29 July 2004

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 "

25 July 2004

Some years ago, after I had begun to learn the rudiments of English Country dance, and begun to lead the dances myself, I began to keep a notebook. In this notebook, I allowed myself to place anything at all I deemed useful or suitable, without anxiety or self-consciousness, no Muse or editor leaning on my shoulder to see what I had written there--a kind of Lichtenbergian "waste-book," in which programs, dances, notes, and observations jostled for space together. Others may see it, and have often seen it, but the notebook serves only me: it is the continuing register of my experience as a dance-leader.
So with this notebook in electronic form. It would be disingenous to write, and then to publish, anything that has a place on the World Wide Web with the pretense that it is a private communication of the soul to itself--what is the point of publication, after all, but to be read? still, it is a kind of waste-record of my life and observations that I allow the world to overhear.
By way of preliminaries:
*Night Thoughts* was the title of a book-length poem by the 18th-century divine Edward Young. Immensely popular in its day, even with its rather heterodox theology, it would have sunk without a trace by the twentieth century but for two things. William Blake, for a deluxe late-18th-century edition of the poem, created a series of illustrations, typically alternating the brooding and the ecstatic: these, with the revival of Blake's reputation, have long since outpaced poor Young's poem. Plus, in the 1850s, George Eliot wrote a perceptive, sensitive long essay on Young, perhaps her finest non-fiction writing.
So much for Young. I do not embrace his theology or Blake's illustrations of it--I purloin his title as convenient for a kind of nocturnal diary, written by night, not the first inspirations of the dawn but the retrospections of the sunset and after.
I will not disguise my life in these pages, but I will try to protect my friends, who have not given permission for the publication of their lives. You may find yourself in these *Thoughts*, but nameless or obscured.
Why write these lines at all? why, in an era of information at flood-tide, amid a noise of endless chinwaggery, should I add my voice? I could scarcely make a claim to distinctiveness--anything that is human is unlikely to be unique--nor would I be so grandiose as to claim to speak for my kind or my generation or my country. All I know is that as I write for myself, I speak for myself also--that, at least, I am sure no-one else can manage.