Cecil Sharp House, London, Saturday, 29 March 2003
by kind permission of The English Folk Dance and Song Society
This one-day conference attracted over 60 participants to explore the problems of reconstructing dances from verbal description and notated scores, and the value of re-creating dances from contextual information. Case studies presented spanned the period from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century.
Papers presented |
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| Patri J. Pugliese | Dancing and fencing from the Renaissance to the 19th century | |
| Diana Cruickshank | Theres many a slip: the interpretation of 15th-century Italian dance | |
| David Wilson | Problems and possible solutions in French Basse Dance | |
| Jennifer Kiek | Newcastle: an exercise in early English Country Dance | |
| Susan de Guardiola | Quando vanno à festini: reconstructing and re-creating a social context for 16th-century Italian court dance | |
| Jørgen Schou-Pedersen | Traditional French dances from the baroque period | |
| Ken Pierce, John S. Powell & Jennifer Thorp | An echo of the past? Le Roussau's Harlequin and Le Malade Imaginaire | |
| Robert Mullally | Reconstructing the Carole | |
| Anne Daye & Jeremy Barlow | The shock of the new: Ben Jonsons antimasque of witches 1609 | |
The conference proceedings have been published by DHDS, see the publications page.
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The conference was following by a 19th-Century Ball Mr Rogers' Assembly to the music of Green Ginger, consisting of quadrilles, couple dances and country Dances.
On the following day, Sunday 30 March 2003, Anne Daye led a workshop Measure for Measure which explored ideas put forward at the 2001 Playford conference about the double step and its role in interpreting the music and shaping the figures of country dances up to c 1680. The changes introduced by the French style from then on were also considered. Participants danced a selection of country dances from before and after 1680 and discussed the underlying theory of measure revealed by the practice.