( ...continued from page 1 ) We know that Josias Priest, at whose School for Young Gentlewomen the first recorded performance of Dido and Æneas took place, was familiar with this notation and we have a choreography by him for twelve ladies published in a collection of dances in 1711. Priest had composed dances for the opera and he surely choreographed all the dances listed in the libretto. The dances within operas sometimes used interpolated music, and a new choreographer would simply substitute his own dances and his own dance music. There are a few dances mentioned in the Dido and Æneas libretto for which no music survives.

The surviving choreographies and descriptions from this period tell us that group theatrical dance from this period was a marriage of the French step vocabulary to intricately plastic geometric formations not unlike a Busby Berkeley film musical, a Balanchine ballet, or even a halftime marching band number. Character and flavor would have been added to these dances by means of costuming and step variations or exaggerations. Sometimes the dances were related thematically to the previous or following opera scenes, sometimes they were merely entertaining entr’actes.

Many of dances in Dido and Æneas however seem to comment on the action in the same way that the choruses do. (Later, as the Baroque sensibility gave way to the Rococco and then to the Romantic, ballet would take on a more expressive and narrative quality.)

Just as the highly emotional story of Dido and her Trojan prince Æneas are told within the beautifully stylized framework of baroque music and oratory, so I have tried to compose the dances within a late 17th century social schema where the spectacle represented on the stage was only marginally more theatrical than the everyday spectacle of the severely circumscribed life at court. They are meant to show “grandeur that is not pompous, and gaiety that is not inelegant.”

- Bob Skiba