[SCA-Dance] Belle Qui

Jane & Mark Waks waks at comcast.net
Thu Jun 24 09:18:30 EDT 2010


Greg Lindahl wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 11:28:16PM -0500, Iohann se pipere wrote:
>> My expertise is mostly in music, but I thought that this dance was
>> created by a SCAdian and merely set to the Renaissance tune "Belle
>> Qui."
> 
> Oh yeah, I completely forgot to mention that aspect:
> 
> http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/dance/Carolingian_Pavane.html
> 
> That's why we call the dance the "Carolingian Pavane" and not Belle Qui.

Just to clarify from Gregory's slightly terse notes, since some readers 
probably don't know the characters: the dance probably was not written 
by a SCAdian, but was popularized by us.

Ingrid Brainard was one of the serious scholars of renaissance dance, 
who gave Carolingia its start in the field. (She passed away a few years 
ago.) She's responsible for one of the major reconstruction styles of 
early Italian (although the Sparti style has become more dominant in 
recent years), and taught a lot of us at various times.

Baron Patri was a longtime student and friend of hers, as well as one of 
the founders of Carolingia and one of the SCA's first great 
dancemasters. My general understanding is that Ingrid came up with more 
or less this choreography as an example (or possibly for a performance 
of her dance troupe), and it got into the SCA via Patri. As that got 
spread around the Society that example became "the way it's done". This 
happens a lot in SCA dance, and is the usual danger of providing one 
example of a more flexible form.

So "Carolingian Pavane" basically alludes to the fact that this 
choreography spread from Carolingia outward -- we didn't write it, but 
were largely responsible for it getting around...

				-- Justin


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