PECOUR’S L’ALLEMANDE, 1702–1765: HOW ‘GERMAN’ WAS IT?

Abstract

Louis-Guillaume Pecour’s couple-dance called L’Allemande introduced in 1702 a mode of dancing that in some respects was different to anything that had been seen before on stage or at court in France, and that was to influence a number of dances for the theatre and ballroom in the following years. Particular characteristics of Pecour’s dance were its unusual arm positions, which seem to have indicated a specifically ‘Germanic’ character, and some sequences of steps which, although also occurring in other dances of the time, nevertheless seemed to reinforce some notion of ‘Germanic’ dancing. Some of these characteristics also appeared in dances devised in London after 1714 for the Hanoverian royal family, perhaps as a deliberate allusion to their German ancestry. This article examines the structure and form of Pecour’s L’Allemande, and the extent to which it, and some of the dances it influenced, may have represented a stereotype of ‘Germanic’ culture as something outlandish or uncultivated unless redeemed by an overlay of French choreographic sophistication.