When not engaged in digging through archives for my PhD, I spend a good amount of my time dressed in period costume performing the dances of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. So, of course, it was with a hop, skip and fleuret that I greeted the arrival of BBC 4’s series, Dancing Cheek to Cheek: An Intimate History of Dance. As an avid aficionado of Strictly Come Dancing, I was also delighted to hear that head judge and long-time dance professional Len Goodman would be teaming up with social historian Dr Lucy Worsley to present the series. Therefore, all plans were cancelled, and I settled to down to enjoy episode one, which was devoted entirely to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dance.
The premise was that whilst exploring the history of social dancing, Worsley and Goodman would attempt to learn and perform some of the more popular dances. The first few minutes of the programme were somewhat chronologically confused with an uneasy segue between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the action jumping from the maypole to the minuet with indecent haste. I realised afterwards that, as is often the case in documentaries today, this device was intended to ‘trail’ the programme as a whole. Whilst this might cater for the apparently short attention-span of modern youngsters, it proved confusing for my husband, who quickly complained he’d lost track of the history.
Fortunately, the programme did eventually revert to a more normal chronological exploration (albeit with a tendency to keep skipping ahead to Worsley’s attempts to master the eighteenth-century minuet). The story of dance’s development opened by stressing that for Puritans, dance was the work of the devil. Whilst this (and the revelation that Puritans hated Maypole dancing in particular) came as no surprise to me, the explanation of the seventeenth-century ‘cushion dance’ did. Apparently, this dance, cheerfully demonstrated by Goodman, was one in which young men encouraged young ladies to kneel on a cushion to be kissed.
I would disagree with the show’s subsequent assertion that dancing vanished under the Commonwealth. Although public dancing was banned, social dance in private homes, especially in less Puritan areas of Britain would have continued. This is clearly demonstrated by the publication and instant popularity of John Playford’s The English Dancing Master, the original handbook for English country dancing, which appeared in 1651 (two years into Cromwell’s rule).
Playford was given his laurels in the programme as Worsley and Goodman learnt the basics of country dancing with a group of barristers from the Inns of Court in London. I was surprised that more time wasn’t devoted to this dance form, which remained popular from the seventeenth into the nineteenth century and was certainly performed by the widest number of people from all walks of life, from rural agricultural workers in barns, via the new assembly-rooms of the eighteenth century to the elite ballroom.
Country dance (translated by the French to contre-danse or ‘facing one another’) was easily understood by all, with its repetitive patterns and common steps across numerous dances, and was thus (surely the BBC holy grail) the most accessible dance form of the period.
The producers however decided to concentrate on the most showy and complex dance of the eighteenth century, the last in a long line of difficult triple-metre baroque dances of the seventeenth century (I noted a brief mention of both the Sarabande and the Courante) – the Minuet.
The minuet was a dance form that had huge influence on the eighteenth century well beyond the ballroom, in its physical representation of the culture of politeness that informed Georgian Society.
Lord Chesterfield wrote in 1765, “Do everything in minuet time, speak, think and move always in that measure, equally free from the dullness of slow, or the hurry and huddle of quick time.” Its stately patterns and measured and graceful movement, not to mention (as Goodman and Worsley discovered to their cost) the time taken to master it, made it an elite preoccupation, with high-status children taught its forms and movements from an early age. A woman’s first debut in a ballroom, in which she would be expected to perform a minuet a deux before the assembled and critical company, was a watershed moment in her progress into the marriage mart. This was acknowledged in the programme with various experts, such as the excellent Dr Moira Goff, the brains behind the recent Georgians Revealed: Life, Style and the Making of Modern Britain at the British Library and Darren Royston, teacher of Historical Dance at RADA enlisted to explain and demonstrate both the actual steps of the minuet and the attitudinal physical aspects.
Worsley and Goodman’s learning process in the minuet saw the dancer in me wince. Worsley is keen and tries hard, but sadly ability is also a necessary prerequisite. Even Goodman, a former professional dancer, struggled with the arcane and balletic nature of the dance.
The lessons were coupled with the social history of the development of assembly-rooms and the increasing popularity of dancing masters and dance manuals to impart what had previously been an elite art-form into popular culture. It was good to see reference to Kellom Tomlinson’s popular dance manual The Art of Dancing Explained by Reading and Figures (1744), which explains dance notation and covers both country and minuet dance.
It was even better to see the rather less well-known The Rudiments of Genteel Behaviour by Francis Nivelon (1737), because this book makes an important link between dance itself and other expressions of physical politeness such as standing, receiving and bowing. I would however have liked to see reference to a more popular tome. Nivelon’s book, a beautiful and expensive production with twelve specially produced engravings, would have been far beyond the reach of the average middle-class reader. Something like S.J. Gardiner’s A Definition of Minuet Dancing, Rules for Behaviour in Company (1786) would have better represented the middle-class aspiration hinted at in the programme.
The rise of assembly-rooms during the eighteenth century was also covered, and it was here that I came to disagree with the programme most vehemently. Assembly-room attendance by the up and coming middle-classes was taken to be a sign of democratic and enlightened attitudes, and we saw the ‘march of progress’ trope that is distressingly familiar to eighteenth-century studies. It is certainly true that (as the programme stated) assembly-rooms were nominally democratic, with a subscription payable by all, high or low. However the programme did not acknowledge visible and invisible barriers between societal groups.
Assembly rooms explicitly discriminated in class terms through the ticketing system at Almack’s available only for the highest in society, or through price barriers – it was considerably more expensive to obtain a subscription to the London Assembly than the Deptford Assembly. The programme also did not mention the physical discrimination on the ballroom floor. Minuets were danced one couple at a time from the most important attendee down in order of precedence. Miss Smith, the aspiring butcher’s daughter, would certainly not have had time in the allocated programme to display her newly-acquired minuet before the assembled company. Even the country dances were danced in order of precedence, with the most important people at the top of the set, who would often drop out when they reached the bottom. This thin veneer of democracy was insufficiently interrogated in the programme.
Worsley and Goodman were then suitably attired for an eighteenth-century ballroom, with the usual tiresome deviation into women’s dress and an investigation of Worsley’s undergarments with no view at all of men’s dress and fashion of the period or Goodman’s reaction to it.
I’m not sure I really want to see Len in his pants, but when will the BBC, our national broadcaster, realise the inherent sexism in portraying in detail the dressing of female historians in period costume whilst their male presenters and historians continue to wear a collar and tie?
Finally, our intrepid presenters performed their minuet before a suitably critical audience, the Covent Garden Minuet Company.
It was, as Craig Revel-Horwood might acidly have said ‘really not your best dance darling’ and merited, as Goodman ruefully admitted, a mere six out of ten. This only served to demonstrate the skill and the necessary time required to minuet well and might have been further underlined had the Covent Garden Minuet Company been allowed to demonstrate!
Overall, however, I thought the programme was good: a well-presented look at the history of social dancing, inevitably in some places quite basic but definitely with some parts that an aficionado of the eighteenth century would appreciate and learn from.
I’d certainly recommend it to BSECS readers, and I’ll be sitting down to the next episode as the programme moves into the nineteenth century and the rise of the waltz and polka.
The first episode of Dancing Cheek to Cheek was aired on BBC 4 on Monday 17th November 2014 and is currently available on iPlayer. The series continues on 24th November.