Author Archives: moiragoff

Various Authenticities

Leave a reply

When I first began to study baroque dance, I tried very hard to be authentic – not least because I was so often criticised for my ‘balletic’ approach. It took me some time to realise that such authenticity is impossible. We know a great deal about dancing in the late 17th and early 18th centuries (far more than most people realise), but there is just as much that we don’t and indeed cannot know. My own reconstructions of dances, particularly the solos danced by Mrs Santlow and Mlles Subligny and Guiot, owe as much (if not more) to my personal style and technique as a ballet-trained dancer as they do to the notations and dance manuals of the early 1700s.

The subject of authenticity came into my mind again a week or so ago, when I went to a talk at the Wallace Collection. The speaker was the choreographer and Director of the Birmingham Royal Ballet David Bintley. His new ballet The King Dances is based on Le Ballet de la Nuit, the 1653 ballet de cour in which the fourteen-year-old Louis XIV appeared as the rising sun and became known ever after as the ‘Sun King’. Bintley talked about his forays into history and the world of baroque dance as he developed his choreography. He had gone so far as to have a baroque dance expert give instruction to his dancers – only to find that the unfamiliar style and technique was too difficult to learn in a short period. Although it marked the beginning of ballet, baroque dance was far from the strength and extension now characteristic of its descendant.

At the time of writing, I have not seen Bintley’s The King Dances so I cannot comment on the ballet. However, the photographs of the production are stunning. The young male dancers look as fabulously glamorous as their youthful antecedents at the French court must have done. When they are caught in mid-step the effect is strangely evocative of the ballet de cour, as we glimpse it through the few surviving designs for costumes and scenes. Could Bintley’s work possibly be ‘authentic’ in ways that a production consciously attempting complete ‘authenticity’ could not?

I thought about authenticity again this weekend, while I was taking part in a dance display for a heritage open day which also gave me time to watch. The dances – several cotillons by Dezais and a couple of ballroom duets – were all faithfully reconstructed from 18th-century sources. The costumes were handsome and in good period style, right down to the corsets. However, these were not the essential factors that made the display authentic. There was a range of skills and experience among the dancers and the dances were practised but not perfect. The dances were lively and all the dancers very evidently enjoyed performing them. They took pleasure in dancing with each other and for their audience. I couldn’t help thinking that it must have been very similar at many real balls in the 18th century – except that we may well have danced better than our forebears did.

Authenticity surely resides as much, if not more, in the spirit of the reconstruction as in the letter.

 

Two more Dezais dance names

Leave a reply

There are just two more dances in Dezais’s 1725 Premier Livre de Contre-Dances that I haven’t considered yet – L’Inconstante and L’Esprit Follet. Again, I won’t look at the choreographies but pursue the sources of the dances’ names.

L’Inconstante, for four dancers, is the second dance in the collection. Its duple-time music is identified on the notation as a tambourin. The music has A and B strains of eight and sixteen bars respectively, while the dance has the ‘Change’ and ‘Figure’ structure of a cotillon. So far, I have not been able to find a plausible source for the title. Marivaux’s play La Double Inconstance was given at the Thêâtre Italien on 6 April 1723, but there seems to be nothing to link it to Dezais’s choreography. It is interesting to note that, in London, Farquhar’s play The Inconstant was revived at the Drury Lane Theatre on 16 October 1723. It is unlikely that there is a link, so is there another source which also flirts with the idea of inconstancy?

L’Esprit Follet, for eight dancers, is the seventh dance in the Premier Livre. The duple-time music is titled ‘Rigaudon’ but has the half-bar upbeat of a gavotte. The A strain has four bars and the B strain has eight. The dance has the familiar structure of a cotillon. I haven’t got to the bottom of this title either. ‘Esprit follet’ can be translated as ‘goblin’, which gives me the idea of mischievous (if not malicious) playfulness. Esprits follets featured in the ballets de cour of the mid-17th century and there is a 1684 play by Noël Le Breton de Hauteroche titled L’Esprit Follet. There is no singing or dancing in any of the editions I’ve looked at, so I’m tempted to go in a different direction.

The repertoire of the Italian comedians in 17th-century Paris included a play entitled Arlequin Esprit Follet. I haven’t been able to track down any performances in Paris either at the fairs or the Théâtre Italien in the early 18th century, but a piece with that title was played in London intermittently between 1719 and 1735. The earliest of these performances were given by a troupe led by Francisque Moylin which included the Sallé children Francis and Marie. This suggests that Arlequin Esprit Follet was a given regularly in Paris and elsewhere.  In the absence of a text and, particularly, any music it is impossible to prove, but could Dezais’s  cotillon L’Esprit Follet draw on music from the commedia dell’arte piece Arlequin Esprit Follet?

Do such links, which may be less tenuous than I suggest, say anything about the spirit in which these contredanses should be performed?

 

Le Cotillon de Surenne

Leave a reply

Le Cotillon de Surenne, for eight dancers, is the fourth contredanse in Dezais’s 1725 Premier Livre de Contre-Dances. The music is a gavotte, with A and B strains of four bars each, and the dance has the cotillon ‘Change’ and ‘Figure’ structure. I’m not going to examine the choreography. Instead, I’ll pursue possible sources for the name of this dance.

Surenne (also spelled Suresne in the 18th century, and now Surêne) is a place in the environs of Paris. Nowadays, it lies within the city’s suburbs around six miles west of its centre. In the 1700s, it seems to have been somewhere that Parisians went for entertainment. Could the title of Dezais’s choreography refer to this? Or could it be linked to a short comédie-ballet, written by Florent Carton Dancourt , with the title L’Impromptu de Suresne? According to the title page of the libretto published in 1713, this piece was played that year by the ‘Comediens du Roy’ at Surêne itself. The composer of the music is not named.

The comédie-ballet ends with a divertissement of singing and dancing, with several dances. There is a Passepied, a Menuet, a Rigaudon, another Menuet, an Entrée and a Gavotte (also titled ‘Branle’). The 1713 libretto has no music, but this was included when the work was republished in Paris in 1760 in volume eleven of Les Oeuvres de Théâtre de M. d’Ancourt.  The following lines are sung to the gavotte tune:

En ces lieux l’Amour amene

Les plaisirs, les jeux, les ris;

Des plus doux nœuds il enchaîne

Les coeurs de ses feux épris,

Chacun déserte Paris

Pour venir rire à Surêne.

While the music is recognisably a gavotte, and has A and B strains of four bars each, it is not the same as that of Dezais’s cotillon. It may or may not be the original music for the divertissement.

It is possible that Dezais drew on earlier music for L’Impromptu de Suresne. It is more than likely that his title Le Cotillon de Surenne refers to the pleasures to be encountered just outside Paris.

A Year of Dance: 1725

Leave a reply

1725 was quite a busy year, both culturally and politically.

In Britain, one noteworthy event was George I’s foundation of the Order of the Bath. However, the hanging of the notorious thief-taker Jonathan Wild at Tyburn on 24 May 1725 probably attracted greater interest. In Europe, there were several events of undoubted political significance. Tsar Peter the Great died on 8 February and was succeeded by his second wife – Catherine I was the first woman to rule Russia. The Emperor Charles VI and King Philip V of Spain signed the Treaty of Vienna on 30 April, which included a guarantee of the Pragmatic Sanction allowing the Emperor to be succeeded by a daughter, despite the prevailing Salic law. In France, the fifteen year old Louis XV married the Polish Princess Marie Leszczyńska. She was seven years older than the King.

At the Paris Opéra, Les Eléments an opéra-ballet by Delalande and Destouches was given its first public performance on 29 May 1725. The work had initially been performed in 1721 as a court ballet, with Louis XV among the dancers. Its popularity on the public stage was to be long-lived. In London there were two notably diverse premieres within a week. Handel’s latest opera Rodelinda was performed at the King’s Theatre on 13 February. On 20 February, Drury Lane’s new pantomime Apollo and Daphne opened. It was described in the bills as a ‘Dramatick Entertainment of Dancing’ and it did indeed have a great deal of serious dancing in its main plot.

1725 was an unusually busy year for dance publishing. In London, L’Abbé’s new dance for the year was Prince Frederick, in honour of George I’s eldest grandson. L’Abbé’s A New Collection of Dances, notations for 13 choreographies performed in London’s theatres, may have appeared this year (it has no publication date). The undated 18th edition of The Dancing-Master has also been assigned to 1725, although some modern sources prefer 1728. The dancing master Siris published his own ‘dance for the year’ The Diana, in honour of the Duchess of Marlborough’s much-loved grand-daughter Lady Diana Spencer.

Siris. The Diana. First plate

Siris. The Diana. First plate

In Paris, the most important dance publication of 1725 was undoubtedly Pierre Rameau’s treatise Le Maître a danser. This work explains how to perform the steps recorded by Feuillet a quarter of a century earlier. Rameau’s revision of the Beauchamp-Feuillet system of notation, put forward in his Abbrégé de la Nouvelle Méthode, probably appeared in late 1725. He followed Feuillet by including a collection of twelve dances by Pecour as part two of the treatise, all in his revised notation. These dances, described as the most beautiful and best liked of Pecour’s many choreographies, were apparently still popular in the ballroom. They were given a new lease of life by their appearance in subsequent reissues of Rameau’s Abbrégé.

Pecour. La Mariée, notated by Rameau. First plate

Pecour. La Mariée, notated by Rameau. First plate

The regular annual collections of dances issued first by Feuillet and then by Dezais continued with the XXIII Recüeil de dances pour l’Année 1725. Dezais also published his Premier Livre de Contre-Dances, which I have written about in other posts. The title Premier Livre … suggests that he was intending to pursue a new series devoted to notations of contredanses. No more collections of either danses à deux or contredanses appeared after 1725. The abrupt cessation suggests that Dezais died before he could prepare or publish further collections. 1725 marks the end of the publication of notated dances in France, until the contredanses known as cotillons began to appear in a simplified form of notation in the early 1760s.

La Mariée on the London stage

Leave a reply

La Mariée, a ballroom dance for a man and a woman, was one of the dances Pierre Rameau described as the most beautiful choreographies created by Guillaume-Louis Pecour. Rameau included his own notation of the dance in his Abbregé de la nouvelle methode,dans l’art d’ecrire ou de traçer toutes sortes de danse de ville, published in Paris probably in 1725. The duet already had a long history by then, for it was first published in 1700 in Feuillet’s Recueil de dances composées par M. Pecour, one of the collections that accompanied Choregraphie.

Guillaume-Louis Pecour. Recueil de dances (Paris, 1700), plate 12, opening of La Mariée

Guillaume-Louis Pecour. Recueil de dances (Paris, 1700), plate 12, opening of La Mariée

The dance historian Rebecca Harris-Warrick showed, in an essay published in 1989, that La Mariée was almost certainly originally a stage dance created for a revival of Lully’s opera Roland in 1690. She suggested that the dance entered the French ballroom repertoire during the 1690s. It may have been danced in mascarade entertainments during the 1700 carnival season at the French court. It may well have continued to be danced on the stage of the Paris Opéra in later revivals of Roland, by such stars as Ballon and Mlle Subligny (1705) and David Dumoulin and Mlle Prévost (1709). It was mentioned in many dance treatises and republished in notation many times between 1700 and 1765. After that it apparently faded from view.

Pecour’s popular duet had probably reached London by 1698, when the music was published in John Walsh’s compilation Theater Musick, being a Collection of the Newest Ayers for the Violin. Harris-Warrick speculates that it may have been danced at William III’s birth night ball that year. If so, one of the performers could have been Anthony L’Abbé who had already danced before the King in May 1698. On 1 June 1703, L’Abbé was billed at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in The Wedding Dance. This was described in advertisements as ‘compos’d by Monsieur L’Abbé, and perform’d by him, Mrs Elford, and others’. The piece seems to have been a divertissement, which may or may not have incorporated Pecour’s La Mariée.

In later years, ‘Wedding’ dances reappeared every so often among the entr’acte entertainments in London’s theatres. There was a Wedding Dance ‘by Prince and others’ at Drury Lane on 20 July 1713 and a Grand Comic Wedding Dance, created by Moreau, at Lincoln’s Inn Fields on 14 January 1717. Moreau’s Wedding Dance was performed by three men and three women together with the Sallé children, Francis and Marie. I am inclined to think that La Mariée was performed as part of Moreau’s divertissement, possibly by the Sallés. On 15 May 1718, a dance titled Marie was given at Drury Lane by Cook and Miss Schoolding. Apart from the ongoing dance rivalry between the theatres, which caused much copying of repertoire, Cook had danced in Moreau’s piece and Miss Schoolding was Mrs Moreau’s younger sister.

Thereafter The Marie (as it was often billed) was regularly given as an entr’acte dance. The Sallés performed it, as adult dancers, several times during the 1725-26 and 1726-27 seasons. The duet was later taken up by Leach Glover, one of the leading dancers in John Rich’s company, who gave it regularly at his benefit performances during the 1730s. Pecour’s famous ball dance apparently made its last London stage appearance, after a gap of many years, on 24 April 1759 at Covent Garden. It was performed ‘By Desire’ by Lalauze and Miss Toogood at his benefit. Did they really dance the choreography as created some seventy years earlier?

Hungarian dances in the ballroom

Leave a reply

The first dance in the 1725 Premier livre de contre-dances is the Cotillon Hongrois for four. I cannot  identify with certainty a person or an event that might have inspired the name ‘Hongrois’ but in this post I will explore the wider context for the dance and put forward a suggestion.

Hungary was the largest territory within the Habsburg Austrian monarchy. Charles VI was Holy Roman Emperor, ruler of Austria and King of Hungary from 1711 until 1740. He was also Prince of Transylvania, which had once been part of Hungary and retained strong links with that country. The history of the area in the 17th and early 18th centuries is complex. I will not even attempt to summarise it, except to say that events there influenced and were influenced by what was happening in the rest of Europe.

In his XIIIe Recueil de danses pour l’année 1715, Dezais included La Transilvanie a ballroom duet by Claude Ballon. This choreography has some resemblance to a cotillon. The music is in duple time and, according to Francine Lancelot in La Belle Dance, it is very similar to a gavotte. The musical structure is AABACAA. The choreographic structure has ‘verses’ and a repeated ‘chorus’. The step sequence for the opening section is used again for the third and fourth A repeats, although the direction of travel and the floor pattern is varied each time. This, of course, is the collection in which Dezais advertises his manuscript versions of contredanses for eight, two of which (Le Cotillon de Surenne and L’Esprit Follet) were finally printed in 1725. Although it is not mentioned, was the Cotillon Hongrois another dance that significantly predated its appearance in the Premier livre?

There may, perhaps, be a specific reason for the name La Transilvanie. Before the accession of Charles VI in 1711, the Prince of Transylvania had been Francis II Rácóczi. He led an unsuccessful uprising in Hungary in the early 1700s, with initial encouragement from the French. Between 1713 and 1717 he was in exile in France. Was La Transilvanie dedicated to him? Does the Cotillon Hongrois date to the mid-1710s rather than the mid-1720s and does it refer to Rácóczi and his exploits in Hungary?

Adám Mányoki. Francis II Rákoczi. 1724

Adám Mányoki. Francis II Rákoczi. 1724

A portrait of Rákoczi shows him in dress similar to a hussar. Did this depiction influence the Hungarian dances that were popular on the London stage in the 1720s and 1730s? I will look at these in a separate post.

What’s in a date?

Leave a reply

Some of the dances in Dezais’s Premier livre de contre-dances may have been created in the early 1720s, but others were probably at least ten years old. In his ‘Avertissement’ at the beginning of the XIII Recueil de danses pour l’année 1715, Dezais wrote:

‘On donne avis qu’il y a un tres grand nombres de Contredanses à huit qui ne sont pas imprimées et qui se vendent écrit à la main: scavoir le Cotillon nouveaux, la Christinne, le Pharaon, la Bœmienne, la Utrech, le Cotillon de Surenne, l’Esprit Follet, et le Cotillon des Fêtes de Thalie.’

The ‘Avertissement’ reveals the popularity of cotillons in the early 1700s. It also highlights the topicality of some of the dance names. ‘la Utrech’ must surely refer to the Peace of Utrecht, the name given to the several treaties signed in Utrecht during 1713 and 1714 which between them ended the War of the Spanish Succession. Dezais published Le Cotillon des Fêtes de Thalie in his XIIIIe. Recueil de danses pour l’année 1716. Mouret’s opéra-ballet Les Fêtes ou le Triomphe de Thalie was first given at the Paris Opéra in 1714. Le Cotillon de Surenne and L’Esprit Follet must surely be the choreographies published in the 1725 Premier livre de Contre-dances so they were not quite so topical when they finally appeared in print. I will try to unravel the references within the names of both in later posts.

I will resist the temptation to investigate the other dance names in Dezais’s 1715 list. As several dance historians have noted, the names of dances may indicate that they were created some years before being published in notation. The discrepancy in dates (which may not be obvious) can also lead to false conclusions when trying to discover the references within dance names. My suggestions for the dedicatees of Dezais’s  contredanses L’Infante and La Carignan may, or may not, be correct.

What’s in a name?

Leave a reply

Many ballroom duets and country dances have distinctive names. These might link the choreographies to their music, to a play, or to a place or a dedicatee. Dance names provide glimpses of the social and cultural milieu within which the dances were performed.

I’ve been looking at the Premier livre de contre-dances published by Dezais in 1725 and I thought it would be interesting to follow up some of the dance names in this collection. At first, it seemed unlikely that I would be able to discover very much but as I pursued my research I began to see links with other areas of my dance history interests – the ballet de cour of Louis XIV, royal and aristocratic dancers and dancing on the London stage, among other topics. I very quickly gathered enough information for several posts.

I’ll look at just a couple of the dance names here, both linked to royalty. L’Infante, the third dance in the collection, is a contredanse for eight with a structure similar to the later cotillon. The name obviously refers to a Spanish princess or Infanta. The French and Spanish royal families intermarried several times during the 17th and 18th centuries. Louis XIV’s mother was a Spanish princess and so was his wife. His successor Louis XV was briefly betrothed to the Spanish infanta Mariana Victoria. She was the daughter of King Philip V, younger brother to Louis’s father the duc de Bourgogne, so the two were first cousins. She arrived in Paris in 1721 to live at the Palais du Louvre until she was old enough for the marriage to take place. The young King was eleven, but his intended bride was only three years old. By 1725, following the King’s serious illness, the King’s ministers had realised they must find a princess who was old enough to be married and quickly provide an heir to the throne. The betrothal with the little Infanta was ended and she was sent back to Spain in March that year. In September 1725, Louis XV married the 22-year-old Polish princess Marie Leszczyńska. Mariana Victoria married the Prince of Brazil, heir to the Portuguese throne, in 1729. Was she the Infanta of Dezais’s contredanse?

Nicolas Largilliere. The Infanta Mariana Victoria. 1724

Nicolas Largilliere. The Infanta Mariana Victoria. 1724

La Carignan, the last dance in the Premier livre, is a minuet for four. The dance’s name links it to the royal house of Savoy. Victor-Amedée of Savoy, prince de Carignan was probably the dedicatee of Pecour’s ballroom duet La Carignan, published by Feuillet in the IIme Recueil de danses de bal pour l’année 1704. Dezais’s contredanse may have honoured another member of the Savoy-Carignan family. Victor-Amedée, his wife Marie-Victoire of Savoy and their children had been resident in France since the late 1710s. Their daughter Anne-Thérèse, born in Paris in 1717, is a possible dedicatee of the 1725 choreography.

These dance names, like many others, were topical, but were dances always created – and named – close to their publication date?

 

Dancing Masters’ Advertisements

Leave a reply

Looking through my notes on dancing masters and their various treatises, I was reminded that some of them advertised for pupils in London and provincial newspapers. I haven’t yet done a comprehensive search, but in the course of my work on cotillons I came across some interesting examples of publicity from the 1760s. I quoted from some of these advertisements in my post Teaching the Cotillon. Here are some more, of particular relevance to learning to dance and favourite ballroom duets.

Messrs Hart and Welch, advertising in the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser for 2 May 1768, offered ‘The cotillons, minuet, louvre, passepied, matlotte, novelle, bretagne, the almand, françois and English country dances’, all of which would be ‘taught as usual at home or abroad’. In this context ‘abroad’ presumably meant their dancing school ‘at No. 109, near Exeter-change, in the Strand’. The list of dances offered is suggestive of the repertoire expected in the ballroom, although advertisements for balls refer only to minuets and country dances including (of course) the newly fashionable cotillon.

Hart and Welch appear to have been teaching several venerable danses à deux. The ‘louvre’ is probably Aimable Vainqueur,  first published in 1701. This duet was mentioned by Taubert, Rameau and Tomlinson and printed in notation, probably for the last time, as late as 1765. The ‘bretagne’, dating to 1704, was cited by the same three dancing masters. The ‘passepied’ and ‘novelle’ (perhaps La Nouvelle Forlanne of 1710) may both be linked to dances published in the early 18th century. The ‘matlotte’ may refer to a duet published by Feuillet in 1706. Is the ‘almand’ the famous duet by Pecour that was first published in 1702 and made its last appearance in print in 1765? The many references to these dances seem to suggest that they were still well-known more than fifty years after their creation.

Mr Patence also advertised in the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser. On 14 June 1768 he offered ‘the minuet, louvre, country and other dancing’ and promised to teach ‘in the most polite and expeditious manner’. The louvre would take sixteen lessons (the minuet needed only twelve). These dances would be taught ‘with all the proper steps, such as cupees, borees, bounds, rebounds, marches, periwits, danzas, brilloes, back and fore granade’. Mr Patence’s French seems to have been entirely phonetic and he apparently also drew on other languages for his dance terminology. Periwits are presumably pirouettes, but I’ll have to think about the translations of some of his other terms. He also reveals how changing fashions were affecting ballroom dancing:

‘Mr. Patence having practised dancing some years, has just reason to think, that the excellent dance the louvre, would be more introduced in our polite assemblies, but the insufficiency of masters, in not knowing the proper graces, steps and figures, is the reason of its decline, having known some to have had scholars four years, and then know very little of the matter.’

There is more than a hint of rivalry here and Mr Patence may even have had a particular dancing master in mind. However, by the late 1760s, dancing masters may simply have been unwilling to allow time for such danses à deux alongside the minuets which were integral to their balls. Although, if that was the case, why did Hart and Welch teach so many of them?

Learning to Dance: Kellom Tomlinson

Leave a reply

According to his own testimony, Kellom Tomlinson completed his dance manual in 1724 but was obliged to defer publication following the appearance of The Dancing-Master in 1728. The Art of Dancing was finally published in 1735, complete with more than thirty engraved illustrations. It is probably the most beautiful of the dance treatises produced during the 18th century. Tomlinson brought out a second edition in 1744.

He provided an outline of the book’s contents at the very beginning:

‘The First Book treats of the beautiful Attitudes or Postures of Standing, the different Positions from whence the Steps of Dancing are to be taken and performed; and likewise the Manner of Walking gracefully. The several Sorts of Bows and Courtesies are also fully described, and all or most of the Steps used in Genteel Dancing’

Like Taubert (but unlike Rameau), Tomlinson also included ‘many of those [Steps] properly belonging to the Stage’. The second book of his treatise focuses on the minuet.

Tomlinson’s illustrations are integral to his manual of dancing:

‘the Piece which I here offer to the World will be of general Use to all, who either have learned, or are learning to dance: the Words describing the Manner in which the Steps are to be taken; and the Figures representing Persons as actually taking them’

The engravings were a selling point, but also provided an additional income stream since they could be purchased independently of the text.

Kellom Tomlinson. The Art of Dancing (London, 1735), Book II, Plate VIII.

Kellom Tomlinson. The Art of Dancing (London, 1735), Book II, Plate VIII.

The Art of Dancing begins with three chapters, ‘Of Standing’, ‘Of Walking’ and ‘Of Bowing’ respectively. After a discussion ‘Of the Dancing-Room’, intended to assist pupils in navigating the spaces within which they would be expected to dance duets, Tomlinson gets straight on to steps. Unlike Taubert and Rameau, he defers explanations of the steps and figures of the minuet until after he has dealt with the other steps would-be dancers might meet in danses à deux or figure dances.

The chapters on standing and walking are short, just a couple of pages each. ‘Of Bowing’ (which deals with both gentlemen and ladies) carries on through ten pages. Most of the first chapter, on standing, is devoted to a description of the five positions of the feet. Tomlinson relates these to the graceful and agreeable ways of standing to be used by gentlemen – ‘Position, then, is the different Placing or Setting our Feet on the Floor, whether in Conversation or Dancing’. In his second chapter, Tomlinson makes the link between walking and dancing explicit – ‘And it is further to be noted, that, in Walking with a good Grace, Time and Harmony must be observed, as well as in Dancing’.

Tomlinson begins his third chapter on ‘the different Sorts of Honours’ by explaining  ‘Bows or Courtesies are the outward Marks of Respect we pay to others, … and, if made in a regular Manner, they are, indeed, very grand, noble and highly ornamental’. He obviously saw such honours as integral to manners and polite deportment and very closely linked, in their performance, to dancing. He gives as much instruction on the disposition of the body as on the mechanics of the bow or courtesie, talking of:

‘the handsome Position of the Waiste, neither too much forwards nor backwards, the whole Poise of the Body  being beautiful and upright, directly perpendicular or right down over the Heel or Heels , on which the Poise rests’

The recommended stance contributes much to both the lady’s and the gentleman’s honours.

The fourth chapter, ‘Of the Dancing-Room’ ends with a survey of the dancing body and the elements of dancing. Tomlinson seems to be drawing on John Weaver’s Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures upon Dancing, published in 1721, as well as Feuillet’s Choregraphie. I will return to the ‘Actions and Motions of the Body’, first set out by Feuillet, ‘from whence the whole Body or Art of Dancing is produced’.  Kellom Tomlinson is not specific about his teaching methods, but he makes reference to these basic ‘Actions and Motions’ throughout his explanations of steps.