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The relationships between Renaissance courtly dancing, the art of fencing, and military drill, have recently been much commented upon. This paper explores one particular type of mock combat – the Barriers – where the spectacle moved increasingly close to choreography, but without ever quite becoming a dance itself. After a brief outline of the evolution of the Barriers, the paper concentrates on a number of late sixteenth and early seventeenth century treatises which – rather than the actual combat – all stressed the importance of the passeggio and riverenza, that is the balletic aspects of the spectacle; and placed great emphasis on grace, deportment, foot placement, and on the need to keep exactly to the tempo set by accompanying music.
This article examines the changes Fabritio Caroso made to his choreographies from his first treatise Il ballarino (1581) to those from his second, Nobiltà di dame (1600), as wellas the terms Caroso used to refer to these changes and the significance that these terms had for him. While modern scholars have discussed these changes as evincing an increased interest in symmetry by Caroso, the dance master did not employ this term in his treatises at all. The terms he did use were closer to the earlier concepts of Vitruvius's symmetria and of Leon Battista Alberti's concinnitas. The analysis of his choreographic changes demonstrate that Caroso was not particularly focused on symmetry in the modern sense, that is, in increasing the number of mirror or rotational symmetrical spatial patterns in his revised choreographies. What we dosee in Caroso's revised choreographies is an increased interest in balance and repetition, the arrangement and number of elements, and a concern to provide a theory or rules for designing choreographies that were articulated and written down, and conformed to the prevailing theory of beauty in the other arts, in order that his choreographies would also be judged to be perfect and to epitomise grace and beauty.
The fragment in Le Ballet de Madame (1615) is the Androgyne ballet in which a young Louis XIII on the verge of his majority performs the role of a Hermaphrodite. The analysis reveals the complex iconography of this role with respect to the recent erasure of his succession to kingship after the death of Henri IV in 1610. The presence to social memory of the king's un-mourned corpse is relived in the Hermaphrodite figure, which is also a phoenix. But, this is only possible through the sexual imbroglio of the incorporation of the patriarch's body in that of his successor, a veritable figure of melancholy in psychoanalytic terms. Hence, the hermaphrodite fragment proves important to the political imaginary of absolutism in that we can perceive that the body natural of the king is brought to the fore at the expense of the body politic. The analysis is carried forth through the study of a series of contemporary texts devoted to this ballet andthe theoretical background provided by twentieth-century interpretations of baroque power: Walter Benjamin, Louis Marin, Ernst Kantorowicz, and Georgio Agamben. The king as Hermaphrodite shows the bare life of sovereignty and the embodiment of the exception, whichis Carl Schmidt's answer to Benjamin's notion of allegory. Hence, the essay brings extensive historical research into dialogue with contemporary theory at the level of the analysis of theatricality as a mode of symbolic action.
Thomas Middleton's tragedy Women Beware Women (c.1613 –21) includes in its fifthact a masque during which the play's miscreants are severally killed and its corrupt society collapses. The masque's debt to Ben Jonson's Hymenaei is discussed, together with its possible recollection of Florentine entertainments, including those staged in 1586 for the wedding of Cesare d' Este with Virginia de' Medici. The play is based on fact, centring on the seduction of Bianca Cappello and her marriage with the Grand Duke Francesco de' Medici. Middleton makes considerable efforts to provide an 'authentic' Florentine setting for his play including, it is suggested, recalling the celebrated series of Medici wedding entertainments and touching on the fascination of an early seventeenth-century elite society with Florentine culture.
In summer 1621, George Villiers, then Marquess of Buckingham, invited the king and an exclusive circle of courtiers to inaugurate his newly restored countryside residence Burley-on-the-Hill in Rutland, Lincolnshire. On this occasion, he commissioned Ben Jonson with a masque, The Gypsies Metamorphos'd, in which he himself and various friends performed as dancing, pick-pocketing and palm-reading gipsies. The Gypsies Metamorphos'd was a risqué piece which experimented with innovative features, some of them outrageous. In particular, Jonson and his collaborators drew upon French-style ballet and banqueting fashions which they combined with traditional English music and song. This essay explains the reason for these artistic choices.
It was customary in the seventeenth century to assimilate court ballet with drama, as both art forms were seen to strive for a common aim: the imitation or representation of nature. However, critics were also keen to point out their essential differences, for, unlike tragedy, ballet disregarded the rules of neo-classical aesthetics and its only concern seemed to be to please and to entertain. This was particularly evident in the court ballets written by Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin between 1639 and 1641. Unsurprisingly, they were singled out for special criticism by theorists of the ballet, who highlighted their dramatic shortcomings, and failed to see that they constituted another form of dramatic aesthetics, which was conspicuous precisely because of its emancipation from the strictures of Aristotelian theory. It could be said that the ballets of Desmarets had all the hallmarks of contemporary tragicomedy: irregularity of construction, diversity of action, disregard for the unity of tone, etc., but in adapting the principles of this new aesthetics to the ballet, Desmarets ran the risk of transgressing the boundaries of tragicomedy and even of drama, approaching a genre which was no longer dramatic but narrative, i.e. epic poetry.
In the late seventeenth century, the Swedish ambassador and architect Nicodemus Tessin the Younger used his sojourn in Paris to frequent the opera house and to build up collections of theatre designs which are now housed in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. He developed links with French artists and, in particular, with the Berain dynasty encouraging his son to continue the association. The son eagerly followed his advice compiling an inventory of the theatrical designs which his father had collected, an inventory which serves to identify those costume drawings for the Ballet Les Plaisirs de la Paix (1715) which are analysed in this essay and published here for the first time.
This study explores the choreographic themes and the emotional and psychic concerns which are so central to the creativity of Kenneth MacMillan. Clement Crisp, who has seen and reviewed MacMillan's ballets for forty years, from the earliest apprentice works to the final Judas Tree, offers some observations on the nature of MacMillan's inspiration, on the ideas that fired his imagination and their realisation in dance.
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