pp.102,129-133).
In Orchesography, Arbeau goes through an elaborate defense of dance based on a history of dance in the ancient world with specific reference made to classical gods, and philosophers (in particular, Lucian's, dialogue "The Dance"). He goes so far as to attempt to correlate specific sixteenth century dances with the dance types of ancient Greece:
It is true that we compare the Emmeleia to our pavans and basse dances, the Kordax to galliards, tordians, lavoltas, gavottes, branles of Champagne and Burgundy, gay branles and mixed branles, the Sikinnis to double and single branles, and the Pyrric to the dance we call buffens or mattachins. (Arbeau,p.15)
It is difficult to know whether treatises, such as Arbeau's, represented the dance of their day, or "a utopian ideal" of what theorists thought dance should be like (Marko,p.7). Arbeau tells his pupil,
Our predecessors danced pavans, basse dances, branles and corantos; the basse dance has been out of date some forty or fifty years, but I foresee that wise and dignified matrons will restore it to fashion as being a type of dance full of virtue and decorum. (Evans,p.51)
One of Arbeau's purposes in writing a dance manual was to elevate the status of dance and, by extension, the status of the professional dancing master. Arbeau's desire to reconstruct some of these old dances can be interpreted as a way of counteracting what he considered to be the corruption of dance by his contemporaries (Marko,p.82,note 23). When his pupil asks him to write down the tunes of a pavan and a basse dance, Arbeau replies,
I shall do so willingly, in the hope that such honourable dances are reinstated and replace the lascivious, shameless ones introduced in their stead to the regret of wise lords and ladies and matrons of sound and chaste judgement. (Evans,p.59)
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