Sites providing Information about Baroque Dance
See also: Music & Musicians → Information.
General Information
- Feuillet discussion list
- Information about the baroque dance mailing list (low traffic list, mainly announcements).
- Calendar of Historical Dance
- List of historical dance events, classes, balls, performances and summer schools, plus links, facsimiles.
- The Library of Congress' American Ballroom Companion
- Dance instruction manuals ca.1490–1920. Includes dance manuals and background information. See stuff I found on the LoC website, for a list of baroque-related contents.
- The Early Dance Circle
- UK-based early dance organisation whose pages contain an introduction to dance styles from the middle-ages to the 19th century, and But how do you know how they danced so long ago? (don't miss the link to part 2).
- Bob Daoust's Pages
- Lots of nice graphics, plus some information about baroque dance.
- La Belle Danse
- Baroque dance company whose site contains some background information.
- BaroqueDance.com
- Paige Whitley-Bauguess' site includes background information on baroque dance, with a nice introduction to reading notation.
- Ken Pierce's site
- Includes copies of several of his papers with accompanying material such as videos, plus a quick introduction to baroque dance in question-answer format.
- Crossing the Line – an Intro to Baroque Court Dance
- Brief class notes including background information, a few step descriptions and instructions for a ballroom minuet.
- Blakeney Manor: Dance & Music
- Includes Rameau/Essex's description of the minuet, and an essay The Social and Political Importance of Dance. Part of a Scarlet Pimpernel tribute site.
- La Musique Française au XVIIIème siècle
- Includes a section on ballet and dance. (Français)
- Virtual Feuillet (The Internet Archive)
- This is an archived version from 1997 of a web page that described a project to create an animated baroque dancer. The animations themselves do not seem to have been archived, however the pages do contain a description of Beauchamp-Feuillet notation. (English/Italiano)
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Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra Education: Unit 5 [Broken? 4th May 2008]
- For kids. Contains a description of baroque and late renaissance dance by Angene Feves.
- Wikipedia: Baroque dance
- An entry in an "open" encyclopedia – anyone can edit it. Last time I looked the early dance content was pretty inaccurate much of the time.
- CATNYPL: Baroque dancing
- From the catalogue of the New York Public Library. For other forms of historical dance, see this page of their catalogue.
- New York Public Library: 500 Years of Italian Dance
- Guide to an exhibition presented at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, October 2006 to January 2007. This exhibition brought two "new" Italian manuscript notations to the attention of scholars and dancers: Balletto per S.A.R. Il Sig. Principe di Galles by Bortolo Ganasetti (1729), and the apparently anonymous L'Ammazzone. Both are duets for a man and a woman, the first being a passepied and bourée comparable to other extant ball dances, and the second being more elaborate, starting in 6/4 with two step-units per bar, and finishing with a pair of bourées. There's a tiny bit of information about these dances on the website, but unfortunately no facsimile unless it's very well hidden.
- University of Waterloo (Canada) Dance Collection
- A selection of titles from the collection.
- CÉSAR: Calendrier Électronique des Spectacles sous l'Ancien Regime
- Database of performing arts in 17th and 18th century France, including events, people, places, productions and publications. (English/Français)
- Tanz zur Zeit von Madame de Pompadour
- Essay in German on dancing in the time of Madame de Pompadour. Part of the site Madame de Pompadour und ihre Zeit. (Deutsch)
- PeoplePlay UK, Theatre History Online
- Items from the collection at London's Theatre Museum. [There's lots of things scattered about this site, so you'll want to explore, but I'll quickly highlight their guided tours of Dance and Opera, their portrait of Hester Santlow/Booth, their early 17th-century costume designs, and a surviving 18th-century theatrical dancer's costume.]
- Barocktanz.com
- Peter Hoffmann provides a handy notation reference in German and English. (Deutsch)
- A Survey of the Loure Through Definitions, Music, and Choreographies
- By Julie Andrijeski, part of the work towards her doctorate. [Don't be put off reading this "thesis" thinking it might be hard going – it's highly readable, and since the author is both a musician and a dancer, she knows what she's talking about. If you already know basically what a loure is then it's unlikely to revolutionise your understanding of the form, but it certainly introduced me to lots of new sources, and sharpened up my ideas a bit.]
- The Social Etiquette & Politics of Dance
- An essay by Sarah Hixon.
- Historialliset Tanssit
- Finnish-language historical dance wiki – they have a category for Barokkitanssit. "Baroque" here includes country dancing, with the "real" baroque dancing being a few favourite beginner-level dances. I'll highlight that it includes the notation for the Gavotte du Roy, which I don't think is otherwise available online. (Suomi)
- The British Library: John Playford and The English Dancing Master
- A short guide to items in their collection. The documents cover country dancing, court dancing and comic theatrical dancing.
- The Hornpipe – Conference Papers
- Transcribed papers from a 1993 conference held in London. The main interest here is the overview of the 18th-Century 3/2 hornpipe by Madeleine Inglehearn.
- Sound Moves
- A conference on music and dance held in 2005 near London. The proceedings are available to download and include a couple of baroque-related items: Moira Goff, Trumpets and Flutes: Music and Dance in John Weaver's "The Loves of Mars and Venus", and Kimiko Okamoto, From Autonomy to Conformity: The Metrical Relationship between Music and Dance in Early Eighteenth-Century France. A third paper, Joellen A. Meglin et al., Music of the Body: Modern Minuets and Passepieds far from Passé, is mostly concerned with 20th century dance, but does touch on the baroque.
Primary Sources
- Dance Instruction Manuals
- From the Library of Congress' site. For a list of the baroque stuff that I've found, see my contents of the LOC site.
- Online-Choreographies from the Library of Congress
- An alternative interface to Feuillet's collections, Chorégraphie, and Book 2 of Tomlinson. From The Calendar of Historical Dance.
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The Books of John Weaver
- Scans of the first edition of Orchesography (Weaver's translation of Feuillet) and Of Time and Cadence in Dancing, plus an HTML transcription of Orchesography. All nicely indexed.
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Bibliothèque nationale de France: Gallica
- Large collection of facsimiles and transcriptions. (Français)
There's lots in there, but it's not easy to search by topic. Some things I've found:
[If your browser doesn't open the graphics files properly, you may need to explicitly save them as .pdf files.]
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La Sarabande d'Yssé (LMC 7660) and Folies d'Espagne pour Femme (LMC 4740)
- From the Stravaganze site.
- Dansomanie
- Ballet news and history site. It includes facsimiles of Feuillet and Lambranzi, but I'm not sure if it's still possible to navigate to them from the front page. (Français)
- Gavotte du Roy
- Facsimile of the notation from a Finnish-language historical dance wiki. (Suomi)
- The British Library: Renaissance and Early Modern Festival Books
- A collection of festival books from 1458 to 1697, with background information and photographic reproductions. ("Festival books" are books published in association with an event, they describe the celebrations, which often include theatrical entertainments. I think of them as being equivalent to a modern glossy souvenir programme, although they were largely conceived as propaganda.)
- Google Books
- A growing index of books. Contains short samples from modern books, and full copies of books that are out of copyright, if they have got to them. In the out-of-copyright category I have, so far, found the following:
- The first part of Taubert's Rechtschaffener Tanzmeister
- Tomlinson, The Art of Dancing Explained by Reading and Figures
- Feuillet's large 1704 collection of dances by Pécour
- Isaac/Weaver's A Collection of Ball Dances Perform'd at Court
- Pemberton, An Essay for the Further Improvement of Dancing
- Feldtenstein's Erweiterung der Kunst nach der Chorographie zu tanzen
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The Parfaict's Dictionnaire des théâtres de Paris – there are different volumes from different sources, but I pieced together a complete set all from Oxford University, so I'll link to those to save you digging: Tome Premier (A–B), Tome Second (C–F), Tome Troisième (G–N), Tome Quatrième (O–R), Tome Cinquième (S–T), Tome Sixième (V–Z), Tome Septième (additions/corrections).
Pictures
- Lambranzi, Neue und Curieuse Theatrialische Tantz-Schul
- A facsimile of the famous 1716 source, this version includes an introduction and plate descriptions in Italian. From the Dansomanie website.
- Mademoiselle de Camargo Dancing
- One version of the painting by Lancret. On view at the Wallace Collection, London.
- La Camargo Dancing
- Another version of the painting by Lancret. On view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. [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.]
- PeoplePlay UK, Theatre History Online
- Items from the collection at London's Theatre Museum. [There's lots of things scattered about this site, so you'll want to explore, but I'll quickly highlight their guided tours of Dance and Opera, their portrait of Hester Santlow/Booth, their early 17th-century costume designs, and a surviving 18th-century theatrical dancer's costume.]
- New York Public Library: Digital Gallery
- A huge collection of historical images, including ones related to dance. Do beware that many of their nominally 18th century images are 19th century images based on earlier originals, so there's a danger of seeing the 18th century through 19th century eyes. Having said that, here's what I've found, arranged roughly chronologically (they don't always give dates):
- Bibliothèque de la Danse de l'ESBCM
- Dance library in Montréal, Canada. Relevant categories in their catalogue include Danse Baroque, Danse Ancienne, 18e Siècle, Ballets de Cour and Menuet (Danse). The website includes online versions of some of the images in their collection, mostly late 18th-century, so not really baroque, but these are interesting:
- Berain, Chinese Gong Player
- Information about, and picture of, a costume design by Berain the Elder, sold at auction.
Dance/Ballet Histories
- Britannica.com, History of Dance
- If you have subscribed, if not you can get a 14-day free trial.
- Ballet-Modern FAQ, Part 4
- Ballet History. (Also, Part 5 briefly mentions Beauchamp-Feuillet notation and has a bibliography of books on dance history).
- Ballet History
- From the Studio to Stage site. See the section The French Influence (same text available at the-ballet.com).
- History of Pointe Shoes
- Really a history of ballerina technique. From the site of pointe shoe makers Gaynor Midden.
- Footnotes: The Shoes Make the Dance
- How dance shoes have effected dance.
- Dance Notation History
- From ballet.co.uk.
- Histoire de la Danse
- From La Danse.net. (Français)
Video Clips
See also: Products → Videos.
- Library of Congress: American Memory: Video clips
- Demonstrations of steps, and short sequences. Unfortunately only one dancer, so you can't see how the floor-patterns work. Note that video clip 24 is identical to clip 25, so don't waste your time downloading them both.
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Dancing Times: Video Clips [Broken? 4th May 2008]
- A collection of videos of dance from various periods. [Just in case it isn't obvious, note that clips 4 and on actually show 20th century ballet, and not period dance. The two authentic late-17th century clips are not attributed, but they come from Paige Whitley-Bauguess' video/DVD Introduction to Baroque Dance – Dance Types. Also the Entrée D'Apolon is the better of the two performances.]
- NYBDC: Video clips
- Video clips from the New York Baroque Dance Company's website. [For some reason I find that the sound and video sometimes aren't correctly synchronised in clip-1.]
- Kennedy Center: New York Baroque Dance Company
- Videos of the group's annual June performances.
- Le Prologue au Cabinet des Fées
- Clips from a modern-baroque hybrid from L'Eventail, plus interview answers from Marie-Geneviève Massé. Looks as though some of the inspiration came from Lambranzi. (Français)
- Baroque Dance for Musicians
- Resources for a course given by Dr. Ross W. Duffin at Case Western Reserve University. Video clips and links, including some very grainy videos of Wendy Hilton dancing.
- A couple of videos
- Uploaded to Google Video by Stefan Kühn. Both contain several dance fragments, the first from a performance and rehearsal by Teatro Arcimboldo, and the second ballroom dances: La Bourgogne, a country dance I don't recognise, and a country dance I do recognise, Hole in the Wall.
- Dances in Lully's Persée
- From an article in the Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music. Article and dance demonstrations by Ken Pierce and Jennifer Thorp. [A contender for the best baroque dance on the web.]
- BaroqueDance.com
- Includes some short video clips, mainly to advertise Paige Whitley-Bauguess' DVDs.
- La Belle Danse: Videos
- Videos from Daniel Gariépy's dance company. [Includes extant and newly choreographed works. I noticed that a couple of the new works are essentially arrangements of extant choreographies.]
- Sarabande by Mr. Feuillet
- Female solo danced by Sarah Hixon at the East Coast Baroque Dance Workshop. [Nice video, well worth the download.]