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Abstract
In my dissertation, I argue that dance—whether as practice or performance— embodies the ideologies and values of the human communities that creates it. Specifically, I posit that the contredanse, a French derivative of the English country dance, embodied a mode of sociability, which echoed the social ideals and interactive networks of the French Enlightenment. In contrast to the precise choreography and performative elitism of court dancing and ballet, the contredanse incorporated many dancers into a lively, ever-changing series of movements that disregarded class or rank. It favored an egalitarian and interactive approach to human sociability rather than a deterministic and hierarchical social order.
I explore the historical and ideological communities fashioned by the contredanse from three perspectives. In the first chapter, I consider the process by which the English country dance became the French contredanse, a process evolving over the course of four translative movements: linguistic, spatial, choreographic, and cultural. In the second chapter, I demonstrate the type of sociability enacted and visualized by the contredanse through its choreographic structures as well as in the socio-economic processes of dance apprenticeship and performance current in eighteenth-century France. In the final chapter, I explore the identificatory interaction of spectators and dancers via the visual display of the contredanse in ballets, comic operas, and other forms of musical theater. The appearance of the contredanse, a “real” social practice, within a dramatic performance developed a community of affect that allowed French theater-goers to identify with the world onstage and to authentically experience the emotions and ideas being performed by the fictional characters. What emerges through this tri-part analysis of the exchanges and collective associations encouraged by the contredanse in eighteenth-century France is a highly visible “Republic of Dancers” that embodied the collective identity and sociable ideals of its literary and philosophical counterpart, the Enlightenment Republic of Letters.
