I would like to start with an anecdote. When my daughter was five weeks old, she had a stiff neck, and almost couldn't turn her head at all to her left. So, my wife and I went to see an osteopath. The doctor's practice was a family business: father and son—both of them neurologists and chiropractors—work on scores of bodies day by day, manipulating and treating them. The father is also an osteopath; the son is still learning to become one. We saw the son. He treated our daughter who screamed and turned red and in turn got her back straightened, but not quite as straight as it should have been. So, the son got his father, who showed him another trick or two, explained them to his son and to us, and left again. Our daughter was now really aligned, and the son said: “Well, this is how it goes. I am still learning. While I push and pull and push and pull, my father just needs one grip and the work is done.” Our daughter sneezed. “Do we need to come back?” we asked. “No, one time is sufficient. Good-bye,” he replied and left for his next patient.

“What does it mean to reconstruct a dance?” wonders Martin Nachbar in his text “Training Remembering.” Following Henri Bergson, he proposes an explanation in terms of images that are actualized in ways that involve not only the visual sense, but also hearing, touch, and proprioception. Remembering something is actualizing it through the senses. Such sensory actualization is instrumental not only to literally remember moments from our own past, but also to our modes of engaging with the thoughts, ideas, experiences, and creations of others. In this process, Nachbar observes, our own body, with its movement knowledge and experiences, becomes the frame through which remembering takes shape, while at the same time this frame may be questioned and trained anew within the process.

For some time now, scholarly medieval studies have been preoccupied with questions about the relationship between the modern and the premodern, and even about the very meanings of these terms. Medievalists in different fields have thoughtfully re-examined the critical paradigms that rely on a break between the medieval as premodernity, on the one hand, and the early modern as an initiation of modernity, on the other. Such new perspectives on periodization and the Middle Ages have tended to originate in studies of literature, theater, history, and art. The discipline of medieval studies has not, for the most part, considered what dance might contribute to our understanding of the constitution of historical periods such as “medieval” and “early modern.” And yet, basse danse and bassadanza, due to their placement in a fifteenth-century moment variously claimed by both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, potentially offer much to such discussions of periodization. As a performance, this fifteenth-century dance situates itself in a dynamic transition between the medieval and the early modern, raising questions about the nature, location, and even existence of this periodization boundary. At the same time, however, the instructional and codifying techniques associated with basse danse and bassadanza reinforce a more traditional periodization dynamic, whereby a culture looks back mainly in order to look forward, organizing its ideas about time and history around the mechanism of anticipation. I shall argue in this essay that basse danse and bassadanza reveal a suggestively conflicted perspective on time through the distinction they establish between the temporality of execution and that of instruction. Furthermore, in their espousal of anticipatory strategies, the instruction manuals in particular show how representations of early dance can construct perspectives on historical periodization. Casting into relief thus an occluded narrative about how period borders form and solidify, basse danse and bassadanza additionally offer early period scholarship some new ways to reconsider and dissolve such borders.

How does one come to terms with the “already said” or the “already danced”? I ask this in light of the many instances where contemporary dance has insistently undertaken—as a condition of its own renewal—a critique of past works that have been transmitted through the oral tradition. This undoing of the oral tradition's dominance has instantiated a new relation to the past in contemporary dance. Hannah Arendt throws some light on this process when she quotes Walter Benjamin, for whom modernity required that we find a different way of connecting with the past—one that would replace transmission with citationality. To cite, in speech act theory, as in dance, presupposes that the authority of the past be replaced with that disquieting ability of the past to infiltrate the present in a disembodied way (Arendt 1974, 291). The challenge of citation to the prestige of oral person-to-person transmission of a dance has introduced a new way for contemporary artists to relate to and re-embody past works.

In the middle of Mark Morris's ballet Dido and Aeneas, set to the Henry Purcell opera of the same title, a female dancer mimes the story of the Greek goddess Diana and her unfortunate suitor, Actaeon. While hunting in the mountains, Actaeon catches sight of Diana bathing nude, and the fiercely chaste goddess transforms him into a stag; his own well-trained hounds, baying triumphantly, turn on their master. When the word “mountain” is sung, the dancer marks out two jagged peaks over her head with one hand. When the hunter Actaeon is mentioned by name, the dancer mimes a bow being arched and an arrow shot from it. Then, as the line “here, here, Actaeon met his fate,” is being sung, the dancer points one finger down at a spot on the ground, nodding emphatically. It was here, she is saying—right here, where I am pointing, see?