French branles for opening the ball in the late 16th–17th centuries
(Dmitry Filimonov)

This workshop is dedicated to three branles: Simple, Gay and Poitou. These dances in different combinations were a part of an opening suite for French balls in the late 16th–17th centuries. Three most complete descriptions of these branles survived in Arbeau’s “Orchesographie” (1589), “Instruction pour dancer” (c. 1602), and de Lauze’s “Apologie de la Danse” (1623). While Arbeau’s branle descriptions are relatively straightforward, two other sources lack music and present more challenges for dance historians. Taking into account all currently known sources for these dances, as well as work on a textual and contextual analysis of “Instruction...”, we arrived at reconstructions that are compatible with each other, fit the descriptions quite well and help to explain some peculiarities of these descriptions. It allowed us to uncover underlying choreographic principles for these three branles that are the same in each of three descriptions as well as highlight differences between them. In the workshop, we’ll present our reconstructions of these dances for each of the three main descriptions. For each of the dances, we’ll discuss how these three variants relate to each other, what common features seem to persist and what differences in style can be seen there.

Dmitry Filimonov, Moskau, Russland:

Dmitry Filimonov started his dancing career in 1993 as a competitive dancer and came to early dances in 2002. He teaches historical dance in the “Golden Forests” dance studio (a co-leader of the studio). He is head of the historical dance research seminar in Moscow. Dmitry gave lectures at many international conferences and has published several articles on early dance topics from 16th to 19th century.