dance_articles.pdf

Dance Articles

Basic Dance

Reconstruction

This is an article which I originally presented as a “Dance Reconstruction

100” class for a Rowany festival. It contains some useful pointers for

beginning dance reconstructors and people who want to start reconstructing

renaissance dance.

Where to Begin

Find some old dance books. No, older ones than that! Primary sources!

The primary sources can be found in the latest rendance bibliography (at

the end of this book). Also use the on line version -- it is the most up to

date and is absolutely huge. It is worth getting a copy even if you have to

find a friend to get one via e-mail for you. There is a copy as an appendix

in my dance book if you have a copy of that.

Not all of the sources in that book are primary sources, however all of the

primary sources are listed in it.

The period primary sources fall into these categories, from oldest to

newest:

15th C Italian

There are several manuscripts of 15 th C Italian dance (there were no

printed books of dance in that time). The authors were:

• Domenico

• Cornazano

• Ebreo / Ambrosio (various versions)

There is an exceedingly comprehensive new translation of the above three

books by A. William Smith just released in the USA by Pendgragon Press.

There is an excellent transcription and translation of Ebreo, with

reconstruction of the music, by Barbara Sparti available from Oxford

University Press. Buy it if you are at all interested in this period because

of the wealth of background material it contains.

Basic Dance Reconstruction

15th C Burgundian

(Basse Dance

books)

There are three main primary sources for 15 th C Burgundian dance. These

are:

• The Brussels MS

• Moderne

• Tolouze

The latter two of which can be found in a single volume by Minkoff, and

can be still obtained from Dance Books in London.

The MS “The Manner of Dauncynge of Bace Dances” is an English book

but it may as well be considered a Burgundian text because it contains the

Burgundian style of dances. It is possibly a translation of an earlier (lost)

Burgundian MS, but it also probably contains some errors.

16th C French

The main one is of course Arbeau’s Orchesography . That is sadly out of

print but can be obtained from some specialty shops. It is the seminal

work on dance as far as the SCA is concerned because something like 50%

of our dances come from it.

16th C Italian

There are two main authors in this area -- Caroso and Negri.

Caroso has two books (Il Ballarino and Nobilta di Dame) -- the latter is

available in a translation only version from Julia Sutton. The former is

currently available only in Italian.

Negri has a book “La Gratie d’Amore” -- not for the faint hearted. It is

available in transcription and translation (done as a university thesis) by G

Y Kendall, available from UMI -- consult your nearest university library

and they will be able to get you the appropriate order forms.

English

(Allemandes and

Early Country

Dances)

The main source for these dances is the Inns of Court MSS.

The best transcription, translation, and reconstruction of the Allemandes

in this book is Peter and Janelle Durham's book Dances from the Inns of

Court , which you should find listed in the bibliography in this book.

There is a journal article in Historical Dance that gives a transcription of all

of the MSS. They are not very big and the article is worth a look.

English Country

Dance

Well, there is only one source for English Country Dance and that is

Playford. It’s not period (1651) but used heavily in the SCA.

Dance Articles

Where to go Next

Some Easy Dances

to Reconstruct

Start with dances from these books:

• Arbeau

• Playford

• Inns of Court

All of the above are available in English translations at least. Playford was

originally written in English, while Arbeau is French but is very self

explanatory -- it even contains some pictures.

Note that all of the dances from these books have been reconstructed,

however it is not a total waste of time to go back to them occasionally.

This is because (a) they are a good easy place to start and provide a useful

reality check and (b) you often find mistakes in what you thought was a

perfectly decent reconstruction!

Some Harder

Dances to

Reconstruct

My first recommendation is to point you in the direction of the 15th

Century Italian books. This is because the dances are relatively easy to

do, easy to teach, and easy to learn (although not as easy as Arbeau’s

stuff). Also, and more importantly, it has not already been done.

There are dances in these books that have never (to my knowledge) been

reconstructed.

There are reconstructions that are continually being worked on and re-

worked. More and more is being found out about the steps in these

dances all the time (although David Wilson’s “Steps Used in Courtly

Dancing in the 15h Century” buries a lot of the arguments, as does some

of Barbara Sparti’s more recent research).

The next place to go are the 15th C Burgundian dances. Here is how to do

them:

• The books themselves are written in French or Catalan, but easy to

understand. Get a good translation of the introduction sections -- they

are where all of the steps and patterns are described.

• Pick one of the dances that you can actually find music to (there are a

few good books on these, or you can find some on CDs or tapes). Just

get a piece the right length is the important point.

• The steps are written out in a tabular fashion -- it doesn’t matter that

the language is foreign. Just remember that R9 is reverance, and the

other funny looking “r” is a demarche. Again, this is described in the

introduction.

Basic Dance Reconstruction

Stuff for the

Experts Only

Caroso and Negri are the obvious choices. They are the most difficult sets

of dances to reconstruct, teach, learn and dance, and the most complex

pre-17th C dances that there are.

Learning Caroso or Negri (in particular the latter) is like learning a new

language. Do it a bit at a time. Get a copy of one of the books and browse

through it. Ask a few experts. Play with some steps first then find a dance

to work on and see how far you get.

Reconstructing from Negri is something I cannot teach in one hour -- find

someone to talk to about it, get on rendance via e-mail, or phone me a lot!

There is one other area that has not been touched much -- that is the

Spanish manuscripts. These are very hard to reconstruct (although the

dances themselves are similar to the Burgundian basse danses) because

there are no introduction sections, and the dances are written using a

strange notation.

There has been one good article in Historical Dance about translating this

scrawl but very few people have been game to try it.

Things I haven’t

mentioned

This was not meant to be a class to show you how to reconstruct a dance

-- it was designed to point you at the right books.

You can reconstruct a dance for yourself, teach it in your own local group,

and then show it off to the rest of Lochac. It’s not that hard.

The list above was not a 100% complete list of all of the sources either -- I

have left out some of the more obscure ones like Lupi (Italy) and Arena

(France), and also the Catalan/Spanish texts of the 15th C baixa dance. If

you find a copy or transcription or translation of one then go for it!

You may need a bit more assistance than what the dance books tell you.

Arbeau explains relatively simply how to do doubles and singles, but there

are NO step descriptions in any of the 15th C books -- we have worked it

out based on timings and words in some of the introductory sections. Get

David Wilson’s book if you want to do 15th C dances.

Some of the evidence we have for what these books mean is not 100%

watertight. Get out your red pen if you have to and mark up someone

else’s reconstruction first (with their permission of course) and see if you

can see where they have drawn evidence direct from the text and where

other evidence or guesswork has been pulled in. Try to understand some

of the thought processes. Don’t be scared to change things.

Translations are all very well and good, but you must be able to recognise

some of the language -- especially for the Italian stuff. Learn to speak

“dance” not any language -- especially learn to speak “dance italian” (Julia

Sutton’s habit of calling a trabuchetto a “falling jump” just does not work

for me -- learn what a trabuchetto is, how it works, and why it is called a

“trabuchetto” -- there is a reason!).

Find a good source of music. That can be hard to come by, I know, but it

is worth the effort browsing CD shops because there are new recordings

being released all the time (the rendance group is working on a

discography to go with the bibliography).

Dance Articles

The Reconstruction Process

To illustrate the reconstruction process, I'm going to work through part of

a dance from Negri (one of the more complex sources) to show you exactly

how the various bits fit together.

Reconstructing from Negri is not something I'd advise for a beginner, but

the source is fairly easy to get hold of (ask any university library for a UMI

order form), and it is available in Italian with the English translation.

Lo Spagnoletto

Lo Spagnoletto is the first dance in Negri's book, starting at page 209 in

Kendall's translation available from UMI, with a starting position

illustrated on the previous page.

Music and Timing The music for Lo Spagnoletto is fairly easy – it is in duple time (Kendall

has transcribed it into modern notation in 4/4), and appears to have 3

separate parts – A, B, and C. There are some words above the music that

say “it is 3 parts of music and must be done 2 times per part until the end

of the dance.”

In a lot of cases the sources don't give repeat instructions like that, in

particular Caroso doesn't often include them, so we have to do a bit of

guesswork. Having the music sorted out beforehand helps a lot.

How long is the

music?

Reading the music and counting the bars is easy – each of the “parts” of

music has 4 bars, and is repeated, so that makes 8.

Of course we still don't know how many times the music is to be played.

Looking at the dance description briefly, there are 5 parts to the dance, so

it could be that the music is played 5 times, or it could be that it is played

one and two-thirds through – this would make 5 parts because each

repeat of the music is 3 parts, as Negri says.

Looking at the dance description a bit more closely, it seems that parts 2

and 4 are repeated. So now we have the option of 7 times through the

music, or 2 1/3 times through.

So, each of the “parts” of the dance will either be 8 bars of music, or 24

bars of music.

Steps

Start reading through the first part of the dance, which says (from the

translation):

All four place themselves in the middle of the dance

floor in a square, as you see in the present figure;

together they do the riverenza breve with a jump, one

seguito, two fioretti spezzati, and one seguito going

around to the left hand side; ...

So far, we have a riverenza breve, some fioretti spezzati, and some seguiti.

Step length and

timing

Negri's step descriptions for the balli (in his third treatise) begin on page

188 of the Kendall translation, and so far it's all bad. The riverenza breve

is not described, the fioretto spezzato is mentioned but not described, but

we do have a description for the seguito.

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