For some time now, scholarly medieval studies have been preoccupied with questions about the relationship between the modern and the premodern, and even about the very meanings of these terms.Footnote 1 Medievalists in different fields have thoughtfully re-examined the critical paradigms that rely on a break between the medieval as premodernity, on the one hand, and the early modern as an initiation of modernity, on the other.Footnote 2 Such new perspectives on periodization and the Middle Ages have tended to originate in studies of literature, theater, history, and art. The discipline of medieval studies has not, for the most part, considered what dance might contribute to our understanding of the constitution of historical periods such as “medieval” and “early modern.”Footnote 3 And yet, basse danse and bassadanza, due to their placement in a fifteenth-century moment variously claimed by both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, potentially offer much to such discussions of periodization. As a performance, this fifteenth-century dance situates itself in a dynamic transition between the medieval and the early modern, raising questions about the nature, location, and even existence of this periodization boundary. At the same time, however, the instructional and codifying techniques associated with basse danse and bassadanza reinforce a more traditional periodization dynamic, whereby a culture looks back mainly in order to look forward, organizing its ideas about time and history around the mechanism of anticipation. I shall argue in this essay that basse danse and bassadanza reveal a suggestively conflicted perspective on time through the distinction they establish between the temporality of execution and that of instruction. Furthermore, in their espousal of anticipatory strategies, the instruction manuals in particular show how representations of early dance can construct perspectives on historical periodization. Casting into relief thus an occluded narrative about how period borders form and solidify, basse danse and bassadanza additionally offer early period scholarship some new ways to reconsider and dissolve such borders.
Before proceeding to my readings of the dances and manuals, I will first say a few words about the anticipatory impulse to which I refer above, as this concept recurs throughout my argument and will benefit from some explanation at the outset. In scholarly studies of early modernity and its construction, one increasingly finds readings that identify an impulse toward anticipation and futurity in the culture at large—an impulse that helps to define early modernity's sense of its relationship to history and to identify points of contact among literature, art, and social and political realms. For example, J. K. Barret employs Sidney's Old Arcadia to argue that Renaissance England's literary and legal traditions together “emphasized … a desire ‘to feel the future in the instant.’” Integral to the constitution of early modern subjectivity, Barret suggests, is a consciousness of “future retrospection,” and the present “imagined as a past still to come” (Reference Barret and Brady2010, 54). This temporal positioning articulates itself through romance and legal texts' overlapping interest in promise, debt, and suspicion (“decidedly future-oriented”). Barret demonstrates that early modernity's law and literature “expect a future moment of looking back,” and its poetry, in particular, recognizes the value of the artistic future as encompassing “boundless possibility.”Footnote 4 In William Engel's Mapping Mortality, “monitory memory” and “projective memory” appear as important terms for understanding early modern approaches to the world; both terms emphasize structures of anticipation. Memory here is concerned with “what is to come,” as knowledge of the past is enlisted to make judgments about future conduct and also to project a progressive series of images of the self as one moves into the future toward death. Engel argues, “Projective memory (which is at once monitory and retroactive, looking back forward and backward—and beyond) paves the way for our reconstructing the cultural psychology of using the memory arts” in the early modern period (Reference Engel1995, 55–7; 67–8). Projective and monitory memory manifest themselves, according to Engel, in both canonical poetic texts (such as Paradise Lost) and in a visual tradition of broadsides and pamphlets, emphasizing the ubiquity of this condition of mind. While the precise nature of the engagement with futurity and anticipation differs for Barret and Engel, these two readings provide helpful examples of a defining early modern orientation toward futurity and a consciousness of the past's deep enmeshment with looking ahead and thinking about what is to come. These brief examples by no means imply an exhaustive claim here, and it is certainly not the case that the early modern period is the only one to espouse ideas analogous to projective memory or future retrospection. Studies such as Barret's and Engel's, however, suggest that these ideas play an important role in constituting the idea of early modernity. I thus use these conceptual structures as a frame for my ensuing remarks on dance manuals that are situated in a suggestively ambiguous space between the medieval and the early modern, and that use memory to look forward.
Unbounded Time in Basse Danse and Bassadanza
Basse danse and bassadanza are both characterized by stately, ordered movements, which are of varying speeds, but are appropriate for a courtly setting (Marrocco Reference Marrocco1981, 17). Italian bassadanza has often been understood as a more complicated, conceptually sophisticated, and somewhat livelier development of its French and Burgundian counterpart basse danse. The Italian form features, in particular, more elaborate floor patterns, tending toward a dance that is more explicitly narrative than the abstract processional patterns of basse danse.Footnote 5 As one critic puts it, in a statement to which I shall return later, “the simple, dignified and courtly basse danse has been turned [in bassadanza] into a colorful, many-faceted choreographic work of art” (Brainard Reference Brainard and Kealiinohomoku1979, 70). The tradition of perceiving microclimates in European periodization dictates that in the fifteenth century, Italy might bask in the Renaissance while England and France still experienced the heavy weather of the Middle Ages (Burkhardt Reference Burkhardt and Middlemore1930, 143–56, 152). Within this context, basse danse might be perceived as evolving from its Gothic processional guise into the seemingly more complicated bassadanza. When we consider the ways that these traditions' features overlap with and inform each other, however, we recognize that basse danse and bassadanza intersect across a suggestive temporal and developmental space. Furthermore, if basse danse and bassadanza undermine the border between the medieval and the early modern, basse danse additionally produces for its performers and viewers an experience of temporality that works against a linear forward drive or the anticipatory impulse that uses the past to look forward into the future. It thus enacts an experience of time that countermands the periodization impulses often directed toward it.
Certain critical views of basse danse and bassadanza question the model of progression or the perception of one tradition anticipating the other. Frederick Crane, for instance, sees differing and autonomous forms, rather than a purely evolutionary scenario:
Although the basse danse shows some common features over the long period of its history, and throughout its geographical distribution, three divisions can be distinguished that are largely independent in musical repertoire and choreographic style: the French basse danse of the fifteenth century, the Italian bassadanza of the fifteenth century, and the basse danse of the sixteenth century. (Reference Crane1986, 1)
Crane's account invokes the factors of both space and time to counteract the narrative of progression. He chooses not to include any fifteenth-century Italian treatises in his collection of materials relevant to basse danse (Crane Reference Crane1986, 1). Other critics instead identify resonances existing between the northern European and Italian traditions. These resonances, however, are complex and layered, replacing the model of progressive continuity not with separation but rather with shared and overlapping elements. One of the bassadanza melodies, for instance, that appears in Antonio Cornazano's Italian treatise also exists in Michel Toulouze's French incunabulum on dance (Bukofzer Reference Bukofzer1950, 193). Whereas Crane excludes the fifteenth-century Italians from his text, James L. Jackman uses this musical affinity to justify appendices containing Cornazano's and Guglielmo Ebreo's dance tunes in his study of French and Burgundian basse danse (Jackman Reference Jackman1980, iii, 37, 38).Footnote 6 Furthermore, Jennifer Nevile has recently argued that certain Italian bassedanze deliberately altered their structures so as to be able to imitate, and incorporate elements of, French basse danse (Nevile Reference Nevile, Buckley and J. Cyrus2011, 234–35). Such a phenomenon suggests that the fifteenth-century practitioners of these dances themselves did not necessarily see distinctions between them in terms of a teleology of increased sophistication.
Such readings introduce the possibility that developments in these dance forms occur across multiple and interweaving temporalities. As David Lawton argues in an account of periodization in medieval studies, “Whatever the period that contains us, our lives contain many different periods” (Reference Lawton2007, 485). Seeing these dances as containing different periods of dance within themselves would allow them to exist both simultaneously and in sequence with one another. Frances Rust, influenced by a traditional conception of the fifteenth century as conservative, suggests that change in dance practices during this period was also slow (Rust Reference Rust1969, 36).Footnote 7 Kathi Meyer-Baer asserts that the form of basse danse “changed considerably” in the sixteenth century and that “forms of dances sometimes change quickly”; in this case the rhythm changed while the character of the step might have remained similar (Reference Meyer-Baer1955, 274–5).Footnote 8 While it is possible to imagine the rate of change suddenly accelerating upon the move into the sixteenth century, it is equally possible to suppose that rates of change varied within themselves and varied for different aspects of the dance, and that over a broader expanse of time this phenomenon might take on the appearance that Meyer-Baer (Reference Meyer-Baer1955) describes. What one heard, what one saw, what one felt in forming a step with one's foot in a basse danse or bassadanza—all these placed one within a cultural moment at the same time that they unmistakably echoed other times and places, and also implicated one in intervals of change that—like the dance steps themselves—fluctuated between quick and slow. The material history of dance—such as it can be reconstructed—thus provides an alternative to the account in which a practice associated with the sophistication of early modernity arises to supersede one labeled as medieval.
Even if we were to disregard this reciprocity between French and Italian traditions, there exists a temporal complexity internal to the very form of medieval basse danse that offers a conceptual sophistication equal to that of the bassadanza. Jennifer Nevile has suggested that time in fifteenth-century Italian dance often articulated itself in terms of the speed and rhythm of steps and their relationship to music; she also argues that the cessation of movement in this dance created the effect of the cessation of time.Footnote 9 The directional movements of French and Burgundian basse danse add to this theorization a structure for time that both participates in and undoes progression—a temporal function related to, but separate from, that of stopping and starting. The incremental nature of the steps, combined with the spectacle of a horizontal line of multiple couples, casts into relief the element—almost the essence—of directionality itself. Basse danse uses this forward and backward directional motion to represent and theorize temporal structure. As motion forward and back fills, empties, and refills the space of the dance, it suggests an element of recursion in the dance's time.
To make this case, we must first establish that advancing and retreating patterns of movement are integral to this dance. The French tradition “recorded basses danses with only forward and backward motion relieved with occasional steps to the side (branles) until well into the fifteenth century” (Thomas Reference Thomas1978, 25). We see evidence of this characteristic in the well-known fifteenth-century Basse danse du roy despaingne's measures:
R b / ss ddd rrr b / ss ddd r b / ss ddd rrr b / ss d r d r b / ss ddd rrr b / ss d r d r b /Footnote 10
The simple (s) and double (d) steps move forward, while the démarche or reprise (r) steps move back; the branle (b) shifts to the side.Footnote 11 In this choreography, as in many basses danses, the variation of steps primarily affects the relationship of forward to backward motion. The second measure contains fewer reprises than the first, and the fourth and sixth measures more rapidly alternate between forward and backward movement than do the others. These features make it possible to see basse danse as foregrounding the relationship between forward and backward motion. Emphasizing the prominence of this forward and backward orientation is the fact that basse danse is related to estampie, one of the early dance forms possessing a “front,” which involved dancing forward toward a person or point, and then back.Footnote 12 Thus, from the viewer's perspective as well, the steps involve a dynamic of forward and backward motion, and the processional and linear orientation of the dancing group accentuates the presence of forward and backward motion (punctuated at intervals by the sideways branle) in the constitution of the dance and its aesthetic.
Such forward and backward motion proposes a model of time as similarly bidirectional. Beyond the specific secular realm of dance, medieval paraliturgical practice also used danced movement to represent complex temporality. Thus a broader context exists for considering medieval movement traditions as commenting upon time. Religious ceremonies incorporating a labyrinth motif, for example, could include dance. In these instances, dance conveyed the nature of medieval liturgical time, a time experienced in the spectatorship of, or participation in, liturgical ceremony and characterized by recursion, repetition, and a consciousness of the integration of past and present (Chaganti Reference Chaganti2008, 51–2). According to Craig Wright, the physical movement into the center of the maze and back out integrated itself into the ceremony's complex interweaving of classical and Christian tradition and its articulation of the relationship between Scriptural and human time (Reference Wright2001, 139–45). Within this larger cultural reality, we might then ask what the specific occasion of the secular medieval basse danse says about time through its movements. Anthropology provides one answer, suggesting that movements oriented in front of and behind the body have, in Western culture, traditionally been associated respectively with forward and backward progress in time.Footnote 13 Thus, it becomes possible in the backwards step to revisit an earlier point in time through its delineation in space. Additionally, watching the dancers recede allows for the possibility of their re-inhabiting a spatial plane when they move forward again. The movement goes further than making time stand still, instead providing both viewer and participant with a visualization of time's passage in more than one direction. Thus the medieval scene of basse danse potentially holds within itself the possibility for conceptual insight about how time within the dance, and time more generally, might be structured. Rather than existing as a processional form contrasted with the narrative creativity of bassadanza, basse danse as medieval dance makes visible in its execution a scene of suggestive temporal ambiguity. It produces a kinetic space capable of accommodating a nonverbal theory of how time might function: recursively, and questioning the structures of its own progression. If, as Sarah Kay has argued, it is a hallmark of late-medieval intellectual practice to explore the possibility of physical space to accommodate and engage metaphysical truth, then basse danse as a medieval cultural production asserts itself as generating a physical space that outlines and reflects a conceptual insight (Reference Kay2007, 7). Mark Franko has suggested that “if the practice of the ideal dance is meant to ‘represent’ anything, that object to be represented would be its own theory” (Reference Franko1986, 29).Footnote 14 Here basse danse theorizes its own operations by raising questions about the experience of time that its performance makes possible.
At more than one level, then, basse danse and bassadanza resist the periodization strategies to which they might initially seem extremely adaptable. First, the musical and choreographic overlap between the two locates them in a shared space that problematizes the idea of the period boundary. Second, basse danse in particular expands upon the impulses we see in Engel's and Barret's accounts of the early modern period. Rather than looking back mainly in order to go forward, basse danse sequences make visible a model of time in which moving back and moving forward balance each other in elaborate patterns. In these ways, the dance presented its fifteenth-century audiences with access to this temporal model for thinking about the relations among the different European incarnations of its form, rather than understanding this dance form only through prolepsis or a narrative of increasing sophistication.
Memory, Instruction, and the Anticipatory Impulse
Despite basse danse and bassadanza's accommodation of a temporality more subtle and multifaceted than a forward-march of progress, however, the language and form of the surviving manuals for basse danse and bassadanza demonstrate their investment in progression and anticipation. While the features of basse danse and bassadanza obscure the medieval–early modern boundary, I shall argue in this section that the remaining material witnesses for instructing and representing these early dances play a very different role. The manuals rely on varied strategies to convey their internalization of the principles of progression, anticipation, and evolution. One strategy is to index the anticipatory impulse to significant ontological change in the body; another is to locate the structure of anticipation not only in the manuals' content but also in their very form.
The manuals refer to anticipation as part of their broader invocation of memory theory, for such classically influenced discourses often emphasized the use of remembered knowledge in the process of looking forward to compose something new. Indeed, all dance preservation requires careful thought about how memory functions. In her comparison of early Italian dances to some English ones discovered in the 1990s, Nevile notes that resemblances between them inhere within floor patterns more than steps, because floor patterns allow awareness of “one's relationship vis-à-vis the other dancers, and with the space in which one is dancing,” and these are factors “crucial in the process of remembering a dance” (Nevile Reference Nevile1998, 239). The English dance thus shows how the act of memory becomes embedded within the nature of the dance itself. Literary depictions of dance provide another perspective on memory's depth within dance tradition. Boccaccio, for instance, generally did not include specific steps or choreographies when alluding to dancing, presumably because this information was so familiar to readers and ingrained within a cultural memory (Marrocco Reference Marrocco1978, 20). But my interest here lies in establishing how fifteenth-century manuals reflected their awareness of learned memory discourse. From Domenico da Piacenza, considered the father of dancing masters, to his pupils Antonio Cornazano and Guglielmo Ebreo, the Italian dancing masters of the fifteenth century all begin their treatises by establishing the importance of a good memory in dance (Cornazano Reference Cornazano, Inglehearn and Forsyth1981, 18; Gombosi Reference Gombosi1941, 298; Smith Reference Smith1995, 10–1; Sparti Reference Sparti1993, 93–5).
In its 1455 dedicatory sonnet, Antonio Cornazano's Book on the Art of Dancing signals its interest in memory discourse by alluding to Petrarchan convention. Cornazano addresses the sonnet to Hippolyta Sforza, who was nine years old when this treatise was dedicated to her. Reputed to be a skilled dancer herself as an adult, Hippolyta married into a “vicious and depraved” Neapolitan court, surviving this inhospitable environment until the age of thirty-eight.Footnote 15 In his dedication to her, Cornazano explains:
Here Cornazano understands memory's power as one that will protect the dance traditions he has taught from disappearance. His praise of Hippolyta elsewhere in the poem as “Inclyta diva” (l.89) [glorious deity] and “dea fra l'altre donne electa” (l.99) [goddess chosen from among the other women] is certainly a conventional strategy. In this context, however, it also lends universality and timelessness to the dance knowledge for which he means her to act as a repository. Cornazano maintains that it is the “studio di questa opra” (l.98) [study of this work], along with her own dignity and ageless maturity, that will accord her this deified status. The stanza's rhetorical gestures thus tie the desired immortality of the dedicatee to that of the “legiadro moto/de piedi in ballo” (l. 100–101) [graceful motion of feet in the dance]. Penning the dedicatory sonnet makes of its Petrarchan form a mausoleum in which to enshrine the youthful beauty of Hippolyta Sforza—preserving, immortalizing, and memorializing it. Similarly, setting the dances down in writing memorializes them. The rhyming and structural paralleling of “diva” and “scriva,” each the first end rhyme of a quatrain, reinforce this correspondence between the textually enshrined Hippolyta and the inscribed dances with which the manual presents her. The manual memorializes both for posterity.
Through a different evocation of Petrarchan literary tradition, Guglielmo Ebreo's On the Practice or Art of Dancing (1463) also meditates on the uses of memory in dance writing. Guglielmo's dedicatory verses to Lord Galeazzo contain this account of producing the dance manual:
The poem's use of sparso invokes a familiar Petrarchan figure—not the sonnet form itself, as in Cornazano's case, but rather the imagery of scattering. As numerous Petrarch scholars have noted, the scattering of his rhymes signals various levels of anxiety for Petrarch about loss, preservation, and the memory of the past. Jason Leubner has argued that the scattering of Petrarch's beloved poetic object Laura, like the scattering of the classical past itself, makes her particularly distant and vulnerable to erosion and loss, even as the poet obsessively repeats the language of remembering in his contemplation of her (Reference Leubner2007, 1080).Footnote 16 Guglielmo also refers to the shards of dance knowledge he has gathered as “fragmenti,” another freighted term in the Petrarchan consideration of time and memory (Barolini Reference Barolini1989, 1–38). In this dedicatory verse, Guglielmo uses the deliberately inconsequential image of scattered paper to convey, through this image's Petrarchan associations, a fear of loss, forgetting, and oblivion. Over time, early dance manuals express increasingly explicitly the problem of dance's vulnerability to being forgotten; in the sixteenth century, for example, Antonius Arena would opine that dance is as difficult to remember as law, and that dances are constantly changing (Arena Reference Arena, Guthrie and Zorzi1986, 24, 11). Guglielmo's scraps of paper and his fragments function as powerful motifs for dance's evanescence and its participation in the same uneasy dynamics of loss and forgetting that Italian poetic tradition had been exploring. To assert that this book has successfully gathered up what was dispersed—and placed it in the contained space of an “opretta”—suggests working against forgetting. Cornazano's dedication seems at once to wish to preserve the dances in writing for the specific use of the patron, and at the same time to suggest, through the patron's own timelessly enshrined grace, that these dances should remain within a broader and more communal memory. Guglielmo's treatise makes a similar move. Its dedication at once offers the gathering of steps specifically to the patron, and at the same time intimates, through the humanist language of scattering and fragments, that it undertakes a more significant memorializing and preserving project as well.
Moving from dedications and prologues into the body of the manuals, we see references to classical learned memory discourse. Like the other manual writers, Domenico foregrounds memory as one of the most important traits in learning and practicing dance, because it stores all movements, both natural and incidental (ornamental). He uses the rhetoric of the treasury (“texorera”) (l.40) to describe the dancer's memory (Smith Reference Smith1995, vol. 1, 12, line 40). This was an important motif in classical memory theory as well as in medieval and early modern adaptations of it (Engel Reference Engel1995, 6). Furthermore, Domenico involves the virtue of a good memory in his larger argument about the importance of temperance and moderation in dance. In this discussion, he invokes prudence in particular, calling memoria its mother and emphasizing the role of prudence in avoiding extremes in dance (Smith Reference Smith1995, vol. 1, 14, lines 81–2).Footnote 17
In their allusions to classical and Petrarchan motifs, these sections of the manuals conjure a cultural discourse of humanist learning that was deeply preoccupied with its memory of, and relationship to, the past.Footnote 18 Exploration of this relationship to the past often coexisted with meditation on humanist principles and the liberal arts. Guglielmo Ebreo in particular is seen as wishing to assert dance's place in the liberal arts, drawing upon Leon Battista Alberti's strategies in On Painting, and presenting the conventional attributes of the dancer—memory and measure—as related to the liberal humanist tradition of arts and sciences (Sparti Reference Sparti1993, 9–11). These treatises thus feature both the dedicatory memorializing of dance traditions and the use of memory as a trait that situates dance within the liberal arts. In both these capacities, the manuals foreground memory's intersection with learned, humanist, and classical traditions. They invoke memorial preservation and the complexities of cultural memory through the particular medium of learned traditions that also do so.
Having established this association between memory discourse and the dance manuals, we might now look more closely at specific aspects of this use of memory discourse, and in doing so we find that the manuals are especially interested in memory's implication within acts of looking back to look forward. In the example of Domenico's manual above, memory engenders prudent behavior by allowing one's knowledge of the past to affect judgment in the future. For Domenico, misura, prudence, and memory exist in a tightly linked triangle: “Non sapiamo noi che la mexura e parte de prudentia et e nele arte liberale? No sapiamo che la memoria e madre dela prudentia? …” (Smith Reference Smith1995, vol. 1, 14, lines 80–2) [Do we not know that measure is part of prudence and of the liberal arts? Do we not know that memory is the mother of prudence?].Footnote 19 He implies not only the interdependence of memory and misura, but also the role of memory in understanding the structure—beginning, middle, and end—of the dance over time. As prudence always sees past, present, and future, the skilled and temperate dancer at once orients himself toward the beginning, middle, and end of the dance.Footnote 20 By emphasizing that the dancer must always understand where he is in relation to beginning, middle, and end of the dance, Domenico illustrates that in the fifteenth century, memory in dance always occurred as simultaneous recollection and anticipation.
Indeed, the factor of anticipation played an important role in early memory theory, particularly in connection to acts of composition. The fourth-century Julius Victor, for example, was less interested in memory storage and loci than in the uses of memory for future compositional and rhetorical acts. Basing his own words on Quintilian's, Victor argues for the importance of memorization as a source of “models for imitation.” The memory of such models helps to avoid “the dangers of chaotic, unplanned movement” (Carruthers Reference Carruthers2008, 107). In the sixth century, Boethius also associated memory with composition in describing a “program of mental representation.” Images are stored in the mind (drawing on memory theory's treasuries and loci in which to store what is remembered) in order to produce concepts (Copeland and Sluiter Reference Copeland and Sluiter2009, 24). Within the context of the manuals' more general interest in memory discourse, these specific theories correspond to Domenico's use of memory in dance instruction. In each case, the foreknowledge that memory allows, by providing models for imitation, can ensure order and temperance. Victor and Quintilian use memory to avoid a metaphoric movement that is unstructured and chaotic, and, correspondingly, Domenico shows how memory keeps the formalization of physical movement safe from such disorder.Footnote 21 Guglielmo shares this sense that the ability to look forward from the foundation of memory preserves order and temperance, especially in the face of change and unpredictability. In his chapter on memory, Guglielmo begins by asserting that “una perfetta memoria” [a perfect memory] is just as important to the successful dancer as an understanding of measure. If the music should change in the course of the dance, the dancer must be able to keep what he knows clear in his memory so that he is not found wanting “per pocha avertenza o per manchamento di memoria” [because of insufficient forethought or lack of memory]. Memory allows the dancer to look ahead and adapt his execution of the dance to novelties introduced within the process of performance (Sparti Reference Sparti1993, 94).
The dance manuals' engagement of a discourse of memory as it relates to anticipation and prolepsis exists within a critical context that identifies memory's indispensability to the possibility of future performance. Jody Enders reveals the classical and medieval foundations of this idea in the relationship between performance and rhetoric. Throughout her work, Enders explores memory and the idea of “protodrama,” citing memory's mediation between invention and delivery. Rhetoric in this guise also fulfills an anticipatory function, “provid[ing] models and sketches of pre-performance, or virtual performance, or intentions of performance” (Reference Enders1999, 17).Footnote 22 Contemporary theorizations of memory, anticipation, and performance yield a useful elaboration in Joseph Roach's device of the “quotation” (to which I shall return later). Roach argues for the active role of memory in the constitution of performance. His performance genealogies are “expressive movements as mnemonic reserves.” Part of the memory that we bring to bear on performance involves “kinesthetic imagination,” and this imagination converges with memory, allowing the performer's awareness of movement to be “at once remembered and reinvented.” In this understanding of performance and memory, Roach names a particular debt to dance theorists, but he also extends this analysis outward to say that “[l]ike performance, memory operates as both quotation and invention, an improvisation on borrowed themes, with claims on the future as well as the past” (Reference Roach1996, 26–7, 33).Footnote 23 In Roach's account, the dynamism of performance makes uniquely visible the interaction between memory's repositories in the past and its potential to constitute enactment proleptically.
Articulations of performance and movement theory that focus particularly on dance also demonstrate that memory's work is important because of what it can anticipate in the future. Erin Manning, for instance, theorizes the process of danced movement as one that always contains what she calls an “interval”—an incorporeal and yet substantial phenomenon in which the body experiences the potential of the movement that it is about to make. Central to Manning in her explication of this concept is that “you are never stopped. To move is to engage in the potential inherent in the preacceleration that embodies you”; thus space itself is not static, but rather contributes to the production of movement (Reference Manning2009, 13–24). Another important aspect of this argument, however, is its triangulation of movement, memory, and forgetting. For Manning, the “becoming-event” that will result in movement “creates a memory that feeds into future movement” (Reference Manning2009, 25). At the same time, each new expression of movement involves both memory and a repeated “magic of forgetting that assures that every movement will begin anew, despite and because of the endless potential of its preaccelerated state” (Manning Reference Manning2009, 18). The formalized movement of dance implies a pattern of anticipatory memory for the dancer. At the same time that each movement is remade as though new, a somatic memory inhabits the space before the movement takes place. This memory projects itself into the future, and creates, in Manning's terms, a future anteriority always at play in the body's engagement with space (Reference Manning2009, 24).
Given that both contemporary dance theory and early dance instruction arrive at this conclusion about the intersection of memory and anticipation specifically in dance, we might recognize not only the presence but also the central importance of acts of mental anticipation in accounts of dance technique. The fifteenth-century manuals emphasize the importance of anticipation and futurity through a language of ontological change in the body in order to describe the process of dancing. Like the other manual writers, Cornazano specifies that memory is crucial to dancing because of the need to “remember the steps you are about to perform when you begin to dance” (Cornazano Reference Cornazano, Inglehearn and Forsyth1981, 18). Within this larger framework, he provides a specific description of the technique by which the dancer moves from the ripresa to continenza step in the bassadanza, a transition that requires delineating contrast between the large, or slower, step and the small, or quicker. Cornazano describes the transition from one movement to another as follows:
Talhor tacere un tempo e star lo morte non e brutto ma entrare poi nel seguente con aeroso modo quasi come persona che susciti da morte a vita. In questo Misser Domenichino vostro bon servitore e mio maestro ha havuto evidentissimo guidicio dicendo che ‘l dançare specialimente di misura larga vole essere simile ad ombra phantasmatica nella quale similitudine ad explicarla se intendono molte cose che non si sanno dire.
(Smith Reference Smith1995, vol. 1, 88, lines 258–70)[Sometimes to omit a tempo and stay in stillness is not ugly; but then, enter into the following step in an airy manner, almost like a person who has been resuscitated from death to life. In this, your good servant and my master, Misser Domenichino, has had the most evident judiciousness in saying that dancing, especially in the slow measure, should be similar to an illusive shadow, a simile in which (to explain it) many things that cannot be said are understood.]
Cornazano first uses death as a metaphor (“star lo morte”) signifying stillness in the body. He then adjusts the figural force of this term, employing it as a simile but foregrounding a more literal and physical sense of death by contrasting it with life and associating it with resuscitation. In one sense, we might say that his simile simply provides a means to convey a shift in the tempo of the movement, from slower to faster. And yet, the abrupt and unexpected literality of death here creates a somewhat different effect. It suggests a qualitative change in the movement rather than a quantitative one. As Nevile argues, the reference to death moves the dancer into a timeless state (Reference Nevile and Jones2007, 305). Cornazano's description responds to and elaborates on Manning's concept of the interval. His imagery suggests that within the anticipatory dynamics that precede bodily movement, a shift potentially occurs in the dancer's sense of his own body. Not only is Cornazano asking the dancer to speed up in the transition; he is also asking the dancer to change his sense of being in his body during the anticipatory process—a body in death vs. a body in life. If, for Manning, danced movement involves the entwinement of forgetting and remembering, for Cornazano it is a layering of memory's continuity with a change in ontological state—a propulsion from oblivion to knowing. It is not simply that the anticipatory impulse resides within the body, but rather that its importance in describing dance requires that it become embodied, that it permeate body and mind through the condition of a progressive change in state.
There are specific moments in the manual that do accommodate the more ambiguous and shifting temporality we saw in basse danse, particularly through the invocation of the idea of fantasmata. In citing Domenico's use of “phantasmatica,” Cornazano is responding to this description of movement quality in Domenico's treatise:
…fantasmata e una presteza corporalle la quale e mossa cum lo intelecto dela mexura dicta imprima disopra facendo requia acadauno tempo che pari haver veduto la capo di meduxa como dice el poeta cioe che facto el motto sii tutto di piedra in quello instante et in instante mitti ale como falcone che per paica mosso… .
(Smith Reference Smith1995, vol. 1, 12, l. 60–5)fantasmata is a bodily quickness which is moved by the understanding of the measure first spoken of above, making it necessary at one tempo that one appear to have seen the head of the Medusa as the poet says, that is, having made the motion, that you be all of stone in that instant, and in an instant have taken to wing like a falcon who has been moved by hunger.
Both Domenico's and Cornazano's passages attempt to put into language the effect of the transition between a slow and fast tempo, or else—in a more extreme sense—between stillness and motion. As Franko argues in his reading of Domenico's passage, “Fantasmata is not a quality peculiar to either movement … but rather one inherent in their interplay”; it is a “dialectical” transition between movement and pose “in which each seems about to become the other” (Franko Reference Franko1986, 64–5). This dialectical reading of fantasmata suggests that the dance relies not simply on progression through time and an orientation to the future, but rather on a less linear kind of interplay between movement and pose. Giorgio Agamben's account of this term's development through Aristotelian theory and medieval literary culture also has implications for the individual's temporal experience of the phantasm. As a mental image vital to thought process, the classical and medieval phantasm of cognitive and memory theory overlaps with Domenico and Cornazano's usages. In all cases, it is an image in the mind that enables understanding, sensation, and memory (Agamben Reference Agamben and Ronald1993, 76–7). As Agamben suggests, while the phantasm is subjected to a “progressive ‘disrobing’” of its material components in the process of intellection, it is also—particularly in its involvement with medieval theories of love—implicated in the dynamics of mirroring. Images of the vitreous eye, of water, of fountains, of Narcissus all inform the function and operation of the phantasm (Reference Agamben and Ronald1993, 79, 80–3).Footnote 24 These reflective motifs imply an experience of the phantasm that is dialectical and obsessively recursive as much as it is included in a progression of mental steps moving forward and anticipating an endpoint.
At the same time, though, the relationship among manuals, in the midst of which Cornazano's passage situates itself, reverts to an anticipatory structure and a focus upon futurity. Cornazano explicitly suggests that Domenico's depiction of the slow measure anticipates his own subtle use of bodily revival and the shape it gives to incipient movement. It might seem impossibly speculative to imagine Domenico considering his own work as anticipating something else; however, we should keep in mind that Cornazano was a pupil of Domenico's, and in that sense the latter might well have perceived himself as writing toward a future of further dance writing and dance instruction (Thomas Reference Thomas1978, 24). The shift in these two manuals from the Medusa/falcon image to death/life also casts into relief the capacity of change in state to communicate the anticipatory dynamic. As we saw, Cornazano's use of death and life to convey the quality of the dancer's body in this moment of transition is emphatically physical and literal. It suggests an absolute habitation of oblivion and consciousness, even as the memory of what comes next engineers the transition between the two. Domenico's Medusa victim and falcon evoke different ideas. A dancer attempting to replicate the condition of the petrified gazer, and then the hungry falcon, would essentially be replicating powerful tropes from the classical and medieval past; he would see these familiar cultural references out of the corner of his eye, so to speak, even as he tried to occupy the physical conditions of stony oblivion followed by urgently forward-moving pursuit. The depth of the shift in state of being—the absoluteness of life and death—exists as an intimation in Domenico's version, but for Cornazano, it looks forward to his own more extreme rendering.
Guglielmo's manual reflects a different means by which anticipation becomes crucial to the representation and instruction of dance. As Cornazano and Domenico illustrate, dancing masters conducted implicit dialogues with each other, drawing the quotation (in Roach's sense) of the master forward into time to converse with the pupil. If such dialogue is implicit for Cornazano and Domenico, it becomes explicit for Guglielmo, who incorporates into his work an “Argumentum disciplinorum”—a set of imagined objections and ripostes between himself and a student. This form is familiar from classical philosophical writing, and it appears as well in Arbeau's later Orchésographie, which is presented in its entirety as a dialogue between the pseudonymous ArbeauFootnote 25 and a former pupil playfully named Capriol (Arbeau Reference Arbeau and Evans1948, 11). The two names possess an imaginative whimsicality: one a clever anagram of the author's real name (a dance of letters) and the other an allusion to a danced step. This exaggerated artifice emphasizes the location of this dialogue within the mind of a single author, rather than between two actual interlocutors. In the case of Guglielmo, as in the case of any dialogue imagined by one speaker, every utterance is foreseen. When Guglielmo's student challenges, for instance, “Che ci bisogna memoria et misura? Ci pareno adoncha tutte cose superflue. Et senza esse potersi perfettamente ballare” [What need is there for memory and measure? They thus seem to be all superfluous things, and it is possible to dance perfectly without them], both Guglielmo and his readers surely know the reply: that all of the elements of dance are important, but “maxime la memoria & misura” [most of all memory and measure] (Sparti Reference Sparti1993, 114). The dialogue of one functions as a kind of dance through its own use of memory in order to anticipate what will follow. Guglielmo possesses an enshrined knowledge of the principles he wishes to deploy in his dance manifesto. Because he is the only interlocutor in the scene, he can foresee the rhetorical steps and patterns the debate will trace, based on his own memory of both the relevant material and the conventional forms of philosophical dialogue. Engaging his memory, he can experience a sense of where he will move rhetorically before he enacts the movement. In fact, the dialogue of one means that Guglielmo never alights to rest, if we re-invoke Manning's formulation here. And simultaneously, engaging with the form and momentum of the dialogue requires a forgetting of the kind Manning discusses, so that the rejoinder can appear to have the genuine force of debate—an urgent response to a newly introduced objection.
Finally, lest it appear that I am participating in the very periodization divide that I aim to question throughout this essay by seeing evidence of the anticipatory only in manuals associated traditionally with the early modern, I shall end this section with a few words about the French and Burgundian manual tradition and its own engagement with the dynamics of anticipation. In this tradition, the very phenomenon of communicating dance through textual means articulates itself through an anticipatory process. The two relevant texts are the manuscript known as Brussels 9085 (ca. 1470) and Michel Toulouze's incunabulum L'art et instruction de bien danser, printed in the late 1480s.Footnote 26 Brussels 9085 stands out as unusually intriguing for being one of a small number of Burgundian manuscripts produced in this period on dyed black parchment; its dance and musical notations are rendered in silver and gold.Footnote 27 These dance notations, which consist of single letters as abbreviations designating steps (as in the example of the basse danse notation above), represent one of the earliest such notational systems recorded in the West (Closson Reference Closson1912, 7). Toulouze's manual shares many features with Brussels 9085, including the notational technique. One difference, however, lies in the fact that L'art et instruction includes a narrative explanation of the abbreviations: “Et est a noter que pour plus facillement entendre les lettres que s'ensuyent apres les notes que pour .R. tu doibs entendre desmarche pour .B. branle, pour .S. pas simple et pour .D. tu doibs entendre pas double” (Jackman Reference Jackman1980, 3) [And it is to be noted that to understand the letters that follow the notes more easily, for R you must understand “démarche,” for B “branle,” for S “simple step,” and for D you must understand “double step”].Footnote 28 The inclusion of this key might simply suggest a need for clarification. And yet, the age of terms such as “branle,” as well as their embeddedness within dance culture, makes it a little difficult to believe that these abbreviations were met with incomprehension.
I would suggest instead that Toulouze's elaboration makes manifest the way that the manual can anticipate a relationship between dance and text. The system of steps corresponding to individual letters looks forward to the unfolding of each inscribed sign into a narrative made up of such signs. Brussels 9085, with only the letter code itself, and Toulouze, which elaborates upon that code, are thought to have a common source.Footnote 29 This implies that the memory technique of representing steps as letters—generated in that putative source—holds within itself and anticipates the possibility of multiplying the letters to form narrative text. We see this possibility realized in Toulouze. In characterizing this dynamic created between Brussels 9085 and Toulouze, we are speaking not of manuals whose content explicitly engages with anticipatory dynamics (as with the Italian texts), but rather of manuals whose anticipatory dynamics inhere within their very form. Whether we classify all the manuals I have discussed here as medieval or early modern, the manual tradition more broadly construed appears united in its dependence upon mechanisms of anticipation, and a forward-looking vision of time that differs from the model that some of the dances' own features offer.
Periodization and Early Dance
Reflecting the anticipatory operations of the manuals' methods, content, and form, critical discourse surrounding these early dance traditions also seems invested in the dynamics of futurity, looking forward as a way of articulating the relationship between the medieval and the early modern. In this final section, I propose that the unique status of the instruction manual reveals one process by which the anticipatory gesture located within the early modern period migrates into critical discussions of this period as defined against the medieval. While it can often seem the case that critics take on or embody ways of thinking embedded in their objects of study, I argue that dance manuals can offer some specific and unusual insights into this phenomenon because of their own complex negotiation between reading and writing bodies.
In her remarks about basse danse and bassadanza, Ingrid Brainard provides the clearest example of a traditional form of periodization applied to the study of early dance. She notes:
The changes that took place in the realm of the bassadanza as compared to the basse danse are particularly interesting, for it is here that we can pinpoint the first important differences between the late Gothic court dance style of Burgundy and the Renaissance spirit of Italy in the same period. Practically overnight, without any tangible period of transition, the simple, dignified and courtly basse danse has been turned into a colorful, many-faceted choreographic work of art. (Brainard Reference Brainard and Kealiinohomoku1979, 70)
In one sense, we could say that this is a quite multivalent representation of temporality: are we thinking in terms of simultaneity (“in the same period”) or progression (“overnight” and “turned into”)? And elsewhere, Brainard notes that the Brussels manuscript was itself influenced by Italian dance tradition, reversing to some degree the order she presents here (Brainard Reference Brainard1956, cited in Franko Reference Franko1986, 5, n. 11). But these local points about the relationship between the traditions ultimately defer to the powerful story of periodization that she tells in the passage above. As her language conveys, this is a story of progression from simplicity to sophistication, and from courtly convention to colorful individuality.
Other scholars' descriptions imply a similar narrative. Otto Gombosi associates the French and Italian traditions of basse danse and bassadanza by virtue of their shared distinction from other dance forms, but within the context of this association makes a case for the Italian version as reflecting a particular creative sophistication that the French lacks. Italian bassadanza, he explains, is more complex because each complete dance is choreographically distinct. Its sequence of steps is in its entirety subject to the desires of the choreographer and composer. French basse danse, however, is a “free composition” of mesures, or fixed sequences. It consists of smaller, predetermined building blocks of step sequences that might be combined in different ways (though there is little variation even in the combination). For Gombosi, this difference implies that whereas the French dance “makes quite impossible a creatively artistic disposition of the spatial medium,” the Italian dancing master can be “an artist of a real Raumkunst” (Reference Gombosi1941, 302–3).Footnote 30 By setting these dances up as related traditions, and then proceeding to characterize their difference as one between creativity and restrictive formalism, Gombosi also implies that this dance traces a progressive arc in which the Renaissance leaves the Middle Ages behind in the pursuit of a humanist ideal.
The connection that some scholars make between the historian's object of study and the historian's internalization or embodiment of his object's characteristics can explain in a general way the connection between our historical archive's proleptic orientation and that of the historians who study it. Natalie Zemon Davis, for instance, identifies in historians a “rightful tension within their bosoms between the field that endures and their own brief embodiment of its claims” (Reference Davis1988, 2). Dance studies offer compelling refinements of this theorization of the historian's body and its role in historical work. Susan Foster, for example, has argued that historical inquiry is itself a kind of choreography, in which the historian's body finds resonances with the bodies of the past, changing both past and present bodies. A “mutually constructed semiosis” emerges (Foster Reference Foster and Foster1995, 10). This view of “choreographing history” implies permeable boundaries between the historian's body and historical bodies, and the body becomes an important point of contact between the historian and his work. In such a theorization of the historian's work, the possibility of taking on—through bodily experience or movement or affect—the habits of thought found in the historical object emerges. Foster argues that “as historians' bodies affiliate with documents about the bodies of the past, both past and present bodies redefine their identities. As historians assimilate the theories of past bodily practices, those practices begin to designate their own progressions” (Foster Reference Foster and Foster1995, 10).Footnote 31 In such a scene of historical work, it becomes easy to see that the anticipatory stance of the fifteenth-century body might come to inhabit the historian who studies it.
Beyond this general framework, however, the dance manual shows us how this habitation occurs in its specific deployment of form, content, and the imperatives of the instruction manual. It is important to ask what is particular to the material of basse danse and bassadanza that causes it to forge such a powerful relationship between the anticipatory mechanisms of its manuals and the attitudes of its historians, so that the more ambiguous model of time inherent in the dance itself becomes occluded as a model for understanding its historical period. The unique status of the instruction manual can address this question. Instruction manuals are implicitly performative, desiring to speak something into being, but they also complicate the status of the speaker as performer. In reading of one of the most famous contemporary instruction manuals—John Ashbery's poem of the same name—Jasper Bernes argues that the speaker “is both the writer of instructions and executor of instructions”; the manual inevitably creates an effect of doubling as one watches oneself undergo experience (Bernes Reference Bernes2012, 3; see also Ashbery Reference Ashbery1997, 8–10). The instruction manual's speaker shares this doubleness with the historian, who embodies and explicates across time. As we have seen in the dance manuals, this dynamic of both embodying and explicating exists at a number of different levels. Teachers and pupils look forward and back, to themselves and to each other, in the process of dictating movement. And at all of these levels, the manuals perform gestures of anticipation; whether in instructions to remember and look ahead, or in the dialogue generated by one dancing master with himself, or in the relationship between two incarnations of imagery to describe movement, or in the form of the manual tradition itself. Every instructional layer, in which the historical body doubles as acting and explicating, is also shot through with anticipation. Viewed in this light, the manuals detail how their investment in anticipation ultimately becomes so powerful and pervasive—so intimately connected to the doubled bodies that explicate and act as they articulate instructions. The manuals thus suggest to us why anticipation is, in turn, such a deeply felt impulse in the historian's body, paralleling as it does the doubleness of the fifteenth-century dance instructor. Furthermore, the manuals take an additional step beyond simply illustrating this dynamic relation of historical work and embodiment. They offer a specific account of how form as well as content produce this dynamic.
Modern and contemporary dance frequently make explicit their engagement with intellectual and philosophical culture. Not only can early dance's intersection with its surrounding philosophical culture be equally complex and subtle, but, in addition, our attention to the habits of mind early dance espouses can help us see in new ways the critical habits we have brought to these historical traditions. In the case of fifteenth-century basse danse and bassadanza, the differing temporalities of performance and instruction participate in both the establishment of some deeply ingrained perspectives on historical period, on the one hand, and the possibility of subverting such perceptions, on the other. The presence of studies such as Gerhard Richter's recent book Afterness indicates the hold that future-oriented thinking continues to have in critical conceptions of modernity. This text also elucidates the specific ways in which proleptic models of thought in fact contain within themselves many other structures of temporality, but its overall orientation is that of futurity. This study posits a strong association between modernity itself and “an afterness that both follows and inaugurates one more time,” lending urgency to this idea by renaming it as “the impossible possibility of survival” (Richter Reference Richter2011, 201–6). Within an intellectual context that privileges “the experience of a coming after,” it becomes especially important also to look back for alternative models of time, such as that found in the basse danse. In doing so, we might recognize not only the conceptual value sometimes obscured by preconceptions about historical period, but also some ways that dance can produce forms of thought.
