Dancing the corantoes (circa 1630) in the light of European sources
(Hubert Hazebroucq)
The courante has been the most practised ballroom couple dance in France, during the Seventeenth Century, before being supplanted by the minuet. However, very few technical sources document its practice before 1700, and nearly all were written or published out of France. Some descriptions of steps or variations can thus be found in Italy for the first decades of the XVIIth C, notably thanks to Negri (1600) and Santucci (1614) and England provides a second corpus of sources, with the publication in London of Apologie de la Danse, 1623, by F. De Lauze, and moreover with a manuscript describing two corantoes and belonging to the Inns of court context (Ms. Rawlinson D 864, Bodleian Library, Oxford, circa 1630, according to Ian Payne).
The mystery of the sketchy notations for the "Coranto Dance" and "The Firstt Corantt" is deepened by the small and unclear diagrams annotated by some numbers, at the top of the two pages, plausibly drawing the spatial track. While several attempts of reconstruction have been done for the courante réglée by F. de Lauze, there has apparently been no extensive analysis of these corantoes, and no publication proposing a consistent interpretation linking the textual indications and the diagrams. My recent research intends to give some consistent hypotheses for a complete reconstruction.
The workshop will first propose, as a groundwork, to practice the basic steps according to the sources of the first half of the XVIIth century in Italy and England, in order to experiment the analogies and their stylistic variants. We will then focus on the interpretation of the corantoes in Ms. Rawlinson, in order to practice their main sequences and combinations, and to link the steps with the space. We will also experiment some comparisons with the sequences from De Lauze’s courante réglée, showing the structural similarities which open new perspectives and questions on the figured French courantes in England before 1650. We will here explore how much the courantes of that period were a canvas with constants, more than a really improvised dance, or a fixed choreography.
Hubert Hazebroucq, Paris, Frankreich:
Hubert Hazebroucq is a choreographer, dancer, teacher and independant researcher specialized in Renaissance and Baroque dance since 1998. With his company Les Corps Eloquents, founded in 2008, he is invited in many international festivals (Utrecht) and he performs with famous early music ensembles like Doulce Mémoire. He is a board member of the association of searchers ACRAS17-18, and holds a Master degree on ballroom dancing around 1660. He works principally on the technique and poetics in dance from the 15th to the 18th century.
