Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg
Dance and the Garden

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XXX
Salomon de Caus
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Jennifer Nevile (and several other researchers) have noted the parallels between the Renaissance gardens and Renaissance choreography in Italy, England and France. This is also reflected in the parallels found between dance and gardens during the Baroque period in Europe. Choreography changed as the Renaissance progressed into the Baroque period, and a similar change took place simultaneously in garden design as well. This was no coincidence!
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Parameters that can be examined showing parallels between dance and garden design:
  1. Garden design and choreography both control and order space. Dance is concerned with spatial patterns on the ground as well as in the air. Formal gardens create patterns on the ground which are static, but the images or patterns change as viewers stroll through sections, opening up new shapes to their view.
  2. To fully appreciate patterns in both choreographed dances as well as formal gardens, the dances are best viewed from above. In parallel, to get maximum appreciation from formal gardens, the gardens are maximally appreciated when viewed from a height (from a window in a palacial mansion, or even from atop a centrally located garden mount). The order, measure and symmetry found in circles, straight lines and other geometrical forms existed both in dance patterns as well as the compartmentalized garden parterres.
  3. The concerns about choreography and the concerns about formal garden design took place at roughly the same time period. For example, major Italian dance treatises were published in 1581 (Caroso) and Negri (1602).
  4. Examination of the parallel concerns found in dance choreography and formal garden design will focus on the following:
    • Ordered and measure in gardens and dance.
    • Geometric shapes or figures found in both gardens and dance.
    • Shapes found in both gardens and dance patterns were meant to be observed from an elevated height.
    • Court dance and princely gardens expressed social power and authority of a ruler, and supported the social ideology.
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"Above all, the Renaissance garden was ordered and measured. Through it was expressed the interaction of the artificial culture created by human beings with the natural 'culture' created by God. Nature as a reflection of the cosmic order was seen as inherently ordered, and so in the garden the art of mankind had to 'imitate not only nature's outward appearance, but also its underlying order.' This underlying order was understood to be rendered more perfect by the cultivation of trees and plants in the garden, and in the addition of sculpture, ornaments, water features, mounds, and grottos. In the topiary work, labyrinths, as seen in the Villa d'Este ( fig. 1) and in trellis constructions, natural materials - plants, vines, and trees —were cultivated into geometric figures like spheres or pyramids, or into natural shapes like animals. One fifteenth-century garden is described as having topiary in the form of 'ships, temples, vases, giants, men, women, dragons, centaurs, putti, various animals and birds, jousters, philosophers, a pope [and] cardinals.' In Giusto Utens's depiction of the Medici villa at Costello, the steps leading up to the garden are ornamented with topiary in the shape of vases. Behind these steps is a hedge topped with a topiary parapet, while at the top of a second, narrower flight of stairs are topiary obelisks. Although the materials used to construct the topiary work, or edifices like pavilions were natural, their appearance was not." 1
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"The overwhelming importance of order in fifteeenth- and sixteenth-century gardens was the characteristic which distinguished them from the gardens of earlier centuries. It is also the characteristic which binds them to other artistic endeavours of the Renaissance, such as painting, architecture, and poetry, as well as cartography and theatre design. For example, the influence of symmetry on Renaissance thought can be seen in the cartographers' strong conviction that the unknown landmass of the southern hemisphere would have to equal that of the northern hemisphere. Similarly, in the maps of Gerard Mercator (1595) and Abraham Ortelius (1570) there is a vertical symmetry between the landmass of the Old world and that of the New." 1
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"One of Alberti's central points was that the garden was the concern of the architect just as much as the house was, because the same geometric figures should be employed in gardens as in buildings." 2
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"In the designs of Francesco di Giorgio, for example, the compartments of the gardens are very similar to the rooms of houses. The ordered and compartmentalized gardens in sixteenth-century Italy often resembled the plans for ideal cities which appeared at the same time." 2
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However, the relationship between palace architecture and palace garden design that Alberti referred to is more significant than might at first be realized. "... one of the fifteenth-century dance masters, Guglielmo da Ebro, spent a great deal of time explaining how the art of dancing proceeds from the art of music, and how the essential nature of music was the study of proportion and relation. For the educated of the fifteenth century (as for those of the Middle Ages) the perfect art was one in which rational form and proportion were expressed simultaneously in sound and movement; that is, poetry which was sung and danced. Thus the art of dance in the Renaissance was also created on the principles of order and proportion: a proportioning of the dance space: a proportioning of the movements of the body, and a proportioning of the music. The resultant choreographies reflected this order in their use of geometric shapes (squares, straight lines), and in their use of space." 3
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"In gardens the order was not only expressed through geometric forms of the ornaments, but also through the use of bi-lateral symmetry, the central; paths which bisected each other at right angles, the trees planted in straight lines, and the geometry of the compartments, all of which created a strong rectilinear character. ... (See fig. 2.) Not only does each compartment have its own geometric space, but each section is divided into four quarters. Even the large trees in the beds at the back of the garden are clearly shown in the 1573 engraving of the Villa d'Este (fig. 1)."3
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"In the grand gardens the concern for straight lines and regular geometric shapes extended from the largest design units down to the smallest components, as can be seen in the detail of the garden at L'Ambrogiana. "(See fig. 3.) The beds, which were filled with flowering plants of different colors and shapes, were divided again into squares, circles, triangles, all delineated by paths."4
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"The similarity between the patterns of the compartments and those of the choreographies can be illustrated by comparing the garden at L'Ambrogiana with the sixteenth-century balletto, Dolce Amoroso Foco. In this dance for three couples the men stand in a line down one side of the room, the ladies facing them down the other side. The first part of the dance emphasizes the straight lines with all the movement being along the original axes or an axis perpendicular to it, created when the couples change places. (This is illustrated by fig. 5.) The second half of the dance is a hay which creates patterns that are those of the compartments. The middle couple start the hay and change places on the perpendicular axis. They then move diagonally to change places with the last woman and the first man. They then move along the original axis to change places with the remaining two dancers. (The path created is shown in fig. 6.) This path is very similar to those in the top left compartment of figure 3. After six steps all the dancers are in a straight line across the width of the hall. The hay continues in a straight line, with each change of place creating a circular figure found in the top right compartment. Holding right then left hands alternately, each couple traces a 90 degree arc to create a straight line along the length of the hall. During the next step they trace another 90 degree arc to complete their half of the circle and to form a straight line across the width of the hall. (See fig. 7.)"
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"One of the major contributing factors to the ordered, rectilinear nature of the formal gardens was the use of the square. The compartments, while often having circular forms within them were invariably square. This shape was further emphasized by the planting of large trees in each corner of the compartment, as in Villa Petraia and L'Ambrogiana. (See fig. 4 and fig. 2.) This characteristic of the Renaissance garden also found expression in the patterns created by the dancers as they progressed through the figures of the dance. For example, the figure of a square delineated by a dancer at each corner was a common formation in Renaissance dance, either as an initial pattern, or as a formation kept throughout the dance. For example, Negri's balletto, La Battaglia, is a dance for two couples which begins and ends in a square. This dance also contains several hays in which the square dissolves into a straight line, then back into a square, then into a line again but on an axis perpendicular to the previous one. (See fig. 8.) 5
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"Furthermore, in the choreographies the harmony and proportion of the straight walks of espaliered fruit trees or yew were transmuted into the long, forward-moving floor tracks of the fifteenth-century balli and bassedanza, and the common circular figure which was often interspersed with rectilinear patterns (I am referring here to the figure which is created when a couple takes left or right hands and they move around each other tracing out a circle as they go.) One example of this type of the floor pattern is the bassadanza Lauro (which was choreographed by Lorenzo de'Medici). (See fig. 9.) Many of the bassedanza and balli share this type of floor pattern. Figure 9 shows the starting position of the two performers and the path they traverse during the course of the dance. In this particulare dance the couple only move forward, with a pause in the middle of the choreograpy to describe a circle. The floor track is very similar to the gardens with their long, straight, central avenue, often interspersed with a circle around which the four compartments are arranged; for example, the Medici villa Petraia (fig. 4) or the Medici villa Poggio a Caiano." 6
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"[t]hroughout the Renaissance, a central avenue traversed the garden, often covered with a pergola.... Movement from one end of the garden to the other, but not excursions to either side, was encouraged by such an axis."7
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"Another important design principle of both Renaissance gardens and court dance is that both were meant to be viewed from above.
Texts from the fifteenth century and particularly in the sixteenth repeatedly stress that the order in the garden must be visible, primarily from a high spot, as the patterns in the garden simples were best viewed from the palace windows.... But even from its highest point, the ordering of a garden through the repitition of compartments, geometric figures, ovals, and hippodromes could not be wholly perceived from within [emphasis by J. Nevile]. Painted and engraved views of gardens... present what is not visible from within - nature ordered through regular units.
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"The patterns of the dances were also designed to be seen from above. At a ball the dancing took place on the floor of the hall, and often the ladies of the court were seated on raised platforms along one wall. In the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when dancing became a common feature of theatrical performances, the dancing often took place on the floor of the hall with thr king or prince seated on a raised platform to view the spectacle. When the dances took place out of doors many spectators watched from the upper-level windows of the buildings around the city squares. Thus, as in the gardens, the patterns would not be entirely visible to those on the dance space, especially not to the performers themselves. The order of the whole would only be visible from above. This was certainly the case for the Jacobean masque dances as they were performed not on the raised stage but on the floor of the hall, surrounded on three sides by the audience. Not only would there not have been enough room on the front of a prospective stage to adequately perform a dance with eight, nine, twelve, or sixteen participants, but with most of the audience seated along the sides of the hall at right angles to the stage and facing in towards the central space, the danced portrayal of initials and geometric figures would have been difficult for them to perceive."8
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"In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the choreographies were designed to be viewed from all sides. The audience, who were often performers, watched the dance from close by (like the windows of a palace), or from within the dance space itself (like a mount in the garden)."9
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"The gardens of the Renaissance most often operated with the same focal point. The boundaries of the garden were also clearly marked by hedges or walls. The space they occupied was not large, unlike later seventeenth- and eighteenth-century gardens: 'the whole was measurable and finite.' One's attention was focused within the garden, either looking down on the compartments, or within the compartments themselves, or along a trellised avenue to a grotto or fountain."9
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"Gardens increased in size in the seventeenth century, and the basis of their design changed. No longer were the gardens organized around a collection of small compartments enclosed within a wall or a hedge. The two to three foot hedges of the sixteenth century increased in height in the seventeenth century so that their wall-like dimensions controlled the view within the garden far more and worked to prevent a perception of the order and organization of the garden as a whole. From their vantage point of the first floor of the house, or a raised terrace, the attention of the visitors came to be focused less on the patterns within the immediate foreground and more on a distant vista, which, while still a part of the garden, was situated at the end of a wide central avenue that dominated the entire garden." 9
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"In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries dance increasingly moved onto a stage, which meant that one side only was the front, and that the focus of the performers' attention had to be directed out from the dance space into the body of the hall. The performers were 'looking out' from the stage into the distance, as they were no longer surrounded, or in close proximity to their fellow courtiers. The audience were also further removed from the dancing. They too were looking at a far distant vista to see the dance, as perspective channelled their gaze toward a certain point.
"The effect that changing the nature of the dance space had on the choreographic patterns can be seen by comparing Emilio Cavalieri's ballo, O che nuovo miracolo, for the final intermedio in the 1589 wedding celebrations of the Grand Duke Ferdinando de'Medici and Christine of Lorraine, with the social dances of late sixteenth-century Italy. The floor patterns in Cavalieri's ballo are very similar to those found in the contemporary courtly social dances. Cavalieri used common patterns such as una treccia or una interecciata (a hay), two seguiti in volta (in which each dancer creates a small individual circle by turning around one shoulder or the other), two dancers coming together to meet and take hands and then to change places, and a 'figure of 8' pattern in which dancers first circle around the dancer next to them, and then around the dancer on the other side of them.
"The main difference between the floor patterns in O che nuovo miracolo and the majority of the social dances is that in the former the action has to take place on a flat plans in front of the arc of seven dancers, with the focus being outwards in one direction; that is, towards the audience. The square, or rectangular, patterns in which the focus and interaction between the performers are inward looking are not present in this ballo." 10
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"... The creation of a square, or two lines, of dancers is not possible, or at least not desirable, when a dance is transposed to a proscenium stage. Rather than partners changing place along a perpendicular axis the dancers in Cavalieri's ballo are all starting facing the same direction. They then have to move forward, away from the arc formation, meet, change places, and then return to the arc so that they all face the front of the stage again at the end of the step sequence." 11
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"The court dances and the grand gardens of the Renaissance were both used by princes, popes, and cardinals as expressions of their splendour and power.12 The expense and the labor of designing, building, planning, and maintaining these gardens was enormous, and thus they were only available to a few. While small private gardens abounded in Rome as extensions of the indoor living space, it was only 'the lavish gardens created for the popes, the cardinals, and the noble families ... that express[ed] the the intellectual concepts necessary for the consideration of the garden as a work of art."
"Contemporary discriptions of the princely gardens recognized their function as a display of the power of its owner. For these visitors the order and control exerted over the plant life and over the forces of water in the fountains and grottoes, and exhibited in the garden were exemplars of the prince's dominion in other aspects of life. It was as if the 'streams respond to the call of their lord, plants spring up at his bidding.'" 13
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"Dance also functioned as an expression of the authority and power of a prince. The rules and postural codes of courtly dance were part of the mechanisms by which the court made itself appear above and inaccessible to the rest of society. The courtiers believed that their superiority was to be demonstrated to the rest of society by the different way in which they moved, walked, danced, and even stood in repose. Their carrieage and demeanour when on the dance floor did not change once they had finished dancing: it remained with them as it was their normal posture."
"[d]ance was not only an essential part of aristocratic education and courtly behaviour; it also provided a code of social emblems and a language of cosmic metaphors which were part of the Renaissance world-view. To the Renaissance mind, nurtured on Plato, a well-conducted life was essentially a noble dance." 14, 15
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"... it was the 'movements and the geometric patterns' that made Renaissance court dance 'both graceful and more significant than a simple ritual. The patterns inscribed on the floor of the ballroom or stage were not haphazard; they had divine effects.' These were the same geometric patterns which were present in formal gardens and which were also seen as having a moral effect on those who walked through them. ... 'the geometric forms which recur so frequently in these designs for plant-beds - shapes such as the square (traditionally a symbol of earth and its elements), the circle (a symbol of heaven and divinity), the regular polygons, and the triangle (a symbol of fire) - had to sustain complex astrological and magical-esoteric connotations.'
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"The house and garden were regarded as one unit, with the garden laid out so that it was seen at best advantage from a single viewpoint." [Note: Salomom De Caus' scaeonography, or linear-perspective] "The geometric compartments of flowers changed into parterres of box, and the patterns in these beds also underwent a radical alteration. Gone were the squares, circles, and hexagons, and the rectilinear character of the compartment designs. The French parterres were curvilinear, composed of 'S'-shaped curves, arabesques, arcs, and embroidery-like scroll patterns, as illustrated by the garden at Vaux-le-Vicomte, and one of the designs for a parterre de broderie from Jacques Boyceau's Traité du Jardinage, of 1638 (fig. 10). 16
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"One of the earliest gardens in which we know [that parterres de broderie were introduced into French gardens was at the] palace at Fontainebleau, renovated by Claude Mollet in the 1590s under instructions of Henry IV. A general plan of the palace and gardens from circa 1600 has survived, which show that the beds were still laid out in geometrical patterns. In 1614, however, another plan was made of Fontainebleau by Alexandre Francini. In this design all the parterres are of the new scroll-like designs. The geometric shapes of the previous century have gone."17
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"The radical change in the patterns employed in garden designs of the seventeenth century is echoed in the change which occurred in the patterns created by the French choreographers of the seventeenth century, particularly in the dances created for Louis XIV's court at Versailles. The rectilinear floor plans vanished as the courtiers traced out the same sweeping curves and arabesques found in parterres outside the palace. Figure 11 is the notation of the regular minuet, which was used to open the balls at Versailles during the reign of Louis XIV. Both the difference between it and the floor plans of the sixteenth-century balletti, and the similarity with the parterres de broderie, are quite striking."18
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"If the new style of garden design was first used in France some time between 1600 and 1614, when did these developments arrive in England, and what does the answer to this question tell us about the type of dances performed by the courtiers in the masques of James I's reign?
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"During the first two decades of the seventeenth century there was renewed interest among the English nobility in remodelling and extending their gardens.
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"Most of the publications reflected gardening practice of Elizabeth's reign, with their emphasis on enclosed gardens laid out as a single square, subdivided into four quarters, or as a series of squares all planted with different knots.
"...the predominant form of gardens at this time were rectilinear. Smythson's survey of Wimbledon House shows the total area divided into separate gardens, each laid out in four square compartments, with the largest garden indicated as planted with knots.
Smythson also recorded the additions made to Somerset House. 'This garden [had] a quatrefoil laid onto a divided square for its geometrical basis, though this was merely the preliminary to what became a complex arrangement of knots, beds and emblematic devices.' From 1603 to 1610 Sir William Rigdon built a house and a garden for himself at Dowsby in Lincolnshire. Once again the ground plan for Dowsby indicates that the patterns of the compartments were knots, and that the trees in the orchard were to be planted in quincunx. 19
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"Wilton House, the seat of the Earl of Pembroke, provides a clue as to when the new French style was adopted in England. From a description of the garden in 1623 as 'circular, triangular, quadrangular, orbicular [and] oval,' it seems that the garden was geometric and rectilinear. Philip Herbert inherited Wilton on the death of his brother. From 1632 to 1635 he had part of the house and garden rebuilt, with Isaac de Caus in charge of the work. Ten years later Isaac de Caus published a series of plans of Wilton, and from these plans it is very clear that the four compartments which lay underneath the windows of the piano nobile were parterres de broderie (fig. 12). From the surviving evidence, the garden at Wilton in 1635 appears to be the earliest example of an English garden laid out according to the new design principles developed in France."
"The conclusion that the transition from the strongly geometric Renaissance style to the arabesques of the baroque first occurred in England in the 1630s is confirmed by another royal garden, St James's Palace."
"Formal gardens also appear in masque stage sets, and, not surprisingly, the descriptions of these gardens parallel the developments in the living gardens of the nobility." 20
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"... the knots which had filled each quarter [Banqueting House] had vanished, replaced with the new, fashionable parterres. On this occasion, the masque was Thomas Carew's Coleum Britannicum, performed before the court on 18 February 1634;..." 21
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"Similarly, a year earlier in the court play, The Shepard's Paradise, (1633) the design by Inigo Jones portrays a garden in which the new, French, scroll-like parterres are clearly visible.
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"If garden styles in England began to change to the new French style in the late 1620s and early 1630s, did the court dance practice follow a parallel path? From the descriptions of the main-masque dances which do exist in the masque-texts themselves it seems clear that the early masque dances continued practices of the sixteenth century.22
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"From the late 1620s onwards there was an increasing French influence at court, which in the gardens resulted in a change to the arabesques of the seventeenth-century French style and may well have had the same result as regards the dance practice."23
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"From the late 1620s and early 1630s, however, English court dance imitated more closely the contemporary practice, in which geometric shapes changed to scroll-like patterns and 'S'-shaped curves and arabesques." Flowing, Curvilinear shapes.24

1 "Dance and the Garden: Moving and Static Choreography in Renaissace Europe", Jennifer Nevile, Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 52, 1999, 805-836, pp. 809, 810
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Note that Ptolemaic cartography (third method) showed ellipses in perspective, thus may be viewed as an early use of what became central to the Renaissance aesthetic: linear perspective was of major significance in art, architecture, garden design, theatre design (perspective theatres), and even in dance.
2 Ibid., p. 811
3 Ibid., p. 812
4 Ibid., p. 813
5 Ibid., p. 814
6 Ibid., p. 815
7 Ibid., p. 818
8 Ibid., pp. 818, 819
9 Ibid., p. 819
10 Ibid., p. 820
11 Ibid., p. 821
12 Ibid., p. 821 (footnote #53): "In today's common usage the words 'magnificence' and 'splendour' are often used interchangeably. In the sixteenth century, however, there was a distinction made between them. In the 1490s the Neapolitan humanist Giovanni Pontano wrote two treatises, one on 'Magnificence' and one on 'Splendour.' In these two treatises Pontano says that 'magnificence' applies to large, substantial and permanent projects such as houses and buildings. 'Splendour' refers to more transient objects, private collections, furnishings, clothes and gardens. For more information on this distinction see Coffin, 1982, especially 213-14."
13 Ibid., p. 821
14 Ibid., p. 822
15 Ibid., footnote #62: "... one of Plato's words for "uneducated" is 'achorentos,' that is, 'danceless'."
The 'apaidentos' (uneducated) were 'achorentos' (danceless). See "Dance, Spectacle, and the Body Politick, 1250-1750", Nevile, Jennifer (Ed.), Indiana Univ. Press, Bloomington, In., 2008, p. 266
16 Ibid., pp. 823, 824.
17 Ibid., p. 824.
18 Ibid., p. 825. "Figure 11 is taken from Kellom Tomlinson's work, The Art of Dancing, which was published in 1735. The dance is written in a system of notation developed by Pierre Beauchamp in the latter part of the seventeenth century. The system was first used in publications by Raoul-Auger Feuillet in his work, Chorégraphie ou l'Art de De'crire la Danse, published in Paris in 1700. Thus, as was the case with the dance treatises of Caroso and Negri, the written records of the choreographies notate a practice which had existed for decades previously."
19 Ibid., p. 827
20 Ibid., p. 828
21 Ibid., p. 829
22 Ibid., p. 830
23 Ibid., p. 832
24 Ibid., p. 833

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