Conference proceedings

The art and art of dancing the Basse-Danse

by Catherine Ingrassia

From the 14th century onwards, chain dances, which until then had been the most common dances, shared their success with a new dance form which, although timid at first, was to take on considerable importance in the history of dance. Although chain dances did not disappear, it is certain that from the 14th century onwards, dance games and certain dance forms evolved, giving rise to a new, highly refined technique, the basse-danse. The first genuine dance treatises were written in Italy around the middle of the 15th century, by dancing masters who taught dances to the Italian nobility. By the end of the 15th century, other treatises had been written or published in France, laying the foundations for a dance whose choreographic structure was far from simple. The basse-danse was a noble dance designed to demonstrate the "intellectual" superiority of high society. The fashion for basse-danse did not last very long, as it seems to have originated in the 15th century, and had already fallen out of fashion some forty years earlier, when the canon of Langres published his Orchésographie in 1588. But for a century or a century and a half, basse-danse would have time to change and evolve, before disappearing to make way for new dances such as the Pavane, the Gaillarde or the branle. I don't pretend to solve all the riddles posed by the dance treatises of this period, but I do try to show what the foundations of this new dance were, and how it evolved until its disappearance at the dawn of the Renaissance.

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Proceedings of the Basse Danse conference

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Moresque dance from the 15th century

By Catherine Ingrassia

Moresque is a 15th-century dance known only through iconography and a few archival texts or royal accounts. It's a show dance, performed by various characters: a woman, a madman or Moor, dancers and a musician playing the tabor and flute. Although performances differ from one another, the same characters are always present. There is no text explaining the symbolism of the moresque, so it's very difficult to know how it was danced; we can, however, get an idea from the texts and, above all, from the surviving representations of this dance. Indeed, a series of small ivory boxes, as well as various engravings, manuscripts, tapestries and sculptures offer us different figurations. This dance evolved rapidly and, although it disappeared at the dawn of the Renaissance, it survived - or rather, its symbolic theme survives in many popular dances - right up to the present day. Indeed, its traces can be found in English Morris-dance, Provençal moresques and certain forms of sword dance. These allow us to say that moresque is, perhaps, a dance with sexual connotations, in which the men "fight" to acquire the woman, while preventing her from falling into the "impure" arms of the madman or Moor.