The French Noble Style
The great innovations in dance in the 17th century originated at the French court under Louis XIV, and it is here that we see the first clear stylistic ancestor of classical ballet. The same basic technique was used both at social events, and as theatrical dance in court ballets and at public theaters. The style of dance is commonly known to modern scholars as the French noble style or belle danse (French, literally "beautiful dance"), however it is often referred to casually as baroque dance in spite of the existence of other theatrical and social dance styles during the baroque era.
Primary sources include more than three hundred choreographies in Beauchamp-Feuillet notation, as well as manuals by Raoul Auger Feuillet and Pierre Rameau in France, Kellom Tomlinson and John Weaver in England, and Gottfried Taubert in Germany. This wealth of evidence has allowed modern scholars and dancers to recreate the style, although areas of controversy still exist. The standard modern introduction is Hilton.
French dance types include:
- Bourrée
- Canarie (canary)
- Chaconne
- (French) courante
- Entrée grave
- Forlane (forlana)
- Gavotte
- Gigue
- Loure (slow gigue)
- Menuet (minuet)
- Musette
- Passacaille (passacaglia)
- Passepied
- Rigaudon
- Sarabande
- Tambourin
The English, working in the French style, added their own hornpipe to this list.
Many of these dance types are familiar from baroque music, perhaps most spectacularly in the stylized suites of J. S. Bach. Note however, that the allemandes, that occur in these suites do not correspond to a French dance from the same period.
Read more about this topic: Baroque Dance
Famous quotes containing the words noble style, french, noble and/or style:
“The noble style immobilizes its subjects.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“I never rebel so much against France as not to regard Paris with a friendly eye; she has had my heart since my childhood.... I love her tenderly, even to her warts and her spots. I am French only by this great city: the glory of France, and one of the noblest ornaments of the world.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“My noble friend, chew upon this.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when required to make the effort. As if plainness and vigor and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. The sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)