4 - The baroque body

Summary

Baroque dance developed from the late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century court ballet, ballet de cour, and survived into eighteenth-century opera ballet until it was eventually displaced by the dramatic innovations of Marie Sallé and Jean-Georges Noverre. Although it disappeared entirely from European stages with the emergence of the nineteenth-century romantic ballet, the baroque made a return in the twentieth century through a series of “baroquisms” in modern dance and ballet, as well as through historical reconstructions of a scholarly and theatrical nature. There is evidence of a serious attempt to reconstruct baroque dance as early as 1910 in Germany. The creation of original or speculative baroque movement languages, however, was more prevalent until mid-century. Modern dancer Alexander Sacharoff, for example, choreographed and performed solos such as Au temps du grand siècle/Pavane royale in 1919, and Kurt Jooss choreographed Pavane on the Death of an Infanta in 1929. Oskar Schlemmer was influenced by early seventeenth-century burlesque ballet costume design in his experimental Triadic Ballet (1922). Bronislava Nijinska choreographed Les Fâcheux for the Ballets de Monte Carlo in 1924 and danced the male lead herself. Martha Graham choreographed Imperial Gesture in 1935 and José Limón choreographed The Moor's Pavane, based on Othello with a Henry Purcell score, in 1949. In all of these cases, something understood as the marker of period style was incorporated into a twentieth-century concept of dance modernism.