by Alan Jones
In 2024, Julia Bengtsson and I collaborated on a stimulating project for The New York Baroque Dance Company, centered on dances to music by Francis Johnson performed in the United States in the 1820s. We decided to continue our work in this vein as we reunited in Paris this past February to present our work for the Centre National de la Danse (CND), which made the Johnson project possible.
As I have been immersed for some time in research on different national dances, I was particularly curious about exploring Cossack dance, which was widely taught in dancing schools of the United States. Slavic dances were first applauded on the American stage during George Washington’s presidency, notably a Pas Russe performed in Philadelphia and Baltimore in the 1790s by James and Lucy Byrne, formerly of Covent Garden. The Pas Russe was soon eclipsed by the Cossack Dance, which naturally appealed to American audiences because of the Cossacks’ fierce attachment to independence and freedom. One of the most important interpretations of a Cossack Dance took place in New York in 1805, by Louise Gervais Gervais article) and Charles Berault, both French dance teachers. Their duet was apparently derived from the Scythian Dance from Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride. Not long after, Gervais and Berault jointly released a collection of dances with music selected by Mr. Berault and dance figures by Miss Gervais. This work is important as the first example of choreography published by a woman in the United States, but the two chose to limit themselves mainly to simple cotillions, and so the choreography of their Cossack Dance was lost.
A rich selection of choreographic sources nevertheless has been preserved at the library of the Paris Opera and other international archives. All these sources present interesting artistic possibilities as well as logistic challenges, and I ultimately opted to study all of them and to create an original piece of historically informed choreography, rather than a reconstruction of any one dance. Our plan was to rehearse while we prepared for our presentation at the CND, which meant that I would not have the luxury of experimenting, but that I would need to have a dance nearly complete before Julia’s arrival in Paris. For music, my choice fell upon an anonymous Cossack Dance published in Baltimore in the early 1800s, which I had already worked on with the Mexican ensemble Concierto Barroco, for a zoom workshop with the NYBDC. 
Of the different sources at my disposal, I worked most closely with the notebooks of Michel Saint-Léon, now preserved at the Paris Opera. Saint-Léon wrote down two Cossack dances about 1830, while serving as dancing master to the court of Würtemberg in southwestern Germany. Of the material offered by one duet, I retained bows following the form of the minuet, but adapted stylistically for Americans’ idea of dancing Cossacks. Just as in the minuet, the two dancers split off into opposite corners. One girl does a step very distantly based on male prisiadka technique, alternating demi-pliés with pointings of one foot forward, while the other does eight pas de basque forward. I developed this into a repeating motif, which continues with other elements of Saint-Léon’s instruction, including a hand hold borrowed from the allemande. Photographs of Ukrainian dancers from the early twentieth century interestingly recall some of the engravings familiar from the two main Parisian handbooks on the allemande, by Guillaume and Dubois. It is also curious that the spatial paths of Saint-Léon’s dance frequently correspond to a Cossack Dance from the mysterious “Dance Book TB 1826,” now preserved in Wellington, New Zealand.
Another useful source proved to be the manuscript of Terpsichorographie, a treatise planned circa 1815 by Jean-Etienne Despréaux, former dancer of the Paris Opera who was then an inspecteur of the School of Dance. Two fragmentary Cossack dances in the manuscript were probably intended for pupils of the Opera school. Using his own notation system, which employs letters of the alphabet read from left to right, Despréaux indicates steps executed by a single dancer whose gender is not indicated. From this source I exploited an opening stamping sequence, rendered in different ways in the two examples, as well as a combination in which the dancer strikes the floor alternatively with heel and toe. These movements were called piqués, the earliest use of that term in dance literature, and still exist in the French tradition of danses de caractères.
Among these combinations I introduced double pas de basques, common to both the Cossack Dance and the Pas Russe, as well as the cabriole known as the golubets or hołupiec. This step, which involves striking the legs together in first position while traveling laterally, was described by Charles Durang, son of the famous John Durang, and is familiar from the character dances of Swan Lake, Coppélia, and other ballets.
For general inspiration and details of posture and arms, I constantly kept in mind two images of the French danseuse Angélique Saint-Romain, who performed a Cossack dance in Vienna circa 1820. One Soviet character dance manual, talking about Ukrainian dance, says that these dances should be filled with a “playful sense of humor, and robust, high-spirited exuberance.” Our Cossack dance is meant to temper the the energy of Eastern European dance with the refinement of the French school. Our way of working is certainly novel, with one-on-one rehearsals in Paris followed by company rehearsals in New York, along with email and telephone exchanges, and zoom rehearsals. My hope is that the exuberance of the originals will come across in the spirit of the whole.
Julia Bengtsson is presently rehearsing the Cossack Dance and other duets, solos, and quartets to dancers of the NYBDC, which will be performed May 10th in Dallas with the Dallas Bach Society… https://www.ticketdfw.com/event/homage-to-lafayette
Tempesta di Mare, performed on May 17: https://tempestadimare.my.salesforce-sites.com/ticket/#/events/a0SVQ000002w10z2AA
and at the Berkeley Festival on June 12: https://www.berkeleyfestival.org/new-york-baroque-dance-company-music-of-the-regiment
To learn more about Louise Gervais and other pioneers of American dance, watch for Alan Jones’s forthcoming Substack, Early Ballet USA.
Images Below: Angélique Saint-Romain in a Cossack dance in Vienna c. 1820. Period engraving, and re-imagined in color by ChatGPT.
The New York Baroque Dance Co. 
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