Baroque Dance - The French Noble Style

The French Noble Style

The great innovations in dance in the 17th century originated at the French court under Louis XIV, and it is here that we see the first clear stylistic ancestor of classical ballet. The same basic technique was used both at social events, and as theatrical dance in court ballets and at public theaters. The style of dance is commonly known to modern scholars as the French noble style or belle danse (French, literally "beautiful dance"), however it is often referred to casually as baroque dance in spite of the existence of other theatrical and social dance styles during the baroque era.

Primary sources include more than three hundred choreographies in Beauchamp-Feuillet notation, as well as manuals by Raoul Auger Feuillet and Pierre Rameau in France, Kellom Tomlinson and John Weaver in England, and Gottfried Taubert in Germany. This wealth of evidence has allowed modern scholars and dancers to recreate the style, although areas of controversy still exist. The standard modern introduction is Hilton.

French dance types include:

• Bourrée
• Canarie (canary)
• Chaconne
• (French) courante
• Entrée grave
• Forlane (forlana)
• Gavotte
• Gigue
• Loure (slow gigue)
• Menuet (minuet)
• Musette
• Passacaille (passacaglia)
• Passepied
• Rigaudon
• Sarabande
• Tambourin

The English, working in the French style, added their own hornpipe to this list.

Many of these dance types are familiar from baroque music, perhaps most spectacularly in the stylized suites of J. S. Bach. Note however, that the allemandes, that occur in these suites do not correspond to a French dance from the same period.