[SCA-Dance] My article on the theory of Renaissance dance

[Yves de Fortanier]

Bonjour from Yves,

I really enjoyed reading your article, Rochl. Per your request, here are my
comments and critique.

Dialogue format: good!

"At least seven distinct types" of SCA dance rings true. However, how
distinct are balli from bassadanze? What of balletti and cascarde? Your
"types" refer to time and place - but in the end of that paragraph you use a
nice French term I also use, genre, and stay with it. 

The first four image captures are very low-res on my screen. Are the PDF
creation settings compressing the original images more than you wanted?

Brownian motion is traditionally regarded as discovered by the botanist
Robert Brown in 1827. A bit OOP, wouldn't you agree?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion

With a single, the lead foot moves once. With a double, the lead foot moves
twice. (That was a nice a-ha moment for me earlier this year.)

In the Brussels ms. section you use Italian, French, and English terms. The
original French terms are Reverence, Branle, Reprise*, Simple(s), and
Double(s).

* Well, technically, the instructions say "desmarche". Reprise is an
alternate term for desmarche and "d" was already used for "double".

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/lod/vol2/brussels_reconstruction.html

Also, I say it was produced "sometime before 1501, probably during or after
1497."

http://tinyurl.com/53a468

"Le mois de mai" should be "Le mois de may". The "form of the dance" is
actually the number of (tenor) notes in the music. Your example says: Le
mois de may a xxxiiij notes a iiij m[esures].

http://caagt.rug.ac.be/~vfack/ihdp/brussels.html

In English: The month of may has 34 notes "in" 4 measures. 

The "measure" is more like a section of the dance. The basse dances in the
Brussels ms. have three to seven of these. Dances in other genres have a
similar number of sections with the occasional outlier (say, Goddesses and
its 11 sections).

Regarding the U-S-A pattern, there's at least one common dance that uses
U-A-S instead: Chestnut!

I like that you used en-dashes as spacers rather than hyphens.

Sometimes you have one space after a colon, sometimes two. On the plus side,
as far as I can tell, you always have two spaces after a period ending a
sentence.

IKA Moment - you have royalty/nobility leading dances?! *boggled*  8-)

Kudos on your work so far, Rochl. I hope you find my feedback useful.

Cordially,
Yves de Fortanier
Meridies