Dance of the Month for 2016-2017
By Nicolas Lancret
This Saturday, August 6, 2016 from 3-5pm
Our Dance of the Month this year will be based on a collection of English Country Dances which were brought back to the French court by French dancing masters. In 1706 Raoul Anger (formerly thought to be spelled Auger) Feuillet published a collection of 32 dances with an explanation of how to decode the notation style in which they were written which was in fact the new dance notation developed at the court of Louis XIV by Beauchamp, Feuillet, etc.
The original contredanse collection can be seen online here: Library Of Congress It would be a wonderful exercise for students to prepare the figures before the class and see how they did in their reconstruction from notation!
Donald Pauley has translated the dances to the verbal description of the dances which is more in common use today at: Pauley PDF If students are not able to read the dance notation, this may be of use.
For those students new to contredancing, please be assured that our teachers will be explaining the dance steps and patterns for every class.
Meggie Sweeney Smith will be our teacher in August. She is a member of The New York Baroque Dance Company and has recently graduated from NYU with an MA in Teaching Dance in the Professions – New York University, Steinhardt.
We will be going in order and the first two dances are La Bonne Amitié (also known as Jamaica) followed by the polar emotion, La Jalousie.
A good music recording of both of these dances can be found online: Presto Classical
We look forward to seeing you at our first Saturday of the month, Dance of the Month Classes hosted by Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn from 3-5pm. Cost is only $17.
