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	Igor Tabakov / MT Diana Scrivener led a mixed-ability group including dance professionals and amateurs.

Courtly Tradition Gets a Revival

A British expert on Baroque dancing visited Moscow to pass on her knowledge of the centuries-old steps.

By Alastair Gee
Published: December 16, 2005

Last weekend, as snow gusted outside, an unusual master class took place in a brightly lit dance studio. With wall-length mirrors reflecting their movements and stately classical music lending an atmosphere of refinement, the 15 participants were learning Baroque and English country dances that were popular in aristocratic circles in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.

The two-day class was led by renowned British dance historian Diana Scrivener, on a break from her usual teaching duties at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. She wore cream shoes in an authentic Baroque style and a flowing black dance skirt that she often tucked out of the way into the waistband.

The participants, all in dance slippers and intent on learning, ranged from a dance tutor at Moscow's Academy of Dance to a computer programmer and the head of a scientific research institute. Earlier this year, Scrivener held classes in St. Petersburg, and she was invited to teach in Moscow by the the organizers of the authentic music festival Moskovskoye Deistvo.

Beginning early on Saturday, Scrivener taught the class a "vocabulary" of dainty and precise Baroque steps involving ankle flicks, graceful hand rotations and small hopping kicks. The upper body usually remained still in the dances, with the arms held slightly away from the torso, as if ready to receive a partner.

Although Scrivener knew only a little Russian, and some of her students no English, she made herself understood with demonstrations, gestures and the tone of her voice. She sang out steps, counted time and took participants by the arm and hand as she showed them how they were meant to move.

"Have you done any Baroque dance before?" she asked one girl who was frustrated at the difficulties she was experiencing. "No? Well, you're doing marvelously, then," she reassured her.

By the second day of the master class, the students were dancing in elegant group formations, coming together in diamonds and columns and then breaking apart again, sliding the leather soles of their shoes across the floor in unison and doing small hops with pointed toes.

Baroque dance revives "an aspect of life that is perhaps missing today," Scrivener said in a break between classes. "We're talking about a period of chivalry, and what does that entail for dancers? Suddenly, a young man has to lead a woman onto a dance floor."

The dance historian related how Baroque emerged from the spectacular performances in the court of the "Sun King," Louis XIV, in the late 17th century and was a precursor of ballet. The Moscow group was learning a set of dances that Scrivener herself choreographed to music written by the 18th-century British composer William Croft to accompany a Restoration play.

"As dance historians, we're up against it," Scrivener said of recreating the Baroque period. "We don't have visual recordings of what they did." Instead, she said that she searches for clues in the music. "If one is sufficiently in tune with the composer -- pardon the pun -- then you hear the phrase, you see the way it rises and falls, and you think: It can only be that step."

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