“All Singing, All Dancing!”

Since its birth at the Italian courts in the late 16th century, opera has always been a sensual feast of music, poetry, art, acting and dance, combined to elicit an emotional response from the audience. It was Italian musicians and singers and dancing masters who graced all the royal courts of Renaissance Europe, creating a taste for “Italian” opera everywhere.

By the end of the next century, the Sun King, Louis XIV, took the spotlight off Italy and shone it brightly on Versailles, making France the new political and cultural center of Europe. He not only created “style” in the modern sense of the word, but made sure it was French style, turning the palace at Versailles into a showcase for that style. At a court, where everyone and everything was on constant display, no French noble person could survive without dance lessons. Each season brought new choreographies to be learned which were complex and lengthy, and which were performed by a single couple before a highly critical audience of their noble peers. Often a choreography was admired on the opera stage one night and then performed for many nights after in the ballroom, with little or no change. This attested not to the simplicity of theater dance of the time, but to the extreme sophistication of 18th century court dance.

In 1700, French dancing master Raoul Feuillet published a dance notation system which used abstract symbols to represent the steps and movements. Feuillet notational system remained in use until the early 19th century, and not only made it possible for the French to turn their dances into an export, but also made it possible for us today to read and reconstruct several hundred theater and ballroom dances which were performed during those hundred years. The vocabulary of step names from the 18th century contains many terms familiar to modern ballet dancers and devotees: pas de bourreé, jetté, pirouette and assemblé to name a few. If the steps were slightly different in execution, they were nonetheless the foundation of modern ballet step repertoire. ( continued on page 2... )