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The Dancing English, Part One: The Social Dance
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10930 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1993 |
3,048 Words |
| Author
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John Bremer
John Bremer, a Cambridge philosopher and educator, writes
mostly on Plato. |
"This is a school for manners, and, according to the old proverb, manners maketh man", the dancer said, removing his tricorn hat and fluffing out the lace at his wrists. Maybe not macho but definitely manly. After all, he had just performed a dance from the time of the first American president, when dancing was a necessary social accomplishment and an education in courtesy and manners. It was important in learning how to be a gentleman, a civilized, cultivated man, both in and out of the company of ladies.
The performance took place in the Hall of Musical Instruments, at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, last January, in the week of President Clinton's inauguration. Rightly so, for the dances were an important part of the heritage of the Founding Father's generation. And that heritage was primarily English.
The dances of early America were derived from the English dances of the court, of the ballrooms, of the assembly rooms, and of the folk. Brought over initially by immigrants and later by itinerant dancing masters, they were transformed by the colonial experience and later by the self-consciousness of independence. But the dances continued to reflect English manners and English style.
The manners and style are carried on today by artistic groups, such as the Colonial Assembly of the Germantown Country Dancers from Philadelphia, that replicate authentic costume and steps. The also are enjoyed by many groups of ordinary Americans who find something deeply satisfying in the well-ordered world of English country-dance. Though uninterested in costume and the intricate steps of the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century dancing masters, modern English country-dancers perform--in England and America--in a straightforward style that depends on a mixture of dances from the court and country.
To understand this we must go back to Elizabethan and Jacobean England, to the English Renaissance, and the time of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Johnson, Spenser, Byrd, and Tallis, and of the King James Version of the Bible. Elizabeth Tudor and the dance
On April 28, 1602, Queen Elizabeth, in her sixty-eighth year and partnered by a French duke, opened a ball at Richmond, near London-reportedly with a galliard, which is a lively dance in triple time with leaping steps and intricate variations. It may well be true, for, in 1589, a gentlemen of the Privy Chamber had written, "the Queen is so well as I assure you, six or seven
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