I have come into the habit of saying that stupidity is popular in America. How can anyone doubt it, when the smart and the cultured are at pains to conceal their minds and their tastes? There is no shortage of sheer intellect in America--luck and bulk alone do not an empire make. But we have tended, of late, to shame our intellectuals, to bully and isolate them, to set them in constant and largely unconscious competition with each other. In their distress, intellectuals have retreated, petulant as children, into labryinths of self-destructive discourse--or fled for Hollywood or Washington.
This is the week of the Democratic National Convention--they are sweeping the floors in Boston as I write. The party's candidate has spoken--that very upright, downright old horse Kerry--and we have arrived at that strangely tender, eager, vulnerable moment of Democratic Party life, when a taper's worth of hope can be seen again. The POTUS' numbers are not overwhelming; the queasy economy, and the brooding anger brought to a focus by Michael Moore's film, may yet tell against Bush, and very unpleasantly for him.
I could do worse, here, than to include my latest blather to the English Country dance discussion list, these in response to Sharon Green's request for information about the source of "Barbarini's Tambourine":
Sharon:
I don't have that issue of the CDSS news before meeither, but I think I can reconstruct enough "for starters."
Kitty Keller, in the CDSS article you reference, has suggested that the dancer honored by the title ofBarbarini's Tambo. is Barbara Campanini, "LaBarbarina" (1721-1799).
According to the "Thinkquest" library on the web,"Where La Carmargo (another Italian-born Frenchdancer) could do an excellent entrechat-quatre, a jumpin which the legs cross each other, or "beat", twice,La Barbarina could do an entrechat-huit, a jump with four beats." Anything you could do, Camargo, Barbarina could do better. Yes, she could.
According to aSpanish-language web source, as translated by Google,"It made debut in Paris in 1739 and it made, during ten years, a shining race by all Europe." I don't doubt it. For our purposes, however, it is perhaps more important that La Barbarina was famed for a characterdance (a *tamborin* or *tambourin*) that featured a tambourine. Here is a link to a portrait of LaBarbarina wielding the instrument in question: http://www.abcgallery.com/P/pesne/pesne12.html
According to the New Grove Dictionary of Music, the tambourin is "an 18th-century French character-piece supposedly based on a Provençal folkdance accompaniedby pipe and tabor. The bass part simulates a drum by sharply accentuating the rhythm and by the repetition of a single note, usually the tonic, while an upper voice imitates the pipe with a fast-moving melody. The metre is usually 2/4 and the tempo lively. Rousseau described it as ‘a kind of dance much in style today in the French theatre’, adding that it must be lively and well accented, or ‘swinging’ (‘sautillant et biencadencé’)."This description, I think, accords well with our experience of B's T, although there is no reason tobelieve (as Kitty also points out, I think) that there is much choreographic relationship between La Barbarina's solo dance and our country dance--it's a tribute rather than an imitation."
And, following that:
"Dear Sharon (and others):
My apologies that I did not note that the source Iquoted misspelled the name of La Camargo (MarieCamargo)--"Carmargo," as seen in the quoted source, is not correct. La Camargo (1710-1770) gets far more column space in the history of dance than La Barbarina, who was comparatively just a twinkle of the *tamborin*.According to Richard Andros, "Though her elevation was limited by heeled shoes, she is credited with having executed the entrechat quatre. But what is far more important, by shortening her skirt a few inches she opened up unimagined vistas of technical possibility."I myself wonder if "technical possibility" was the vista her audiences thought they were seeing, but perhaps I'm cynical.
At any rate, there is a lovely and famous fete-galante style painting of her, dancing with her frequent partner Laval, by Nicolas Lancret, abbreviated skirt in evidence:http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pinfo?Object=99+0+none "
