Category Archives: Stage Dancing

Season of Dancing: 1714-1715

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It is quite some time since I have explored dancing in one of the seasons on the London stage, and quite a while since I have been able to publish a post on Dance in History as I have been busy with other research and writing. Nearly three years ago, I posted Season of Dancing: 1716-1717 to try to place in context the first performances of John Weaver’s The Loves of Mars and Venus. I have been thinking about Weaver and his work over the past year and more, so I thought I would look back a little further to see what was happening on the London stage in the preceding seasons and what light that might shed on Weaver’s ground-breaking ballet. The starting point of 1714-1715 is, of course, determined by the opening of the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre that season and the return to theatrical competition for the first time since 1710-1711. In the past, I have also considered the wider context in my Year of Dance posts for 1714 to 1717.

Drury Lane opened for the 1714-1715 season on 21 September 1714 and the company gave 217 performances (including during its summer season) by the time it closed on 23 August 1715. The King’s Theatre opened on 23 October 1714 but, as London’s opera house, gave far fewer performances – only 42 by the time it closed on 27 August 1715. Lincoln’s Inn Fields reopened on 18 December 1714, following the decision of the new King George I to allow John Rich the use of his patent after some years of silence. By 31 August 1715 Rich’s new company had given 130 performances, a sign of its weakness against the senior established company at Drury Lane.

All three companies included dancing among their entertainments. The statistics for these offerings are interesting. Drury Lane offered entr’acte dancing in a little over 20% of its performances. At the King’s Theatre around 19% of its performances were advertised with dancing. Lincoln’s Inn Fields included entr’acte dancing in 96% of its performances, a startling statistic that proves the importance that Rich attached to dance from the very beginning of his career as the manager of one of London’s patent theatres.

The immediate change wrought by the reopening of Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the return to competition is highlighted by a few statistics from the 1713-1714 season, when the only theatres allowed to mount performances were Drury Lane and the then Queen’s Theatre. Drury Lane advertised 196 performances but included entr’acte dancing only during the benefit and summer seasons for around 11 % of the total. The Queen’s Theatre advertised dancing at only one of its 31 performances that season, with no mention of the dancers. However, the opera house’s practice of minimal advertising (because its performances were offered on subscription) make it very difficult to know how much dancing was actually offered there each season throughout much of the eighteenth century.

Returning to 1714-1715, Drury Lane billed a total of thirteen dancers (eight men and five women) in entr’acte dances, although only five of them – three men (Wade, Prince and Birkhead) and two women (Mrs Santlow and Mrs Bicknell) – gave more than a handful of performances. The advertisements suggest that Mrs Santlow and Mrs Bicknell were the chief draw when it came to entr’acte dancing. None of the men were named in advertisements before the early months of 1715, when Rich’s dance strategy had become obvious. Both Hester Santlow and Margaret Bicknell were well established as dancer-actresses with the company. John Wade and Joseph (or John) Prince were both specialist dancers, while Matthew Birkhead was an actor, singer and dancer.

Lincoln’s Inn Fields advertised eighteen dancers (fourteen men and four women) in the entr’actes during the season, but – as at Drury Lane – only ten of them were billed for more than a handful of performances. Ann Russell and Mrs Schoolding appeared throughout the season and both apparently made their London stage debuts following Rich’s opening of the theatre. Miss Russell was a dancer and would remain one throughout her career, without making the usual transition to a dancer-actress. She married Hildebrand Bullock, a member of the well-known acting family, on 3 May 1715 and would thereafter be billed as Mrs Bullock. Mrs Schoolding seems to have begun an acting career at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, alongside her appearances as a dancer. Letitia Cross was not billed until 5 July 1715 but gave at least ten performances before the end of the season. She had already enjoyed a long career as an actress, a singer and a dancer. Three of the men – Anthony Moreau, Louis Dupré and William Boval – made their London stage debuts this season. Newhouse may have appeared elsewhere in earlier seasons, but his appearance at Lincoln’s Inn Fields on 8 February 1715 is the first record of him dancing at one of the patent theatres. Charles Delagarde was well established as a dancer and dancing master. John Thurmond Junior had appeared in London in earlier seasons, as had Sandham. All the men were specialist dancers.

The dancers who appeared regularly in the entr’actes could be said to form a ‘company within the company’ at each playhouse, even though several of them (the women in particular) acted as well as danced. Both acting companies mounted plays that included significant amounts of dancing in 1714-1715, but no casts were listed by either theatre in advertisements so it is impossible to be sure of the involvement of the dancers alongside the actors and actresses who danced only occasionally.

As for the entr’acte dances, Drury Lane offered nine, while Lincoln’s Inn Fields advertised seventeen. Drury Lane rarely mentioned specific dances in its advertisements, so it is impossible to know whether the repertoire was more extensive or which dances were the most popular.  It seems likely that Mrs Santlow’s solo Harlequin was among the latter. She was billed in it twice during 1714-1715 and the dance had been popular since she first performed it, perhaps as early as 1706. This is the less familiar version of her portrait as Harlequine, the one she owned herself which shows her skirt at the length she probably wore for performance.

It was one of only two dances advertised by Drury Lane before the opening of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, after which the theatre did not bill dance titles again until the benefit season began. The theatre’s managers were initially slow to grasp the value of dancing to attract audiences in the new atmosphere of rivalry. Other dances that may have been more popular than the bills suggest were the duets Dutch Skipper and French Peasant, the first given by Wade and Mrs Bicknell and the second by Wade and Mrs Santlow. Both had become part of the entr’acte repertoire not long after 1700 and would remain popular into the 1740s.

At Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the Dutch Skipper – first given on 6 January 1715 by Delagarde and Miss Russell – was far and away the most popular entr’acte dance, advertised twenty times by the end of the season. It was followed by a solo Scaramouch, performed on 5 February 1715 ‘by a Gentleman for his Diversion’ who gave it seven times during the season. John Thurmond Junior also danced a solo Scaramouch from 16 May 1715, when he was billed as ‘lately arrived from Ireland’. Scaramouch was already a familiar dancing character in London. John Thurmond Junior had been billed dancing the role ‘as it was performed by the famous Monsieur du Brill from the Opera at Brussels’ back in 1711. This print shows Pierre Dubreuil as Scaramouch about that time and suggests the acrobatic skills that Thurmond Junior may have emulated.

There were six entr’acte dances involving Scaramouch this season, with Lincoln’s Inn Fields leading the way and Drury Lane trying to catch up. At Lincoln’s Inn Fields, there was also an Italian Night Scene between Harlequin, Scaramouch and Punch (31 March 1715) and Scaramouches (18 April 1715, apparently a group dance although no dancers were named). Drury Lane replied with a Scaramouch and Harlequin (31 May 1715), a Tub Dance between a Cooper, his Wife, his Man, Scaramouch and Harlequin (2 June 1715) and Four Scaramouches (also 2 June 1715). In these dances, Harlequin would have been performed by one of the male dancers in the company. The four Scaramouches were probably danced by Prince, Wade, Sandham and Newhouse, who were listed in the bill (they also shared between them the male roles in the Tub Dance).

Delagarde and Miss Russell have a good claim to be the leading dancers at Lincoln’s Inn Fields this season, not only because of the number of their appearances (he was billed 65 times and she on 82 occasions) but also for their repertoire. As well as the Dutch Skipper, they performed a Spanish Entry, a Swedish Dance, a Venetian Dance and, most notably, The Friendship a new dance by Mr Isaac (who had been Queen Anne’s dancing master) which was also published in notation. The last of these may have been given before George I when he made his only visit of the season to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, on 10 March 1715 (he had visited Drury Lane on 5 January 1715). The new King was not proficient in English so limited his attendance at plays, preferring the Italian opera at the King’s Theatre. No serious dances were advertised at Drury Lane this season, whereas at Lincoln’s Inn Fields the Spanish Entry, an Entry and Mrs Bullock’s solo Chacone, given later in the season, can probably be assigned to the genre.

The 1714-1715 season should probably be seen as one of transition, at least so far as the dancing was concerned, as Drury Lane adjusted to the return of theatrical competition after enjoying several years of monopoly and Lincoln’s Inn Fields tried to gauge how it would deal with the dramatic superiority of its rival. Both theatres had to assess the impact of a new monarch and a new royal family on London’s theatrical life. In the following season of 1715-1716, they began to develop responses that would have a lasting effect on the entertainments of dancing to be seen on the London stage.

The Necromancer at 300

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At the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, the manager John Rich had been watching Drury Lane’s developing repertoire of pantomimes and he was quick to respond to the success of Harlequin Dotor Faustus. On 20 November 1723, the afterpiece at Lincoln’s Inn Fields was ‘A New Dramatick Entertainment in Grotesque Characters’ entitled The Necromancer; or, Harlequin Doctor Faustus. Here is the advertisement from the Daily Courant that same day.

Rich himself, under his stage name ‘Lun’, took the title role. The new pantomime was given 51 performances before the end of the season and then played every season until 1744-1745. It was briefly revived in 1751-1752 and 1752-1753 before it finally disappeared from the repertoire.

The Necromancer was far more successful than Thurmond Junor’s Harlequin Doctor Faustus. It is thus interesting to note that in 1766-1767 Henry Woodward (who had been trained in the role of Harlequin by John Rich) produced a new pantomime at the Covent Garden Theatre titling it simply Harlequin Doctor Faustus. The advertisements declared that it drew on The Necromancer for some of its scenes, but it seems to have had little or nothing to do with Thurmond Junior’s original.

Rich’s pantomimes made much use of singing and The Necromancer had two scenes which exploited the talents of the singers in his company. The opening scene echoed that of Harlequin Doctor Faustus, as the Doctor is persuaded to sign away his soul, but Rich had a Good Spirit, a Bad Spirit and (instead of Mephostophilus) an Infernal Spirit, all of whom made their entreaties in song. A drawing now in the British Museum shows Faustus together with the Infernal Spirit in this scene.

There is a dance of five Furies in this same scene (which may have been a nod to French opera, which was a strong influence on Rich and his pantomime productions). The Infernal Spirit finally induces Faustus to take his fatal step by conjuring the appearance of Helen of Troy, who does not dance but sings. Rich’s creative response to his rival’s scenario can be seen from the very beginning of The Necromancer. The second episode of singing begins the final scene of the pantomime, when Faustus himself conjures Hero and Leander, who celebrate in song their eternal bliss in the Elysian Fields until Charon arrives and declares (again in song) his intention to ferry them to Hell.

The Lincoln’s Inn Fields pantomime was far more focussed than its rival at Drury Lane. It had only eight scenes, three of which were purely transitional – as characters entered and left the stage linking the scenes before and after with the minimum of action, a device that Thurmond Junior did not really use. The whole action of The Necromancer was published in An Exact Description of the Two Fam’d Entertainments of Harlequin Doctor Faustus … and The Necromancer of 1724. The first performances of the pantomime were accompanied by The Vocal Parts of an Entertainment, call’d The Necromancer : or, Harlequin Doctor Faustus which must have appeared before the end of 1723. There was also a series of editions of A Dramatick Entertainment call’d The Necromancer: or, Harlequin Doctor Faustus which gave only the sung texts. Without An Exact Description, we would know little about the comic action in The Necromancer.

There was dancing in five of the eight scenes. In scene 5, two men enter as Faustus is enjoying a meal with two Country Girls. He tells the men’s fortunes, which they reject and then try to make off without paying him. As they leave, Faustus ‘brings ‘em back on their Hands, making ‘em in that Posture dance a Minuet round the Room’.

In the following scene the dancing was probably more conventional, for the location moves to a Mill where the Miller’s Wife dances a solo before she is joined by the Miller for a duet. Their choreography may have owed something to the various Miller’s dances which had been given in the entr’actes at London’s theatres since the early 1700s. The scene carried on with one of the pantomime’s more daring scenic tricks, as Faustus tries to elude the Miller and make off with his wife, finally fixing the Miller to one of the sails of his own Mill and setting them turning.

Rich’s masterstroke was the finale of The Necromancer, which may have been developed in response to little more than a hint in Thurmond Junior’s Harlequin Doctor Faustus. In the latter, Mephostophilus ‘flies down upon a Dragon’ in the first scene, but Rich reserved the appearance of his monster to the end of his pantomime. As soon as Hero, Leander and Charon have vanished:

‘The Doctor waves his Wand, and the Scene changes to a Wood; a monstrous Dragon appears, and descends about half way down the Stage, and from each Claw drops a Daemon, representing divers grotesque Figures, viz. Harlequin, Punch, Scaramouch, and Mezzetin. Four Female Spirits rise in Character to each Figure, and join in an Antick Dance;’

This was probably the most substantial sequence of dancing in the pantomime, performed by the company’s leading dancers with Dupré and Mrs Rogier as the Harlequins, Nivelon Junior and Mrs Cross as the Pierrots (Punch is not listed among these dancing Spirits in the advertisements although he did appear in the pantomime, played by Nivelon Senior i.e. Francis Nivelon), Glover and Mrs Wall as the Mezzetins and Lanyon and Mrs Bullock as Scaramouches. Dupré was, of course, a dancing Harlequin and his performance in this last scene must have been very different from John Rich’s in the title role. The dance historian Richard Semmens has suggested that this ‘Antick Dance’ was performed to a chacone, a piece which is included among music for The Necromancer published some years later. The scene then moves inexorably to its tragic conclusion.

‘as they are performing, a Clock strikes; the Doctor is seiz’d by Spirits, and thrown into the Dragon’s Mouth, which opens and shuts several times, ‘till he has swallow’d the Doctor down, belching out Flames of Fire, and roaring in a horrible Manner. The Dragon rises slowly; the four Daemons that drop from his Claws, take hold of ‘em again, and rise with it; the Spirits vanish;’

Rich did not bother with a masque to point the moral of his tale. The Necromancer ends with a sung chorus:

Now triumph Hell, and Fiends be gay,

The Sorc’rer is become our Prey.

In contrast to Harlequin Doctor Faustus, evil apparently triumphs at the end of The Necromancer.

It has been suggested that Rich was preparing The Necromancer as a new pantomime for Lincoln’s Inn Fields well before Drury Lane mounted Harlequin Doctor Faustus, but the coincidence seems unlikely and does not fit with his later practice. Could he instead have been developing another theme and then quickly repurposed its tricks and transformations to outdo Drury Lane with its own story?

References:

Richard Semmens, Studies in the English Pantomime, 1712-1733 (Hillsdale, NY, 2016), chapter 3.

Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson, ‘“Heathen Gods and Heroes”: Singers and John Rich’s Pantomimes at Lincoln’s Inn Fields’, “The Stage’s Glory” John Rich, 1692-1761, ed. Berta Joncus and Jeremy Barlow (Newark, NJ, 2011), 157-168.

Harlequin Doctor Faustus at 300

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How many people (including dance historians) have heard of the pantomime Harlequin Doctor Faustus, which celebrates its 300th birthday this year? It wasn’t the first English pantomime but it began a craze for these afterpieces which established this unique genre of entertainment on the London stage.

John Thurmond Junior’s Harlequin Doctor Faustus was first given at the Drury Lane Theatre on 26 November 1723. Here is the advertisement in the Daily Courant that same day:

It reveals the importance of commedia dell’arte characters, from Harlequin to Punch, as well as those from classical mythology, as part of its appeal to audiences. The emphasis on ‘Scenes, Machines, Habits and other Decorations’, all of which were ‘intirely New’ reveals the hopes of Drury Lane’s managers that the afterpiece would prove a money spinner. These were justified, at least for a while, for Harlequin Doctor Faustus was performed forty times before the end of 1723-1724 and was revived every season until 1730-1731. Its subsequent disappearance from the Drury Lane repertoire was probably due to the actors’ rebellion at the theatre at the end of the 1732-1733 season and the ensuing instability of the company. Harlequin Doctor Faustus was revived for eight performances in 1733-1734 but then disappeared altogether.

John Thurmond Junior was the son of the actor John Thurmond (hence his epithet) and seems to have begun his career on the Dublin stage. As a dancer, his repertoire ranged from the serious through the comic to the grotesque. His commedia dell’arte character was Scaramouch and he created the role of Mephostophilus in Harlequin Doctor Faustus. Thurmond Junior created several pantomimes for Drury Lane, notably Apollo and Daphne; or, Harlequin Mercury (first given on 20 February 1725) in which he used the serious part (with the title roles played by dancers – himself and Mrs Booth) to emulate John Weaver’s dramatic entertainments of dancing.

Harlequin Doctor Faustus and John Rich’s The Necromancer; or, Harlequin Doctor Faustus (first performed less than a month later, which I will also write about), Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre’s answer to Drury Lane’s pantomime, were so successful that scenarios for both were quickly printed. There are at least four different published versions of Harlequin Doctor Faustus, the most detailed of which brings both pantomimes together in print and probably appeared in 1724. Here is the title page:

This sets down the action in sixteen successive scenes, beginning in ‘The Doctor’s Study’ where Faustus signs away his soul and Mephostophilus ‘flies down upon a Dragon, which throws from its Mouth and Nostrils Flames of Fire’ to take the contract from him and present him with a white wand ‘by which he has the Gift and Power of Enchantment’. The following scenes present a frenzy of action with many tricks and transformations as well as a generous scattering of dances. Faustus was performed by John Shaw, whose formidable dance talents encompassed a wide range of styles (I have mentioned him in a number of previous posts).

The fourth scene turns to classical literature. Faustus and three ‘Students’ (in the characters of Scaramouch, Punch and Pierot) are drinking together when the table at which they are sitting:

‘… upon the Doctor’s waving his Wand, rises by degrees, and forms a stately Canopy, under which is discover’d the Spirit of Helen, who gets up and dances; and on her return to her Seat, the Canopy gradually falls, and is a Table again.’

‘Helen’ is, of course, Helen of Troy. Scene fourteen ends with a scenic spectacle as Doctor Faustus and his companions try to escape a pursuing mob by locking themselves into a barn. When the mob force a way in, they escape down the chimney ‘but the Doctor, as he quits the Barn-Top, waves his Wand and sets it all on Fire; it burns some time, very fiercely, and the Top at last falling in, the Mob, in utmost Dread, scour away’.

Scene fifteen returns to the Doctor’s study as his agreement with the Devil expires and he is accosted first by Time and then by Death, who strikes Faustus down.

‘Then two Fiends enter, in Lightning and Thunder, and laying hold of the Doctor, turn him on his Head, and so sink downwards with him, through Flames, that from below blaze up in a dreadful Manner; other Dæmons, at the same Time, as he is going down, tear him Limb from Limb, and, with his mangled Pieces, fly rejoicing upwards.’

Thurmond Junior’s pantomime did not end there, for a final scene revealed ‘A Poetical Heaven. The Prospect terminating in plain Clouds’ in which ‘several Gods and Goddesses are discover’d ranged on each Side, expressing the utmost Satisfaction at the Doctor’s Fall’. They perform a series of dances, beginning with a duet by Flora and Iris, then a ‘Pyrrhic’ solo by Mars (danced by Thurmond Junior), a duet by Bacchus and Ceres, followed by a solo for Mercury (danced by John Shaw) ‘compos’d of the several Attitudes belonging to the Character’. This ‘Grand Masque of the Heathen Deities’ was a divertissement of serious dancing and culminated as ‘the Cloud that finishes the Prospect flies up, and discovers a further View of a glorious transcendent Coelum’ revealing:

‘Diana, standing, in a fix’d Posture on an Altitude form’d by Clouds, the Moon transparent over her Head in an Azure Sky, tinctur’d with little Stars, she descends to a Symphony of Flutes; and having deliver’d her Bow and Quiver to two attending Deities, she dances.’

Diana was performed by Hester Booth, the leading dancer on the London stage. The newspapers were dismissive of the comic scenes in Harlequin Doctor Faustus, but they were agreed on the magnificence of the concluding masque and the beauty of Mrs Booth’s dancing. Both the comic and the serious parts of Thurmond Junior’s pantomime would influence many future productions.

It is frustrating that we have next to no evidence of this or most other 18th-century pantomimes. There are no records of costumes or scenery and such music as seems to survive may, or may not, belong to this production. No portrait of John Thurmond Junior is known. The nearest we can get is the satirical engraving ‘A Just View of the British Stage’ which castigates the Drury Lane management for their pantomime productions. Thurmond Junior may be the dancing master (identifiable by his pochette) shown hanging towards the top right of the print.

References:

Moira Goff, ‘John Thurmond Junior – John Weaver’s Successor?’, Proceedings, Society of Dance History Scholars, Twenty-Sixth Annual Conference, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland, 26-29 June 2003 (Stoughton, Wisconsin, 2003), pp, 40-44.

Moira Goff, The Incomparable Hester Santlow (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 115-117.

Richard Semmens, Studies in the English Pantomime, 1712-1733 (Hillsdale, NY, 2016), chapter 2

Anthony L’Abbé. The Prince of Wales’s Saraband

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The notation for Anthony L’Abbé’s ballroom dance The Prince of Wales’s Saraband is one of the exhibits in Crown to Couture at Kensington Palace (the exhibition closes on 29 October 2023). It is shown out of context and with next to no explanation of its meaning so, although I have written about the dance elsewhere, I thought it would be worth a post in Dance in History to provide some information about this beguiling duet.

The Prince of Wales’s Saraband was one of a series of dances created by Anthony L’Abbé and published in Beauchamp-Feuillet notation by Edmund Pemberton following L’Abbé’s appointment by George I as royal dancing master around 1715. The title page makes clear that this was one of the dances choreographed by L’Abbé to celebrate the birthday of Queen Caroline, wife of King George II and mother of the Prince.

Her birthday was on 1 March and it had been celebrated at court since at least 1717, when L’Abbé’s ballroom dance The Royal George was created and published for that purpose. In that case, the title page of the dance makes no reference to the then Princess of Wales but the advertisements for the notation make it clear that the dance was in her honour.

By 1731, Caroline had been Queen for fewer than four years and L’Abbé had not published a dance since the Queen Caroline which honoured her birthday in 1728. In 1731, there was a birth night ball for the Queen and the report in the Daily Advertiser for 3 March 1731 gives us some details.

There is no mention of L’Abbé’s dance, although Frederick Prince of Wales ‘open’d the Ball’ by dancing a minuet with his sister Anne the Princess Royal. The reference to the illumination of the houses of all three of the actor-managers of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, is interesting, for The Prince of Wales’s Saraband was performed in the entr’actes at that theatre on 22 March 1731 by William Essex and Hester Booth. That first public performance was obviously also intended to honour the Queen.

The dance seems to have been admired, for it was revived at the Haymarket Theatre on 21 August 1734 and again at Drury Lane on 17 May 1735, each time performed by Davenport and Miss Brett. It was revived again at Covent Garden on 25 April and 13 May 1737, by Dupré (probably the dancer James Dupré) and Miss Norman.

Prince Frederick had remained in Hanover following the accession of his grandfather as George I in 1714. He came to England only in 1728, eighteen months after the accession of his parents to the British throne. By this time, the prince was twenty-one and he joined a family which included four sisters and a brother whom he scarcely knew. This portrait by Philippe Mercier shows Prince Frederick in the mid-1730s.

Prince Frederick’s relationship with his parents, particularly his mother Queen Caroline, became steadily more difficult after his arrival in England. In 1731, the year The Prince of Wales’s Saraband was created, this problem lay in the future.

The Prince of Wales’s Saraband, as notated, is ostensibly an undemanding ballroom dance of 48 bars of music with the familiar AABB musical structure (A=10 B=14). The choreography is divided between four plates of notation (which by this time was Pemberton’s regular practice and probably reflects the expense of paper for printing). Plate 1 records the two A sections (20 bars of dance and music) and plate 2 the first B section. Plate 3 has bars 1 – 8 of the second B section and the dance ends on plate 4 with its final 6 bars. This division of the last section of the dance between two plates is dictated by the circular figures traced, which need to be shown separately so that they do not overlap, but also respects the musical phrasing. The layout on each plate may also reflect Pemberton’s aesthetic preferences – his notations for Isaac and L’Abbé include some of the most beautiful examples of this highly specialised genre of engraving.

Closer analysis of the notation reveals that this duet has some complexities and that it demands immaculate style and technique if it is to make an impact. Reconstructing the dance raises a number of questions about those aspects that are not notated – in particular arm movements and the use of the head. In all of these notated ballroom dances, the attention of the two performers seems to be divided between the presence (the guest of honour), each other and the surrounding audience. How much do we really know about the conventions that governed the performance of such dances, either at court or on stage, which should inform our dance reconstructions?

The Prince of Wales’s Saraband opens with a figure based around a temps de courante à deux, in which a temps is followed by a temps de courante, first on the inside foot and then on the outside foot. The notation indicates that the dancers turn their bodies towards the pointing foot on each temps, turning back towards the presence on each temps de courante. Did this mean that they turned their heads the same way or did they look steadfastly forward?

In the remaining bars of the first A section, they turn alternately towards one another and the presence but there are also opportunities to take in the surrounding audience.

The end of the dance, the steps and figures of the its last six bars on the final plate, has the dancers face the presence side-by-side for three bars travelling sideways away from each other and back again. They then turn to perform a pas de bourrée directly upstage, followed by a variant on the pas de bourrée vîte curving away from each other and coming face to face briefly before a coupé into their final réverence.

I can’t help wondering if this sequence was created, in part, to allow the dancers to acknowledge the audience that surrounded them before they made their final honours. The performance of The Prince of Wales’s Saraband at Drury Lane was part of a benefit for Mrs Booth, when some of the audience may have sat around the dancers on the stage (almost as they would have done in the ballroom) as well as in the auditorium. There is no evidence that Queen Caroline herself attended, but the royal box at this period would have been directly opposite the stage in the centre of the first tier just above the pit, providing the dancers with a specific focus.

The step vocabulary of this dance is dominated by the pas de bourrée, with and without a final jetté, extending to the pas de bourrée vîte. There are also a number of variants of the coupé, including the coupé sans poser and the coupé avec ouverture de jambe. It is interesting that, throughout, L’Abbé uses the jetté and not the demi-jetté in pas composés. These add energy and prevent the dance from becoming languid. He also likes to pair steps, although where he repeats these pairings he often introduces an element of variation the second time.

One sequence, on the second plate within the final bars of the B section, is noteworthy and quite challenging to perform.

L’Abbé introduces an element of suspension, in the opening coupé sans poser with a one-beat pause (which comes at the end of the preceding musical phrase), before a pas composé which demands unhurried speed – a pas plié, changement and coupé soutenu to fourth position with a quarter-turn. There is then a coupé avec ouverture de jambe (also with a one-beat pause) before the pas composé is repeated. This sequence ends with another coupé avec ouverture de jambe and a pause, before the B section is completed with two pas balancés.

The Prince of Wales’s Saraband was first performed on stage by Mrs Booth (née Hester Santlow), with whom L’Abbé had worked over many years and for whom he had created several notable choreographies. Could this ostensibly simple, yet demanding, ballroom duet have been created with and for her, intended specifically for performance at her benefit?

Further Reading:

Moira Goff, ‘Edmund Pemberton, Dancing Master and Publisher’, Dance Research, 11.1 (Spring 1993), 52-81

Moira Goff, The Incomparable Mrs Booth (London, 2007), pp. 138-139.

Contextualizing Mr Isaac’s Minuets

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I thought it would be interesting, and perhaps informative, to try to place Mr Isaac’s minuets within the context of other minuet choreographies of approximately the same period. It isn’t easy to date the French notated dances, other than by their dates of publication, but given that some use music that appeared earlier they, too, may have been created a few years before their first appearance in print. I have taken my investigation as far as 1709, the year that Isaac’s The Royal Portuguez was published. Apart from the minuet in Favier’s Le Mariage de la Grosse Cathos of 1688, which I include here, there are six other minuets to be explored. Some are minuets only, while others are minuet sections within multi-partite dances.

La Bourée d’Achille was first published in Feuillet’s Recueil de dances composées par Mr. Pecour in Paris in 1700, one of the first two collections of dances to appear in notation. The minuet is the central section of the dance, with 48 bars of music in 3/4 time (2xAABB A=4 B=8), preceded and followed by a bourrée. The music is from Achille et Polixène, the opera begun by Lully and completed after his death by Colasse. It was first performed in 1687 and then not revived until 1712. So, the duet must antedate 1700 and could belong to the mid to late 1690s.

The Menuet à Deux was published by Feuillet in Recueil de dances contenant un tres grand nombres, de meillieures entrées de ballet de Mr. Pecour which appeared in Paris in 1704. This was the first collection of dances closely linked to the Paris Opéra (Feuillet had published a collection of his own ‘theatrical’ choreographies in 1700, but these seem not to have been associated with dancers on the professional stage). It was danced by Dumoulin l’aîné and Mlle Victoire in Campra’s Fragments de Mr de Lully in 1702 and the choreography obviously belongs to that date. As its title suggests, this is a minuet throughout which has 48 bars in 3/4 time (AABB A=8 B=16)

The Entrée pour un homme et une femme was also choreographed by Pecour and included in the 1704 Recueil de dances. The music is from Destouches’s opera Omphale, first given at the Paris Opéra in 1701 and then at court in 1702 (after which it was not revived until 1721). The notation declares that this duet was performed by Ballon and Mlle Subligny. It was, of course, a minuet for the stage rather than the ballroom with 68 bars of music in 3/4 time (a rondeau, ABACA A=16 B=8 C=12)

La Bavière, choreographed by Pecour, appeared in the IIIIe Recueil de dances de bal pour l’année 1706 published in Paris the previous year. This is a minuet followed by a forlana, to music from La Barre’s La Vénitienne first given at the Paris Opéra in 1705, so this ballroom dance must surely have been created with speedy publication in mind. The minuet has 32 bars of music in 3/4 time (AABB A=B=8)

The Brawl of Audenarde, by Siris, was published individually in London as his ‘new Dance for the year 1709’ and was obviously intended to celebrate the Duke of Marlborough’s victory at the Battle of Oudenarde as part of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1708. The title page says ‘The Tune by Mr. G.’, John Ernest Galliard, and the music was published separately the same year. This dance is a courante followed by a minuet and then a gigue, so it has structural affinities with some of Mr Isaac’s choreographies. The minuet has 32 bars of music in 3/4 time (ABAB A=B=8).

Le Menuet d’Alcide, another choreography by Pecour, was also published in 1709 but in Paris within the VIIe Recüeil de dances pour l’année 1709. Its music is from the opera Alcide by Louis Lully and Marin Marais, first performed at the Paris Opéra in 1693 and revived in 1705 (according to Francine Lancelot’s catalogue La Belle Dance (entry FL/1709.1/02) the music was also used in Ariane et Bacchus by Marais in 1696). This is another minuet throughout with 54 bars of music in 6/4 (3xAABB’ A=4 B=6 B’=4). It is possible, but perhaps unlikely, that Pecour’s choreography dates to the mid to late 1690s.

Leaving aside issues of dating, do any of these minuets have steps or figures in common with those by Mr Isaac that I explored in my earlier post?

Favier’s minuet ‘Entrée des 2. Garçons et des 2. filles de la Nopce’ in Le Mariage de la Grosse Cathos is analysed in detail by Rebecca Harris-Warrick and Carol Marsh in their 1994 book Musical Theatre at the Court of Louis XIV (see particularly pages 144-148). This choreography uses pas de menuet and contretemps du menuet, plus a single coupé and assemblé combination. The pas de menuet and contretemps du menuet differ from later versions, both in their component steps and their timing (see Harris-Warrick and Marsh, pp. 109, 111). There is no reference to any of the later conventional figures of the ballroom minuet. This ‘Entrée’ is a stage choreography performed within a work which uses music, songs and dances to portray an event – the marriage of ‘Fat Kate’. It is, perhaps, more surprising that it uses a standard and restricted vocabulary of steps than that it ignores the usual figures of the minuet, if these had indeed been established by 1688.

The French ballroom dances published in the early 1700s all reflect the menuet ordinaire as known from Rameau’s Le Maître à danser of 1725. The minuets in La Bourée d’Achille and La Bavière, as well as Le Menuet d’Alcide, all predominantly use the pas de menuet with some contretemps du menuet and occasional grace steps. In La Bourée d’Achille the pas de menuet à trois mouvements is favoured, while in Le Menuet d’Alcide preference is given to the pas de menuet à deux mouvements. The figures of these two minuets (particularly the latter) recognisably relate to the conventional figures of the ballroom minuet, but the minuet section in La Bavière is too short to do other than allude to the opening figure before moving on to another short figure which simply gets the dancers to their places to begin the following forlana.

Of the two minuets for the stage, the Menuet à Deux danced by Dumoulin l’aîné and Mlle Victoire is the most conventional. Of the twenty-four pas composés in this dance (which are written as if in 6/4), ten are pas de menuet à deux mouvements and eight are contretemps du menuet. Pecour begins the dance with a coupé sideways as the couple face each other, followed by a pas tombé and a jetté. The first B section of the music begins with the couple facing one another on a right line for a pas balancé forwards and backwards, incorporating a beat and an ouverture de jambe, before moving sideways away from each other with a fleuret and a pas balonné. They then repeat this sequence. Despite his choice of steps, Pecour seems not to reflect any of the ballroom minuet’s figures within his choreography – although this dance has quite a strong inward focus between the two dancers which is interesting in the context of a stage performance. Here is the first plate.

The Entrée pour un homme et une femme, danced by Ballon and Mlle Subligny in Omphale, has a far more varied vocabulary of steps with only four pas de menuet à deux mouvements and two contretemps du menuet. Otherwise Pecour uses pas composés based on a wider range of basic steps, some of which play with conventional steps from the minuet, for example the demi-contretemps followed by a pas tombé and a jetté, while others come together into sequences which echo those he uses in other dance types, like the coupé à deux mouvements followed by a coupé sans poser as the couple move sideways away from each other. There are no clear references to the conventional figures of the minuet, although the final retreat does have a contretemps du menuet as the pair move backwards upstage. Here is the final plate of this duet.

It is worth noting that this dance is far more outwardly focussed than Pecour’s Menuet à Deux. It is less easy to identify as a minuet from its choreography, but I suspect that a subtle relationship with the conventions of the ballroom minuet might emerge in the course of detailed reconstruction of the duet.

The last of the minuets seems to relate most closely to those by Mr Isaac, perhaps because Siris was working in London as well, or maybe because he was trying to emulate some aspects of Isaac’s choreographic style. Here is plate two of The Brawl of Audenarde with the whole of the minuet section.

The notation and engraving styles are strikingly different from those of the French notations and resemble those of Isaac’s dances (the printer John Walsh produced both Isaac’s and Siris’s dances). The dancers have just completed the courante, the opening section of the duet, and are facing each other offset across the dancing space. They begin by moving onto the same diametrical line with a variant of the pas de bourrée in which the last step is a pas glissé, recognisable from Isaac’s minuet for The Britannia, to which Siris adds a final plié. This is joined to a hop and a jetté, the final elements of the contretemps du menuet, to make a new hybrid pas composé emulating the sort of steps created by Isaac. Siris makes copious use of the pas de menuet à deux mouvements – there are seven in all within this 16-bar minuet (although the music is notated in 3/4, the dance steps are written in 6/4) and four are given small variations. There is a grace step, the pas de courante, which appears once in its usual guise of a tems de courante followed by a demi-jetté battu and then in an ornamented version (performed by the woman as well as the man) which has a double beat. The latter comes close to the end of the minuet section, by which time the couple are in mirror symmetry and so dancing on opposite feet. Like La Bavière, the minuet section of The Brawl of Audenarde is too short to include even allusions to the figures of the ballroom minuet. It ends with the man and woman side by side facing the presence, but improper, ready to begin the gigue with which the duet ends.

On the evidence of this small selection of early notated minuets, six French and one English (or, at least, published in London), Mr Isaac’s choreography was very idiosyncratic. The nearest to him in style is Siris. Should we read anything into the fact that, in his own translation of Feuillet’s Choregraphie entitled The Art of Dancing, Demonstrated by Characters and Figures and published in London in 1706, Siris claimed that he had been taught the notation by its inventor Pierre Beauchamp in the late 1680s? As we now know, Mr Isaac had begun his career in Paris by the early 1670s and was undoubtedly acquainted with Beauchamp. Did he and Siris enjoy similar early training in belle danse, contributing to the similarities between their approaches to choreography?

The Dancer in the Dancing Space: The ‘Chacone de Phaëton’

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There are three choreographies to the chaconne from act two of Lully’s 1683 opera Phaëton:

  • Guillaume-Louis Pecour, ‘Chacone pour une femme’, Recüeil de dances (Paris, 1704). LMC 2020, FL/1704.1/03.
  • Guillaume-Louis Pecour, ‘Chacone de Phaëton pour un homme non Dancée a l’Opera’, also in the Recueil de dances (Paris, 1704). LMC 1960, FL/1704.1/29.
  • Anonymous, ‘La chaconne de phaestons’ a solo for a man surviving in the manuscript source held by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fr. 14884. LMC 1940, FL/Ms17.1/10.

All use a single iteration of the music, which in the opera is played through twice. Each of the choreographies thus has 152 bars of music with which to create a series of dance variations.

I have recently been working on the solo for a woman and become interested in the dancer’s relationship to the space within which she is dancing – or, perhaps more accurately, the space which surrounds her. We do not know when or where this solo was performed – it may or may not have been given within the opera. The step vocabulary is straightforward, with little in the way of embellishment, but its use of space and the changing orientation of the dancer as she traces her figures is worth some analysis.

A quick look at the notations for the two male solos indicates that both are very focussed on downstage centre (often referred to, particularly in ballroom contexts, as the ‘presence’), whether they are facing it or have their backs turned. These male dancers rarely turn to either stage right or stage left, or their ballroom equivalents. The use of space is quite different to that in the female solo.

Here, I would like to look at just three sequences from Pecour’s ‘Chacone pour une femme’ of 1704.

  • Plate 10, bars 1 – 16 (the first two musical variations), the beginning of this dance
  • Plate 17, bars 117 – 124, towards the end of the solo
  • Plate 19, bars 137 – 144, the penultimate variation of the dance.

I won’t say anything about the music, except that the notator of the dance respects the musical variations as he divides the choreography between plates – each plate has 16 bars of dance / music (two variations, each of 4 + 4 bars), except for plates 14 and 18 which each have 12 bars of dance / music to reflect changes in the structure of the music.

This chaconne begins with the dancer moving to right and left, before making a conventional passage downstage. According to the notation, she faces the presence as she waits to begin. She starts with a quarter-turn to the right for a coupé à deux mouvements, and then makes a quarter-turn to the left for a coupé battu avec ouverture de jambe. She repeats these two steps on the other foot, turning first to the left and then back to the right. So, she addresses each side of her dancing space before turning to the presence. I haven’t done any research to see if this is unusual among the notated dances, but in terms of the dancer’s successive orientations within her dancing space it is interesting. Here is the first plate of the ‘Chacone pour une femme’, with the first two dance / music variations, together with a detail of the passage I have described:

By plate 17, the dancer is within reach of the end of the choreography after a variety of steps and figures. Here, I want to look particularly at the second 8-bar variation – my focus is on the figure to the right of the plate.

This is not the first rectilinear figure in the chaconne. There is another in plate 12, in which the dancer performs seven coupés à deux mouvements with a final coupé simple. All travel sideways to the left and there is a quarter-turn to the left at the beginning of every other step, from the first to the seventh and then on the eighth as well. So, the dancer performs two coupés à deux mouvements facing downstage, two facing stage left, two facing upstage, one facing stage right and the final coupé simple facing downstage again. The turns in the figure on plate 17 are more subtle and varied and follow each other in quick succession. This was the sequence which set me thinking about the dancer’s use of space and orientation as I struggled to get it right. I also couldn’t help wondering how it might relate to later codifications of the directions of the body in ballet and in modern ballroom (two styles I am acquainted with).

This variation has eight pas de bourrée. The dancer begins facing the presence, having just done a pas de bourrée sideways. Her first step has a quarter-turn to the right and then a half-turn to the right on the demi-coupé and ensuing step of the pas de bourrée, so she faces stage right then stage left and has a final step backwards with no turn. The next pas de bourrée has a quarter-turn to the right at the beginning and she stays facing downstage for the rest of the step. The third and fourth pas de bourrée each have quarter-turns to the right on their first two steps, followed by no turn. The dancer faces stage right, upstage, stage left, downstage as she moves. Although she ends facing the presence, her fifth step has a quarter turn on its second step so, she turns away to face stage right. The sixth pas de bourrée has a quarter-turn to the right on the first step, so she faces upstage immediately (at the point when she must be directly in front of the presence). Her seventh step has quarter-turns to the right on the first and second steps, turning her back to face downstage, a direction she maintains for the eighth pas de bourrée (which moves sideways to the right, reflecting the step which preceded this sequence). I have said little about changes in the direction of the steps themselves (the second to the sixth pas de bourrée each begin with a sideways step), but they play a part in the surprising complexities of this variation.

As I worked on it, I began to wonder how important these degrees of turn were. They reminded me of the precise degrees of turn required in modern ballroom steps, in which the directions of the body relate to the centre lines, the outer lines (the walls) of the dancing space and the ‘line of dance’ (a concept that needs further analysis) itself. Both these rectilinear figures within the chaconne move anti-clockwise around the space, as do modern ballroom dancers, with the dancer herself turning clockwise as she moves. I understand that directions of the body and directions of travel were not codified, in either ballet or ballroom dancing, before the early 20th century, but here are the rudiments of them within baroque dance some 200 years earlier. Of course, this focus on the perimeter of the dancing space raises a question – was the ‘Chacone pour une femme’ created for the court ballroom rather than the stage?

The last sequence I want to look at comes close to the end of the dance, on the very last plate of the notation.

It is both an extension and a variation of the sequence with which this chaconne began, and also draws on another earlier version of that opening sequence in which the coupé à deux mouvements was replaced by a contretemps. This latest variation begins with a contretemps, followed by a coupé battu avec ouverture de jambe, but the dancer turns to the left first and does not turn back to the presence on her second step. Instead, she continues to face stage left and then does a half-turn pirouette to face stage right, followed by a coupé soutenu in the same direction. She then repeats the whole sequence on the other foot in the opposite direction, not really addressing the presence at all. She only turns to face downstage when she begins the final variation of the choreography directly before the presence, and then faces it until the very end of the dance.

I can’t guess at the significance of these changes of direction within this particular female solo, although I do feel that it is important to dance them accurately. I couldn’t readily find anything on the topic of body directions among the sources accessible to me, but I need to take another look. The concept of the presence needs revisiting, too. So, perhaps, there will be a follow-up to this post in due course.

Reading List:

Régine Astier, ‘Chaconne pour une femme: Chaconne de Phaëton. A performance Study’, Dance Research, XV.2 (Winter 1997), 150-169. (Papers from the 1996 conference Dance to Honour Kings)

Francine Lancelot. La Belle Dance: Catalogue Raisonnée (Paris, 1996) [FL]

Meredith Ellis Little and Carol G. Marsh. La Danse Noble: an Inventory of Dances and Sources (Williamstown, 1992) [LMC]

The Entrée Grave: A Touchstone of Male Virtuosity?

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I am pursuing a line of research that has led me to the entrée grave and its use in musical works on the London stage in the late 17th century, so I thought I would take a closer look at this dance type through the choreographies surviving in notation. I have, of course, written about male dancing in other posts and I list these below for anyone who might be interested.

In her 2016 book Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera (p. 56), Rebecca Harris-Warrick describes the entrée grave as ‘a slow dance in duple meter characterized by dotted quarter note /eighth-note patterns, rather like the opening portion of an overture’, cautioning that ‘“grave” is found in the headings for choreographies … in scores such a piece is generally identified simply as an entrée or an air’. She also tells us that ‘in choreographic sources entrées graves are always danced by men’ (although she does cite an opera in which one may have been danced by women, p. 332).

Here, I am concerned only with the ‘choreographic sources’, as I want mainly to look at the vocabulary and technique associated with the entrée grave. The most comprehensive listing of notated dances is provided by La Danse Noble by Meredith Little and Carol Marsh, published in 1992, which includes an ‘Index to Dance Types and Styles’. The authors point out that ‘classification by type and style is often a problematic matter’ and this is certainly the case with the entrée grave. They list eight notated choreographies as entrées graves, but Francine Lancelot in La Belle Dance identifies only two in her ‘Index of Dances according to the Number of Performers’ – adding another six through her detailed descriptions of individual notations. I include references to entries in both of these catalogues in my list of choreographies below – prefaced LMC for Little and Marsh and FL for Lancelot.

The dances they identify as entrées graves are not quite the same. Little and Marsh include two solo versions of the ‘Entrée de Saturne’ from the Prologue to Lully’s Phaëton which are not this dance type (LMC4000 and LMC4260) and are not so identified by Lancelot (FL/1700.1/11 and FL/MS05.1/13). These are omitted from the list below. However, Lancelot identifies two male duets which are not classified as entrées graves by Little and Marsh (LMC4220, FL/1704.1/23 and LMC2780, FL/1713.2/36) which have been added to the list. So, between them, these two catalogues identify eight notated choreographies which may be classed as entrées graves. The dancing characters are identified by Lancelot from the livrets for the individual operas from which the music for the dance is taken.

Feuillet, Recüeil de dances (Paris, 1700)

  • ‘Entrée grave pour homme’, music anonymous (AABBB’ A=8 B=9 B’=4 38 bars). No dancing character indicated. (LMC4140, FL/1700.1/13)
  • ‘Entrée d’Apolon’, music from Lully Le Triomphe de l’Amour (1681), entrée XV (AABBB’ A=9 B=19 B’=7 63 bars). Dancing character Apollo. (LMC2720, FL/1700.1/14)
  • ‘Balet de neuf danseurs’, opening section, music from Lully Bellérophon (1679), act V scene 3 (AABB A=B=11 44 bars). Dancing characters Lyciens. (LMC1320, FL/1700.1/15)

Pecour, Recüeil de dances (Paris, 1704)

  • ‘Entrée pour deux hommes’, music from Lully Cadmus et Hermione (1674), V, 3 (AABB A=4 B=9 26 bars). Lancelot notes that the music is a gavotte but implies that the choreography is actually an entrée grave (as indicated by the notation). Dancing characters Suivants de Comus. (LMC4220, FL/1704.1/23)
  • ‘Entrée d’Appolon pour homme’, music from Lully Le Triomphe de l’Amour (1681), entrée XV (AABBB’ A=9 B=19 B’=7 63 bars). Dancing character Apollo. (LMC2740, FL/1704.1/30)

Pecour, Nouveau Recüeil de dances (Paris, c1713)

  • ‘Entrée de Cithe’ (a male duet), music from Bourgeois, Les Amours déguiséz (1713), 3e Entrée (AAB A=10 B=16 36 bars). Dancing characters Scithes (Scythians). (LMC2780, FL/1713.2/36)
  • ‘Entré seul pour un homme’, music from Stuck Méléagre (1709), act II scene 7 (AABB A=8 B=13 42 bars). Dancing characters Guerriers. (LMC4580, FL/1713.2/38)

L’Abbé, A New Collection of Dances (London, c1725)

  • ‘Entrée’, music from Lully, Acis et Galatée (1686), Prologue (AABB A-10 B=13 46 bars). Dancing characters in the opera Suite de l’Abondance, Suite de Comus. (LMC4180, FL/1725.1/12)

So, we have in all six male solos and two male duets published over the first quarter of the 18th century that might tell us something about the step vocabulary and the dance style of the entrée grave. The details given above provide quite a lot of information, before we turn to the notations themselves. All the choreographies are quite short. The longest are the two versions, by Feuillet and Pecour respectively, of the ‘Entrée’ for Apollo to music from Lully’s Le Triomphe de l’Amour of 1681, with 63 bars of music. The shortest is Pecour’s ‘Entrée pour deux hommes’ from Lully’s Cadmus et Hermione of 1674, with only 26 bars of music (and a question mark over the dance type it represents). It is worth remembering that, with the entrée grave, each bar of music has two pas composés of dancing many of which are complex or virtuosic. The music has to be slow to allow the dancers time to execute the steps.

None of Feuillet’s choreographies and none of Pecour’s solos are directly linked with performances at the Paris Opéra. Indeed, Pecour’s version of the ‘Entrée d’Appolon’ states that it was ‘non dancée à l’Opera’.  Only Pecour’s two duets record dances performed there – the dancers are named in the livrets for each opera as well as on the head-title for each notation. L’Abbé’s solo for Desnoyer was created for performance in London, as an entr’acte entertainment at the Drury Lane Theatre. Nevertheless, given that L’Abbé as well as Pecour had danced at the Paris Opéra and that Feuillet must also have been familiar with its repertoire as well as its dance conventions, it is worth considering the dancing characters for which the music was originally written as part of any choreographic analysis.

Apollo was, of course, the Olympian god identified with the sun (and with whom Louis XIV identified himself). The Lyciens were simply men of Lycia, celebrating the marriage of the Lycian princess Philonoé to the hero Bellérophon. The Suite (Followers) of Comus were the dancing characters in both Cadmus et Hermione and, probably, Acis et Galatée. The Cithes (Scythians), in other contexts known as warlike nomads from southern Russia, take part in celebrations in Les Amours déguiséz, but they also link to the Guerriers who dance an entrée grave in Méléagre. Between them, these characters carry three separate associations which might also overlap. Apollo represents power and control, yet there is an underlying hint of excess given the god’s many love affairs. The theme of revelry links the Followers of Comus with the Lyciens and the Cithes. The Guerriers, and perhaps the Cithes, suggest the portrayal of power and control. The messages conveyed by the entrée grave may be less clear and fixed than has been supposed.

An analysis of the notated dances reveals shared features. They routinely include some of the most virtuosic male steps – multiple pirouettes (with and without pas battus by the working leg), entre-chats à six and a variety of cabrioles, in particular the demie cabriole en tournant un tour en saut de basque. The first plate of Pecour’s ‘Entrée d’Appolon’, published in 1704, shows both an entre-chat and the demie cabriole en tournant, while the third plate shows two pirouettes, one without and one with pas battus.

All of these entrée grave choreographies include a number of basic steps, between a quarter and a third of the total in the surviving notations. They also routinely ornament such steps with beats and turns, making them far more complex. Examples of both (with some unadorned basic steps) can be seen in the second plate of Feuillet’s ‘Entrée grave pour homme’ from his collection of 1700.

The figures (floor patterns) traced by these male dancers are not easy to interpret. They seem mainly to move downstage and upstage on a central line, with occasional steps to right or left which quickly bring them back centre stage. Many of their steps, particularly those classed as virtuosic, are performed in place, so the dancer does not travel nearly as much as the notations imply. (Steps are, of course, written along the dance tracts, whether or not the dancer travels along these). The few circular figures are usually associated with the demie cabriole en tournant un tour en saut de basque, which makes a turn in the air so that the dancer lands close to where he began his jump. There are a few video recordings of some of the notated entrées graves which show the dancers traversing the stage quite freely, but I am not sure how much these owe to the demands of the dancing space rather than the notation. These male solos are certainly more compact and less varied in their figures than the corresponding female theatrical solos.

The only entrée grave for more than one or two male dancers is the ‘Balet de neuf Danseurs’ by Feuillet, again from his 1700 collection. It is danced by a leading man with eight ‘Followers’ who stand behind and to each side of him as he begins the choreography. Only the first section is an entrée grave, which is followed by two canaries. The soloist dances the first A section and then stands centre back while four of the eight Followers (those who were standing behind him) perform two parallel duets to the second A section. The soloist then dances to the first B section and is followed by the same four men, who resume their duets for the second B section. The dance continues with the soloist, who dances the first and second canary, and it finishes with all eight Followers dancing the repeat of the two canary tunes while the soloist again stands centre back. This choreography may reveal one way in which dancing masters could deploy a group of male dancers onstage for an entrée grave. Here are the first two plates of this choreography.

There is one other entrée grave choreography that I have not so far mentioned, but which is equally relevant to the research project that brought me to this topic. This is the ‘Air des Ivrognes’ in Le Mariage de la Grosse Cathos, a ballet performed at the court of Louis XIV in 1688. The ballet was recorded by its choreographer Jean Favier in a dance notation of his own invention, which was published in facsimile, decoded, set in context and analysed by Rebecca Harris-Warrick and Carol G. Marsh in 1994 in Musical Theatre at the Court of Louis XIV. They suggest that this duet, performed by two male dancers from the Paris Opéra in the guise of Peasants, ‘would have been immediately recognised as a burlesque of the entrée grave, the noblest and most difficult of the theatrical dances of the time’ (p. 55). As their analysis reveals, it is indisputably a comic number even as the dancers attempt some of the virtuosic feats associated with this dance type.

My research into the entrée grave has, necessarily, been limited. It would be useful to know how many more entrées graves there are in the operas of Lully and his immediate successors and which characters performed them, even though the choreographies are lost, but this is a task for musicologists. Although much of my work on baroque dance is practical, the demands of the entrée grave are well beyond my dancing skills – it is a shame that conference papers by those who have danced these difficult choreographies should remain unpublished and thus inaccessible. I have been able to answer some of my own immediate research questions, but my work has uncovered others. Was the entrée grave simply an expression of power and nobility or did it have other contexts with different meanings? How well was this dance known beyond France and how was it seen and understood elsewhere, for example in London? What was it really like in performance?

Reading list:

Rebecca Harris-Warrick. Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera (Cambridge, 2016)

Rebecca Harris-Warrick and Carol G. Marsh, Musical Theatre at the Court of Louis XIV: Le Mariage de la Grosse Cathos (Cambridge, 1994)

Francine Lancelot. La Belle Dance: Catalogue Raisonnée (Paris, 1996)

Meredith Ellis Little and Carol G. Marsh. La Danse Noble: an Inventory of Dances and Sources (Williamstown, 1992)

Previous Dance in History Posts about Male Dancing:

Money for Entrechats: Valuing the Virtuosic Male Dancer – L’Abbé and Ballon

Money for Entrechats: Valuing the Virtuosic Male Dancer – Delagarde and Dupré

Demie Cabriole en Tournant un Tour en Saut de Basque – a Step Solely for a Man?

Demies Cabrioles in Male Solos and Duets

Pas de Sissonne Battu in Stage Dances for Men

Entre-Chats in Male Solos and Duets

Subscription Lists and London’s Dancing Masters: Anthony L’Abbé

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Around 1725, Le Roussau published A New Collection of Dances – thirteen choreographies ‘That have been performed both in Druy-Lane [sic] and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, by the best Dancers’ created by Anthony L’Abbé and notated by Le Roussau himself. The dancers were named on the title page as Ballon, L’Abbé, Delagarde, Dupré and Desnoyer with Mrs Elford, Mrs Santlow, Mrs Bullock and Mrs Younger. All were leading dancers in London’s theatres. The collection provides a series of snapshots of stage dancing in London between 1698 and 1722. It also gives us an insight into the world of professional dancers and dancing masters, through the ‘List of the Masters, Subscribers’ which precedes the notated dances. They are the individuals who made publication possible by paying in advance for the printed copies.

The list of subscribers is on two preliminary pages and has 68 names.

All five of the male dancers represented among the notated choreographies subscribed, but not one of the women – there are no female subscribers to this collection. Given the popularity with audiences of the professional female dancers named on the title page, that absence is worth further investigation. Was it to do with their status within the dance worlds of Britain, France and Europe? Was it that they didn’t teach (or weren’t known as teachers, even if they did)? Were they excluded from learning and using Beauchamp-Feuillet notation? I can’t readily answer any of those questions, but this subscription list reveals the need for a great deal more research and much discussion about the 18th-century dance world.

Of the 68 male subscribers, 48 were British and apparently based in London, six were from English provincial towns and cities, seven were French and five were based elsewhere in Europe. L’Abbé himself subscribed for four copies, while Dezais (Feuillet’s successor as the publisher of notated dances in Paris) took two – the same as Edward Lally (who may have been the seasoned dancing master Edmund Lally, rather than the young Edward Lally – probably his son – just beginning to make a name for himself on the London stage), and John Shaw who was one of London’s leading professional dancers. Shaw died young in December 1725, providing an end date for the publication of L’Abbé’s Collection. It is interesting that, although he had been trained by the French dancer René Cherrier and assuredly had a mastery of French dance style and technique, Shaw was not one of the Collection’s male dancers. They were all French, by ancestry if not nationality. Even more interesting is the fact that all the female dancers were British.

The list of subscribers includes ‘Mr. Edw. Pemberton’, probably Edmund Pemberton, the notator and publisher of L’Abbé’s ballroom dances many of which were created for the Hanoverian court to which L’Abbé was dancing master. L’Abbé’s list overlaps with that of Pemberton’s 1711 An Essay for the Further Improvement of Dancing (which includes a solo version of L’Abbé’s passacaille to music from Lully’s opera Armide). Pemberton’s dedicatee Thomas Caverley did not subscribe to L’Abbé’s theatrical choreographies, perhaps because – although he was a champion of dance notation – he was dedicated to the teaching of amateurs and ballroom dancing. Among the other English dancing masters who were L’Abbé’s subscribers were Couch, Essex, Fairbank, Groscourt, Gery, two members of the Holt family, Shirley and John Weaver. All supported both Pemberton’s and L’Abbé’s collections.

A handful of London’s other male professional dancers also subscribed – Boval, Newhouse, John Thurmond and John Topham, who were to be seen dancing varied repertoires at Drury Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Fields. We don’t know how much it cost to purchase L’Abbé’s A New Collection of Dances by subscription, but Le Roussau’s title page advertised copies at 25 shillings (around £145 today). Was this within the means of such dancers, some of who were definitely below the top ranks? Was their interest in the notations chiefly to aid teaching, or might they have drawn upon these when creating new choreographies for their own use?

John Weaver had been the first London dancing master to publish by subscription, with Orchesography (his translation of Feuillet’s Choregraphie) in 1706. Among the subscribers to L’Abbé’s Collection several had subscribed to one or more of the three works published in that way by Weaver (the others were A Collection of Ball-Dances by Mr Isaac, also in 1706, and Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures upon Dancing in 1721). A few – Essex, Walter Holt and Pemberton – subscribed to all five of the treatises published by subscription between 1706 and 1735. The last to appear was Kellom Tomlinson’s The Art of Dancing, which he must have been planning if not writing close to the time when L’Abbé’s Collection was published, to which he subscribed.

Apart from a few continental dancers working in London’s theatres, there were no European subscribers to any of the dance treatises published in London – except for L’Abbé’s Collection, which had seven subscribers from Paris and five from elsewhere in Europe. Among the Parisians, I have already mentioned Dezais. His name is the only one that would be unfamiliar to non-specialists with an interest in dancing during the 18th century. Claude Ballon and Michel Blondy were close contemporaries of L’Abbé, as well as being leading dancers at the Paris Opéra from the 1690s and distinguished teachers of dancing. Ballon’s ballroom dances were published by Dezais. Dumoulin may well be David Dumoulin, the most celebrated of the four brothers who all pursued dancing careers at the Paris Opéra. He was noted for his mastery of the serious style. Like François Marcel, he was from a younger generation of dancers. He made his Opéra debut in 1705 followed by Marcel in 1708. Marcel was also making a reputation as a teacher. It is very unlikely that ‘Mr. Dupre, junior, of Paris’ was Louis ‘le grand’ Dupré, in fact he may have been related to London’s Louis Dupré the dancer in four of L’Abbé’s choreographies in the Collection.

The ’Mons. Pecour’ listed must have been Guillaume-Louis Pecour, ballet master at the Paris Opéra. His dancing career reached back to the early 1670s. L’Abbé’s A New Collection of Dances emulates the Nouveau Recüeil de Dance de Bal at Celle de Ballet notated and published by Gaudrau around 1713. Gaudrau’s collection of Pecour’s ballroom and stage choreographies has nine ballroom dances and thirty theatrical dances, to Le Roussau’s thirteen stage dances by L’Abbé. Gaudrau, ‘Mr. Gaudro, of Madrid in Spain’ is among L’Abbé’s subscribers. There is also ‘Mons’ Phi. Duruel, of Dusseldorp in Germany’ – John-Philippe Du Ruel had danced in London between 1703, when he was billed as ‘from the opera at Paris’ and described as a ‘Scholar’ of Pecour, and 1707, the year he danced at court for Queen Anne’s birthday celebrations. It seems likely that he was the dancing master based in Dusseldorf by the mid-1720s.

The subscription list to A New Collection of Dances surely represents L’Abbé’s own circle of dancers and dancing masters – those he knew and who knew him and his work. There were the men L’Abbé must have danced alongside at the Paris Opéra, as well as those he had worked with both onstage and off over the twenty years and more that he had been in London. What about the English provincial dancing masters and those in Europe? Did they know L’Abbé or did he know them, by reputation at least? Were they invited to subscribe and by whom? Did some of those who were more closely associated with L’Abbé act as intermediaries in this process? As you can see, I have rather more questions than answers about this particular list of subscribers.

Reconstructing The Louvre (Aimable Vainqueur)

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I have written about Pecour’s 1701 duet Aimable Vainqueur in at least three posts. This popular dance was mentioned in Favourite Ballroom Duets and Famous French Ballroom Dances. In Aimable Vainqueur on the London Stage, I looked at one strand of the performance history of The Louvre – the title by which Aimable Vainqueur was known in London’s theatres. In this post, I will look at the process of reconstructing the dance, as I have been doing just that using John Weaver’s version of the notation (titled The Louvre), which he included in the second edition of Orchesography in 1722. This is the version I will use for my exploration here.

The Louvre (Aimable Vainqueur) is a loure to music from André Campra’s 1700 opera Hésione. I don’t know whether London audiences knew that, possibly not as they were unlikely to have heard of the opera, but they must have appreciated the tune or the dance would not have survived in the entr’acte repertoire as long as it did. The music in Weaver’s version, as in Feuillet’s original of 1701, has the time signature 3 and the dance notation has one pas composé to each bar of music. Other loures, including the first part of Mr Isaac’s ball dance The Pastorall of 1713, have music in 6/4 with two pas composés to each bar of music on the dance notation. I will return to the relationship between the dance and the music later.

Weaver’s notation has some minor differences from Feuillet’s original, which suggest that he derived his version from Richard Shirley’s notation of the dance, published in London in 1715. Weaver copied Shirley’s floor patterns on the second plate as well as some of Shirley’s notations of individual steps – and he repeated some of Shirley’s mistakes. I assume that Shirley had access to Feuillet’s notation and either he, or possibly his engraver, made the changes. The Louvre has six plates of notation, with the dance divided between them in a way which reflects the music’s structure and phrasing. The music is AABB (A=14 B=24) and plate 1 has the first A, plate 2 has the second A, plate 3 has bars 1-8 of the first B, plate 4 has bars 9-24 of the first B and the second B section is similarly divided between plates 5 and 6.

The notation is clearly set out, although it is not without mistakes and the floor patterns do not always accurately reflect the spatial relationships between the two dancers. Regular users of such notated choreographies will know that it is not possible to entirely reconcile the patterns on the page with those to be performed within the dancing space. Here is the first plate of Weaver’s notation.

All the steps of The Louvre are from the basic vocabulary of baroque dance. The pas de bourée is most often used and the coupé appears in a number of different versions, including coupé simple, coupé à deux mouvements, coupé avec ouverture de jambe and coupé sans poser le corps. Pecour’s figures and step sequences have a classical simplicity (a feature of much of his choreography), although I can’t help feeling that Aimable Vainqueur may have been expressive rather than abstract in performance. The dance takes its title from the first words of an air sung by Venus in act 3 scene 5 of Hésione. The tune was used in the opera for a dance by ‘Ombres de Amans fortunéz’, the shades of happy lovers. At the Paris Opéra, the leading dancers were Claude Ballon and Marie-Thérèse Subligny and it seems unlikely that the choreography they performed closely resembled the ballroom duet created by Pecour for performance before Louis XIV at Marly by several pairs of courtiers – although the two may well have shared some passages. I have to admit that, when I am trying to reconstruct notated dances, it is important that I know about the context for both the music and the dance to help with my interpretation.

The Louvre is in mirror symmetry, except for the last 16 bars of the first B section and bars 9 to 18 of the second B in which the dancers are on the same foot and so in axial symmetry. The sequence within the first B section is of particular choreographic interest and I will analyse it in some detail.

The duet begins conventionally, with the couple side by side and the woman on the man’s right for a passage which travels directly towards the presence. I will use some stage terms to delineate the dancing space, although these are not really appropriate for the ballroom. The dance begins with two coupés à deux mouvements, followed by a pas de bourée and a tems de courante. The sequence is simple but nicely varied rhythmically and calls for a pleasing succession of arm movements. Fewer than a third of the steps in The Louvre are directed towards the presence, although it is apparent that the dancers remain mindful of it throughout – as they would have needed to be both at the court of Louis XIV and on the London stage. The next figure begins with a variant of the pas de bourée en presence, which allows the couple to acknowledge each other for the first time. Then, after another variant of the en presence, they curve away with a contretemps which moves first sideways and then forwards. I am beginning to wonder if such steps, so early in a duet, were a commonplace intended to allow the dancers to address those who surrounded the dancing space, whether in the ballroom or on stage. In The Louvre, the dancers turn back to face the presence, cross (with the woman upstage of the man) and then travel towards the presence again to complete the section with a pas de bourée and a tems de courante.

The second plate (the A repeat) uses much the same vocabulary of steps, although the dancers begin by turning to face one another and travelling sideways rather than forwards. They turn to face the presence for a few steps and then curve away from each other, turn to face and then curve away again before turning to face on the last bar.

Plate 3 begins the B section with the dancers again travelling sideways upstage. Pecour then gives them each a double loop figure, in opposite directions but still in mirror symmetry. They pass one another across the stage, the woman upstage of the man, and end their second loop facing each other up and down the dancing area. The man has his back to the presence. This sequence of 8 bars (five of which are pas de bourée) raises some questions about which way the dancers’ heads turn and where they direct their gaze as they move through the figure.  As they approach each other in the fourth bar, before they cross, do they look at each other rather than over their raised opposition arm (which would result in the man looking at the woman and the woman looking away from him)? In the fifth bar, in which they meet and then pass, do they both look over the raised arm towards the presence? Here is plate three of the dance, to give an idea of what might be happening.

In many ballroom choreographies there must surely have been a continual interplay between the dancers and their spectators, as they regarded each other, looked towards the presence or acknowledged members of the surrounding audience.

The last 16 bars of this first B section are on plate 4. They are surely the heart of this choreography, so I will explore the steps and figures in some detail. Here is the notation.

The dancers begin facing one another up and down the room and the man has his back to the presence. The couple keep to their own areas of the dancing space throughout. The step vocabulary is more varied than it has been, with the addition of half-turn pirouettes and balancé. I am not a musician, but much of the music for The Louvre seems to fall into 2-bar phrases, perhaps reproducing the 6/4 time signature found in other loures, which can seem like a call and response. This idea is clearly evident in this section of the choreography. First, the woman dances away from the man on a diagonal, with a contretemps and a coupé avec ouverture de jambe, turning her back and then turning again to face downstage (she could be looking towards him over her raised arm). She changes feet as she begins the contretemps, so that the symmetry becomes axial. The man waits as she does her steps and then responds by doing the same, ending facing upstage again. They then dance together for 4 bars, but the woman does two half-turn pirouettes followed by balancé, while the man does the balancé first and then the pirouettes. This little 8-bar sequence can surely be made expressive, in harmony with the dance’s original title Aimable Vainqueur. Was it part of Pecour’s choreography for the stage? The couple then travel towards one another on the diagonal with a pas de bourée and a tems de courante (echoing earlier pairings of these steps) before circling away and then coming to face one another across the dancing space. They do another balancé, but the man adds an extra step forward, returning to mirror symmetry.

The next figure, using the first 8 bars of the second B section, has the dancers tracing mirror-image figures of eight (although the notation blurs the pattern). They begin with jetté-chassés, followed by two pas de bourée, then jetté-chassés again and a pas de bourée followed by a coupé to first position facing one another.

In the last 16 bars of the dance, Pecour introduces some fresh choreographic devices. Here is the final plate of The Louvre.

The dancers turn away from each other, the man facing the presence and the woman with her back to it, with a quarter-turn pirouette followed by a demi-coupé sans poser le corps. They have returned to axial symmetry with their pirouettes. They travel sideways towards each other and away again, with a varied series of coupés.  Throughout this sequence the man faces the presence while the woman faces upstage. They curve away from each other, the woman passing directly in front of the presence while the man is further upstage, and come to face one another again, having changed sides. This sequence also poses challenges on where to look and the notation does not agree exactly on the steps of the two dancers (which may or may not be a mistake). This time, they could be looking towards each other as they approach with a pas de bourée – even though this means that the woman is ignoring the presence as she dances past. The sequence finishes with a coupé to first position, preparing a return to mirror symmetry.

The last six bars of The Louvre seem to be grouped in twos: half-turn pirouette, coupé avec ouverture de jambe, in which the couple turn away from each other and perhaps look towards the presence as they each extend their downstage leg; half-turn pirouette and a quarter-turn into a tems de courante travelling upstage, during which they might look at each other; finally a pas de bourée and a half-turn into the coupé which brings them side by side ready to bow to the presence.

The Louvre is certainly susceptible to interpretative choices which can change the focus of the dance and the interplay between the dancers. There is a great deal of information within the notation, although this is not always clear. There is much that is missing, too – not only the obvious, like arm movements, and the less obvious, like épaulement and the placing of the head, but also pointers to the meaning of the choreography. Is it abstract or is it expressive? We can make choices as we both reconstruct and recreate this delightful dance and try to understand what made it so popular for so long.

Money for Entrechats: Valuing the Virtuosic Male Dancer – Delagarde and Dupré

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The second male duet in L’Abbé’s New Collection of Dances is the ‘Canaries performd’ by Mr La Garde & Mr Düpré’. Here is the first plate of the notation.

The dance probably dates to the 1714-1715 London theatre season, the only period when the two dancers were in the same company and are known to have danced together. This duet was performed during a period of peace with France following a long and debilitating war, as the War of the Spanish Succession had finally ended in the spring of 1713 with the Treaty of Utrecht. More significant, in 1714 Queen Anne died and was succeeded by the Elector of Hanover as George I. The new King arrived in England on 18 September and was crowned on 20 October 1714. One outcome of the change of dynasty was the renewal of theatre rivalries, when the King allowed John Rich to open a playhouse in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and provide fresh competition for Drury Lane. Rich very quickly revealed his entrepreneurial flair and a predilection for singing and dancing alongside the usual fare of comedies and tragedies. ‘Entertainments’ were a feature of his opening bill on 18 December 1714, and several dancers were billed by name for the performance on 22 December. Like Thomas Betterton (with whom he otherwise had little in common), Rich was interested in French opera and French dancers. Over his years as a playhouse manager he would engage a series of French dancers as a draw for audiences.

Charles Delagarde was born in 1687 or 1688 and first appears in a bill for the Queen’s Theatre on 12 December 1705, performing in a Grand Dance led by Anthony L’Abbé. This was probably not his first performance on the London stage. John Essex tells us:

‘Mr. L’Abbe bred up Mr D’ la Garde, who maintained the genteel Part of Dancing upon the Stage many years after his Master, and with great Honour supported the Character the World had long before entertained of Mr. L’Abbe …

Mr. D’ la Garde was happy enough in his Comic Performances, but more graceful and pleasing in the Serious.’

His career is hard to trace in detail, but Delagarde spent some years at the Queen’s Theatre as a dancer and dancing master for the opera there. The bill for Lincoln’s Inn Fields on 1 January 1715 offered dancing ‘By de la Garde, who has not appear’d these six years’, which was not true as he had appeared at Drury Lane as recently as 2 May 1712. His repertoire in his first season with the new company ranged from a Spanish Entry to a Dutch Skipper. Delagarde remained at Lincoln’s Inn Fields until 1718-19, after which he retired from the stage. His value to the company and appeal to audiences is shown by the receipts at his benefit performance on 2 April 1715. His was the sixth performer’s benefit of the season and the first given to a dancer and pulled in £119. 8s. (equivalent to around £13000 today).

Louis Dupré’s origins and background are still to be discovered, although it has long been known that he was not ‘le grand’ Dupré who enjoyed an exceptionally long and successful career at the Paris Opéra. Dupré was apparently first engaged by Rich, for the 1714-1715 season marks the beginning of his career in London. Essex does not mention him, but he seems to have been a versatile dancer with a repertoire that ranged from a solo Harlequin dance to the exceptional technical demands of the solo ‘Chacone of Amadis’ which also appears in L’Abbé’s New Collection of Dances. He danced at Lincoln’s Inn Fields for most of his career, and died around 1735. Dupré’s benefit on 7 April (the eighth performer’s and second dancer’s benefit) brought in £121.5s (equivalent to around £13500 today) making it just a little more successful than Delagarde’s. Sadly, there are no known portraits of either Dupré or Delagarde.

It is worth trying to put these benefit earnings into a wider context. For both Delagarde and Dupré, these are the highest benefit receipts recorded for them (although there are a number of their benefit performances for which we do not have such figures). From this period, we only have accounts for Rich’s Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre – there is nothing comparable for Drury Lane, so we cannot compare the dancers at the two theatres. At Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the highest benefit earnings in 1714-1715 were for the actor Theophilus Keene, whose receipts amounted to £170.1s (around £18000 today) while the actress Frances Maria Knight gained £141.1s (around £15500) and the singer Richard Leveridge received £133.14s (around £14800). It is worth looking more closely at the benefit earnings of dancers around this time – I hope to do this in a later post. Ballon’s 500 guineas were for a five-week engagement (although we do not know how often he performed) and these benefit figures of some fifteen years later provide another perspective on his earnings.

Returning to the ‘Canaries’ duet, this is a dance in 6/8 similar to a gigue but faster. As a fast dance, it was quite popular as a showcase for male dancers. Three ‘canary’ male duets were published in notation. The other two were Feuillet’s ‘Canary à deux’ for two unnamed men to music from an unknown source, published in 1700, and Pecour’s ‘Canary pour deux hommes’ for Piffetot and ‘Chevrier’ (probably the dancer René Cherrier) to music from Desmarest’s opera Didon, published in 1704. L’Abbé’s choreography has 48 bars of music, taken from act five scene three of Lully’s 1677 opera Isis, and a musical structure AABBAABB (A=4 B=8).

The duet opens conventionally with the two men side by side upstage, standing in third position ready to step forward on the outside foot. As with the ‘Loure or Faune’ the choreography uses mirror symmetry throughout. The speed of the dance allows for less ornamentation, but even so around 40% of the steps have turns, some 30% incorporate beats and about 10% have other embellishments like pas glissés or ronds de jambe. Unlike the earlier dance, the ‘Canaries’ has some repetition of steps or phrases, particularly at the beginning and near the end. There are the usual virtuosic steps, such as assemblé battu en tournant, with a full turn in the air and an entrechat-six, and pirouettes, one of which has a full turn with beats while the other has one-and-a-half turns without embellishment. Other steps are featured, for example the pas tortillé or ‘waving step’ in which the dancer uses toe and heel swivels to move from turned-out to parallel positions and back again. Parallel positions of the feet were described as ‘Spanish’ so their inclusion here is perhaps a nod to the earlier history of the canaries. There are several cabrioles, including a soubresaut (a vertical jump in fifth position) with a cabriole followed immediately by an assemblé battu. Here is the third plate of the duet, with pas tortillés as well as the assemblé battu en tournant with its additions. These virtuoso steps are interspersed with plain pas de bourée and a demi-contretemps.

The dance ends with a demie cabriole en tournant un tour en saut de basque – a jump with a turn, a beat in the air and a final step forward. The men end on the same side as they began the dance.

We do not know when or where this choreography was performed, although there was a performance at Lincoln’s Inn Fields which seems particularly appropriate. On 10 March 1715, the King ‘honour’d that House [Lincoln’s Inn Fields] with his presence the first Time since they open’d’. Delagarde and Dupré were both billed to appear. Could they have performed the ‘Canaries’ for Britain’s new monarch?

The ‘Loure or Faune’ and ‘Canaries’ duets in L’Abbé’s New Collection of Dances highlight the virtuosity attained by male professional dancers in the years around 1700. They provide an insight into their power, speed and dexterity and show the intricacy of the ornamentations they were expected to master. The male repertoire of the early 1700s, which has so far been little studied by dance historians, makes demands that go well beyond the technique expected of professional female dancers at the time (at least that is what the notated dances suggest). The vocabulary of steps depends on male strength, of course, but much of the embellishment is located in the lower leg and male legs were clearly visible (as the portraits of Ballon demonstrate). Alongside the sheer physical display of such dancing, ‘Frenchness’ was obviously a key component of its appeal. France led Europe in dancing, whether in the ballroom or on stage, as the notated dances testify, and French ballet and opéra-ballet were widely influential, even in London where French opera never found favour. Despite the late 20th-century focus on the leading female dancers at the Paris Opéra and elsewhere, the men were the real stars at this period.

Does the difference in the monetary values set on the individual male dancers discussed in these two posts reveal something other than the initial shock of the new and its waning with the passage of time? L’Abbé obviously benefitted from being the first leading French dancer of his generation to visit London. He went on to a successful career there and became a widely admired and respected royal dancing master. Ballon made a far greater and longer-lasting impact in one short visit. He seems to have had something extra, which justified the extravagance lavished upon him. He undoubtedly had the style and technique to amaze audiences, but he surely had more – a glamour and sheer physical allure that bewitched those who saw him and persuaded those who hadn’t that no price was too high for the privilege.

This post was originally the second section of a conference paper, given several years ago but never published, which I have revised.

Reading List:

Moira Goff, ‘John Rich, French Dancing, and English Pantomimes’ in Berta Joncus and Jeremy Barlow (eds) “The Stage’s Glory” John Rich, 1692-1761 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 85-98.

Moira Goff, The Incomparable Hester Santlow (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).

Moira Goff, ‘The “London” Dupré’, Historical Dance, 3.6 (1999), 23-6.

Anthony L’Abbé, A New Collection of Dances. Originally published by F. Le Roussau London c.1725 (London, 1991).

F. Le Roussau, Chacoon for a Harlequin (London: Le Roussau, [1729?]).

Pierre Rameau, trans. John Essex, The Dancing-Master (London, 1728), The Preface.