[SCA-Dance] Tempo and culture
Mary Railing
mrailing at kiva.net
Thu Feb 14 13:27:50 EST 2008
What an interesting thread! So many topics have been raised by it.
Unfortunately, I'm leaving town tomarrow for several days. If our modern
short attention spans can hold out that long, I'll try to get my resources
together next week and reply at length. In the mean time, some short
observations:
Of course people other than Italians danced to dances of various tempi.
The pairing of a slow, duple dance with a faster, triple dance was common
all over Europe. See Pavan/Galliard, Bassedanse/Tourdion, etc.
There are no choreographies from Eastern Europe, but a great deal of
renaissance dance music has survived from Hungary, Poland, and
Chechoslovakia. (I don't know about Romania.) This music is mostly
similar in name and style to the Pavans, Galliards, etc, found elsewhere,
but there are also local (and therefore unknown to us) dances.
Renaissance musical culture was international and multipurpose. It was
common to find the same tune in Italy and England, as a song, a dance,
and/or a Mass. It's ok to borrow any tune from the correct period for a
choreography.
There are period ways to liven up a pavan, but these mostly involve
changing the steps, rather than adding figures. However, masque dances
seemed to involve a lot of processional dances with simple steps and
complicated floor patterns. This was not social dance, however. An
emphasis on floor patterns in social dance seems to be a Baroque
preoccupation.
More later--
--Urraca
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