Academic literature on the topic 'Dance – 19th century'

During the 1830s in Paris the quadrille, a five-movement figure dance, became musically omnipresent to the distress of many critics, who saw the genre as detrimental to French music and musical taste. Discussions of the dance in journalism and literature associate bourgeois women and girls and working-class men with promotion of the genre. As a figure dance with walking steps, the quadrille was enjoyed by respectable women who experienced it as a safe frame for civilized social interaction, although their male counterparts found the dance boring and uninviting. In contrast, working-class men were known for their engaging and energetic performances as cancanneurs, improvisatory dancers exhibiting a lack of control associated with political instability and revolution. Quadrilles were perceived to have a negative influence on musical education for girls, who resembled the cancanneurs in their mechanical and animalistic qualities, and who preferred quadrilles over more ambitious pieces for piano. More serious was the perceived damage that arrangements of operas as quadrilles inflicted on the original, reducing great works to the banal through simplification. By serving as an example of all that stands in opposition to art in French music, the quadrille contributed to the formulation of the concept of music as art.

Abstract A privileged position in discourse on 19th-century opera is occupied by narration concerning the emancipation of national styles. In order to work out a fresh approach in scientific study of this subject, it seems crucial that we should abandon the ethnocentric perspective. This was one of the main postulates of Jean-Marie Pradier’s utopian project of ethnoscenology. Importantly, Pradier also stressed the physical aspect of all stage practice. In the times of Rossini, Verdi, Gounod and Moniuszko, the physicality of the spectacle was associated not only with singing, but also with choreography. The links between 19th-century opera and its broadly conceived dance component are the subject of a highly inspiring essay by Maribeth Clark, whose arguments, theses and conclusions we also present here in detail. Stanisław Moniuszko’s operatic style is commonly associated with Polish dance rhythms. Still, salon dance should also be considered, apart from national dances, as one of the keys to the composer’s entire oeuvre. In a study of his stage works from both the Vilnius and the Warsaw periods, the dance idiom will not be limited to the presence of dance rhythms in the protagonists’ arias or to the ballet sections. Dance qualities can be discerned in Moniuszko’s music on a much deeper, fundamental level of the construction of operatic narration. Dance is frequently a hidden mechanism that serves as an axis of development for the presented events or as an element that organises the dramaturgy of entire scenes and instrumental passages. This paper is an attempt to take a fresh look at the role of the dance idiom in Moniuszko’s operatic narrations, an initial reconnaissance, in which I point to the sources of the composer’s inspirations and illustrate my theses with specific examples.

Aberrations in the constancy and duration of movement challenge the determination of bodies and things within and beyond dance. In fact, 19th-century anthropological studies on animism and recent cognitive science experiments on timescale bias demonstrate that the agency of erratic motion is difficult to apprehend. From irregular and unexpected movements in dance to the variable tempos of cell motility, this paper considers how arrhythmic choreography recalibrates the agency of matter, objects, bodies and environments.

The article gives a comparative analysis of historical and ethnographic materials of the late 19th - early 20th century to define the anthropological characteristics of theatricality in the context of Mordovian dance plasticity. For the first time ever, the basis is provided to the artistic and esthetic levels of existence of the syncretic behavioural activities of ancient composition of the “bezaktersky” theater of the “folklore period”.

In the 19th century, after a two-centuries oblivion, the interest in a medieval genre “danse macabre” reappeared. Dances of Death were embodied not only in pictorial art, literature and music, but also attracted the attention of scholars. The research subject of this article is one of such scientific works - “Les Danses des Morts” by J.-G. Kastner. Its uniqueness consists in the combination of a theoretical research and practical embodiment of its results in a piece of music. The genre of the tractate is defined by scholars as “livre partition” - a sheet music book. The article contains the biographical data of the life and creative work of the French scholar, music expert and composer, little-known in Russian musicology. Based on their own translation of the original text, the authors study the structure-content components of the tractate and define its specificity. J.-G. Kastner considers the genre “danse macabre” in the historical, philosophical and aesthetic contexts; traces back the interdependence of literary, decorative, and musical versions of the dances. The tractate of the French musicologist considers in detail the range of instruments of dance macabre (based on the collection of wooden engravings of a gothic Doten Dantz printed in the late 15th century). The authors define the features of J.-G. Kastner’s ideas which differ them from the thanatological views of his predecessors H. Peino and E.-H. Langlois.

Anne Fairbrother Hill was a member of a popular 19th-century family of theatrical entertainers. Following a successful career as a dancer and ingénue in London and the provinces she came to America in the 1840s with her actor/manager husband, Charles Hill, and their three children. The Hills toured widely, but they also spent considerable time in Montreal and Toronto. Anne Hill was instrumental in introducing Canadian audiences to the rich repertoire of the Romantic ballet. A talented teacher, she opened very successful dance schools in both Toronto and Montreal, assisting amateurs in both cities to mount their own theatrical productions. In the 1860s she settled permanently in Montreal where she continued to appear on stage in character roles until shortly before her death.

Lithuanian authors, authors abroad, and artists have presented Lithuanian folk clothes in their works. However, the oldest examples of these representations are not very reliable, because the authors painted them according to the descriptions of other people or copied works among each other. In the 20th century, the national costume of Lithuania changed considerably. Attention was not given to ethnographic regional peculiarities; instead, similar materials were chosen without any analysis. This article performs a comparative analysis of folk (the 19th century to the first half of the 20th century) and national (the second half of the 20th century) Lithuanian costumes to establish signs of cultural pollution and remaining authenticity. Over 500 articles of clothing with different purposes are collected from Lithuanian museums. Fabric parameters, such as raw materials, weaving technique, weave, pattern, decoration elements, etc., are established. The research results show that authentic folk clothes of the 19th century differ from the national costume of the second half of the 20th century in their cut, decoration, and patterns. No differences between ethnographic regions survived in the national costumes. Thus, at present, we must preserve our tangible heritage and re-create, as authentically as possible, national costume for folk songs and dance ensembles, folk restaurants, and rural tourism homesteads.

The interest for traditional dance research in Serbia is noted since the second part of the 19th century in various ethnographical sources. However, organized and scientifically grounded study was begun by the sisters Danica and Ljubica Janković marked by publishing of the first of totally eight volumes of the "Folk Dances" [Narodne igre] in 1934. All eight books of this edition published periodically until 1964 were highly acknowledged by the broader scientific communities in Europe and the USA. Dance research was continued by the following generation of researchers: Milica Ilijin, Olivera Mladenović, Slobodan Zečević, and Olivera Vasić. The next significant step toward developing dance research began in 1990 when the subject of ethnochoreology was added to the program of basic ethnomusicological studies at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade and shortly afterward in 1996 in the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad. Academic ethnochoreological education in both institutions was established by Olivera Vasić. The epistemological background of all traditional dance research in Serbia was anchored mostly in ethnography focused on the description of rural traditions and partly in traditional dance history. Its broader folkloristic framework has, more or less, strong national orientation. However, it could be said that, thanks to the lifelong professional commitment of the researchers, and a relatively unified methodology of their research, ethnochoreology maintained continuity as a scientific discipline since its early beginnings. The next significant milestone in the development of the discipline happened when traditional dance research was included in the PhD doctoral research projects within ethnomusicological studies at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade. Those projects, some of which are still in the ongoing process, are interdisciplinary and interlink ethnochoreology with ethnomusicology and related disciplines. This paper reexamines and reevaluates the eighty years long tradition of dance research in Serbia and positions its ontological, epistemological and methodological trajectories in the broader context of its relation to other social sciences/humanities in the contemporary era of interdisciplinarity and postdiciplinarity.

The article traces the historical stages of the emergence and development of modern choreography, its main directions, the influence of outstanding choreographers on the development of the plastic language of modern dance. It is noted that modern dance and its many and varied styles, types, forms arouse interest and the most controversial reactions from both the viewer and the critic. The concept of "modern choreography" was used and was relevant at every stage of the historical development of dance. In this or that historical period, dance was considered innovative and in line with the spirit of its time. Particular attention is paid to modern dance in the article. It incorporated both the aesthetic principles of the early 20th century and the further transformation of the modern dance of the second half of the 20th - early 21st centuries. The work also explores the emergence of the theory of movement, which appeared at the turn of the 19th - 20th centuries. However, despite the absence of a system of choreographic structure, tools for its analysis have already been proposed. This dance did not have a specific form and was aimed at conveying a person's spiritual state. In parallel with the birth of modern dance, new views on its perspectives were framed. The innovators sought to minimize the importance of costume, music, and decoration while maximizing lexical material and depth of thought, which rejected any canons of dance composition. It marked the beginning of a new era - the postmodern era, in which modern choreography evolves, moves in search of new forms and means of expression, changes, creating a new vocabulary, artistic symbols, and understandable signs.

Beginning with Giorgio Agamben�s alignment of ethics and potentiality, this essay questions the ethical dimension of gesture in the field of dance as an eminently potentiality-bound art form. This draws on Daniel Sibony�s concept of law and dance, according to which the body simultaneously repels and longs for the law as a nexus of heteronomous structures. I frame this through a revision of Aby Warburg�s rhetorical concept, pathos formula, into the corollary term, ethos formula, as the encoded movement patterns of ethical attitudes or comportments which are motivated by decision-making rather than emotional content. Do gestures and their citation in dance bear an ethical dimension similar to the encoded transmission of emotions through movement?This new concept of ethos formula finds an excellent example in the work of the American choreographer Ted Shawn (1891�1972). His strikingly hybrid use of ethos formula from the 19th century Catholic theorist Fran�ois Delsarte and his parallel practice of quoting liturgical gestures from Protestant church services, pursues the ambiguity and uncanniness of modernity itself. For Shawn�like many other protagonists of modernist dance�argues on the one hand for freeing the body from the boundaries of classical ballet in the name of individual expression, and on the other hand for an instrumentalized body that still clings to principles of taxonomy and normativity.