Francine Lancelot

Biography

In 1987, I met Francine Lancelot, a lecturer at the University of Nice. She guided me in my research into basse danse and moresque. Her extensive knowledge of Baroque dance and traditional Provençal dances enabled me to see these two types of dance in a new light. Her approach as a methodical, ethnographic dance researcher and her sensitivity as a dancer-choreographer will enable me to study medieval dance methodically, but also to understand the value that experimentation can bring to ancient dance. Francine Lancelot is a dancer, actress and dance researcher who has devoted her life to early dance, mainly Baroque, and to traditional dance. Introduced to dance notation by Pierre Conté, and to traditional and early dance by Jean-Michel Guilcher, she obtained a doctorate in ethnology in 1973, working for the CNRS. Her doctoral thesis, supervised by Algirdas Julien Greimas, was on Les sociétés de farandole en Provence et Languedoc. She is also dedicated to rediscovering the choreographic repertoire of the 17th and 18th centuries. In 1980, she founded the "Ris et Danceries" company and contributed to the dissemination of Baroque dance, notably by remounting Lully's lyrical tragedy Atys in 1987, with William Christie and Jean-Marie Villégier. From 1981 to 1986, she taught Renaissance and Baroque dance as part of the dance curriculum at the University of Paris IV (Clignancourt). In 1986, she was appointed Senior Lecturer in Dance at the University of Nice (Art-Communication-Language department), a position she held from 1985 to 1988. In 1996, she published her major work, La Belle Dance (Paris, Van Dieren), a catalog raisonné of Baroque dance from 1700 to 1790. The corpus lists and analyzes over 500 French choreographic pieces, taken from dance collections and treatises, both handwritten and printed, and notated according to the Feuillet system. Today, this work is considered the "bible" of Baroque dance. Francine Lancelot devoted the last years of her life to putting her archives and those of Ris et Danceries in order, so that they could be deposited in institutions where they would be accessible to researchers, dancers and the public Source: WIKIPEDIA, Ris et Danceries and Ateliers d'ethnomusicologie in "Open Edition journals".