Early virtuosos of the dance
- Related Topics:
- ballet
- ballroom dance
- modern dance
- Morris dance
- country dance
The era of the great dancer was at hand. Marie Sallé (1707–56) was the greatest dancer-mime and an important innovator of her day. Her popularity was rivalled by the Brussels-born Marie Camargo (1710–70), who excelled Sallé in lightness and sparkle. She used the entrechat, a series of rapid crossings of the legs that previously had been used only by male dancers. To show off properly her entrechats and other lithe footwork, she shortened her skirt by several inches, thereby contributing to costume reform. Both ballerinas were depicted by Nicolas Lancret (1690–1743), a painter known for his festive scenes, and both were praised by the writer and philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778), who carefully compared their respective virtues. Both, however, were surpassed by the Italian dancer Barberina Campanini (1721–99), whose fame is less adequately recorded in dance history. By 1739, she had taken Paris by storm, demonstrating jumps and turns executed with a speed and brilliance hitherto unknown. She offered ample proof that the Italian school of dance teaching had by no means died out with the earlier exodus of so many of its best practitioners to the French courts. Despite the great public acclaim that these ballerinas attracted, they were overshadowed by Louis Dupré (1697–1744), known as “The Great Dupré” and “the god of the dance.” In grace, majesty, and allure, he was unsurpassed, giving the male dancer a prominence he held for a century. Dupré was also the first of a direct line of great dance teachers that was unbroken in the late 20th century.
The reign of the minuet
In the realm of the social dance, the years between 1650 and 1750 were called “the age of the minuet” by the dance and music historian Curt Sachs.
The French dance suite
At the great balls of the French court at Versailles, the minuet was the high point of the festivities, which culminated in a suite of dances. The opening branle, led by the king and his escort, was a measured circling around, one couple after another. Next came the courante, which had been toned down from its earlier rather capricious figurations. Over the years it assumed a continuously greater dignity until it was danced with such gravity and sobriety that it was termed the “doctor dance.” It went quickly out of fashion, however, after 1700. Following the courante in the succession was the gavotte, which opened in the form of a round dance. A couple separated to each perform a short solo, then returned to the original circle. Sometimes the suite was extended through an allemande (French: “German”), an old dance form that was introduced into France from the heavily German-speaking province of Alsace in the 1680s. This dance, with its turning couples, the lady on the arm of the gentleman, was a relative of the German Ländler and a precursor of the waltz.
Form of the minuet
But the unrivalled king of the social dances was the minuet, named from the pas menu (“small step”), a term used at least as early as the 15th century. The earliest surviving specimen was composed by Lully in 1663. Mozart composed a series of 12 minuets as late as 1789. It originated as a folk dance in Poitou, but as a court dance it took its form from the courante. Though today it looks mannered, even artificial, in its time it was looked upon as the most beautiful and harmonious of dances, and to execute it perfectly required prolonged and careful study:
The minuet was performed in open couples; spectators and partners were saluted with ceremonial bows. With dainty little steps and glides, to the right and to the left, forward and backward, in quarter turns, approaching and retreating hand in hand, searching and evading, now side by side, now facing, now gliding past one another, the ancient dance play of courtship appears here in a last and almost unrecognizable stylization and refinement. (Curt Sachs, World History of the Dance, trans. Bessie Schönberg, W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1937.)
In spite of the great popularity of the minuet before the French Revolution, it was the object of much barbed commentary in the late 18th century. Voltaire compared the metaphysical philosophers of his time with the dancers of the minuet, who, in their elegant attire, bow and mince daintily across the room showing off their charms, move without progressing a single step, and end up at the very spot from which they began.
English social dance
England thoroughly democratized the dance. Though the English Puritanism of the 17th century stigmatized dance as one of man’s most sinful occupations, even Oliver Cromwell, lord protector of England under the Puritan rule in the 1650s, could not prevent the appearance of The English Dancing Master (issued 1650; dated 1651), by the bookseller and publisher John Playford (1623–c. 1686). This was a collection of English traditional dances and tunes. It had 18 editions in 80 years, each one adding to the repertoire. Its 900 choral dances of rustic origin, which formerly had been danced in the open air but were now usually performed indoors, included an enormous variety of forms and patterns. It was written in straightforward, matter-of-fact language, with no discrimination of dances by social class. Its instructions could be understood and its dances performed by anyone. People could enjoy dancing as a playful, sportive activity rather than as an exercise of courtly etiquette.
These “country dances” could as well be city dances, as is suggested by such names as “Mayden Lane” and “Hide Park” from London locales. Others were named for persons—“Parson’s Farewell” and “My Lady Foster’s Delight”—and that there were foreign influences can be surmised from “The Spanish Jeepsie” and “A la Mode de France.” At the same time, native jigs and hornpipes continued to flourish. The English were particularly fond of the Morris dance, which was a vigorous male dance in the form of a procession through town streets. Its participants, in the disguises of such popular characters as the fool or the Queen of May, wore jingling bells around their ankles and sometimes galloped about on hobby horses. Other dancers wore antlers, tails, and similar animal masking.
About 1700 the English country dances began to appear on the Continent, where they were somewhat formalized and sometimes substantially altered. In France they were named contredanses. The longways, dances with double lines of dancers facing one another, became contredanses anglaises; the rounds became the contredanses françaises, which were also known as cotillions and quadrilles. These figure dances, which quickly spread to Spain, Germany, Poland, and other countries, were the dances of the rising middle class. By no means revolutionary in their content, they were nonetheless a distinct declaration of rationality and common sense in dance, a counterbalance to the artificialities and mannerisms of the aristocratic court dances. The orthodox dance teachers might bemoan the decline from the standards that were epitomized in the minuet, but the townspeople and peasants, unconcerned with such niceties, continued in their uncomplicated knowledge that dancing could be fun.