Baroque Dance Links

Organised by topic – most links occur in more than one category.

Informational General Information Primary Sources Dance/Ballet Histories Video Clips Organisations UK USA Canada France Germany Austria Switzerland Belgium/Netherlands/Luxembourg Sweden Czech Republic Spain Poland Hungary Australia Japan People Specifically about individuals Alphabetical listing

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Recent additions

• 2nd May: Stockholm Baroque Dancers – Dance company run by Bétina Marcolin and Karin Modigh.  (Karin Modigh also gives regular baroque dance classes in Stockholm, links and contact details in her profile.)  (Svenska/English)
• New website 1st May: L'Eclat des Muses – Directed by Christine Bayle, based in Paris.  (Français)
• 21st December: The Early Music Show: Baroque Dance – The regular BBC Radio 3 programme dedicated an episode to dance.  It was broadcast twice: Jan 5th, lunchtime and Jan 12th/13th, midnight.  [Radio ... dance??]
• 8th December: Sarah Hixon – Choreographer, dancer and teacher based in Ohio.  Mainly working in modern dance, but she also has an interest in baroque dance.  Her website includes a relevant essay The Social Etiquette & Politics of Dance, and a video of her dancing a solo sarabande.  [Nice video, well worth the download.]
• 5th December: La Camargo Dancing – Another version of the painting by Lancret.  On view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.  (I had already listed the version at the Wallace Collection.)  [I'd treat the blurb about Mlle. Camargo as dubious – they list the oft-repeated things, and I have never seen a primary source reference for any of them.  In particular, she certainly did not invent toe shoes, and the most cursory flick through Lambranzi will show many skirts that reveal the lower leg.]
• Announcement 4th December: I have started, somewhat experimentally, adding links to relevant products for sale on Amazon.com.  I am adding these because first, I think they will be useful – Amazon, or the people that through sell through them, often represent good value for money – and second, to help fund this website.  I hope the latter aspect hasn't affected my judgement on the former.  The funding part works because if you follow one of the links from my site and subsequently order something on Amazon, I get a small percentage (typically around 4%).  Buying via these links does not cost you anything extra, and I doubt the number of purchases will be large enough for me to even cover hosting costs, so you're not going to make me rich.  I also encourage you to shop around if you're looking for cheaper prices – second-hand is particularly good for this – or if you wish to support smaller independent shops or show your appreciation to publishers by buying directly from them.
• 12th November: Handel in Hamburg – A CD of instrumental music by the young Handel, played by the Parley of Instruments directed by Peter Holman.  None of the music here is for extant choreographies, however much of it is dance music.  [Find on Amazon.com]  [I'm listing this CD as a personal recommendation.  A recording of baroque dance music is nothing unusual in itself, however a recording in which more than a handful of tracks are suitable for dancing is unusual.  So this is for dancers, who, I think, will love it (though of course there will be disagreements about tempi), and for musicians as a demonstration of one way to play that is both appropriate for dancing and musically satisfying.]
• 11th November: Chorégraphie, Andrew Lawrence-King – A CD of music from Feuillet's dance collections played on the baroque triple harp.  [Find on Amazon.com]  [Don't buy this expecting to be able to dance to many of the pieces.  It's beautifully and sensitively played, but it often lacks rhythmic purpose even though the beat is always clear.  It's not that the tempi are wildly off (dancers don't agree about tempi anyway) but unfortunately he has a tendency towards the languorous that affects either the tempo or the mood of many of the pieces, nudging them out of the zone of danceability.  This languor shows itself in the slow pieces, where he has a habit of inserting small pauses at cadences (a cardinal, but lamentably common sin in playing dance music), and the lively pieces, where he never seems to achieve liveliness, even when the tempo is around the right area of the metronome.  Overall, worth getting if you want to listen to some favourite dance tunes played as purely instrumental pieces, but not if you are the sort of person that gets irritated when baroque dance music isn't played to your definition of correctness.  Disappointing really because ALK and his Harp Consort are so good in the Spanish and Latin-American repertoire.]