The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography: Kinetic Theatricality and Social Interaction

By Mark Franko

The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography problematizes the absence of the dancing body in treatises in order to reconstruct it through a series of intertextual readings triggered by Thoinot Arbeau’s definition of dance in his 1589 dance treatise, Orchesographie. The notion of the intertext as elaborated by Michael Riffaterre is used to understand a series of relationships between dance and other activities within which the historical dancing body emerges to the light of day. Arbeau’s discussion of dance as a mute rhetoric in the demonstrative genre points to the intertext of Quintilian’s The Oratorical Institution where the genus demonstrativum is explained as epideixis, the goal of which is to inspire confidence and charm the audience. The second intertext explored is that of civility as found in courtesy books where the posture of the body and the parameters of movement are outlined, converging in the gesture of the révérence. The categories of pose and movement are then read into the structure of the basse danse, the quintessential courtly social dance of the period. The relation of pose to movement or of stillness to mobility is further theorized through the terms of earlier Italian treatises, specifically in terms of fantasmata as used by Domenico da Piacenza.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781785278037

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The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography

The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography

Kinetic Theatricality and Social Interaction

Revised Edition

Mark Franko

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2022

by ANTHEM PRESS

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Copyright © Mark Franko 2022

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021953391

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-801-3 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-801-0 (Hbk)

Cover image: Dancing women, late 15th century or early 16th century (1954), by Leonardo da Vinci. Photographer/Artist: Print Collector

This title is also available as an ebook.

To my parents,

Lily C. Franko and David M. Franko

"Je vous ai dit plus haut que l’on avait renversé le sens des mots et leurs justes significations. Marcher, déclamer, gesticuler, était danser. […] Voilà donc le mot danser mis à la place de déclamer. […] Voilà encore le mot chant à la place de déclamer et celui de danse substitué à celui de geste."

[I told you before that the meaning of words and their real signification was turned upside down. To walk, to declaim, to gesticulate, was to dance. […] So that the word to dance seemed to be standing for declamation. […] Then again the word to sing seemed to be inter-changeable with the word to declaim and dance seemed interchangeable with gesture.]

—Jean-Georges Noverre,

Letters sur la Danse et les Arts Imitateurs, 1760

CONTENTS

Preface to the Revised Edition

1.

Introduction

2.

The Mythological Intertext: Language

3.

The Sociological Intertext: Courtesy

4.

The Pedagogical Intertext: Precepts

5.

The Political Intertext: Civil Conversatione (Social Intercourse)

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION

This book is my doctoral dissertation defended in the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University in 1981 under the direction of Michael Riffaterre and published in a revised edition by Summa Publications in 1986.¹ As such, it is at the origin of my scholarly work and likewise initiated the beginning of my artistic work in choreography. It is a document with roots far back in the past in several senses. I should say immediately that it was an uncommon dissertation topic for the field of French literature, and I remain grateful to Professor Riffaterre for his enthusiastic support. At the time of its writing during the 1970s, the body was emerging as a new focal point of the humanities, especially in France. But this dissertation was still unusual for being not just about the body in a metaphorical sense but about a historical practice of dance, and about the relationship of historically specific dancing bodies to texts that spoke about them both directly and indirectly. Here the notion of intertextuality came to the fore as, in the words of Julia Kristeva, an intersection of textual surfaces.² My primary materials were the earliest European texts about dancing—the so-called dance treatises or instruction manuals that often took the form of dialogues—in relation to other writings that dealt with physical comportment in nondance contexts. The treatises were not actual lessons, but representations of lessons or transpositions of lessons into texts also containing a philosophical dimension.³ Nonetheless, my working hypothesis was that dance treatises lacked the crucial elements of the dancing body in movement. This is what I referred to, perhaps somewhat hyperbolically, as the absence of the dancing body in these writings. The intertexts, however, provided the missing elements of a culturally alive body in movement. The way to understand dance in its written manifestations at this historical moment was to attend to an elsewhere of dance.

This now fully historical dance had become an absent element in history. Unable to be observed in live performance, it lurked in the crevices of discursive statements as supplemented with illustrative drawings, musical tabulatures and alphabetical signs for steps.⁴ Nonetheless, the treatises purported to say what dance is and how it carries out its ascribed role. In this way, treatises contained not only rules and precepts but also theories of social order filtered through the microcosm of heterosexual couple dancing. My methodology proposed to examine the figural language in which treatises articulated a uniquely theoretical orientation. I call it theoretical to contrast it with the pragmatic historical reconstruction of movement.⁵ But this figural language opened upon an embodied aesthetics, not a disembodied theory.⁶ By asking what procedures dance uses to create meaning through interrogating how writing fails to signify dance in its phenomenal reality, a critical interpretation of these passages yielded a body in motion.⁷ The methodology thus pointed away from the practical explanation of dancing toward a theorization of the dancing body itself as encoded in the metaphorical network of language.⁸ This was a body of meaning. With this shift, the treatise was no longer merely a pedagogical and philosophical text but also a literary one. My encounter with the dancing body in writing had raised the ancillary question of how the body means in dance, and it implicitly put dance on a par with literature as a signifying practice demanding interpretation. My underlying intuition was that if the dancing body had become entrusted to texts at this time in history, it was because it had been grasped at some level to be a signifying entity, if not actually a textual one. This orientation to the material was not sparked by dance notation—as might often be assumed—but instead by the elusive corporeality to be read in the texts themselves.

Physical Eloquence and Persuasion

The Renaissance was a period of the rebirth of classical learning and a return to classical aesthetics in European culture of the late Middle Ages and offered promise as such for anyone wanting to understand the origins of classical theater dance. The origins of theater dance in the West were linked to classical learning, which, as Paul Oskar Kristeller has shown, was fundamentally grounded in the study and practices of eloquence. The humanists known to have revived classical learning were first and foremost engaged with grammatical and rhetorical studies.⁹ Questions of composition and the oratorical delivery of public speech pointed to an awareness of the body itself as a performative discourse working alongside verbal discourse. Hence, the body’s role in enunciation was the condition of any statement. And, by extension, dance was in a permanent state of enunciation with respect to what it did not say.¹⁰ I refer here to Louis Marin’s understanding of enunciation as indispensable to discourse but also existing outside of discursive meaning as its transcendental structure and thereby evoking the entire field of deixis in discourse.¹¹ From a rhetorical perspective, this led to the formulation of norms regarding the body’s gestural role in support of vocal intonation and to appeal to the eye. For Quintilian, the ability to sway the mind of the listener was conditional not only upon what the listener heard but also upon what they saw. And gesture had to be understood as both vocal and visual. Although dance was not in itself oratorical action, the latter nonetheless furnished a classical intertext through which humanists reflected on dance as a mode of enunciation that supported communication in social interaction. Yet bearing in mind that dance mostly did not constitute social interactions properly speaking even as it was performed as a kind of social interaction in its own right, dance was located both within and without that of which it formed so essential a part.¹² What’s more, social (inter)action was mirrored in the theoretical aspects of dance treatises as well as in courtesy books and the literature of manners more generally, which lavished much attention upon physical demeanor as determinant for the identity of the person as a social being. For this reason, dance could be present even in the absence of dancing in any literal sense.

As Michael Baxandall makes clear, between 1350 and 1450, humanists were not themselves orators.¹³ Baxandall shows that even though humanists spoke Italian, their cultivation of neoclassical Latin had aesthetic and intellectual aims pertinent to contemporary art practice alongside the project of restoring classical learning: For the Renaissance, rhetoric must be taken primarily in the sense of a systematic study of verbal stylishness—words perhaps read more often than heard—based on the models and manuals of the classical rhetoricians.¹⁴ In Baxandall’s study of the humanists’ contribution to art theory through their concept of composition, stylishness can be summed up as the cultivation of a certain manner. Ideas around style and stylishness became closely associated with manners in the social comportment of courtly society. Baxandall’s discussion contains important clues about how dance was poised between art and social life: the bodily aesthetic forged in the crucible of social exchange subsequently informed the body as subject of art. Of course, Aby Warburg’s discussion of the Nymph comes to mind here as the most prominent historiographic example of conceptualizing the relation between the image of a dancing body and expressive gesture. But contemporaneous treatises on drawing also demonstrate how to represent the human body as a body in motion. For example, in Giacomo Franco’s sketches of body parts in De Excellentia et nobilitate delineationis libro due (1611), the expressive qualities of motion seem to be the very condition of the body’s proper visual representation. By contrast, drawings of the dancing body in dance treatises appear frozen into positions. This may be due to the pedagogical intent of the treatises or to the variability of draughtsman’s skill, but the question arises of how visual representation of the body may have affected the aesthetics of dancing itself.

Photo 1 Giacomo Franco, sketch of arms in De Excellentia et nobilitate delineationis libro due (1611). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Gallica.

Photo 2 Mark Franko in The Treasure of the City of Women (chor. Mark Franko). Photographer: Bernard Plishton.

When Angelo Galli discussed the painting of Pisanello using Italian vernacular terms derived from dance treatises—mesura, aere and maniera (measure, air and manner)—he was applying principles of social dance to the plastic depiction of the human figure.¹⁵ This suggests that the aesthetic principles of the early dance treatises had an influence on the visual representation of the human body in art. Yet the principles mentioned were those applicable to social dance where expression was in the service of self-representation. Dance existed squarely within social reality while also providing the visual artist with principles for depicting the body outside of that reality. This is in part what makes the rhetorical context of dance treatises and oratorical action as a metaphor for dancing so rich for our understanding of danced performance and dance theory in the early modern. Quintilian makes clear that oratory is quite distinct from theater, yet emotional appeal and visualization of narrative were both tools of the orator. Oratory is a highly composed discourse with a social aim, and hence the gestures it sets in play walk a fine line between theater and social accountability.

What sorts of persuasion were at play in dancing itself? My answer to that question differs from what Norbert Elias might have proposed had he turned his attention to dance as part of the civilizing process whose end in his account was the self-control of affect.¹⁶ For me, dance was about the body as beheld by others in a relationship determined to an equal degree by social norms and affect. The body acts as a crucible and testing ground for this encounter. The formal ordering of behavior can engender an affective exchange that opens onto a sphere of action within the social order. The consequences of this action were addressed most directly in my reading of Stefano Guazzo’s La Civil Conversatione (1586). It is the theory of social intercourse in Guazzo that not only demonstrates the relation of the intertexts to the very real effects of dancing but also bridges the fifteenth century with the sixteenth century and Italy with France in this study. If we want to view the early social dance treatises from the Italian fifteenth century and the French sixteenth century as providing the foundational theory of theatricality, physical eloquence points the way but must also be modified by the context of social exchange in a competitive environment that was that of the court. Hence the treatises provide a discourse of the elements of an art that began self-consciously as a language in and of social intercourse. This, in a nutshell, is the argument of this book, which views dance as a combinatorial practice of the social, the rhetorical and the aesthetic. Yet we should not forget that the immediate end of the dancer, at least for Arbeau, was to be loved. This is perhaps a form of admiration of the dancer in the strongest sense. It is also an indicator that from the rhetorical perspective dance was an exercise in self-praise, a form of reflexive epideixis (see my discussion in Chapter 2). By limiting our attention to the social dance, we are better able to observe the exchangeability between loving and being loved, which does not necessarily take place in spectacle.¹⁷ This reciprocity or what Merleau-Ponty would call chiasmatic quality is one of the hallmarks of social dance, but as will be developed further on, it does not preclude theatricality.

The Critique of Reconstruction

From my earlier perspective as a modern dancer in the New York City concert dance milieu of the 1960s, Renaissance dance was something of an oddity. Performances of historical dance such as Julia Sutton’s productions for Pro Musica, a performance group Noah Greenberg founded in 1952, existed on the margin of the modern, experimental and ballet concert scene. As I have written elsewhere: Reconstruction is the activity necessary to restore the movements of a dance in their completeness through the strict decoding of notation (if there is any) and the requisite filling in of knowledge gaps where they occur.¹⁸ How could the technique reconstruction affords in working rigorously from a monovalent textual surface serve to render the historically complex social and aesthetic reality as a movement event reenacted in the present? Was this not to place too great an expectation on the powers of reconstruction? Dance reconstructions of the Renaissance period were produced for the most part by musicologists who studied the relationship between scores and notated steps in courtly social dance manuals. Rarely did they inquire into the quality of gesture.¹⁹ Their staging of Renaissance dance was doubly pedagogical since the manuals themselves were designed as teaching tools. What’s more, in the absence of manuals for theatrical dancing, the assumption was made that what the social dance manuals contained was valid for the theater as well.

Instruction aside, could we be sure that the same social dance movement vocabulary was also used in court ballets, festivals and spectacles? How close was social dance to the origins of choreography in the modern sense? Reconstructions had a tendency to segregate historical dance from eloquence in the larger picture of Renaissance culture while also making claims for its currency in theater dance, claims that I found somewhat precarious. My research began to open out onto a creative project as, when looking up from reading, I mused on what a choreography might look like that itself embodied a reflection on the philosophical, cultural and historical roots of dance. Could this story of dance be told in and through dance itself?

Photo 3 Giacomo Franco, sketch of hands in De Excellentia et nobilitate delineationis libro due (1611). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Gallica.

Photo 4 Christine Dakin in Mark Franko (chor.), Antique Scripts . Photographer: Tom Caravaglia.

This question motivated a performance project that evolved into Renaissance Constructions (1984), an evening-length work with the conceit of the dance treatise as a theatrical device to explore ideas of dance in the Renaissance. I did not attempt to simulate an earlier state of technique but emphasized instead how the mannerism of visual sources could be translated back into today’s dancing body. The painterly aesthetic of the figure as influenced by dance principles could very well be and was translated back into the evocation of a style of being wherein dancing as social behavior took on a heightened aesthetic form. This was what I meant by a construction rather than a reconstruction. Deborah Jowitt’s review characterized Renaissance Constructions as theatrical and theoretical rather than atmospheric.²⁰ My interest was, indeed, in dancing a theory of dance as on the stage but not of the stage. Or, rather, in showing the invisible web between the social and the theatrical. Renaissance Constructions offered a representation of Renaissance dance as itself an image. The body as sign whose role is to present itself as subject (in both senses of that term) turns that sign into a kinetically, if not mimetically, theatrical entity.²¹ But this is not to say that it thus becomes a sign made for the stage. Rather it is a sign whose destiny is to fulfill a social function by reflecting on its own theatricality.

Photo 5 Giacomo Franco, sketch of women’s heads in De Excellentia et nobilitate delineationis libro due (1611). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Gallica.