Tag Archives: Latin American Dance

Thinking About: Dances, Dancing and History

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I recently began to learn the Viennese waltz. I am a newcomer to ballroom dance, but it seems very different to the modern ballroom waltz. I couldn’t help wondering about its history. I have been told it is earlier than its modern counterpart, but how far back does it go? How does it relate to the early 19th-century waltz I was dancing just a few weeks ago?

The early 19th-century waltz raised another question. How does it relate to the minuet? The waltz step we used seemed to share the rhythmic characteristics of the French minuet step (called ‘One and a Fleuret’ by the dancing master Kellom Tomlinson). The man steps onto his left foot and does a quarter-turn pirouette in the first bar, followed by three steps in the next bar (the waltz, like the minuet, is in 3 / 4). The woman does the opposite. Of course, the couple revolve in a clockwise direction, while travelling anti-clockwise around the ballroom, quite unlike the minuet with its serene floor patterns and its fixed front. This waltz was in a hold which was obviously moving towards the modern ballroom hold. The waltzes (French, sauteuse, jetté-sauteuse and German) described by Thomas Wilson in his 1816 treatise seem very different both in steps and hold. So what was going on? How was the waltz developing and changing during the 19th century? Where does the Viennese waltz fit in?

I’ve also been struggling with Argentine tango. At the workshop I went to recently, we were taught a small number of basic steps, and told that these were all we needed to dance tango – everything else was derived from them. My mind immediately flew both to baroque dance and to modern ballroom and Latin. Don’t they all rest on just a few basic steps, which can be joined together, varied and decorated in all sorts of ways to produce an extensive and rich vocabulary of movements? Modern ballroom and Latin dances, as well as Argentine tango, are social dance forms intended for the ballroom, and all are improvisational – like the 18th-century minuet. Modern dances for the stage, or for competitions, have fixed routines – just like the baroque ballroom and theatrical choreographies.

Thinking about the different ballroom and Latin dances, with their various shared vocabularies of steps and their very different musical and stylistic qualities, my mind jumped again to baroque dance and its several dance types. These also share the same steps but are otherwise distinct, musically at least. I am wondering whether being able to grasp the differences between the modern waltz, the foxtrot and the quickstep, and between the rumba and the cha-cha, might help me as I try to differentiate the saraband, the loure, the bourée and rigaudon? The differences between all these dances might seem obvious (at least to the initiated), but they can be hard to interpret in performance unless one is an expert.

So, is all this dancing divisible into ancient and modern, where never the twain shall meet, or is it all actually variations on a shared theme?

 

 

Fraternising with the Enemy?

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In Britain early dance has tended to keep itself to itself. There are some links with folk dancing, but relatively few with the wider dance world. Some forms of dancing have even occasionally been viewed with hostility. I have to admit that I’ve also been affected by these attitudes.

I’ve recently been working on baroque dance with dancers trained in different styles and it has been very rewarding. As a ballet and baroque dancer, who has spent many years focussing on just those two styles, I’ve also recently begun to branch out into other forms of dance. I really wish I’d done this much, much earlier!

I’ve wondered for quite a while how to attract ballet dancers into baroque dance. These two styles should be a marriage made in heaven, as baroque dance is really the earliest form of ballet and the foundation of its style and technique.  It isn’t as easy as that of course, not least because the relationship between early and modern ballet is complex.

I recently did a short course in Spanish classical dance (escuela bolera). I’ve wanted to try this for a long time, and I was really glad I’d seized the opportunity. For the uninitiated (of whom I am one) it seems like a cross between ballet and flamenco. As a ballet dancer, I found I could cope reasonably well and I enjoyed the challenge of unfamiliar steps and arm movements. Escuela bolera has lots to offer baroque dance, for Spanish dance forms (including the playing of castanets) were very influential in France in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.  As Spanish classical dance is also a historic style, some of the baroque steps would surely be of interest. I know that others have pursued this cross-over, but it has never filtered down widely into British early dance.

I’ve also been dipping my toes into modern ballroom and Latin American dance.  I’m finding these dances very difficult, as both the partnering and the steps are miles outside my dance experience and hence my comfort zone. I can’t readily see a connection between these and 18th-century dances (though there must surely be one between them and the couple dances of the 18th and early 19th century). However, good ballroom and Latin dancers can surely bring a sense of performance as well as technical skill to earlier dance forms. They can also challenge our perceptions and understanding and so help with the process of change and development. How can we attract them into early dance?