December 06, 2009

Dancing Badly is Not Historically Incorrect

In trying to recreate historical dance, or any other historical performance art form where sound or film recordings are not available, you constantly run into the question of "what is authentic"?

With social dancing, this is a rather acute question, as the sources for these dances are generally dance manuals. These dance manuals are often very specific on the proper way to perform the dances in question (except when they're not, and assume that everyone already knows the fundamentals of the dances performed - but that's another issue).

Certainly. to dance the dance exactly as described in the book is more than likely correct for some portion of the dancing population of the time, but what if you dance that dance some other way -- is that wrong? Is that unhistorical? Maybe, but then again, maybe not.

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Posted by Walter at 03:02 PM | Comments (1)