Pedagogue of the dance: the dancing master as educator in the long eighteenth century

Abstract

The educational impact of the dancing master is examined within social and cultural contexts including patronage and artistic style. The nature of the dancing master’s peripatetic role and lesson content in domestic and private locations is analysed with reference to notational scores, dance treatises and archival sources. The impact on performance standards in ballrooms and assemblies is assessed and explanations are given as to how the value systems of the aristocracy and gentry were transferred into schools through the direct influence of Erasmus Darwin’s A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education (1797) and Robert Owen (1741–1858), who employed professional dancing masters at his experimental school in New Lanark.

Keywords:

• aesthetic
• polite education
• physical education

Notes

¹ Peter J. Neville Havins, The Spas of England (London: Robert Hale, 1976).

² A. Bloomfield, ‘Agent of the Enlightenment: The Significance of the Dancing Master in Creating a Civilised Society’, Annual Lecture, Early Dance Circle, February 2007.

³ J. Playford, The English Dancing Master (London: Thomas Harper, 1651).

⁴ Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, translated by Sir Thomas Hoby, 1561 (London: Dent & Sons, 1974).

⁵ A. Bloomfield, The Clifton Dynasty (Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2005).

⁶ T. Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Dent, 1970, 1st ed. 1651).

⁷ John Locke, On Politics and Education (New York and London: D. Van Nastrand 1947, 1st ed. of Some Thoughts,1693).

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ S.J. Curtis, History of Education in Great Britain (London: University Tutorial Press, 1948).

¹⁰ Oliver H, Leigh and Earl of Chesterfield, Letters to his Son on the Fine Art of Becoming a Man of the World (New York: Tudor Publishing, n.d.).

¹¹ J.‐J. Rousseau. Emile ou de L’education, translated by Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979, 1st ed. 1762).

¹² Lincoln Kirstein, Movement and Metaphor (London: Pitman, 1971).

¹³ J.‐J. Rousseau, Emile ou de L’education (London: Everyman 1956, 1st ed. 1762).

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁴ E. Darwin, A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools. (Wakefield: S.R. Publishers, 1968, 1st ed. 1797).

¹⁶ G. Yates, The Ball (London: Henry Colburn, 1829).

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Yates, The Ball.

¹⁹ See for example Leslie du S. Read, ‘Weaver, John (1673–1760)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [hereafter ODNB] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28912; Jennifer Thorp, ‘Tomlinson, Kenelm (b.c.1693, d. in or after 1754?)’, ODNB, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/61906; Mary Anne Alburger, ‘Peacock, Francis (1723/4–1807)’, ODNB, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/54595. All accessed February 28, 2008.

²⁰ Noverre (1727–1810) was a Swiss‐French dancing master to Marie Antoinette in Vienna, who as a choreographer and dancing master promoted dramatic ballets, as expounded in Lettres sur la Danse et sur les Ballets 1760. He reformed costume and stage settings, aiming at theatrical unity and asserting a role for dance on the same hierarchy as music, drama and visual art. He worked in England at the time of the French Revolution in 1789, and presented some of his ballets at the King’s Theatre, London. Noverre was influenced by Diderot and the Encyclopedists – Ferdinand Reyna, Concise Encyclopedia of Ballet (London: Collins, 1964).

²¹ Lincoln Kirstein, Movement and Metaphor (London: Pitman 1971).

²² Ibid. As a choreographer John Weaver was the author of five dance books, namely: A Small Treatise of Time and Cadence in Dancing (1706), Essay, Towards a History (1712), The Loves of Mars and Venus (1717), Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures on Dancing (1723) and A History of Mimes and Pantomimes (1728).

²³ The original French text appeared in 1701 under the title Choreographie, ou l’art d’ecrire la danse.

²⁴ Kirstein, Movement and Metaphor; F. Peacock, Practice of Dancing (Aberdeen: J. Chalmers, 1805). See diagrams at the end.

²⁵ Thorp, ‘Tomlinson’.

²⁶ K. Tomlinson, The Derby Mercury, advertisements for dancing Lessons 1734, 1735, 1738, 1739,1740. Derbyshire Local Studies Library.

²⁷ K. Tomlinson, The Art of Dancing (London: 1735), plate O.

²⁸ Tomlinson published five dances (1715–1720) – The Passépied, The Shepherdess, The Prince Eugene, The Address and The Gavotte, one of which was performed by two French children, monsieur and mademoiselle Sallé at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1715. Marie Sallé was then seven years old and became a dance reformer, introducing neo‐classical style costume into the ballet and favouring natural unaffected movements – F. Reyna, A Concise History of Ballet (London: Thames & Hudson, 1964).

²⁹ Yates, The Ball.

³⁰ Peacock, Practice of Dancing (Aberdeen: J. Chalmers, 1805).

³¹ A. Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter (Yale, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 241.

³² Tomlinson, The Art of Dancing.

³³ Derbyshire Records Office, custodian of the Scarsdale family archive. The subsequent masters were Louis Ansermet (1762–1768), Artières, also spelt Artears (1767–1771) and Slingsby (1768–1770). Slingsby was a dancer at the King’s Theatre, London, the opera house supported by the aristocracy – see I. Guest, The Romantic Ballet in England (London: Pitman, 1954).

³⁵ A. Henstock, (Ed.) The Diary of Abigail Gawthern of Nottingham (Nottingham: Thoroton Society, 1980).

³⁴ Yates, The Ball. Gallini had been an opera–dancer but became a teacher after injury.

³⁶ Memoirs of Elizabeth Mosley (neé Bradshawe). Manuscript D1491M/21, Derbyshire County Records Office, Matlock. These were written in 1879 when she was aged 81 years of age.

³⁷ Ibid.

³⁸ Ibid., passim.

³⁹ The ladies’ most elegant and convenient pocket book of 1794 (Nottinghamshire County Records Office).

⁴⁰ J. Austen, Mansfield Park (London and Glasgow, Collins, 1953, 1st ed. 1813).

⁴¹ H.C. Barnard, A History of English Education (London: University of London Press, 1969).

⁴² R. Owen, The Life of Robert Owen (London: G. Smeeton, 1st ed. 1857); R.D. Owen. ‘An Outline of the System of Education at New Lanark’. in Robert Owen on Education, ed. H. Silver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).

⁴³ R. Owen, A New View of Society or Essays on the Principle of the Human Character (London: Cadell & Davies, 1813).

⁴⁴ Ibid.

⁴⁵ F. Podmore Robert Owen (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1906).

⁴⁶ G.S. Emmerson, A Social History of Scottish Dance (London: McGill University Press, 1972).

⁴⁷ Peacock, Practice of Dancing.

⁴⁸ Ibid.