This ZOOM workshop takes place from December 26-28 and in Australia from December 27-29, 2020.
Entrance Fee and Payment: You are automatically registered once you pay $25 through PayPal. The one time entrance fee gives you access to all presentations.
Historical Dance at Play
$25.00
Historical Dance at Play Schedule and Class Descriptions
The first steps of ballet can be found in the Renaissance and Baroque periods when dancing masters were forming rules of dance to be aligned with their sister arts based on a shared aesthetic of beauty. Jesuit scholars of the late 17th and early 18th centuries made a distinction between pure dance and ballet. But ballet was built over the underlying principles of pure dance and also included the theory of passions. Hence, in understanding the first steps of ballet, one begins with pure dance.
In our first workshop on this subject we will look at Geometry, Dance and Design. I have invited Jennifer Nevile (bio) to present a session on Renaissance dance with its use of geometrical space. Her presentation, Geometric Figures, Proportions and the Cosmos: Dance in Renaissance Europe, will be proceeded by a Renaissance Dance Class taught by Ken Pierce (bio). Ken began his studies in historical dance with the Court Dance Company of New York, and joined NYBDC shortly thereafter.
A session on garden design and dance by Jennifer Nevile will also be offered and it is entitled: Grand Gardens and Dance in the Renaissance.
I will be presenting period documentation related to geometrical Baroque choreography based on principles of proportions and ratios entitled Geometric Figures, Beauty and Cosmic Theory: Dance in the Baroque.
I will also teach a Baroque Dance Class before my presentation to give an embodied experience of these principles. My work in this area is part of an ongoing study. You may be interested in my article from 2012, Vitruvian Man, Baroque Dance and Fractals
Steve Bass, architect and author of Beauty, Memory, Unity, will begin the workshop with a lecture on Pythagoras called: Pythagoras and the ‘Mathematica‘. Later he will conduct a second session, Proportion in the Arts, looking at classical principles and their aesthetic which resonates in period dance and the performing arts.
Steve Bass was born in 1947, grew up in New York City and has maintained a small personal architectural practice in the New York City area since 1974. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Pratt Institute, 1970; a Master of Arts from the Royal College of Art, London, 1991, and was a participant in the initial Prince of Wales’s Summer Course in Architecture, 1990. Steve is currently a Fellow of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art in New York City where he teaches on the theoretical and applied aspects of proportion and geometry in design. He has also taught at Notre Dame University, the Grand Central Academy of Art, the New York Open Center and other venues. He has written for ICAA’s journal ‘The Classicist’, ‘Traditional Building’ magazine, and ‘American Arts Quarterly’. His book, ‘Beauty Memory Unity – A Theory of Proportion in Architecture and Design’ is now available from Lindisfarne Books.
I would be happy to answer any questions about this workshop. Please contact me at cturocy@gmail.com
Yours,
Catherine Turocy
Practical and administrative questions should be directed to Jennifer Meller at jenbeast@gmail.com
