Very Early Dance ?

[Deborah Sweet]

Here's a second response.

Estrill
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Subject: Re: Very Early Dance ?
Author:  Mark Waks <justin at dsd.camb.inmet.com> at SMTP
Date:    10/20/95 2:28 PM


Estrill posts a request for info from Bran:

>It's the Dark Ages (go watch the movie "The Warlord").  We've just
>beaten off an attack by Frisian Raiders (or someone, pick your favorite 
>scourge of civilization).  We return to the keep to celebrate!  We do 
>the biggest feast we can manage, and have a revel to remember.  To 
>entertain the court, we have singers, jugglers, story tellers, mimes, 
>musicians, and . . . . dancers.
>
>When I mention the first five groups of entertainers, I think we all can 
>share a common visualization. Not so with the dancers. This is 
>Northwestern Europe, the full weight of the collapse of civilization is 
>upon us (Middle Eastern "belly-dance" is most certainly unknown here).  
>What kind of dance will we see if we hire a "professional dance troupe?"

Okay, some grounding first.

We know damned little about the subject, frankly. We have a fair amount
of information about dance in the Renaissance, enough to reconstruct
a lot of dances with fairly high confidence. We know a *lot* less about
the High Middle Ages -- we have some dance music, and some iconographic
evidence, from which we can make some guesses. We know even less about
the Dark Ages, so anything said here is going to be at least partly
speculative.

I *strongly* doubt that you would go hiring a "professional dance
troupe". I haven't heard of anything of the sort from that period (and
indeed, little like that even in period in general), and I'm skeptical
about whether the concept really existed. Most references we have to
dance in period tend to be at least partly social -- the notion of
dance-as-an-entertainment, which you just watch and don't participate
in, appears to be mostly post-period.  We have references to dance
being involved with some fancy spectacles in the Renaissance. (And
things were a little complicated in the Italian Renaissance, with
everyone acting as both "audience" and "performers".) But dancing was
something you did, not something you watched, for the most part.

Possibly the best we can do here is make some guesses based on the
mid-period evidence, and hope that things were similar further
back. There seemed to be a good deal of line and circle dancing;
there is also some evidence of dances in couples, but they appear
to be less prevalent than they became in later periods. Pavans
probably aren't appropriate, so don't worry about them. Based on
the iconography I've seen, the best analogy seems to be the
styles in Arbeau -- medium-simple dances in lines and circles,
with a modest step vocabulary.

That's most of what I've seen on the subject; it's admittedly
meager, but beyond that I'm guessing. I'd happily defer to anyone
with *any* hard information about dancing in the Dark Ages; I've
seen almost nothing on it, not even references...

				-- Justin

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