The The Dancing Body In Renaissance Choreography eBook

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 Arbeaus 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. Arbeaus discussion of dance as a mute rhetoric in the demonstrative genre points to the intertext of QuintiliansThe Oratorical Institution where thegenus 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 therévérence. The categories of pose and movement are then read into the structure of thebasse 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 offantasmata as used by Domenico da Piacenza.