Is Queen Anne the only royal personage for whom a choreographed dance exists in notation? Historian Moira Goff addressed more matters on baroque dance, “The Favorite”, and dancing royalty

On September 24, 2021, I published a thirty-question and thirty-answer dialogue about baroque dance with historian Moira Goff. Since then, our conversation has developed. These are its next nine questions and answers. AM

Macaulay 31.You’ve said that you found baroque dance to be like and unlike the ballet you knew. Do the differences lie in physical coordination, in phraseology, in musicality?

Goff 31. The physical coordination is certainly different. For example, the arm movements incorporate circling movements from the wrist or the elbow which often occur simultaneously (a wrist circle with one arm and an elbow circle by the other) as the dancer performs a step. The arm positions are reminiscent of those of ballet but are quite different, although the principle of opposition is well established. The arm movements are also carefully timed in relation to the movements of the feet and the arms can move quickly or slowly. There were conventions (some of which are described by Pierre Rameau in Le Maître à danser), but there is a lot we don’t really know particularly when it comes to stage dancing. I have mentioned the importance of the downbeat to each bar, which most often coincides with an élevé or a rélevé- sauté, but baroque dances challenge modern ideas about the music-dance relationship in other ways. The gavotte, the canaries, the chaconne and the saraband all have musical upbeats which must be followed by the dancer. In the case of the gavotte the upbeat is a half-bar and it is all too easy to get out of time, particularly with steps like the assemblé when it is followed by a pause to complete the bar (used quite frequently in choreographies). I can’t help thinking that Pecour and other choreographers of the period around 1700 liked to challenge their dancers, both amateur and professional.

Macaulay 32. “The Favorite” was a “Chacone” danced by Queen Anne (in her days as Princess, in her mid-twenties) with a partner. Was a Chaconne always a dance duet? And was it always with someone of the opposite sex?

Goff 32. The chaconne for the ballroom was sometimes a solo – Mr Isaac choreographed one for a young girl to dance at a court ball which was later published in notation. There are only two notated chaconne duets for the ballroom. One is Isaac’s The Favorite and the other is Anthony L’Abbé’s Princess Ann’s Chacone for George I’s eldest granddaughter published in 1719. Both are duets for a man and a woman and my guess is that other such ballroom duets which have not survived (if there were any) would be too. The stage is a different matter. None of the surviving notations include male duets, but a thorough investigation of stage dancing in London and Paris might well reveal a different picture.

Macaulay 33. Anne was married to Prince George of Denmark, and had begun having children by him - seventeen eventually but all, tragically, dying young or born dead. Her son William, a baby born in 1689, would live to 1700, the longest-lived. Her eighth child was born in October 1690, dying after two hours.

Which leads to an important question. What kind of Chaconne could be danced in or around 1690 by a woman who spent much of her life pregnant?

Goff 33. Princess Anne married Prince George of Denmark in 1683 and became pregnant almost immediately. However, the various biographies of Queen Anne, notably the one by Anne Somerset, provide details of her obstetric history and of her health more generally. Anne Somerset suggests that the Princess seems not to have suffered frequent illness until around 1691 and provides information about Anne dancing in the mid-1690s. There were gaps between her pregnancies around 1690 and in 1691 that could have allowed her to learn and dance The Favorite. It is useful to remember how integral balls, dancing and dance lessons were to court life from the Restoration onwards (and before, of course, but I claim no expertise in the earlier period). By the time of her marriage, Princess Anne would have been a very experienced court dancer.

The Favorite is actually a two-part dance. It begins with a chaconne and ends with a bourée. It is quite long (100 bars of music in all) but the step vocabulary is generally straightforward and it is unlikely that the Princess would have been called upon to do other than small jumps, where these are notated. An important question you don’t mention is – which gentleman of the court would have partnered her? A question to which I don’t know the answer and, without more research, cannot make an informed guess.

Macaulay 34. Or could this have been a duet for two women? Same-sex duets for either sex had been a feature of baroque dance since at least the 1660s, I think.

In this case, one must ask, could it have been a duet for Anne and her own favourite companion, Sarah Churchill? The friendship between Anne and Sarah has always fascinated historians and gossips. Sarah, thirty years old in 1690, was a great beauty and wit: the feeling Anne had for her probably did not take sexual form, but it was nonetheless passionate. She was one of Anne’s ladies-in-waiting, a leading figure of court: her husband had just been made Earl of Marlborough, so she was Countess of Marlborough. They had had several children, the seventh and last of whom was born in 1690.

Goff 34 The notation for The Favorite specifies a man and a woman. It is unlikely that it would have been performed publicly at a court ball by two women, particularly by two women who were – in the early years of the reign of William III and Mary II (Anne’s elder sister) – politically suspect. Although, who knows what might have happened privately.

Macaulay 35. In “The Favorite”, do the couple (whoever they are) dance as mirror images of each other? What else does the geography and footwork and so forth of this chaconne suggest about its dancers and their relationship? Is it a dance of enacted courtship or of friendly equality or what? How much can you tell and/or speculate?

Goff 35. Symmetry in baroque couple dances is an interesting topic. Even for those who don’t read notation it is possible to see in the published dances both mirror symmetry, in which the partners dance on opposite feet and trace symmetrical floor patterns on either side of central lines down and across the dancing space, and axial symmetry, in which they dance on the same foot and trace figures around a shared central point. The Favorite moves back and forth between mirror and axial symmetry according to its figures. I have been reconstructing the dance, but without the benefit of a dancing partner or a musician to fully explore the duet’s choreography and its tunes my work is necessarily limited. At this point, Isaac’s choreography seems to me to be characterised by wit. He may be playing with ideas of royal status and courtship without taking them entirely seriously. I have the sense that this might be true of many of his notated dances, but without more practical and academic work on them it is not really possible to be sure. It is worth mentioning that Isaac’s choreography is very different from that of Pecour, who created many ball dances for the French court. Isaac seems to me to be quirky and playful whereas Pecour seems to be more formal and classical. Pecour’s dances are a lot easier to learn than Isaac’s!

Macaulay 36. “The Favorite” was published only when Anne was Queen. Could we consider it as propaganda, a demonstration of how this new monarch - now often crippled by illness - had moved in her youth? Indeed, could it be a deliberately misleading piece of propaganda, attributing to Anne a degree of physical skill she lacked?

Goff 36. The publication of The Favorite may initially have had more to do with the promotion of Beauchamp-Feuillet notation in England than anything else. What better way to get people interested in the possibilities of dance notation than publishing dances performed at court? There was also a strong element of English-French rivalry, both in terms of court culture and the development of dance notation. The choice of the six duets published in A Collection of Ball-Dances may well have been Isaac’s own. The practice of creating new dances for special occasions, including royal birthdays, probably begins soon after the Restoration and continued into the mid-18th century, although no dances were published in notation after 1740. There is certainly a strong underlying element of royal propaganda in these publications, although I am inclined to see this in terms of emphasising the importance of royal status and court culture more generally rather than immediate political needs.

Macaulay 37. “The Favorite” is not mentioned in Ophelia Field’s biography of Sarah Churchill, “The Favourite” (2002) or in Anne Somerset’s “Queen Anne - the politics of passion” (2012), both otherwise excellent biographies - and yet it’s rare evidence of how moved. Whether she actually danced those steps or whether they were flatteringly embellished once she was monarch, it’s evidence that should be considered.

I don’t blame either Field (to whom I’ve written and with whom I exchanged pleasant emails in 2020) or Somerset, because, as you know, I myself did intensive research in 1985-1990 into Hester Santlow - and published an essay on Santlow of which I remain proud - without examining her dances. Until you first wrote to me, in 1990 or 1991, I never even thought of baroque dance notation as revealing biographical evidence. Has any non-specialist historian begun to address dance notation as an important clue of how these real people moved?

Goff 37. In the biographies and histories that I have read there are few references to dancing and none that indicate that useful work is being done elsewhere. There is the problem that many (if not most) dance historians work outside of academia and their work is published in less eminent specialist journals, so mainstream historians are unlikely to encounter it. Another problem is that historians cannot easily engage with questions of physical movement, unless they can actually see it in action – even then, would they have the knowledge to understand and make use of it? I would like to see more dance historians engaging with the wider world of academic historical research – both history and theatre history – with practical as well as academic presentations.

I wonder what evidence there is about Sarah Churchill’s dancing? I know that she played the part of Mercury in the court masque Calisto in 1675 in which she also danced. She must surely have danced at court balls when she wasn’t pregnant, but I don’t know what research has been done on this. I don’t promise to do any myself, but it is an interesting question.

It is worth mentioning that Madame, the duchesse d’Orléans and youngest sibling of Charles II, was also frequently pregnant during her short life and this prevented her from taking part in some of the French court ballets of the 1660s.

Macaulay 38. Is Anne the only royal personage for whom we have a notated dance?

Goff38. Queen Anne seems to be the only member of the royal family for whom Isaac created dances – others were named for members of the court, who may (or more likely may not) have danced them.

Isaac’s successor Anthony L’Abbé dedicated several of his annual dances to members of the Hanoverian royal family some of whom may indeed have performed them. Notable among them is Anne, Princess Royal, the eldest daughter of George and Caroline, Prince and Princess of Wales. She later became Princess of Orange, and L’Abbé created his last ball dance to celebrate her marriage.

I worked on quite a number of these dances years ago and I think that further reconstruction and research into this fascinating legacy is long overdue! I do wish that there were ways of making it more widely known among dancers and those closely concerned with dancing.

Macaulay 39. It’s fascinating and often depressing how much dance is overlooked in history and biography. Leonie Frieda’s “Catherine de Medici” (2004) has been much praised, and yet it says nothing of the very expensive, much publicised, and historically seminal ballets she organised.

Amanda Foreman’s “Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire” (1998), a very interesting and enjoyable book, does mention Georgiana’s public “Devonshire minuet” with Gaétan Vestris in London - but absolutely omits Georgiana’s promotion in London of the French ballerina Marie-Madeleine Guimard in 1789. Actually, Guimard was a figure of immense prestige and wealth; and her London appearances, occurring directly before the Fall of the Bastille, were both the final performance of her career; Georgiana was giving her patronage to a very remarkable (and controversial) figure at a pivotal moment in world history.

At least Antonia Fraser has some sense of the ballet de cour in her “Love and Louis XIV” (2006). I should add that I was one of Antonia’s many advisors for that book, but she herself could see the importance of court ballet before she consulted me.

Do you have other examples of how a greater sense of dance would have changed (and enriched) a biography or history? Or of where a biography or history admirably shows good dance sense?

Goff 39. Dancing and ballets have featured in several studies of royal courts and elite culture more generally. There are several such volumes on my bookshelves and, although I turn to them whenever I am doing a relevant piece of research, I would need to re-read them before I could answer your question properly. It is one thing to chart dance ‘events’ within a wider study – performances of court ballets, balls, evidence of the activities of dancing masters, &c., &c. – but quite another to understand how pervasive dancing was and what that meant for culture and society.

In the theatres during the 18th century, dancing was part of the bill almost every night. It usually took up relatively little of the performance time and was rarely mentioned in the newspapers, but its relentless inclusion (and the upsets when favoured dancers failed unexpectedly to appear) show how important it was. This is not really reflected in any of the theatrical histories that deal with the period.

At court and in high and genteel society, dancing was fundamental to a variety of entertainments – balls, assemblies, masquerades, elaborate parties for special occasions, and many more – historians are in general aware of this, but I don’t know of any study that tries to engage with what it meant other than at a superficial level. In his Letters, Lord Chesterfield advises his son that ‘to dance well, is absolutely necessary in order to sit, stand and walk well’ (Letter of 16 May 1751), placing it above riding and fencing in importance. I am not sure that his advice has provoked the necessary questions among too many social or cultural historians. The giveaway is usually the absence or paucity of references in the indexes to books where these might be relevant – ‘dancing’, ‘balls’ and even the names of the most famous dancers and dancing masters rarely appear. The writers may mention or even discuss dancing within their texts, but the topic remains invisible unless you read the whole book and take notes for future reference!

@Alastair Macaulay 2021 @Moira Goff 2021

27: Queen Anne

28: The Feuillet notation for “The Favorite”, a 1690 dance performed by Anne before she became queen of Great Britain.

29. More of the “Favorite” Feuillet notation.