FIRST PART A SHORT HISTORY OF DANCE FROM ANTIQUITY TO THE BEGINNING OF THE 19TH CENTURY CHAPTER 2 THE MIDDLE AGES 2.1 Between sacred and profane At the time of early Christianity, the Church had an ambivalent attitude towards dance, as also towards music. Referring to the Jewish tradition, which saw dance and music as an expression of religious exultation, he considered it a means of spiritual elevation, almost a form of prayer. There existed, however, the mystery and Bacchic dance and that of the actors and jesters, from which the Church had to distance itself. In the Early Middle Ages some forms of dance were represented in painting, in sculpture, on church windows, as a practice of participation in the life of the spirit and in the celebration of death. But soon the pagan element that had characterized the most ancient dance events re-emerged. The rites of pagan origin which included dance performances continued to survive especially in the Celtic world. In France the first Sunday of Lent was called Dimanche de brandons , the day in which the farmers, holding a torch ( brandon ) in their hands, walked through the fields dancing for propitiatory purposes. On the occasion of the feast of San Giovanni, naked dancers performed in the streets until they fell exhausted. The Council of Nicaea in 680 spoke against the excesses of processional dances and prohibited them. The ban, however, did not achieve the desired effect, nor did other ordinances issued in subsequent centuries. Starting from the 4th century the ecclesiastical authorities, in an attempt to stem the plurality of cults that had developed within the various Christian communities, began to consider the presence of dance in sacred places a sign of the devil, as an expression of the body that had to be mortified to exalt the soul. Music was also gradually expelled from the official liturgy which, in addition to the human voice and the bell, only allowed the sound of the organ. Despite having been banned in sacred places, dance, however, continued to survive outside, becoming part of the "sacred drama", a theatrical genre which represented episodes from the life of Christ and which was performed in churchyards. 2.1.1 Devotional dances The first form of sacred representation was the dramatic lauda, which was recited by brotherhoods of clerics and lay people, but towards the end of the fourteenth century, stages began to be built outside the churches, staging theatrical performances with profane themes (in Latin pro + fānum “outside the temple”). Dance remained, however, for a long time linked to manifestations of religious devotion, especially in countries furthest from the direct influence of the Roman Church, often retaining a pagan character and resulting in episodes of collective hysteria. Medieval and Renaissance chronicles describe long lines of people, including women and children, walking through streets and squares, holding hands and dancing convulsively, infecting and involving spectators, and also entering churches and cemeteries. These episodes of religious hysteria, which included the dances of "St. Vitus and St. John", probably had the apotropaic function of warding off the plague, which was considered by the people to be a divine punishment. These were practices to ward off evil, a legacy of a pre-Christian past in which dance had a liberating role, purifying anxieties or illnesses. The Church instead interpreted them as cases of diabolical possession, and intervened with exorcism practices, invoking saints John and Vitus. The ritual of tarantism has also been documented since the Middle Ages. According to a belief, to heal from the almost always imaginary bite of a poisonous spider, the tarantula, it was necessary to dance a tarantella until recovery occurred. To the rhythm of the music the victim of the bite made movements similar to those of the spider weaving its web, but the effort was such as to exhaust the person and, consequently, kill the tarantula, rendering its venom harmless. 2.1.2 Dances of fertility and war After the fall of the Roman Empire, the barbarian invasions had brought back ancestral dances, with a pagan character, which the religious authorities of the Early Middle Ages tried in vain to counter. These were round dances, which recalled themes of fertility, with their set of erotic motifs, or war dances such as the fire dance and the sword dance. The latter is found in different eras and cultural contexts and had its greatest development, at a popular level, between the 14th and 17th centuries. We find it in England as morris dance, in southern France ( bacubert ), in Spain and in some territories inhabited by Slavic peoples. The steps essentially consist of the swing of one foot on a slight hop of the other, but the swing can be performed with such impetus as to make it an expression of virile strength. The morris dance, like the dance of the swords or that of the sticks, was connected to initiation and fertility rites and, among some populations, was preparatory to combat. Sometimes, during its execution, the execution of a jester was staged followed by his resurrection (for this reason it is known in France as Les Buffons ). The ritual recalls the primordial sacrifice of cosmogonic myths. The anthropologist Mircea Eliade talks about the cyclical re-enactment of myths connected with the death of a god and his resurrection aimed at guaranteeing the rebirth of vegetation and living forms on earth. 2.1.3 Prayer dances In the climate of medieval religious mysticism, dance also entered the ritual of prayer as an accompaniment to singing. When the pilgrims who went to the sanctuaries of Santiago de Compostela or Monserrat reached their destination, they danced around the altar and sang songs in honor of the Virgin. The texts of these songs are contained in the Llibre Vermell (the "vermillion book", so called due to the color of its cover) written at the end of the 14th century. In the Middle Ages, Montserrat became a place of visit for every pilgrim from Europe who went to Spain and who sometimes even reached the final destination of Santiago de Compostela, "where the world ended". It seems that the emotional charge accumulated by the pilgrims during the journey was such that, in addition to praying to the Virgin, they sang and danced. These pieces of music ( Cuncti simus concanentes, Los sept goytxs, Polorum Regina and Stella Splendens ), with strong popular connotations, were intended for round dancing, as the Llibre Vermell dictates: “ ad trepudium rotundum ” in Latin or “a ball redon” in Catalan vernacular. The Latin expression " ad tripudium rotundum " recalls the war dance of the Salii priests of ancient Rome, composed of three stamps of the foot ( tri-pudium ). Polorum Regina , perhaps the most famous piece of the collection, survived in the repertoire of sacred songs until the end of the 16th century. According to some scholars, Dante knew this ball redon and its melody inspired some atmospheres of Paradise in him. 2.1.4 The Dance of Death At a popular level, macabre and cemetery dances developed in the Middle Ages, i.e. spontaneous dances indulged in during funeral ceremonies. An example of the contrast between sacred and profane is the danse macabre of which pictorial representations remain. The sense of death was very present: it accompanied ordinary people in all phases of the day and of life. In the danse macabre - masterfully depicted by Dürer and Holbein - a skeleton representing death performs dance steps in the form of leaps of joy, repeating the courtship movements, in the consolidated form of the carol, thus recovering an ancient concept according to which, turning rhythmically around a person, one had (or could have) possession of it. , the only medieval macabre dance that has survived intact, is a hymn to death, probably inspired by the plague that decimated the European population between 1347 and 1348, the same one Boccaccio talks about in the Decameron. It is the only song that has come down to us complete with musical notation, the text of which describes how all men recognize the sovereign power of Death. Ad Mortem Festinamus 2.1 5 The jester In the Middle Ages, dance as a form of entertainment was now over: ballets were no longer performed as in Roman times, but acrobats, fire eaters, jugglers and jesters entertained the spectators in the squares or inside the castles. The medieval jester was a storyteller, minstrel, mime, traveling artist, musician and poet, actor and dancer, albeit sui generis. His way of dancing deviated from popular dance forms and consisted of large, aesthetically compelling movements. His dance had no other purpose than entertainment and fun and was for this reason based on agility, physical prowess and the skill of a professional acrobat. 2.2 The cultural rebirth of the 11th century and Provençal courtly poetry After the year 1000 there was a rebirth in Europe in all fields of knowledge, including the literary one which saw the establishment of the written use of vernacular languages and Romance and Germanic dialects in fiction and poetry. During the 12th century, French literature, both in the langue d'oc and in the langue d'oil, had an extraordinary flourishing and also profoundly influenced the nascent literature in the Italian vernacular, so much so that it constituted an inevitable element in the cultural formation of literate poets. In the courts of France, from the south to the north, troubadours and minstrels recited and sang, accompanied by lutes and violas, poetic works written in the spoken language which often in form and style still retained the characteristics of a literature mainly intended for oral communication. The troubadours worked mainly in Provence, in the south of France, and from there they moved to Germany, Spain and Italy. They were often high-ranking figures, cadet sons of noble families but also reigning princes. The oldest troubadour known to us is, in fact, William IX, Count of Poitiers (1087-1127). The noblewoman, wife of the lord of the castle, was the protector and inspiration of the poets who were welcomed there and was the animating center of the court. Among the most famous, Eleanor of Aquitaine, granddaughter of William of Aquitaine, who was the first troubadour, wife of Louis VII of France and then of Henry II Plantagenet, king of England. At the court of Marie de Champagne, the poems of Chrétien de Troyes, author of epic-fantastic poems ( Erec and Enide , King Mark and Isolde the Blonde , Cligès , Lancelot or the Knight of the Cart, Ivano or the knight of the lion , Perceval or the tale of the Grail and other compositions that have only partially survived). The chansons de geste of the Carolingian cycle celebrated the recovery of the Christians led by Charlemagne against the Moors. In Provence and Aquitaine, the troubadours sang courtly love ( la fine amor ) whose rules had been analytically codified in the treatise De Amore by Andrea Cappellano, that is, the perfect love for the lady who is often distant or socially unattainable. Through the complicated interweaving of long narrative poems it was possible to follow the adventures of heroes of the Greco-Latin and Hellenistic epics, such as Alexander or Aeneas, but the greatest interest was directed towards the compositions which celebrated the so-called "matter of Brittany", which flourished in Anglo-Norman environment on both sides of the English Channel, whose protagonists were the knights who were part of King Arthur's legendary Round Table. The adventurous events of the knights were taken from the Historia regum Britanniae , a pseudo-historical work in Latin by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who had intended to give the Britons, fighting against the Saxons, the dignity of an ancient past enriched by the prophecies of the wizard Merlin which ensured Arthur an exceptional destiny. The adventures of the legendary knights and ladies of Arthur's court - Lancelot, Ivano, Gawain, Perceval, Tristan - sung at the courts of France, were softened with the introduction of the sentimental element of love affairs. The first forms of court dance were found in this extraordinary flourishing of motifs and genres in which elements of various cultures converged. 2.3 The reconstruction of medieval dance The iconographic sources constitute the most valid testimony for a reconstruction of medieval dance: frescoes, paintings, and miniatures show dance scenes, indoors or outdoors, showing, sometimes in an elementary way, other times in great detail, the composition of the groups of knights and ladies, their attitude, movements and often the instrumental formation that performs the music. The role of dance in the social life of the noble classes of the time can also be seen from some literary sources: the ten young people who, in Boccaccio's Decameron, take refuge in a villa on the outskirts of Florence, after telling the stories of the day, delight in playing and dancing. The same author tells us that Dioneo played the lute and Fiammetta the flute. Johannes de Grocheo, a French musical theorist of the second half of the 13th century, in his treatise De musica , mentions three different types of dance widespread in his time: estampie (or estampida ), ductia and nota . The estampie, whose name derives from the French term estampir (“to stamp one's feet”), was made up of a certain number of juxtaposed sections ( puncta ), repeated with different conclusions ( ouvert and clos : open and closed), as happens in the ritornelli with the practice of the first and second time. The estampie probably ended with a kind of stamping of both feet. The structure of the other two forms cited by Grocheo was similar, distinguishing them by the smaller number of sections, by the different musical tempo (the estampie is slow, the ductia is fast) and by other characteristics that are not easy to interpret. From a rhythmic point of view, we still know that medieval dances were divided into lively and hopping dances (widespread among the peasants and the popular classes, characterized by an accentuated pantomime development) and walking or crawling dances (proper to the noble class and the courts) in the in which area, from a technical point of view, two fundamental species can still be identified for artistic evolution:“carola” dances (in circle, choral) and “couple” dances (in front or in line), typical courtship dances. The dances cited in the poetic and literary works of the time, in addition to the carole (the only one with a fairly clear choreographic configuration), are the rondeau, the virelais, the ballade, but beyond these classifications, almost nothing is known about the modalities of execution. 2.3.1 Dance songs and instrumental dances On a musical level, the quality and number of musical texts that have come down to us allow us to reconstruct two different types of dance: instrumental dances and vocal dances. The former have no literary text, therefore actual instrumental music. Vocal dances are the so-called "dance songs" and, in a broad sense, also ballads. Classic examples of vocal dances are: . A l'entrada del tens clar and Kalenda maya The text of the first of these examples talks about what happens at the arrival of spring when the "April queen" announces a ball open to all the beautiful girls, but from which they must first of all stay away from the old and jealous king and, with him, all the other husbands: “Away, away, jealous ones, leave us, let us dance among ourselves!” happily repeats the all-female refrain. can also be classified among vocal dances. The poetic content is the unhappy love of the author, the troubadour Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, for Donna Beatrice, sister of the Marquis of Monferrato. But the razo that precedes the composition tells us the occasional motif of this work which was composed to the music of an that two viella players, who came from Paris, performed, with great success, at the court where Raimbaut himself stayed. Kalenda maya estampida During the fourteenth century, the separation of roles between dancers and singers became established in dance songs: those who dance do not sing and those who sing do not participate in the dance. In this phase the need for musical accompaniment begins to be felt. Initially the songs that accompanied the dances were sung by the dancers themselves, but soon the first accompanying instruments appeared, with strings such as the lute or viella, and percussion instruments such as the tambourine. Not infrequently dance music was entrusted to the improvisation of the jester. The "round dance" was performed outdoors, not due to space requirements, but because it was a public activity par excellence which had the aim of strengthening the bonds of solidarity within the group. For this reason, and not because it was a sacred dance, it was directed by religious people, clearly in the role of controllers in an important moment of social activity. 2.3.2 L’Estampie Estampie represents the only dance genre for which we have a real musical corpus made up of 16 songs, coming from two different sources from different eras. Eight compositions called Estampie, from the 13th century, are French and appear in the Chansonnier du Roi or Manuscrit du Roi , a codex preserved in the National Library of France which collects over 600 songs, composed between 1270 and 1320, some by troubadours and trouvères famous (like Guiot de Dijon or Richard de Fournival), others anonymous. The name is preceded by a number and followed by an adjective Real or Royal. The eight estampie real, collected together in two pages, are each called by their respective ordinal numeral, perhaps because they were conceived as a cycle: La Prime Estampie Real, La Seconde Estampie Real, La Tierche Estampie Real and so on. The other eight, dating back to the following century, are inserted in a Florentine codex acquired by the British Library in London, with the heading Istanpitta and the addition of a title: Ghaetta ; Beginning of Joy; Isabella; Three Fountains; Belich; Parliament; In Pro; Principle of Virtue . The codex is one of the most important sources of Italian music of the fourteenth century and contains numerous pieces by the composers of the Italian ars nova (including Francesco Landini and Jacopo da Bologna). Certainly intended for dancing are the trovalli (untitled), the trot (a dance in vogue at the beginning of the 15th century) and two other compositions, the Lamento di Tristan and the Manfredina , with their respective routes, lively rhythmic-melodic variations of the dance. This two-part structure is the beginning of that structural evolution of dance music which will evolve over time into the suite form, typical of baroque music. 2.3.3 Carole, farandole and circle dances The choreographies of medieval dances have never been reconstructed as, in the absence of treatises, research must be based exclusively on literary or iconographic sources. Some indications, however, can be gleaned from the names of the dances themselves: balade and ballad, they generically mean dancing; rondeau, rossa, rondellus, rond, round stand for dancing in circles; virelai (from the verb virer ) means “twist”, therefore dance with twist; carola, karol, querole are terms that indicate dancing in a circle. Carols were dances, accompanied by songs, which drew their mimicry from the words of the ballad. The use of musical instruments was very rare. The explanation lies in the fact that, while the music adapts to the couple's dance, the choral singing also spiritually unites the group of participants to the elementary figures of the dance. It seems that initially only women danced, as we learn from a song dating back perhaps to the 11th century "... the damsels go there to sing carols, the knights to watch". Only in the thirteenth century did women and men begin to dance together, holding hands and forming a circle. These first performances of popular inspiration were of two types: the farandole, dances in which the dancers proceeded in a serpentine manner holding hands, and the branle, a merry-go-round typical of France, which varied from province to province and which also spread to Italy, under the name of brando, and in England, where it was called brawl or round. A description of a circle dance is reported in the Roman de la Rose, a work from the first half of the 13th century: ...You will see them fly in the car And people gracefully dance And always have a nice affair and lots of laps on the fresh grass. A famous depiction of this dance is found in the Allegory of Good Government painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, in which nine girls, holding hands, move in a circle, while a tenth noblewoman sings and plays the tambourine. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Detail from the Allegory of Good Government, Siena (1338-1339). 2.3.4 The Moresca The Moresca was very widespread, a military dance, probably descending from the Pyrrhic, a war dance of the Greeks. It cannot be established with certainty when this dance performance, widespread over the past centuries in various European areas, was born, although obviously, in its form of struggle between Christians and Turks, it cannot be prior to the epic-historical episodes that inspired it. In any case, it must be said that similar dance forms pre-existed in Italy as in the rest of Europe before the Turkish invasion and this suggests that the Moorish represents an overlap of spring rural rites, i.e. fertility dances of the pagan era against the spirits of evil. These dances have never ceased to exist but over time they have lost the original meaning of combat, which is historicized as a commemoration of a historical event as in the case of the fight between the Cross and the Crescent. The choreographies of the Moresca are not documented and the numerous descriptions of the dance differ in theme. Sometimes it is an armed dance that stages the clash between Moors and Christians, other times it is demons that clash with celestial forces. But the numerous analogies with the dance of swords or sticks also suggests a dance linked to fertility rites. A very late example of an armed Moorish is found in Thoinot Arbeau's Orchésographie , from 1588. Around the middle of the fifteenth century the Moorish took on two different dimensions: on the one hand it retained its original form of fight between Turks and Christians as a popular entertainment inserted in the carnival context, on the other it adapted to courtly parties often as an interlude in the intervals of theatrical performances. In a letter to Lorenzo de' Medici from 1465, Braccio Martelli tells of a visit to Lucrezia Donati's villa and how she and her companions in the brigade listened to the love poems of the Magnificent sung to the sound of the lute and danced " the gioiosa, the Chirintana and the Moresca ". Isabella d'Este, reporting in a letter details of the wedding between Lucrezia Borgia and Alfonso D'Este in 1502, describes the various moorish paintings performed during the party: ". .. it was made up of soldiers dressed in the old fashioned way, in black and white armor; in the sallet, white and red feathers; one had a mace in his hand, the other an ax […] and all of them had a rapier and a dagger. First with mazes, then with rapiers, and finally with daggers they fought, beating time ”.