Tag Archives: Charles Delagarde

Season of Dancing: 1714-1715

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.

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 M^r La Garde & M^r 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 20^th-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.

Pas Battus in L’Abbé’s Stage Duets for a Man and a Woman

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My investigation of the choreographies for men in the three published collections of stage dances has shown that Anthony L’Abbé made much greater use of pas battus than Guillaume-Louis Pecour. The three collections have, between them, 31 duets for a man and a woman (around 40% of the total), but I am going to look only at the male-female duets in L’Abbé’s New Collection of Dances (c1725). I won’t attempt a full analysis of each, I’ll simply focus on specific pas battus in each choreography. L’Abbé’s four dances are the ‘Chacone of Galathee performd’ by Mr La Garde and Mrs Santlow’ (plates 22-30), the ‘Saraband of Issee performd’ by Mr Düpré & Mrs Bullock’ (plates 31-36), which is followed by a ‘Jigg’ performed by them (plates 37-39), and the ‘Türkish Dance performd’ by Mr Desnoyer & Mrs Younger’ (plates 84-96). All of the performers were leading dancers in London’s theatres. One of the dances, the ‘Jigg’, has little in the way of pas battus of the sort I am exploring, so I will not include it in this post.

The ‘Chacone of Galathee’ is to music from Lully’s Acis et Galatée of 1686, which was regularly revived after its first performances. It is possible that L’Abbé performed in it at the Paris Opéra. His choreography for Delagarde and Mrs Santlow probably dates to the period 1708-1712, when the two could have danced together, and the duet was evidently meant to be a virtuoso showpiece. The chacone has five 8-bar variations and is played through twice, so the dance has 80 bars of music. It begins with a coupé preparation and a single pirouette en dedans, which sets the tone for what is to follow. The dancers perform in mirror symmetry and do the same steps (on opposite feet) for much of the duet. However, in bar 38 (plate 25), Mrs Santlow begins a pas composé with a jetté emboîté, which is followed by a pas, a pas battu derrière into plié and a demi entre-chat. Delagarde does the same, except that he begins with a demie cabriole or jetté battu, beating his legs together in the air. I wrote about the jetté emboîté in my post Stage Dances for Women and the Demie Cabriole back in April 2019 and concluded that (despite the notation – which may owe as much to social convention as to stage practice) women may well have performed the step as a demie cabriole. I should add that Le Roussau’s notation for this dance has a number of (usually minor) errors.

The differences become more obvious, and more interesting, with the repeat of the music. In bar 43 (plate 26), both dancers perform a full-turn pirouette en dehors on both feet. This is the preparation for their next step – Mrs Santlow performs a tour en l’air with a changement, while Delagarde does an entre-chat droit à 6 without a tour.

Chacone of Galathee 1725 26 (2)

The couple then dance the same steps as each other until bar 72 (plate 29), when Mrs Santlow simply does a changement while Delagarde performs another entre-chat droit à 6.

Chacone of Galathee 1725 29 (2)

They have exactly the same steps, in mirror symmetry, until the end of the choreography. It is obvious that the notation is wrong in one or other (or both) of these places, but how? Is Mrs Santlow’s tour en l’air in bar 44 a mistake, or should Delagarde have had one too? Should the repetition of the changement and the entre-chat in bar 72 have tours as well? Can we really be sure that Mrs Santlow, shown in other dances to have had a virtuoso technique, could not have performed an entre-chat droit à 6?

The ‘Sarabande of Issee’ is to music from Destouches’s opera Issé, first performed in 1697 and given its first revival in 1708. Dupré is, of course, London’s Louis Dupré. Ann Bullock, a pupil of Delagarde, began her career (as Miss Russell) at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre in 1714. Their duet probably dates to around 1715. It begins with a preparatory ouverture de jambe, followed by a pas battu (notated as a spring but possibly performed with a relevé sauté) in which each dancer’s inside leg beats front, back, front around their supporting leg. Throughout the dance, except for the steps I will be singling out, Mrs Bullock dances the same vocabulary as Dupré.

In bars 11 and 19 (plate 32), she and Dupré do something different.

Sarabande of Issee 1725 32

At the bottom of the page, Dupré performs an entre-chat droit à 6 while Mrs Bullock does a changement. In the middle of the page (the tracts running left to right), he does an entre-chat à 5 followed by two demi-contretemps, but she does only a contretemps battu before the two demi-contretemps. In bar 42 (plate 34), Dupré does another entre-chat droit à 6 to Mrs Bullock’s changement. They do the same for a third, and final, time in bar 60 (plate 36). The preceding pas composé for Dupré joins two entre-chats à 5 with an assemblé battu, while Mrs Bullock has a coupé to point, a coupé avec ouverture de jambe and a pas emboîté. The last of these is odd, as the notation for bar 37 (plate 34) shows her matching Dupré with an assemblé battu which has a half-turn in the air. Here is the whole of the final plate for this saraband. You can see the sequence culminating in the entre-chat droit à 6 / changement in the tracts running bottom to top nearest the centre of the page.

Sarabande of Issee 1725 36

Surely Mrs Bullock was capable of performing an entre-chat droit à 6, given her other technical feats in this dance. Does the notation really tell us the steps she did, or were some deliberately simplified for the purposes of publishing the notation?

In the ‘Türkish Dance’ I want to draw attention to three steps in the duet. This choreography uses music from the Entrée ‘La Turquie’ in Campra’s L’Europe galante of 1697. L’Abbé’s dance must date to 1721 or 1722, when George Desnoyer made his first visit to London and apparently enjoyed a dance partnership with the dancer-actress Elizabeth Younger. In bars 17-18 (plate 94, I have numbered the bars from the beginning of the last piece of music in this duet), Desnoyer and Mrs Younger each perform a cabriole one after the other. They repeat this feat in bars 37-38 (plate 96) and, as they move away from each other a few steps later, they do another cabriole in bar 44. The notated cabrioles appear just above the centre of the page and then to right and left as the tract begins to straighten.

Turkish Dance 1725 96

What is going on here? Does the nature of these steps permit a woman to do a cabriole? Did Le Roussau fail to edit out the cabrioles (which are indicated by a single additional short stroke at right-angles to the step) from his notation? Or, were women routinely performing pas cabriolés all along?

My last post on this topic will look at the ‘Passagalia of Venüs & Adonis’ created by L’Abbé for Hester Santlow, a solo which further calls into question the supposed limitations on the technique of female professional dancers.