Women’s Work: Making Dance in Europe before 1800

Introduction: Women in Dance History, the Doubly Invisible

Women have been difficult to capture as historical realities. They appear far less often than men as players in the documented historical record. Somewhat surprisingly, this is true also in the historical record of dance, a field currently closely associated with women. Like the history of women, dance has been difficult to capture as a historical subject. Bringing together these two elusive subjects—women and early dance—is the objective of this volume. In his introduction to Retrieving Women’s History, editor S. Jay Kleinberg notes “women’s invisibility” in historical accounts, which have “systematically omitted” them from the record.1 One objective, then, of recent research into women’s history is to provide women with a place in the sweep of human history, a place that is recorded, and thus remembered , evaluated, and in many cases, newly appreciated. As women have begun to emerge from “the shadows of history,”2 Natalie Zemon Davis and Arlette Farge have remarked, it becomes ever clearer that “wherever one turns, they were present, infinitely present: from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, at home, in the economy, in the intellectual arena, in the public sphere, in social conflict, at play, women 3 Introduction Women in Dance History, the Doubly Invisible L M B were there.”3 And during this same time period, women were there on the dance floor as well—on public stages, in the king’s court, and under the roofs of religious institutions. As an investigation of women’s work in the field of dance, this volume encompasses the period Davis and Farge identified in the quote above—the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries—but embraces it in a wider stretch; one article (Barbara Sparti’s “Isabella and the Dancing Este Brides, 1473–1514”) reaches back to the fifteenth century, and another (Karen Silen’s “Elisabeth of Spalbeek: Dancing the Passion”) even further. Dance from the eighteenth century and earlier is often lumped into a category of “early dance,” partly because it preceded the establishment of ballet technique as we know it today, but also because documentation from periods preceding the nineteenth century is considerably sparser than from later periods, and the nature of the documentation often makes it difficult to interpret. This volume demonstrates some common themes that connect women and dance through this long stretch of time: women exercised patronage and power over dancing, women danced in professional performance contexts, and women explored and expressed their worldviews through dance. We open this volume with an exploration of the ways that patronage and power allowed women to move into and through the world of dance before and during the early modern period. While men were the visibly active architects of the political and social order in this period, women were able, through patronage of the arts, directly to stage performances that had social and political impact. Women as art patrons were not a new phenomenon, and documentation specific to this role in dance has yet to be fully explored.4 Articles in the current volume demonstrate that ladies, like the Este brides and Queen Henrietta Maria, not only patronized dance and dancing masters, but they performed dances in highly public settings—and did so with skill and finesse, as well as with astute social and political judgment. The women of the powerful Este family of Ferrara, for example, displayed their magnificence , power, and prestige through the danced entertainments they supported and, in some cases, performed in. As revealed by Barbara Sparti, these women studied dance, commissioned dances, appeared as dancers on important public occasions, and judged one another by their appearance , taste, and performance in such events. Yet in tracing ways that “dance was used by the various Este women to display magnificence and power,” Sparti concludes that even these established patronesses are 4 L M B difficult to document fully. One reason for this difficulty is the fact that, for the dances that were “the most popular at the time of the Este sisters, we have the least information.” As Sparti points out, here again “is a great gap in written dance history—one that is pregnant with rich and varied kinds of narrative dancing and virtuosic leaps and capers.” This is but one example of glimpses this volume repeatedly allows us into historical treasures awaiting further research. The Este sisters were certainly not alone in wielding their influence through patronage of danced entertainments. A similar...