The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography by Mark Franko

Author:Mark Franko
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Anthem Press

B. The Reverence as an Aleatory Intertext

A series of parallels between dance and civility come to mind when we read that Arbeau’s student Capriol calls the dance a civility: “Mectez en [de la danse] quelque chose par escript cela sera cause que j’apprendray ceste civilité” (Set these things down in writing to enable me to learn this civility).25 It should therefore be useful to refer to Michael Riffaterre’s distinction between two sorts of intertextuality: the aleatory and the obligatory. The process of reading implied by the procedures of mediated intertextuality, which I described earlier, is an example of obligatory intertextuality. Without it we would remain on the level of generalities. The aleatory intertext is suggested by a kind of free association triggered by our memory of other texts.26 I will not dismiss the aleatory intertext upon which all commentaries of Renaissance dance have been founded without first exploiting it to show the way the dance was an ideological extension of civility. In my opinion, the ideological connection has never been adequately explained. The reverence will provide my chief example.

Before the professionalization of the dance, didactic literature on social behavior acted as a text of reference for all social acts.27 The physical discipline required by the dance was in many ways indistinguishable from that required by civility. The Renaissance dance step was not yet the “established unit of motion”28 of the academic classical ballet or “danse d’école” whose forms may be traced from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Perhaps this is because physical training was formalized in the Renaissance only within the social context and not on the technically systematic level of dancing skills. Instructions for the position of the feet while standing, for example, are the same in dance treatises and courtesy books.

Arbeau details two basic positions or “contenances” for standing: “pieds joincts” (joined feet) and “pieds largyz” (feet and legs apart). He adds to both the possibility of keeping the feet straight ahead or of turning them out, away from each other, which he calls “une obliquité.” “Et si d’avanture l’une des semelles demeure directement posée pour sobztenir seulle la pesanteur du corps, et le tallon de l’aultre pied se joinct à icelle, et torne I’arteil obliquement: Cest contenance sera appelle pied joincts oblique” (And if it happens that one foot is so placed as to support the whole weight of the body and the heel of the other foot is brought close to it with the toe at an oblique angle, this pose will be called pieds joincts oblique).29 When Capriol asks which position he prefers, Arbeau responds:

l’une de celles qui ont le pied oblique me semble plus belle, car nous voyons ès medalles et statues antiques, que les Monopedes sont treuvés plus artistes et plus aggreables. Et quand aux pieds joincts ou aux pieds eslargis directement, ils sentent leur contenance foeminine: Et tout ainsi qu’il est mal-seant à une Damoiselle d’avoir une contenance hommace, aussi doibt l’homme eviter les gestes muliebres.

[One of those in which the

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